Apple Criticizes Tree of Knowledge
SAMUEL BECKETT is conjured out of his cave more than is decent, and most often to decorate expressive deficiency. This reviewer, too, may be repeatedly guilty of this compensatory subterfuge, and who doesn’t stand in hope of vivifying a foundering paragraph if all it takes to tag on a lightning bolt is the claim that something or other “is much like Beckett’s Endgame”? For the ease, however, with which Beckett’s work has lent itself to facile invocation Beckett himself deserves some blame. It is telling, for instance, that his writings never fell to the censor’s bludgeon, were never decried a public menace, were never once docketed as fonts of adolescent despair and suicide, as were repeatedly Sartre’s mediocre narrative and plays. In his later years Beckett was more than aware of the deficiency this pointed up in his work, and finally, finding that no provocation sufficed to alarm the authorities, he was driven to censor his work himself. Thus, in his famous staging of Waiting for Godot in Berlin in 1975, Pozzo—as ever—drags with a yank on the rope knotted around his slave’s neck and exalts: “Think pig! . . . Think!” And Lucky—as ever—snaps upright, eyes bugging. But as Lucky’s mouth chokes open to recite the most famous monologue of twentieth-century drama—the erudite, scatological “Quaquaquaqua”—the slave instead glares out at the audience in goggle-eyed silence.
Here Beckett had intervened to scotch the speech. Its cunning, unpunctuated hilarity had once deftly fitted thumbs to the collective jugular, as to insist: “Isn’t collapsing cornered thought, the whole effort ever made to think, a hopeless riot?” But long anthologized with the best of the best, soliloquies from Augustine on, the quaquaqua had surrendered the tense grip in its fingers and become a sure thing. The crowd pleaser invariably brought down the house as the audience thrilled at the resiliency of its own historical immunities, unbreached by even forced doses of self-recognition: Lucky would stammer to a halt; the audience would cheer. Beckett understood that the speech had to go and if the guardians of the good and the true could not be shaken from their slumber, Beckett had demonstrated that his own alertness was unimpeded.
No doubt, from reports of the evening’s stunned expectation, Beckett’s ruse did the trick, and no doubt Beckett at least briefly savored some factor of pure audience disappointment. But if the censorial ruse was first rate, it was also too clever by half for its own good, for the device could hardly be repeated, and this brought the play to a stalemate. After that single performance, Godot fell into limbo; and with the death of Beckett—since the pivotal quaquaqua could neither be pronounced, omitted, nor recreated—it even came to seem that the play had been left behind in perpetuity, unperformably shattered. Until, that is, the publication of Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment. This book’s appearance witnesses language itself, on world historical scale, struggling to come to the aid of Beckett’s play. For in this book the distinguished philosopher, trusted cohort, and expounder of Habermas’s communicative reasoning—Karl-Otto Apel—presents an essay every sentence of which is the sentence. Though it is not until the concluding passage that all messianic hopes are fulfilled, syllable by syllable:
As a metaphysics-free, transcendental-reflexive confirmation of the inescapable presuppositions of philosophical argumentation, the transcendental-pragmatic justification of the standpoint of reason also contains the standards able to unmask crypto-metaphysical theorizing, such as that already pointed out in variants of scientistic reductionism. (p. 351)
True, these numb words performed from under the proscenium arch would be met with so much coughing, noise in the aisles, rough-housing, and snoring that getting through to the last syllable would demand a robust comedia erudite. But Lucky and Pozzo are by origin helpful types and would want to pitch in with a ready prompt and a suggestion or two. In fact, if we listen in on Apel’s sentence again, hear it from near the end of the line—and with improved enunciation—anyone can easily judge its potential for opening night:
APEL (reading from a book open in his hands): “… to unmask crypto-metaphysical theorizing, such as that already pointed out in variants of scientistic reductionism” (p. 351).
LUCKY: Nice, but you forgot, “Please don’t hit me.”
APEL: Hmmm … hmmm … (eyes search farther down the page) … I see, I see … How about, “Justification-free transcendental pragmatics as even earlier pointed out. . .”? (p. 351).
POZZO: Approximately, approximately—Pan! dans les gencives. (“Bang! Right on the kisser!”) Don’t forget to be funny!
APEL: That’s not fair, Pozzo, philosophy is not supposed to be funny. Let’s see how the essay’s last line will play. Why don’t we? Ahem: “The barbarity of reflection” may still lead “to a regression of human culture back to primitive conditions” (p. 351).
LUCKY (distracted, plucks an apple and gives it a bite): It’s a risk.