Samuel Beckett

Jennifer Birkett, Kate Ince

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582298071
• eBook ISBN: 9781317885825
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Bringing together seminal writings on Beckett from the 1950s and 1960s with critical readings from the 1980s and 1990s, this collection is inspired by a wide variety of literary-theoretical approaches and covers the whole range of Beckett's creative work. Following an up-to-date review and analysis of Beckett criticism, fifteen extracts of Beckett criticism are introduced and set in context by editors' headnotes. The book aims to make easily accessible to students and scholars stimulating and innovative writing on the work of Samuel Beckett, representing the wide range of new perspectives opened up by contemporary critical theory: philosophical, political and psychoanalytic criticism, feminist and gender studies, semiotics, and reception theory.

Part One

Political Criticism

1 Trying to Understand Endgame*

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Adorno’s essay of 1961 has been frequently reprinted and three times translated (first in 1969, again in 1982, in a version reprinted by Harold Bloom in 1985, and in 1991). Each time, its appearance has signalled a spate of fresh critical understanding of Beckett’s work, to which Adorno’s contribution has not always been recognized: most recently, for example, that fruitful exploration of the gap between language and reality, and its representation, which distinguishes Beckett criticism in the late 1980s and 1990s. The excerpts here, mining the rich aesthetico-politico-philosophical seams opened up by the Frankfurt School, are crammed with early formulations of what are now commonplaces of contemporary critical theory.

Endgame is for Adorno the imaginative counterpart to his philosophical critique of Enlightenment reason (rationalism), which, he argued, although originally positive in its effects, was transformed by the development of bourgeois scientific society into an agent of repression, reducing human subjects to objects, instruments and functions of state, and seeking to master and destroy the spontaneity and the particularities of nature. This critique is linked with his horror of the Holocaust, which he saw as the logical endpoint of rationalism, spelling the end of confidence in human perfectibility and marking the catastrophic identification of life with death. In a ground-breaking attack on the concept of subject identity, Adorno here seeks to subvert the delusion of totality in which modern subjects live. The job of the philosopher, he believes, as of an artist such as Beckett, is to point to the contradictions of which that delusion is constructed, and expose the unbridgeable gap between the object ‘in itself’ and the concept of it which human perception constructs. In the process, he must also revive the vanishing sense of the importance of particulars, the details that create differences – all those elements that resist the simplifying sweep of the totalitarian mind.

In the first extract, Beckettian form is shown transforming the categories of Sartrean existentialism, abolishing the classical notions of essence, universality and individual identity on which existentialism thrives. Adorno explores the political and philosophical implications of Beckett’s parodies of philosophies and forms, especially his disruptions of classical dramatic form, which history, Adorno argues, had already evacuated of meaning. The second extract considers the consequences of Beckett’s approach for his representation of characters. In his drama, the ‘individual’ is simply a transient form who is both a product of capitalist alienation and a gesture of protest against it. His anti-realist writing discloses the emptiness of the signs by which subjects, trapped in the prison-house of thought, delude themselves that they have autonomy and significance. His drama models the nature of the space in which such characters live. This is a Kafkaesque zone, the politico-philosophical space where meaning is made – or rather, the machine grinds away to make meaning, but none comes: ‘The poverty of the participants in Endgame is the poverty of philosophy’ (Adorno, tr. Nicholsen, 1991, p. 253).

To S.B., in memory of Paris, Fall 1958

Beckett’s oeuvre has many things in common with Parisian existentialism. It is shot through with reminiscences of the categories of absurdity, situation, and decision or the failure to decide, the way medieval ruins permeate Kafka’s monstrous house in the suburbs. Now and then the windows fly open and one sees the black, starless sky of something like philosophical anthropology. But whereas in Sartre the form – that of the pièce à thèse – is somewhat traditional, by no means daring, and aimed at effect, in Beckett the form overtakes what is expressed and changes it. The impulses are raised to the level of the most advanced artistic techniques, those of Joyce and Kafka. For Beckett absurdity is no longer an ‘existential situation’ diluted to an idea and then illustrated. In him literary method surrenders to absurdity without preconceived intentions. Absurdity is relieved of the doctrinal universality which in existentialism, the creed of the irreducibility of individual existence, linked it to the Western pathos of the universal and lasting. Beckett thereby dismisses existentialist conformity, the notion that one ought to be what one is, and with it easy comprehensibility of presentation. What philosophy Beckett provides, he himself reduces to cultural trash, like the innumerable allusions and cultural tidbits he employs, following the tradition of the Anglo-Saxon avant-garde and especially of Joyce and Eliot. For Beckett, culture swarms and crawls, the way the intestinal convolutions of Jugendstil ornamentation swarmed and crawled for the avant-garde before him: modernism as what is obsolete in modernity. Language, regressing, demolishes that obsolete material. In Beckett, this kind of objectivity annihilates the meaning that culture once was, along with its rudiments. And so culture begins to fluoresce. In this Beckett is carrying to its conclusion a tendency present in the modern novel. Reflection, which the cultural criterion of aesthetic immanence proscribed as abstract, is juxtaposed with pure presentation; the Flaubertian principle of a completely self-contained subject matter is undermined. The less events can be presumed to be inherently meaningful, the more the idea of aesthetic substance as the unity of what appears and what was intended becomes an illusion. Beckett rids himself of this illusion by coupling the two moments in their disparity. Thought becomes both a means to produce meaning in the work, a meaning which cannot be rendered directly in tangible form, and a means to express the absence of meaning. Applied to drama, the word ‘meaning’ is ambiguous. It covers the metaphysical content that is represented objectively in the complexion of the artifact; the intention of the whole as a complex of meaning that is the inherent meaning of the drama; and finally the meaning of the words and sentences spoken by the characters and their meaning in sequence, the dialogic meaning. But these equivocations point to something shared. In Beckett’s Endgame that common ground becomes a continuum. Historically, this continuum is supported by a change in the a priori of drama: the fact that there is no longer any substantive, affirmative metaphysical meaning that could provide dramatic form with its law and its epiphany. That, however, disrupts the dramatic form down to its linguistic infrastructure. Drama cannot simply take negative meaning, or the absence of meaning, as its content without everything peculiar to it being affected to the point of turning into its opposite. The essence of drama was constituted by that meaning. Were drama to try to survive meaning aesthetically, it would become inadequate to its substance and be degraded to a clattering machinery for the demonstration of worldviews, as is often the case with existentialist plays. The explosion of the metaphysical meaning, which was the only thing guaranteeing the unity of the aesthetic structure, causes the latter to crumble with a necessity and stringency in no way unequal to that of the traditional canon of dramatic form. Unequivocal aesthetic meaning and its subjectivization in concrete, tangible intention was a surrogate for the transcendent meaningfulness whose very denial constitutes aesthetic content. Through its own organized meaninglessness, dramatic action must model itself on what has transpired with the truth content of drama in general. Nor does this kind of construction of the meaningless stop at the linguistic molecules; if they, and the connections between them, were rationally meaningful, they would necessarily be synthesized into the overall coherence of meaning that the drama as a whole negates. Hence interpretation of Endgame cannot pursue the chimerical aim of expressing the play’s meaning in a form mediated by philosophy. Understanding it can mean only understanding its unintelligibility, concretely reconstructing the meaning of the fact that it has no meaning. Split off, thought no longer presumes, as the Idea once did, to be the meaning of the work, a transcendence produced and vouched for by the work’s immanence. Instead, thought transforms itself into a kind of second-order material, the way the philosophical ideas expounded in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus have their fate as material does, a fate that takes the place of the sensuous immediacy that dwindles in the self-reflective work of art. Until now this transformation of thought into material has been largely involuntary, the plight of works that compulsively mistook themselves for the Idea they could not attain; Beckett accepts the challenge and uses thoughts sans phrase as clichés, fragmentary materials in the monologue intérieur that spirit has become, the reified residues of culture. Pre-Beckettian existentialism exploited philosophy as a literary subject as though it were Schiller in the flesh. Now Beckett, more cultured than any of them, hands it the bill: philosophy, spirit itself, declares itself to be dead inventory, the dream-like leavings of the world of experience, and the poetic process declares itself to be a process of wastage. Dégoût, a productive artistic force since Baudelaire, becomes insatiable in Beckett’s historically mediated impulses. Anything that no longer works becomes canonical, thus rescuing from the shadowlands of methodology a motif from the pre-history of existentialism, Husserl’s universal world-annihilation. Adherents of totalitarianism like Lukács, who wax indignant about the decadence of this truly terrible simplificateur, are not ill-advised by the interest of their bosses. What they hate in Beckett is what they betrayed. Only the nausea of satiety, the taedium of the spirit, wants something completely different; ordained health has to be satisfied with the nourishment offered, homely fare. Beckett’s dégoût refuses to be coerced. Exhorted to play along, he responds with parody, parody both of philosophy, which spits out his dialogues, and of forms. Existentialism itself is parodied; nothing remains of its invariant categories but bare existence. The play’s opposition to ontology, which outlines something somehow First and Eternal, is unmistakable in the following piece of dialogue, which involuntarily caricatures Goethe’s dictum about das alte Wahre, what is old and true, a notion that deteriorates to bourgeois sentiment:

Hamm:	Do you remember your father.
Clov (wearily): Same answer. (Pause.) You’ve asked me these questions millions of times.
Hamm:	I love the old questions. (With fervor.) Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!^1

Thoughts are dragged along and distorted, like the residues of waking life in dreams, homo homini sapienti sat. This is why interpreting Beckett, something he declines to concern himself with, is so awkward. Beckett shrugs his shoulders at the possibility of philosophy today, at the very possibility of theory. The irrationality of bourgeois society in its late phase rebels at letting itself be understood; those were the good old days, when a critique of the political economy of this society could be written that judged it in terms of its own ratio. For since then the society has thrown its ratio on the scrap heap and replaced it with virtually unmediated control. Hence interpretation inevitably lags behind Beckett. His dramatic work, precisely by virtue of its restriction to an exploded facticity, surges out beyond facticity and in its enigmatic character calls for interpretation. One could almost say that the criterion of a philosophy whose hour has struck is that it prove equal to this challenge.

French existentialism had tackled the problem of history. In Beckett, history swallows up existentialism. In Endgame, a historical moment unfolds, namely the experience captured in the title of one of the culture industry’s cheap novels, Kaputt. After the Second World War, everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed without realizing it; humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even the survivors cannot really survive, on a rubbish heap that has made even reflection on one’s own damaged state useless. The word kaputt, the pragmatic presupposition of the play, is snatched back from the marketplace:

Clov:	(He gets up on ladder, turns the telescope on the without.) Let’s see. (He looks, moving the telescope.) Zero … (he looks) … zero … (he looks) … and zero.
Hamm:	Nothing stirs. All is –
Clov:	Zer –
Hamm:	(violently) Wait till you’re spoken to. (Normal voice.) All is … all is … all is what? (Violently.) All is what?
Clov:	What all is? In a word. Is that what you want to know? Just a moment. (He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope, tur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ Note
• Introduction
• PART ONE: POLITICAL CRITICISM
• PART TWO: LITERATURE/PHILOSOPHY
• PART THREE: DECONSTRUCTION
• PART FOUR: PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
• PART FIVE: READER RECEPTION
• PART SIX: SEMIOTICS
• PART SEVEN: FEMINISM/GENDER
• Glossary
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index