Afterword: To Begin Yet Again

The current intellectual scene is perplexing. Vitalisms, cognitivisms, fundamentalisms; theologies new-born and old-revived; slight and possibly even fatal pragmatisms, presentisms and populisms: all these flourish gaily, as items in the contemporary market of ideas. They are options with as much and as little significance as any other range of choices available to a contemporary consumer. Or, to put the point differently: we cling to them like shards of detritus after a great shipwreck. Living ‘in the wake’ is what matters. The twentieth century arrived at a previously unimaginably sophisticated conception and grasp of history that appeared to be connected to and in some degree hold out an august political promise. Yet, paradoxically, the century of historicism pursued to an extraordinarily subtle extreme also turned out to be one of profound historical catastrophe. As Giorgio Agamben tirelessly insists, it is delusional to suppose that we are in the process of extricating ourselves from this paradox. The ghosts of the last century are not to be exorcised by isolating particular and localized features of its unfolding horror, or seeking to cleanse our consciousness of it by treating specific ‘traumas’. That is merely to replicate (if in suitably updated terms) the blithe progressivism that Beckett dismissed out of hand. The last century is not behind but before us, as a conundrum we have yet to learn to contemplate, let alone solve. In this respect, the culture might study Beckett’s art of ‘slow going’ very thoughtfully.¹

In his life and art, Beckett spanned the larger part of the twentieth century. Like other great writers who have come to fame since 1945 – Celan, Coetzee, Sebald – he was haunted by the paradox I have described. According to this paradox, the evidential truth of history is philosophically implausible, and vice versa. There is no philosophical logic to the assumption of a world comprehensively deprived of a greater good, a priori and ab ovo; except insofar as that assumption seems everywhere borne out by history. Beckett wrote in a world become obscure, because it was impossible to trust either in history, or in any possibility of transcending history. He was clearly tempted by a kind of secular Manichaeanism, a philosophical position singularly appropriate to modern history, and one to which recent French philosophers, from the late Sartre (in the Critique of Dialectical Reason) to Badiou, Jambet and Lardreau have sometimes edged close.

Beckett lived through or witnessed the devastating upheavals in Ireland of the 1920s, the indifferent callousness of modern English imperialism and mercantilism, the political and cultural violence of National Socialism in Germany, the dire injustices of the Vichy regime, the Purge and the early years of the Fourth Republic in France, the terrors of the Cold War and the evolving triumph (and self-congratulation) of Western Capital. He saw everything he needed to see to supply him with a logic for historical revulsion. The world he knew was that of the historical remainder, unregenerate, unillumined historical experience, history as issueless maze, an indefinite proliferation of blind alleys. The roots of this knowledge, of course, were Irish. The history of Ireland presented a seven- or eight-hundred-year-old narrative of frequently brutish colonialism. To those who inherited the legacy of colonial Ireland, history itself could all too easily seem like a labyrinth to be negotiated only with great difficulty, from which there was no certainty of any release. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus was one such heir. Joyce himself was another, if in a different way. The early Beckett bears some startling resemblances to Stephen in Ulysses. But as a young Dublin Catholic intellectual whose culture will soon be in the ascendant in Ireland, Stephen Dedalus knows both that history is his nightmare, and that he must struggle to awake from it. As a young Protestant whose culture was in its death throes, Beckett was deprived of any such knowledge and assurance. As for making good: he and his class were deprived of any thought of atoning for the past – whatever that might mean – long before they might conceivably have begun to deem it necessary.

Thus Beckett can only abstract from history, since it will never properly be his. Hence the fact that, whilst his work lacks historical density, others have repeatedly thought of it as very much about historical experience. But if history remains an abstraction for him, he is also condemned to bear it as an eternal millstone round his neck. The young Beckett was emphatically the obverse of Joyce’s Englishman Haines, to whom Stephen sends a telegram quoting Meredith: ‘The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done’.² For Beckett, who had a horror of sentimentality, a New Year could only be ‘a new turn of the old screw’.³ History unfolds as a seemingly unending endgame. The problem is ontological: history is stymied by what Beckett calls ‘the authentic weakness of being’. It is inert, with the inertia of infinite differentiation, and is therefore powerless to save itself. ‘If you really get down to the disaster’, Beckett added, ‘the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable’.⁴ The weakness of being chokes language at its point of utterance, makes words seem both futile and de trop.

Hence the coexistence of two crucial aspects of Beckett’s work that I have emphasized here: melancholia and misericordia. Melancholia arises from Vladimir’s conviction that there is ‘nothing to be done’ (which seems partly to be a tart rejoinder to Lenin’s great historical question of 1902).⁵ The later Beckett increasingly responds that there is nothing to be done; and yet … Misericordia assumes that one cannot remain indifferent to the plight of others astray in the labyrinth. A third aspect of Beckett and his work which I have not emphasized very much, largely because others have, is caritas, goodness to others. This is more relevant to Beckett than the concept of the ‘good friend’. In one sense, obviously, he was a very good friend indeed, but it is not wholly clear that he ever properly experienced friendship, if friendship means intimacy; at least, to judge by the immense gulf that repeatedly yawns between others’ accounts of him and his own writings, the sense of lives lived in different worlds. In Beckett, caritas was a function of melancholia and misericordia. The three together are clearly expressions of a uniquely receptive sensibility. One cannot doubt accounts of Beckett’s extreme sensitivity to the pain and distress of others, or Barbara Bray’s description of him as ‘hyperaesthetic’.⁶

‘Misericordia’: Beckett in 1961.

The trouble with my three terms together is that they are in danger of making Beckett sound like a Christian stoic, which he certainly was not. They form part of a resiliently secular structure of thought. But what most decisively saves Beckett both from mere stoicism, Christian or other, and from secular manichaeanism, insofar as he is saved, is a conviction of the possibility of the event, in Alain Badiou’s sense and definition of that term. Philosophically, the event is a haphazard occurrence of that which appears for the first time, whose emergence is not foreseeable and which cannot be described according to prior laws of causality. From the Copernican transformation of our conception of the universe to the French Revolution, from the love affair that can redefine an ordinary life to Picasso’s modernist experiments in painting, events appear as decisive breaks with the given. They are supplements to what we have previously taken for the world. However fleetingly, the world is made new through events. Apart from them, it exists as a remainder. The term remainder designates history shorn of events and their consequences. It is the world as inhabited by Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot.

Most of the major traditions in Beckett scholarship have tended immediately to pitch themselves at a certain level of abstraction, whether philosophical or modernist. They assume that abstraction is self-evidently commensurate with Beckett’s work. However, a new positivism has recently been invading Beckett studies. Its consequences have sometimes been invigorating. In the end, however, particularly if its orientation is historical, positivism does not logically end in an anti-philosophical account of Beckett. It rather explains why philosophical thought, or an activity akin to it, was essential to him. Philosophical and theoretically-based readings of Beckett in general repeatedly accomplish one side of his project, or confirm it in place. For they reiterate and extend his insistence on the privilege of the speculative intellect relative to historical disaster.

But there are two ways of thinking of Beckettian abstraction, abstraction as retreat from the historical process, and abstraction as intervention in it. Marjorie Perloff and Pascale Casanova have both suggested that a certain kind of (initially French) abstraction from Beckett has long been determined by a headlong flight before the shockwaves of modern history. This was first of all the case with a generation of French intellectuals who wrote on him soon after the war: Bataille, Nadeau, Mayoux, Blanchot.⁷ Here, again, it is important that the ‘Paxtonian revolution’ be comprehensively factored into Beckett studies. In their differing ways, the intellectuals had reason to feel at least embarrassed and at times distinctly if not extremely uneasy about recent French history. Not surprisingly, they gave special place to a non-French (and ex-Resistance) French writer, whilst also rarefying his texts. Like the Gaullists, Bataille and Blanchot were concerned to sever connections with a recent history to which they felt uncomfortably close.⁸ They had a positive interest in not thinking Beckett historically.

This particular mode of abstraction then fed into and subsequently underpinned a whole tradition of first French and then Anglo-American post-structuralist abstraction in Beckett studies. The result was a great deal of fascinating and sometimes brilliant work, but work whose abstraction remained cloistered, whose horizons were strictly those of the very academic milieu Beckett deserted, and which repeatedly confirmed the ahistorical principle in Beckett studies. Badiou’s philosophy also writes history off. But it does so by way of slicing directly across history, thinking history from the vantage point of its possible transformation. His thought of the event annuls history in the interests of other possible histories, histories told by futures beyond our grasp, histories made available to those who are nothing as yet, who exist at the level of ‘heaps of garbage’. Beckett thinks in very similar fashion in ‘Saint-Lô’. Badiou shares Beckett’s double insistence: if it is crucial to register the pervasive trace of history, it is also crucial to negate it.

Badiou conceives of events as taking place only rarely. In this respect, whilst very much against the current grain, his thought is exactly appropriate to Beckett. If the possibility of the event is rare in Badiou’s philosophy, it is so rare in Beckett as to be almost imperceptible. Beckett was captive to a hyper-scrupulous conviction of the extreme difficulty of thinking the event, a difficulty amply borne in on him by recent history. He dedicated himself to that conviction because he knew that its logic was imperious. For Beckett as for Badiou, there is nothing ‘behind’ the world. Nothing decrees that the world must be or stay as it is. What we think we are and know is founded on nothing. The supposition that the world can be made new is therefore logical. Nothing disputes it; except history, which everywhere disputes it. If one paradox is intrinsic to Beckett’s works, it is that of the predicament from which there is apparently no exit, but which is also groundless. One may wait interminably for Godot. There may never be any evidence that he will make himself manifest, or indeed that he exists. But there is nonetheless no reason to suppose that the order of the world definitively excludes the possibility of his arrival. In a sense, the whole of Beckett’s project consists of a mimicry of history, in that it endlessly piles up obstacles to the idea of the transformative event. Ironically, however, as in Quad, the space of possibility can never be absolutely closed down, and thus the project reverses: the more Beckett seems determined to throttle the idea of the event, the more he actually preserves it or demonstrates that it is unkillable. This is the profound if contorted reasoning underlying his well-known assertion that the key word in his plays is perhaps.⁹

Thus, strange as it may seem, Bersani and Dutoit are right when they argue that Beckett is committed to producing ‘formulas for starting again’.¹⁰ His will to write off the world is not to be separated from this commitment. Beckett asserted that ‘Art loves leaps’ (‘L’art adore les sauts’, DI, p. 128). He throws this in the teeth of Leibniz. According to Leibniz, natura non facit saltus, nature makes no leaps: this is the depressingly inexorable principle of natural continuity. Beckett himself appears to adhere to it when, at the beginning of Murphy, he states that ‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new’ (MU, p. 5). But art can break this iron law and serve as a paradigm for breaking it. This is why Beckett could say that his work was ‘about’ the disappearance of the world.¹¹ He claimed to ‘think in new dimensions’, and told Charles Juliet that the only possible affirmation was to ‘give form to the unformed’, the yet-to-be-formed.¹²

Vivian Mercier once claimed that Beckett felt that ‘the entire human experiment has been a failure and must not be repeated’.¹³ Many of Beckett’s works come close to saying this. But this does not mean that he imagined that the ‘human experiment’ thus far was the only one possible, or even that he imagined it that it was the only one possible to human beings. The truly inveterate Beckettian repudiation is of the backward look: hence his distaste for naturalist and realist aesthetics, which are always founded on it. Hence also his disdain for empiricism: he has no investment whatever in a concept of knowledge as rooted in experience. ‘[My] work does not depend on experience,’ he told Lawrence Harvey, ‘it is not a record of experience’.¹⁴ In this respect, his modernism might seem opposed above all to Humean modernity; were it not for the fact that, as Hume himself makes clear in the Treatise on Human Nature 1.3, if knowledge derives only from experience, then that exactly defines its generic limits, and categorically distinguishes its scope, procedures and relation to the world from those (for example) of the prophetic, anticipatory, speculative (and therefore denunciatory) powers of the imagination. In this respect, Beckett is actually a late descendant of Hume, and his work continues to spread the modern scare inaugurated by Hume, who terrified many of his contemporaries.

To repudiate the backward look, however, is not to rid oneself of history. Indeed, it is to run all too large a risk of being overpowered by it again. If, as I have suggested, Beckett’s art is purgatorial and the figure of the scapegoat is central to it, that is because his art is caught up in a work of historical ridding or voiding. Thus, in ‘Saint-Lô’, Beckett assists the ‘old mind’ to ‘sink into its havoc’, in the interests of ‘other shadows’ that have yet to be born into their own ‘bright ways’ (CP, p. 32). Yet, at the same time, even as he seeks to write it off, he also partly identifies the old mind as his own. It is thus that he prepares the ground for others. Whatever the sometimes considerable merits of more recent discourses on Beckett and technology, textuality or the body, their good cheer is initially made possible by a feature of Beckett’s work that is quite distinct from those they focus on. Like Joyce, Beckett assumed ‘the holy office’: ‘Myself unto myself will give/This name, Katharsis-Purgative’. Beckett’s work functions partly as a historical conduit, bearing off what Joyce called the ‘filthy streams’ that obstruct others’ dreams.¹⁵

As this Life has tried to show throughout, Beckett’s art twisted and turned with vicissitude, with the historical situations in which he found himself. Yet he also displayed great tenacity and singleness of purpose, what he called an ‘aversion to half-measures and frills’.¹⁶ This showed in various different ways. It appeared in his work for the Resistance and the Irish Red Cross and his acute sense of responsibility to friends and family members. It appeared in his ferocious powers of concentration. It was even evident in his way of bicycling, ‘panting up the hills in bottom gear, refusing to give in, like my father’.¹⁷ But above all, it showed in his attitude to his art: in his battles with censorship; in the intensity and precision of his demands as a director of his own plays, which were sometimes more than his actors and actresses could bear; in the flat and unequivocal manner in which he turned down requests from others – directors, producers, publishers, prize awarders – if they appeared to require that he compromise his integrity, or that of his work.

For all the ruse of its title, the odd one out of the chapters in this book, the one which places Beckett in relation, not to a more or less profoundly disquieting set of historical circumstances, but to an enabling one, is the chapter on the École Normale. Normaliens have repeatedly demonstrated an acute grasp of Beckett’s sense of the fluidities of mind and world. But they have also noted that it co-exists with its obverse, a recognition that at a certain point, if only in exceptional circumstances, it is crucial that one determine a limit to infinite recession. This is not surprising, because the same emphasis is repeatedly present in the work of normaliens themselves, as one might expect from an institution that produced Bourbaki and Lautman along with Herr. By yet another paradoxical twist of logic, absolute uncertainty and the imperative of Proust’s ‘granite point’ turn out to be twin sides of the same coin. At a certain moment in the indefinite flow of the world, one chooses to stick and become unbudgeable, because nothing will otherwise decree any point at which it is necessary to do so. As Václav Havel put it, Beckett understood that, if one were not to prove ‘indifferent to the run of things’, one would occasionally have to take ‘the meaning of affliction’ upon oneself.¹⁸

‘A romanticism bémolisé, flattened, as B is flattened to B flat’: Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon.

Beckett’s sticking-point has finally a double aspect. He takes extremely, awesomely seriously the Romantic doctrine that, in Matthew Arnold’s words, art is a criticism of life. He literalizes it, radicalizes it, pursues it intransigently and all the way down, takes it quite beyond any conception of which Arnold was capable, to the point where he almost produces a parody of it. He transmutes it into an extravagantly negative and sometimes violent aesthetic. He also rudely strips it of the self-gratifying nobility and humanistic dignity to which the Romantics and their successors remained in thrall. In the German Diaries, he at one point suggests that the only romanticism ‘still tolerable’ for us is, like Caspar David Friedrich’s, bémolisé, flattened, as B is flattened to B flat.¹⁹ At the same time, he persists in whilst also radicalizing and demystifying the Romantic and post-Romantic conviction of the possibility of a secular grace, the occasion, experience, chance, epiphany or trajectory which transforms our understanding of what life can be. To say that he makes this conviction difficult and virtually unsustainable is an understatement. Yet it flickers here and there in his work, flaring unpredictably where we might least expect it, as in Worstward Ho, which abruptly introduces a word that has a specific weight in Romantic discourses, joy:

No mind and words? Even such words. So enough still. Just enough still to joy. Joy! Just enough still to joy that only they. Only! (WH, p. 29)

In the context of Beckett’s work as a whole, that the narrator himself should seem confounded by the appearance of the word is fitting enough. But the possibility of a moment like this is intrinsic to Beckettian failure and impotence. For, though every epoch is vigorously intent on promoting its own instruments of historical closure, be they hadron colliders, race science, economism, the victory of the proletariat, empires, God or DNA, nothing can quite stop history springing extraordinary surprises for the good on us, however intermittently or rarely; nor entirely smother our own capacity to respond to them.