Freedom and Negativity in Beckett and Adorno

Something or Nothing

Natalie Leeder

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786603210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Since his notorious 1961 lecture, 'Trying to Understand Endgame ', Theodor W. Adorno's name has been frequently coupled with that of Samuel Beckett. This book offers a radical reappraisal of the intellectual affinities between these two figures, whose paths crossed all too fleetingly. Specifically the book argues for a preoccupation with the concept of freedom in Beckett's works - one which situates him as a profoundly radical and even political writer. Adorno's own more explicit reconceptualization of freedom and its scarcity in modernity offers a unique lens through which to examine the way Beckett's works preserve a minimal space of freedom that acts in opposition to an unfree social totality. While acknowledging both the biographical encounters between Adorno and Beckett and the influence Beckett's writings had on Adorno's aesthetics, Natalie Leeder goes further to establish a dialogue between their intellectual positions, working with a range of texts from both writers and seeking insight in Adorno's less familiar works, as well as his magnum opera, Aesthetic Theory and Negative Dialectics.

Chapter One

Freedom and Its Limits

Nowhere in Beckett’s corpus are freedom’s limitations explored so explicitly and intensely as in his first published novel, Murphy, and his original and often forgotten foray into theatre, the posthumously published Eleutheria. In these texts, Beckett stages the respective failures of Murphy and Victor to attain freedom, which while desperately desired remains a somewhat nebulous concept. Both characters position themselves in opposition to the empirical world – figured in Murphy primarily as a place of exchange and associated in Eleutheria with a post-war ethic of commitment – in the vain hope of circumventing its demands altogether. Though Murphy ends with a bang – with Murphy ‘delivered up to the third zone by a flush of the cosmic toilet’¹ – and Eleutheria with a whimper, the texts are united in their emphasis on the inherent limitations of their protagonists’ endeavour. Primarily, by isolating themselves from the legitimately despised bourgeois world, Murphy and Victor fail to recognize that everything they do is mediated by it – and in a far more profound way than their ironic acceptance of handouts from their respective families.

Beckett’s interest in limits, moreover, extends to the philosophical systems invoked by these densely allusive texts.² It is, I suggest, through an Adornian framework that we can best understand Beckett’s, admittedly non-systematic, metacritique of philosophy in Murphy and Eleutheria. In these texts, Beckett invokes philosophical positions only to undermine them, so it is imperative to see beyond the dense pattern of allusions to the broader questions that are being addressed. This mode of critique is characteristic of Adorno’s own philosophy, which is concerned with following the philosophical claims of others to the point where they undo themselves. This may seem derivative, or even parasitic, but Adorno’s careful attentiveness to the meanderings of philosophical thought not only exposes conceptual crevices on that philosopher’s own terms, but also reveals the extent to which abstract thought is dependent on the empirical reality it so often shuns in search of immutable truths. In Murphy, then, the protagonist appropriates the extreme Cartesianism of Geulincx and the rationalism of Spinoza for his own narcissistic ends. His relentless and ingenuous perversion of their principles exposes their inherent limitations as philosophical systems while simultaneously pulling the rug from beneath his feet by undermining the basis of his own pursuit of freedom. Far from endorsing Murphy’s use of these philosophies, the narrator adopts a heavily ironic tone towards its protagonist’s pursuits, allowing us, with Adorno’s conceptual framework, to dissect their inherent limitations. If, above all, Murphy concerns itself with the relationship between subject and society, then Murphy’s explosive failure demonstrates how entrenched the ideology of individualism is and how it acts as a mounting obstacle to freedom.

Victor’s withdrawal from society in Eleutheria, however, is markedly positioned against Jean-Paul Sartre’s advocacy of commitment as simultaneously the ethical response to our absolute freedom and the sole means of securing universal freedom. Here I trace a convergence between Beckett and Adorno, the latter of whom manifests a similar scepticism regarding Sartrean freedom and its ethos of commitment. Eleutheria’s parodic subversion of existentialism, however, is unable or unwilling to offer a viable alternative: Victor’s quiet resignation to his condition of ‘limbo’ (Eleutheria, 164) is never fully endorsed by the text, even though it escapes the mocking explosion of Murphy’s pretensions to freedom.

Finally, Beckett’s interrogation of the limits of his protagonists’ search for freedom and the philosophical systems they invoke or respond to leads to a more fundamental limitation: that of the thematic presentation of freedom. Beckett circumvents the inexorable problem of directly representing freedom by locating it in what Richard Begam, with reference to Murphy, describes as the ‘“absent” center’ of the texts³: that is, freedom is at once the desired state of the protagonists, one that is never actualized, and the unpresentable theme around which the texts compulsively circle. To this extent, Murphy and Eleutheria reveal a logic of negation: a refusal to present, falsely, freedom as a positive given. Nonetheless, they are constrained by their exploration of freedom on the level of content alone. With this in mind, this chapter concludes by considering the significance of Adorno’s dialectic of form and content for Beckett’s post-war shift away from traditional representation. Ultimately, I suggest, the multivalent limitations of Murphy and Eleutheria catalyse Beckett’s experimentation with new and increasingly minimal ways of approaching that elusive concept of freedom.

MURPHY’S METACRITIQUE OF PHILOSOPHY

Murphy’s quest for freedom is an unmitigated failure that ends in his undignified death and obsequies. Within what is at times ‘a riotous pot-pourri of many metaphysical systems’,⁴ Murphy adapts and distorts philosophies for his own ends, making it impossible to align him categorically with any one thinker. This is not, however, to underestimate the significance of these perverted philosophies for the novel as a whole or for Murphy’s own catastrophic journey. Murphy’s crude, instrumental application of Descartes, Spinoza and Geulincx certainly results in a humiliating failure, but the novel’s satirical force equally sends the philosophies themselves, and their basic ideological assumptions, hurtling down to the ground. Fundamentally, I argue, the qualities that limit Murphy in his search for freedom can be traced back to the systems of thought he modifies and, beyond that, to the social world he refuses to recognize as his own. That is, following Adorno, I insist on the necessity of understanding philosophy and the empirical world as dialectically mediated. The elevated ideas of seventeenth-century rationalism and bourgeois socio-economic conditions are interdependent, each maintaining and legitimating the other. Cartesian dualism offers Murphy the terms with which to detach himself from the world in a hypostatization of his consciousness of subject–object alienation – or the gap between the ‘little world’ (Murphy, 112) of his mind and the ‘big world’ (6) outside it. This prepares the ground for his warped acceptance of the bourgeois Spinozan virtue of self-preservation, the perversion of which places Murphy at the system’s divine centre in a state of narcissistic self-affirmation. Far from escaping the external world and its values, his retreat into self only serves to confirm its power. His long-awaited freedom is revealed to be uncannily similar to the particular brand of determinism expounded by Geulincx. Only when he stares into the eyes of Mr. Endon, confronted with nothing but his obdurate self, does Murphy finally recognize the tautological horror of his little world, its dependence on the social world and its utter inability to provide anything resembling freedom.

Neary’s prognosis that Murphy’s ‘conarium has shrunk to nothing’ (Murphy, 6) is not far from the truth – or, at least, from Murphy’s truth. Murphy’s system – his perception of himself and his relation to the world – is predicated on a belief in dualism, but, crucially, a dualism without mediation: without the benefit of Descartes’ conarium or pineal gland.⁵ Thus ‘Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without’ (69), an image that is bathetically prefigured in Murphy’s ‘holeproof’ suit that ‘admitted no air from the outer world’ and ‘allowed none of Murphy’s own vapours to escape’ (47). More revealingly, perhaps, it is later compared by Murphy himself to a padded cell, ‘windowless, like a monad’ (114), exposing Beckett’s own awareness that the so-called century of reason is an absolute misnomer: ‘they’re all mad, ils sont tous fous, ils déraissonent! They give reason a responsibility which it simply can’t bear, it’s too weak.’⁶ These deflations of Murphy’s naïve philosophical system highlight its fundamental irrationality, preventing us from wholly coinciding with his antipathy towards the mercantile world. It is precisely Murphy’s relationship with this world – his emphatic rejection of it – that is so problematic, and which is the occasion for much of the novel’s irony. The dualism Murphy intuitively feels to be the case can be understood in Adornian terms as reflecting ‘the real separation, the dichotomy of the human condition, a coercive development’ (AR, 139). Murphy’s alienation from the capitalist world is perfectly justifiable. However, Adorno continues:

[T]‌he resulting separation must not be hypostasized, not magically transformed into an invariant…. The separation is no sooner established directly, without mediation, than it becomes ideology, which is indeed its normal form. The mind will then usurp the place of something absolutely independent – which it is not; its claim of independence heralds the claim of dominance. Once radically parted from the object, the subject reduces it to its own measure; the subject swallows the object, forgetting how much it is an object itself. (AR, 139)

Primarily through the use of a sardonic narrator, Murphy maintains an ironic distance from the views of its protagonist. Hence Murphy’s legitimate alienation from the abhorrent world of ‘Quid pro quo’ (3) is complicated by his insistence upon universalizing it as an absolute. In the long-awaited ‘section six’ (4) mentioned on the second page of the novel, we see how Murphy ontologizes his mind. In this way, his sense of estrangement from the external world is attributed not, fundamentally, to the profoundly unfree nature of capitalist society, but to the ontological fact of his mind as ‘a closed system, subject to no principle of change but its own’ (70). The novel’s detachment from this view is made abundantly clear by the disclaimer at the beginning of the chapter: ‘[h]‌appily we need not concern ourselves with this apparatus as it really was – that would be an extravagance and an impertinence – but solely with what it felt and pictured itself to be’ (69). Adorno insists that such hypostatization as Murphy exhibits generates a deceptive belief in the mind’s independence and supremacy. And, indeed, Murphy’s absolute belief in the ‘self-sufficient and impermeable’ (70) nature of his mind leads to a ‘claim of independence’ that is at once hubristic and facile, since it does not account for the significance of the empirical world. Murphy’s ...