Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas

P. Fifield

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137294074
• eBook ISBN: 9781137319241
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Beckett and Levinas are of central importance to critical debates about literary ethics. Rather than suggest the preservation of literary and ethical value in the wake of the WWII, this book argues that both launched a sustained attack on the principles of literature, weaving narrative, and descriptive doubt through phenomenology, prose, and drama.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

Writing against Art

The status of writing in postwar Paris was a fraught subject. Some of the most high-profile figures punished for collaborating with the occupying German forces were authors and publishers, most famously Robert Brasillach and Bernard Grasset. Equally, the acts of writing and printing, whether a victory sign on a misted window or a propaganda leaflet, put writers such as Vercors and publishers such as Éditions de Minuit at the forefront of resistance.¹ The city of Paris was released from a conqueror whose iconic book-burnings hint at a broader cultural war against France and its artists. In the political melee of the liberated city, the figures who quickly rose to cultural prominence were writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus whose outspoken political engagement promised to stage a break with the failures of the past, while asserting continuity with the tradition of the public intellectual so often considered a marker of French society. This process of renewal was marked by a number of important interventions by the intellectual community, the most prominent of which was Sartre’s own What is Literature? (1947). Beckett’s Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1949) and Levinas’s “Reality and its Shadow” (1948) represent a cogent challenge to Sartre’s interpretation of art, and can be understood better in this light.

The original circumstances of publication encourage this contextualization. “Reality and its Shadow” is quite clearly a challenge to Sartre’s book, and conducts its combat on Sartrean turf, namely Les Temps modernes, where it appeared in 1948. Indeed, it so fiercely challenged Sartre’s opinions that it was prefaced by what might best be described as an editorial disclaimer, which I will discuss shortly. Beckett’s Three Dialogues was published in Transition, which aimed, as Duthuit’s editorial introduction to the first issue put it, “to assemble for the English-speaking world the best of French art and thought whatever the style and whatever the application.”² While the journal undoubtedly delivers its promised diversity, there is a distinct unifying feature in the shape of Duthuit’s own extended essay “Sartre’s Last Class.” Duthuit’s essay, running across five of the six issues, places Sartre’s contemporary writing at the center of the Parisian scene, promising that “The next number of Transition ’48 will contain further important extracts from J.-P. Sartre’s essay ‘What is Literature?’ We plan also to publish some of the occasionally very sharp replies which his attacks on the writers of today and yesterday have elicited.”³ With this nexus of texts in mind we may reread Beckett’s response to Gabriel D’Aubarède’s later suggestion that “the existentialists’ problem of being may afford a key to your works.” Beckett stated that “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.”⁴ In addition to the broader dismissal of philosophy’s explanatory function, the objection is to the appropriation of his works to a Sartrean agenda in the heat of existentialism’s popularity. The Three Dialogues ought to be read, alongside “Reality and its Shadow,” as a notable refusal of Sartre’s views on art.

Sartre’s book establishes the prose writer as a profoundly free figure. Preeminent among the famously self-determining subjects of existentialism, the writer has freedom at the heart of his enterprise: “the writer, a free man addressing free men, has only one subject—freedom.”⁵ The writer’s identity is not a matter of divine nomination, compulsion, or social responsibility, but a matter of choice for the individual: “no one is obliged to choose himself as a writer. Hence, freedom is at the origin. I am an author, first of all, by my free intention to write.”⁶ Having made the choice to be an author, the aim for Sartre’s writer is to disclose the world, rather than create a distracting illusion: “this is quite the final goal of art: to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is.”⁷ This is possible because the writer’s medium allows accurate perception of the world: “words are transparent and [ . . . ] the gaze looks through them.”⁸ Writing and reading are, in this highest form of art, a totalizing project, whereby its participants “may re-adapt the totality of being to man and may again enclose the universe within man.”⁹ The world is made known, and, more profoundly, made mine in the aesthetic experience, so that “The world is my task.”¹⁰ Writing and reading prose constitute a voluntary exercise of my power through which my projects are developed, and the world yields to my efforts. As such, the ultimate aim of the prose writer is not simply to uncover the world, but to exercise his will upon it, as “He knows that to reveal is to change and that one can reveal only by planning to change.”¹¹ The world bends to the will of the committed writer.

Numerous elements of this conception are challenged by Beckett and Levinas. For both writers art constitutes a challenge to freedom. It does not allow an exercise of liberty, but makes an irresistible demand of the author and his audience. Levinas recognizes this at once in the act of criticism. While he prefers its conceptual adeptness to the ambiguous perceptual wash of art, the impetus for interpretation is of deep concern. He observes: “Not content with being absorbed in aesthetic enjoyment, the public feels an irresistible needs to speak” (LR 130). Opposing the critic’s urge to speak to the silence of the artist, who “refuses to say about the artwork anything in addition to the work itself, the fact” (132) the critic’s compulsive speech is a product of the “magic” (132) of the artwork, which commands the participation of its viewers. Characterizing this as art’s “rhythmic” power, which is not an internal feature but an effect, he describes how artworks “impose themselves on us, disengaging themselves from reality. But they impose themselves on us without our assuming them. Or rather, our consenting to them is inverted into a participation [ . . . ] Rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it” (132). Sartre anticipates this objection with a reassertion of the primacy of freedom: “the mirror which he [the author] modesty offers to his readers is magical: it enthralls and compromises [ . . . ] this image remains none the less a work of art, that is, it has its basis in the freedom of the author and is an appeal to the freedom of the reader.”¹² Indeed, his reader is never so thoroughly enthralled that he cannot break away from the art work at his choosing: “I can awaken at every moment, and I know it; but I do not want to; reading is a free dream.”¹³ For Levinas, entrancement precedes and makes freedom impossible, so that, rather than Sartre’s interaction of readerly and writerly liberties, the reader is enchanted in “a waking dream” (133). This is potently illustrated by reference to dancing, in what is surely a passing swipe at the existentialist love affair with jazz-drenched night clubs: “The particular automatic character of a walk or a dance to music is a mode of being where nothing is unconscious, but where consciousness, paralyzed in its freedom, plays, totally absorbed in its freedom” (133). Art is a serious matter insofar as it enchants its audience into toe-tapping frivolity. They do not choose to, but art infiltrates the consciousness, which only appears to exercise its will. This is also evidently a correction of and rebuke to the supposed political sobriety of Sartre’s reader, whose imagination, we are told, “does not play.”¹⁴ Art is a serious matter in its own right for Sartre. For Levinas, by contrast, we must take it seriously because of its seductive frivolity.

If Levinas is concerned primarily with disputing Sartre’s characterization of the free reader, Beckett presents a view of the artist at odds with Sartre’s sovereign creator. Beckett’s famous summary of the artist’s task leaves nothing but obligation: “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.”¹⁵ Each of Beckett’s missing elements is possessed by Sartre’s writer. The latter has a subject (freedom), a medium that allows accurate perception of the world (language), a cultural space within which to speak, increased political and philosophical influence and justification, and a desire to change the world. And by contrast, he is not obliged to speak, but chooses to. The purposeful commitment of a Sartrean author is diagnosed as a two-symptom illness: “the malady of wanting to know what to do and the malady of wanting to be able to do it” (Three Dialogues 110). Indeed, Masson especially ought to be viewed in a Sartrean context, as Beckett repeatedly quotes the painter’s essay “Divigations sur l’espace” first published in Les Temps modernes in 1949. Thus, the second dialogue introduces the artist as one who has an existentialist’s desire to commit, rather than an irresistible obsession. Masson is one who is “In search of the difficulty rather than in its clutch,” and who is still working under the illegitimate “problems he has set himself in the past” (109). Apparently unable to perceive the futility of the artistic act, Masson has the impression of choosing his objective and so revel in “ease and freedom” (112). It is this distinctively Sartrean taste for liberty and competence that condemns him to the art that Beckett maligns. Preferable for Beckett is not an artist with a particular aim, but one who has given up marking a target entirely. Bram van Velde does not try or want, rather he admits and surrenders: “he is the first to accept a certain situation and to consent to a certain act [ . . . ] The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint” (119). In response to Duthuit’s efforts to unearth the cause of this last creative element left standing, “Why is he obliged? [ . . . ] Why is he helpless to paint?” (119–20), Beckett can only iterate lack: “I don’t know [ . . . ] Because there is nothing to paint and nothing to paint with” (119–20). Reaching this limit, which is also its cause, Beckett and Levinas together suggest that art is its own agent, manipulating artist and viewer alike; it exerts an enchantment that is without prior cause or source of authority. This is not, as Levinas makes clear, an ethical obligation, nor is it “an enterprise” through which one chooses to shape the world.¹⁶ It is a cause of its own kind, and it is the proximity of this cause to the ethical that so troubles Levinas.

Written before the advent of his mature ethical metaphysics, “Reality and its Shadow” nevertheless marks the first enunciation of a distrust of art that runs through Totality and Infinity and beyond. He writes in the essay “art, essentially disengaged, constitutes, in a world of initiative and responsibility, a dimension of evasion” (LR 141). Rather than perceiving and acting upon the world, art demands my comprehending fascination: “This is not the disinterestedness of contemplation but of irresponsibility” (142). Levinas thus offers an answer to an important question in Beckett studies, namely, is the “obligation” of the Three Dialogues an ethical one? Levinas suggests, in the strongest possible terms, that it is not. While he comments on the viewer rather than the artist, his writing is unambiguous in stating that art is unethical precisely insofar as it makes a demand of us that is not that of the other person. The obligation that Beckett must express, which exercises its own, self-justifying agency over the artist despite being a nonhuman entity, marks it out as the antithesis of the ethical in Levinas’s metaphysics.

If Levinas settles a Beckettian question, Beckett’s Three Dialogues also opens a new path for Levinas. For a second important disagreement surrounds the task of expression itself. Where Sartre’s prose writer must undertake his work with “the intention of succeeding perfectly,” Levinas denounces art’s desire to express what is beyond comprehension.¹⁷ The artist, he contends, “tells of the ineffable” (130) and thus claims an enriched perception akin to “metaphysical intuition” (130). However, instead of allowing proper comprehension, Levinas argues that art forms a seductive rival to the world, “more real than reality” (130). In this realm the viewer is enveloped in a sea of ambiguous, nonconceptual, sensation. Art obscures and distracts, and its function lies “in not understanding” (131). This is the central charge made against existentialism, the figure behind “the contemporary dogma of knowledge through art” (131). Sartrean metaphysics, Levinas suggests, is an edifice of erroneous perception and misguided activism: “art as knowledge, then brings the problem of committed art, which is a problem of committed literature” (131). This is indigestible for the unnamed author of the editorial preface to the essay, who transforms Sartre into an unlikely redeemer for a fallen literature, as he “gives to a philosophical critique the care to recover art for truth, to rejoin the links between ‘disengaged’ thought and the other, between the game of art and the seriousness of art.”¹⁸ The thought that art might not truthfully depict the world is so central to the code of Les Temps modernes that it sees Levinas’s rebellion as a clarion call for renewed literary truthfulness. What the journal’s editor refuses or fails to discern is the profound degree to which Levinas repudiates the value of art, which is rotten root and branch.

Beckett also famously rejects the possibility that art can express, but instead of falling silent on the subject, states that the artist’s task is to acknowledge this. That is, if “Reality and its Shadow” writes off literature because “It is generally, dogmatically, admitted that the function of art is expression” (130), Beckett’s work begins by refusing precisely this axiom. He dismisses art’s claims to move “towards a more adequate expression of natural experience, as revealed to the vigilant coenaesthesia” (Three Dialogues 101), and prefers an art “weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing” (103). Matching Levinas’s skepticism as to literature’s capacity to express something about the world, Beckett is uneasy around art’s pretensions to totalization, which are once again exemplified by Sartre, who suggested that “Each painting, each book, is a recovery of the totality of being.”¹⁹ Indeed, for both reader and writer, Sartre suggests, the work endeavors to “enclose the universe within man” (43). Writing to Duthuit Beckett even expresses uncertainty toward his claims for Bram van Velde, who clings on to a revealing lexicon: “It is not for nothing that he so often talks of dominating and conquering.”²⁰ Sartre’s artist may likewise view writing as “a means of conquering.”²¹ In elevating the artist as a weak figure, and departing from this totalizing principle, Beckett significantly reopens the question of literature for Levinas.

Less striking than this disagreement is an important argument between Sartre, Beckett, and Levinas about genre, which underlies my own shifts—so far unremarked—between references to prose, painting, and writing. What is Literature? begins not with a call to commitment or an elevation of freedom, but a complaint about the muddling of disciplines in the critical discussions of his contemporaries. Sartre grumbles that “today it’s the thing to ‘talk painting’ in the jargon of the musician or the literary man and to ‘talk literature’ in the jargon of the painter, as if at bottom there were only one art which expressed itself indifferently in one or the other of these languages.”²² If this approach seeks to isolate writing—and within that, prose—from its neighboring artistic disciplines, Beckett, writing to Duthuit on August 11, 1948, states the futility of attempting to do so: “In defining literature, to one’s satisfaction, even brief, where is the gain, even brief? Armour, all that stuff, for a loathsome combat” (Letters II 98). Unhappy in the critic’s chair Beckett nevertheless sets store by the application of painterly ideas to writing. The following day he clarifies: “For me all the Titans are in agreement, the Herculeses, whatever the kind of labour: between [Henri] Pichette and [Michaelangelo] Buonarroti the adding-up is easily don...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index