Stoic Nihilism & the Beauty of Oblivion

A Meditation on Beckett’s Happy Days

Page II

The image at the head of this essay is indicative of Warner’s general directorial approach, which, in this production, is to accentuate to the degree of obviousness, emphasizing what should be suggested, highlighting what should be alluded to, and making conscious the unconscious, or articulating what should remain implied. Whenever Winnie removed the gun from her handbag, or held it in her hands, she pointed it directly at herself for a sustained period of time, as if the mere presence of the gun didn’t clearly suggest peril. Further strident gaffes occurred throughout the performance with the most reprehensible being what earlier was referred to as luxuriating in subpar antics. As Cioran observed, every time Beckett would veer towards lyricism or metaphysics, he would have “his characters erupt in hiccups or other fits,” an abrupt shift employed to restrain his characters from succumbing to hope, for, to Beckett, lyricism and metaphysics are but empty modes of hope. During the intermission, Warner chose to play the theme song to a sophomoric American sitcom with the same name as the play. If Beckett deliberately short circuited any instance of lyricism or metaphysics, he certainly would find such a tenth-rate interlude ill-fitting, not to say of little taste. While Warner’s use of the song may seem relatively incidental to some and this point strained, it is given particular stress because of its absolute lack of necessity. Beckett’s works are especially refined and precise, like Pompeian frescoes, or a composition such as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, making any such ‘addition’ an excrescence, thus a true disfigurement of the play. Of Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg warned that “to whatever extent the composer felt a tone-pictorial representation of the actions and feelings indicated in the text to be important, it is simply to be found in the music. Where the performer does not find such representation, he should refrain from adding anything that the composer did not want. In this instance, he would not be adding, but rather detracting.” In bringing poetry that has been through the void into drama, a poetry born of thinking in new dimensions, Beckett’s work demands to be guided by aesthetic decisions that have an equal intensity, rigor, and taste. His work is as Cioran noted “so impregnated with poetry that it is inseparable from it.” Instead of taking one deeper into the play, Warner’s supplement jettisoned one from it into a banal consumerist reality harshly antithetical to the setting of the play. Poetry, to say the least, was not what she evoked. Happy Days is a kind of colla voce between the habitual or ritualized movements of Winnie and the words that she utters, both sibilate and susurrate, which punctuate her gestures in the abyss. In the midst of this music of word and gesture, throughout it actually, there are silences. Of the 118 pauses in the text, some of which are to be lengthy, few of them were evident during the performance. Silence, like nihilism, was dispensed with almost entirely. The gestures, too, have a geometric precision that adds to the architectural beauty of the play, but that sharpness was lost on Shaw, as the necessity of that sharpness was obviously lost on Warner. Instead of finding “the most refined joy in such constraint and perfection,” they disavowed accuracy for casual, imprecise gestures better suited to realistic drama. If there is an artist’s work analogous to Beckett, it is not Degas or Dix. It is Giacometti. As is well known, Giacometti designed the stage set for the 1961 production of Waiting for Godot, and the two artists, whose lives were predicated on an aesthetic of failure and impossibility, were close friends. In not taking the aesthetic demands of the play seriously, its austere beauty is grossly marred. What it necessitates is an actor with the training of an Olympic athlete, such as Ryszard Cieslak, or Hijikata Tatsumi, the inventor of Butoh, if not simply any well trained Butoh performer. While Shaw lacks this precision and intense physicality, in the midst of the first act, after vacillating between mild effectiveness and some degree of greater control, her performance grew more condensed and affecting. While physically her gestures were too slipshod, aimlessly did she gesticulate, she was emotionally engaging. Shaw is adept at articulating with definite particularity Winnie’s multifarious voices. Her voice is powerful and has the elasticity and color necessary for Beckett’s heroines. Ultimately though, her characterization of Winnie alters the anatomy of the play, and the appreciation of moments of Shaw’s performance becomes an empty regard for an actor’s technique. It’s a separation into pieces of what should remain whole. Interestingly enough, Shaw was most compelling in the brief second act when she could not move. All of her energy and force was crystallized into her voice and it was mesmerizing. Yet that act was played with such literalness that the horror that is Winnie’s optimism was lost. Shaw was ferocious and vituperative, perorating like a figure from the 9th circle of hell, at times almost howling and barking like a beast. She was more like a bedraggled and homeless whore from the Bowery than the Winnie of the first act, partially because Warner decided to black out her teeth—another bizarre and unnecessary liberty that detracted from and did not enhance or illuminate the play. Yet one more peculiar alteration occurred at the most active if not climactic moment of the play, making it all the more glaring. Although he was sporting a top hat and fine dress shirt and tie, Willie wasn’t exactly “dressed to kill” as Beckett described him. Sleeves unbuttoned and askew, Willie came crawling out, jacket dragging along the ground, in dirty long underwear, eradicating once again Beckett’s unerring sense of irony. Where Beckett is subtle, they are barbarous. Further, the second act was lit as if it took place in an infernal region, suggesting nightfall, thus eliminating entirely the absurdity of the opening line, “Hail, holy light,” and the stasis of the world of the play, a world which is entirely without night and without cycles and is nothing but an incessant and eternally recurring present.

If Winnie is optimistic and ‘happy,’ her happiness is frightening, to some Beckett scholars more frightening even than the despair of Endgame, but this dread is wholly lost on these interpreters and most of the reviewers of the play, who write as if irony didn’t exist and Winnie’s happiness no different from Juliet’s. It’s true that “what Beckett offers to thought” is not necessarily “gloomy relinquishment” as Badiou argues. “The lesson of Beckett” he posits “is a lesson in measure, exactitude and courage.” While this is a refreshing interpretation of Beckett’s work, one has to ask, what is that courage for? Utter, let alone absolute despair doesn’t exist in Beckett’s work. True, and I concur that Beckett was in fact “a constant and attentive servant of beauty,” which Badiou persuasively argues, but it is still the beauty of oblivion. What the work is as art is distinct from what the work posits as a worldview. It is not that there is no hope in the universe, or in Beckett’s interpretation of the universe, which is his truthful representation of the world, but that hope is not easily gained. Godot is not dead, but he has yet to ever arrive; unlikely however is his ever arriving. Optimism let us remember is for Beckett something pernicious, it is a sign as he said in Proust of our “smug will to live” and, unfortunately he declares, it is an incurable disease. The hope prevalent in most of the world, or in most of the opinions that pass for thought in the world, is the empty and mawkish hope of the herd, which bears down upon those who are devoid of cheery optimism, for not to be anesthetically merry is to be suspect if not very near felonious. There is something clearly absurd in Winnie’s optimism and happiness, a myopia that is made terrifyingly clear through her inability to recognize the utter meaninglessness of her existence. It is a “blessing” to her that “nothing grows” and it is wonderful that “one can do nothing,” save perhaps adapt, which is also “wonderful!” But there are things that we shouldn’t adapt to and in adapting to them our stupidity and our weakness is frightfully apparent. This is the dumb optimism of America, which must be perpetually happy or to use a vacuous and irritating idiom common for some time and still in use today: “It’s all good.” Is it? Even in Malebolge? To any awakened creature, the tragic reality is different. But to Winnie and those of her faction it is ‘all good,’ and happily they chatter away in the dark eternal night. The gauntlet nonetheless remains and the pessimist is stronger for in recognizing that truth, tragic knowledge is gained.

The literature that exists—one cannot say lives—in Winnie is dead to her, too. The use of her parasol, the brushing of her teeth, the combing of her hair, the application of her lipstick, the rummaging through her bag: all are equally useful means for ‘getting through the day’ no different from her parroting of literature. When the day comes when words fail, for “there are times when even they fail,” she will simply “brush and comb the hair” in order to sustain herself. Winnie is of the generation of women who attended ‘finishing’ school in order to cultivate themselves and refine their manners. With them, silent or awkward moments are not to occur, which is to say, the anxiety of existence is to be continuously circumvented and annulled. Winnie and her kind have been trained to be perpetually gracious and to always have something to say. That is ‘the old style’ and while to a degree it is charming, it is also facetious and hollow. When she quotes, she quotes as if from an anthology, and what she utters are precisely that—quotes. It is not as if she has read books, and here we are closing in on the heart of the matter, if not one of the very atoms of the play. Generally, she prefaces every utterance of a quote with the statement “What is that wonderful line?” But she also ‘quotes’ literature without even knowing it, or rather words invade her daily patter, erupting from her unconscious like sharp prods.

I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on. I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

—Beckett, The Unnamable

To quote is to remember the literature that lives in one, not to be said. Winnie however never refers to any specific writer, play, or poem except when quoting Browning. Despite their bleakness, and all of the lines that are part of Winnie’s monologue, as Brennan observed, are from literature “that is concerned with confronting death or with despair at the limited amount of time we have on earth,” they are all ‘wonderful.’ In this, the utter superficiality of her relation to them is clear, as well as her blindness of her condition or her obstinate refusal to acknowledge it. She knows not of what she speaks and has no significant bond to the texts that exist in her.

I say confusedly what comes uppermost;
But there are times when patience proves at fault,
As now: this morning’s strange encounter – you
Besides me once again.

—Browning, “Paracelsus”

Clearly, patience is definitely a fault in Winnie’s case; it is useless and futile, like Sisyphus forcing his rock continually up the hill. That, one may say, is his fate, but if such is one’s fate, when is continuing to live an abomination of life itself and our inability to bravely end our lives a curse upon existence? There is never any instant, or rare is it that Winnie responds emotionally to the texts she quotes or which ascend into her memory. What invades her does not awaken her as what invaded Wordsworth as he recorded in The Prelude. The visitations of thought provoked in him further thought and reflection whereas Winnie doesn’t think or reflect. Like an automaton, she operates because the gears drive her to. “Things have a life” she says, and they don’t need her. In Winnie then is there not our inability to end things when we should, the stupidity of our clinging to life when life is barely present? Of our adapting to what we should fiercely resist? In Happy Days, it is a posthumous universe that we are in and Beckett let us not forget began writing his dramatic works just after World War II. It seems wholly forgotten by Warner, Shaw, and many critics that Winnie’s life is bleak, absurd, and senseless, and that it endlessly recurs, which intensifies the bleakness to as extreme a degree as possible. Optimism, perhaps, but in not facing senselessness is real cowardice. It is the idiocy of Pangloss who before the grossest atrocities still declares that this world is the best of all possible worlds. Is that not America’s ailment? Is not Beckett critiquing precisely such blind optimism through Winnie, who chews literature like a cow but never digests it? She uses quotes like Hamm uses painkillers, staving off suffering to remain insensate. Woe, woe is her, but blasted like Ophelia with ecstasy she is not; because she never truly encompasses it, it is only an empty woe that she cants, sounding off like a jukebox at the mercy of the mechanics of her body, which she is not aligned with. There are instances when she reveals insight into her condition, but they are exceedingly brief and she hastily dispels them, busying herself with one of her empty activities to stave off the reckoning. Happy Days is also one might say about, in a sense, the death of literature, or about the disembowelment and abuse of it. To imbibe literature as Winnie does is to be lost to it, to be insensate to expressiveness, to formal geometric beauty, to what words evoke and express. It is to eviscerate literature of its force through empty repetition, through fragmented connections to it instead of intimate involvement. If one knows only shards of Hamlet, what real force can the words actually have, divorced from their context? They lose their weight, they lose their sense, thus they lose in effect their gravity and that is meant almost literally. Out of the structure of their cosmos, the world of the book in which they exist, they float in the air and are cast about like seeds in the wind. Books however are not for idling through; that is to disgrace them. “It is not at all easy to understand the blood of another,” says Zarathustra. “I hate all those readers who are idlers.”

Is not Winnie one of these idling readers, as many of her interpreters are? Winnie’s entrapment in the earth is sometimes read as a punishment, which raises the question as to what precisely may have caused it, with her deeper enclosure in the earth in the second act intensifying the ‘punishment’ even more. What, some have questioned, has occurred in the first act to warrant, if anything, the intensification of Winnie’s ‘punishment’? In the second act, Winnie’s ability to recall quotes, or for quotes to arise in her mind, is considerably lessened. What may be at work here is that, in the first act, they were forced out by her unconscious to give her insight into her condition, yet she couldn’t make use of them. “Something says, stop talking now,” she observes, but she never can cease talking to imbibe what arises in her mind. Since she gains no lasting insight into her state, words do not come to her as often as they did in the first act. It is not punishment, that is too literal a reading of the dramatic event, but a deeper collapse into obscurity, or immobility, and she is very nearly buried up to her mouth. What it seems this may be symbolic of is a lack of awareness. To be devoid of insight or to lack perception of one’s condition is to be paralyzed. It is a rigidity born of ignorance, thus it is senseless to think of Winnie as a kind of earth figure, as some regard her. There is nothing fertile about Winnie; she is not a generative force. Demeter she is not. She is a degenerative force and the earth is swallowing her. She is indicative perhaps of our inability to make sense of our selves and the world because of our inability to make sense of literature.

In the end, no one can “hear” more out of things, books included, than he already knows. Whatever one has no access to through experience one has no ears for.

—Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

A lack of an intimate, personal engagement with literature yields nothing but a superficial relation to it such as Winnie’s, which ends in an empty parroting of words instead of an excoriating insight. In place of reading entire texts, Winnie has read but quotes in anthologies, pithy lines from quotation books to ‘pepper’ her discourse with ‘wonderful’ statements whose meaning she knows not.

That is what I find so wonderful, a part remains, of one’s classics, to help one through the day.

—Beckett, Happy Days

Literature is simply something which facilitates passage through a day, like combing one’s hair, brushing one’s teeth, gazing at oneself in the mirror, or gingerly fingering a gun. It is merely a restorative to keep her happy and optimistic, no different from the medicine she consumes in the first act. What is to come?

It is oft imagined that Winnie will sing her song as she sinks slowly into the earth, but this might not be her fate. It is a trajectory that the play logically moves towards, but the song is a crucial dramatic event, perhaps the most decisive moment in the play. It is the instant in time, and the only one in the play, when the discord between the mind and the body is overcome. Song is the one thing that is not under the dominion of habit for Beckett, and habit for him is purely negative. There is no distinction between positive and negative habits for Beckett.

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals . . . The Gideans advocate a habit of living—and look for an epithet. A nonsensical bastard phrase. They imply a hierarchy of habits, as though it were valid to speak of good and bad habits. An automatic adjustment of the human organism to the conditions of its existence has as little moral significance as the casting of a clout when May is or is not out; and the exhortation to cultivate a habit as little sense as an exhortation to cultivate a coryza.

—Beckett, Proust

Song though is the one true spontaneous event; it triumphs over habit. “It must” as Winnie says “come from the heart,” “pour out from the inmost, like a thrush.” “One cannot sing” she later says, “just like that. It bubbles up, for some unknown reason.”

Imagination—lifting up itself
Before the eye and the progress of my song
Like an unfathered vapor, here that power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me! I was lost as in a cloud,
Halted without a struggle to break through;
And now, recovering, to my soul I say
“I recognize thy glory.” In such strength
Of usurpation, in such visitings of
Awful promise, when the light of sense
Goes out in flashes that have shown to us
The invisible world, does greatness make abode,
There harbors whether we be young or old.
Our destiny, our nature, and our home,
Is with infinitude, and only there—
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

—Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805)

Music for Beckett, as for his philosophical mentor Schopenhauer, exists above all arts. It is not that “music is the Idea itself” as Beckett thought though, but that “it passes over the Ideas,” as Schopenhauer actually said. The important difference between it and the other arts according to Schopenhauer is that it is not “a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas.” In Happy Days, song is the unexpected gift, the gift that Winnie searches for in Willie in the first act, and which she longs for in herself, and which she has been hoping for all along. Suddenly, at the very end of the play, Winnie is able to break into song, or rather song erupts out of her like a shoot spontaneously breaking forth from the ground. In this, the body and the mind finally coalesce. It is a rare moment of unification, and she and Willie gaze at one another in silence after it occurs. It is the awakening of perception, the opening of man; the shattering of what Blake called the ‘narrow chinks of our caverns.’ Here perhaps is the play’s actual optimism. It is not in Winnie’s blind happiness, it is not in what all of the critics believe it is, but it is in this final extraordinary moment. What does not or has not been able to happen or occur throughout the entire play finally happens. What possibly follows after the play ends, to articulate the suggestions it yields: the suicide of Willie, murder of Winnie, combined murder/suicide, the kiss of tenderness, Win’s total burial, the repetition of the first act (all magically appears as at the start of the day as Winnie informs us), or, Win’s release from the ground after the song, a signal more hopeful than any other in Beckett’s work, though it could and more than likely is merely a fleeting instant, a small triumph and brief overcoming that will soon or eventually end as nothing persists or is sustained forever—we must continually achieve things as we must continually become who we are. After, a day or so of peace if not real joy and communication between Winnie and Willie may occur only for them to return to the heap of days and the infernal burial. Twenty to thirty years of habit cannot be broken so easily; such conditioned responses are granitic. To free oneself of them is as difficult as an addict’s attempt at overcoming or breaking long developed and deeply ingrained behavior, an internal structure, like a petrified foundation, that takes years to reconfigure. Whereas to destroy such a foundation may not take as long as to build one, after the destruction, a new edifice must be constructed. Patience is its only captain, and courage, but those are not such easily sustainable forces. We are obstinate more in our futility than in our ability to engender real transformations, which are exceedingly difficult to achieve, for rare is it we have the measure, exactitude, and courage to make such lasting transformations. Cioran compared Beckett to what is said of Buddhist adepts seeking illumination, which is that they “must be as relentless as ‘a mouse gnawing on a coffin.’ Every authentic writer makes a similar effort. He is a destroyer who adds to existence—who enriches by undermining it.” In undermining existence, Beckett returns it to us in its crystalline beauty, shorn of its false hope, declaring as Badiou noted “what we must disregard in order to face up to what may be of worth.” That is the beauty of oblivion, which we must tirelessly sculpt and shape, guided by the strength of a positive pessimism. It is that alone which is capable of bearing tragic wisdom, of truthfully confronting the abyss. Only then can we nobly bear what vexes us with any degree of honesty.

© Rainer J. Hanshe—Nietzsche Circle, 2008

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, February 2008)

To download the entire essay, Open PDF: | “Stoic Nihilism & the Beauty of Oblivion”

| page up |