The Century of Beckett
Page III
There are thoughts, not mine.
(From an Abandoned Work)
If there is anyone to die. For we, the organism, the biochemical processes, the “body doing its best,” the sprouted head, the “millions of different sounds,” the voice we emit, that emits us, are as much figments as are the voice in Cascando that speaks of Woburn at the behest of the Opener but who is not Woburn and who is directed by the will of the Opener, and Woburn who is nothing but a character in a story told by a voice instructed by something else yet, and Words in Words and Music that is commanded by Croak to render a thought only Croak knows, and Music who is no more capable than Words of rendering what is known only to Croak—to nothing, to a denatured impulse of some sort, some other sort.
All is mental, figments.
(From An Abandoned Work)
For there is only a voice, and that voice is not us. The voice is Croak, and it calls for words and music to express something about it that it can hardly understand, and we are the figures in the story that the words conjure, and the feelings that the music strives to congeal. The voice is the Opener, who, or which, instigates all that occurs, all that can occur, and Woburn is one of us—stories being told for lack of anything else to do, for lack of anything else to be done by something that we are not. We lack virtually all presence. We are awake in the story being told of us, patterns in the tapestry something weaves with words and music to kill the time. We are alive just enough to know that we are not alive, extant just enough to know that we are not extant. We are nothing seen by nothing, but the seeing does occur.
Beckett is right. It could be no worse.
. . . can’t call your soul your own . . .
(The Old Tune)
We are not. All our cares, concerns, hopes, and despairs are over nothing, felt by nothing—merely stimulations, without inherent character, without significance. Which is to say that ardency proves nothing—how much we care, of what we care, in what way we care, determine nothing. Our ardencies are what we wallow in, to all appearances. There are merely moments, a moment, with a thought hanging in the ether, capable only of inventing stories and suffering over the fact that there is nothing but a thought hanging in the ether, capable of suffering, and of inventing stories to divert itself from suffering over the fact that there is nothing but a thought hanging in the ether, only to suffer again.
A: And then the tear.
S: Exactly, sir. What I call the human trait.
(Rough for Radio II)
All of our reality is superstition, mere magic, the misconstructions we substitute for a science we do not understand, or that we cannot fully see for we must see from the perceived point of view of something that does not exist, that posits and seems to witness causes that do not operate, entities that do not occur, and ambitions, results, and frustrations that are mere fantasies. We are superstitious beliefs.
It is as simple as it could be, for it is as great a thought as it could be, and greatness is always simple, and always apparently absurd. The greatest of thoughts is that which alters the very structure of thought, the geometry of inference, the architectural pattern by which inference is drawn. Great thought does not find it sufficient to trade in overt starting propositions—it staggers the principles whereby thought progresses, the assumptions that underlie all we believe, that hover behind every assertion and suspicion, that stand unchanged at every moment, that do not progress. Beckett’s assault is on the principal prevailing assumption, the primary of the axioms that remains established throughout all normative thinking, that inflects every inference in every train of rumination, that puts the bias in the lawn of otherwise balanced contemplation, that provides the gravitational pull which sets a positive curvature to the line leading to conclusion. He dismisses the assumption of our own existence. As long as one takes for granted one in fact is, as long as one permits that presumption to sneak in behind the back of every observation on any subject, as long as one permits oneself to become distracted from the concentration on disregarding one’s own presence through the shift of attention to anything else, such that the most seemingly obvious of false assumptions becomes invisibly obvious again and sweeps back into one’s base of judgments, Beckett’s point and purpose themselves become invisible. He is absurd only if we reject the most seemingly absurd of positions—otherwise, he is most simple and clear as crystal.
The face in the ashes.
(Words and Music)
It is a great thought, for it changes everything, for everything has always depended on the assumption of its opposite—the assumption that we do exist, the seemingly most self-evident of assumptions. But it is not true.
It is a great thought, and it is the thought of our past century, of the century of artistic revolution of which Beckett was the resident and is the culmination. The absence of our existence, our non-appearance, is the revelation of Modernism in the arts and in philosophy, from abstraction to atonal music that seems to defy the emotional call, to Nietzsche and Mauthner. All evaporated the active agent of us from the compound solution of the real. It begins with Mallarmé, as much as it does with any, for whom all we are and know is illusion, whose Igitur is a drama without characters, whose sonnet “Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx” is a near melodrama in which nothing happens. It can be said that even Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (notably dismissing the typographical possessive, as if there were no one to possess anything) renders existence as a continuous nightmare and nothing more, with no dreamer in evidence, available only to mere supposition (although there is an enormous difference, though not a world of difference, between the claim that the dream is real—Joyce—and the claim that not even “reality” is—Beckett). And Borges claimed the same position in his first published essay, “The Nothingness of Personality,” as the foundation of his art, and it is well known that Nabokov found only the dream to be true.
We need “unities” in order to be able to reckon: that does not
mean we must suppose that such unities exist. We have
borrowed the concept of unity from our “ego” concept—our
oldest article of faith. If we did not hold ourselves to be unities,
we would never have formed the concept “thing.”
(Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 635)
And it can even be argued that the difference between Modernism and Postmodernism lies in the response to this inescapable fact, in the response to the inescapability of this fact. The difference is not in the estimation of the fact but in the disposition of the reaction. When one seeks truth and finds it unobtainable, there are only two postures one can take: either one wallows in the illusory as all that is available, or one redoubles one’s efforts. The alignments in this are easily recognized. It is all a question of commitment, and of character, and of courage—the question of our age.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered . . .
(Ezra Pound, “Canto LXXXI”)
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And one may argue that the thought goes further back than this, that the thought of our nonexistence has hovered before us throughout history, that the history of the mind, history in the mind, has been nothing other than an avoidance of the final recognition, suspended timelessly in front of us. The realization, rendered to be undeniable, rendered to be as evident fact, of our nonexistence is the principal artistic message—the message of the greatest minds who turned their efforts to art. Nabokov’s observation that Hamlet is “the wild dream of a neurotic scholar” is echoed in reverse by Shakespeare himself, for he ratifies the idea in the preceding Julius Caesar, when Brutus “predicts” the plot of Hamlet and identifies it as a momentary daydream, telling us in effect that the entirety of the future play is a disturbing fantasy, an “insurrection” of the mind, that flashes briefly through the thoughts of Hamlet who does not hesitate to kill the king, or do whatever it is he will do, taking no more time about it than does Brutus to kill Caesar—acting without vacillation, without diffidence, without falter.
BRUTUS
Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,
I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
(Julius Caesar, II, i, 61-69)
Hamlet then is a fantasy, a rapid nightmare, suffered by a Hamlet we never meet, who acts in a story we are not told, within a world we do not enter, among characters we cannot suspect. Only the characters and events and world of Hamlet are real, but they are not real—they are someone else’s dream. Nothing said in this is real. And there is no daylight between this view and Nietzsche’s: that Hamlet must be taken in its entirety to be found meaningful at all. Speaking at first of Greek tragedy, “The structure of the scenes and the visual images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can put into words and concepts: the same is also observable in Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for instance, similarly, talks more superficially than he acts, so that the previously mentioned lesson of Hamlet is to be deduced, not from his words, but from a profound contemplation and survey of the whole.” (The Birth of Tragedy, § 17) It is only the play as a whole that matters—nothing in it is of concern. And, the significance is not in the words, in a literary work that is made of nothing but words—the significance, the meaning, is elsewhere, which is to say that it is not in the work at all. And we must not forget the now too little read play by Calderon: Life is a Dream. Or Gogol, or Kafka, or Bruno Schulz.
And it is what we see traced in Greek tragedy, conveyed to us in the earliest thought of our tradition.
It is evident that the further the archetypal masque gets from the ideal masque, the more clearly it reveals itself as the emancipated antimasque, a revel of satyrs who have got out of control. The progress of sophisticated drama appears to be towards an anagnorisis or recognition of the most primitive of all dramatic forms.
At the far end of the archetypal masque, where it joins the auto, we reach the point indicated by Nietzsche as the point of the birth of tragedy, where the revel of satyrs impinges on the appearance of a commanding god, and Dionysus is brought into line with Apollo. We may call this fourth cardinal point of drama the epiphany, the dramatic apocalypse or separation of the divine and the demonic, a point directly opposite the mime, which presents the simply human mixture. This point is the dramatic form of the point of epiphany, most familiar as the point at which the Book of Job, after describing a complete circuit from tragedy through symposium, finally ends. Here the two monsters behemoth and leviathan replace the more frequent demonic animals.
The Classical critics, from Aristotle to Horace, were puzzled to understand why a disorganized ribald farce like the satyr-play should be the source of tragedy, though they were clear that it was.
(Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973, pp. 291-2)
Mrs Rooney: The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down. [Silence. They join in wild laughter.]
(All That Fall)
The point at which satyrs impinge upon the commanding god, the point opposite the human mixture, the point at which chaos batters the banks and coasts of meaning, and all falls down. Which positions Beckett among the ages, with the thought that ignores the ages, his dark and his silence the night of first ages, of ages that are gone and not gone, and his earth seeming unearthly. And which makes him one of the premier artists of the ages, not only for the sheer courage to witness without blinking, without flinching, the dissolution of everything in the sodium light of truth, but to have the ability to formulate the realization sufficiently to get off the first page—or past the first few brush strokes, or the first atonal, or if one likes geometrically precise, musical phrase, or the first few passes at modeling a thin, elongated, emaciated, asexual, standing figure, staring straight into the void. A figure, or a tree.
And it makes Beckett’s plays, and his literature as a whole, what Nietzsche sought in a Dionysian art—not the manner but the point: that we do not exist, that we are figments, not part of the real, and doomed, to the degree we find ourselves to be perceptibly present at all, to suffer dissolution as we are fed into the maw of a world that “lives on itself: its excrements are its food.” (The Will to Power, § 1066)
Beckett douses vividness for truth—that is his artistic revolution. If the purpose of art, or one of its purposes, is to heighten the experience of existence, is to give special attention, if art is celebratory, then Beckett’s literature both is and is not. There is nothing in Beckett that stokes the pleasure of sheer existence, that amplifies the sense of being alive, alive in the sense of pure verve, limitless élan, absolute joy—no attribution could be more obvious than that. Yet, Beckett does magnify the awareness. He makes the nature of existence undeniable. If Sontag is right that every style is a means of giving emphasis, of committing an insistence, then Beckett is our high stylist, for his insistence is unparalleled. Read anything by Beckett, and you cannot help but see it. There is no greater accomplishment for an artist in any field of art: to transform you into the artist, to make you what he has seen—here, to make you the hopelessness, the mind fastened to the dying animal. What you always were, and what now you perceive—to break the illusion.
And it is an act of monumental compassion, for can there be anything more humane, anything more courageous, anything more vivifying, than to tell us the source of our pain?
All works of genius have this in common: even when they demonstrate and make us perceive the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most dreadful despair, they nevertheless comfort the noble soul that finds itself in a state of depression, disillusionment, nullity, boredom, and discouragement, or in the most bitter and deadening misfortunes. Such works rekindle our enthusiasm, and though they treat and represent nothing but death, give back (to us) that life that had been lost.
(Giacomo Leopardi)
Note
(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, February 2007)
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“The Century of Beckett”
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