Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution

Introduction

by Terry Eagleton

Samuel Beckett is one of those writers about whom almost nobody nowadays has a bad word to say, despite the fact that the first London production of Waiting for Godot was greeted with outraged cries of ‘This is how we lost the Empire!’ Yet this well-nigh universal approval may not be entirely for the right reasons. Beckett’s work is undoubtedly somewhat bleak for the taste of a middle class which has traditionally required its art to be edifying; but it seems on the other hand so exactly the kind of thing the middle class expects its modern art to be – namely, a tolerably obscure investigation of the ‘human condition’ – that its gloom may be largely forgiven. In any case, there are always critics on hand to scour these remorselessly negative texts for the occasional glimmer of humanistic hope, in a world where rank pessimism is felt to be somehow ideologically subversive.

Beckett’s prose is so palpably ‘universal’, so packed with pregnant lines, half-symbols and cryptic allusions, and his drama is so much the sort of thing that the West End theatregoer confidently expects from his evening out, that one wonders whether this stark, gratifyingly ‘deep’ discourse of Man is not at some level as mischievously parodic as the work of his fellow Dubliner Oscar Wilde, who in poker-faced style turned out drawing-room dramas so impeccably well-made that they deferred to the English at the very moment they sent them up.

This existential-cum-metaphysical Beckett, resonant with the pathos of Being, may be a character dear to the heart of Maurice Blanchot, who figures more or less as the villain of this book; but it is far from the astonishingly revolutionary artist that Pascale Casanova presents us with here. This is a Beckett who pursues the logic of abstraction to its most inhuman extremes; who refuses the morphine of idealism even when in severe pain; whose work represents a merciless onslaught on the pretensions of Literature; and who preserves a compact with silence, breakdown and failure in the face of historical triumphalism and the self-flaunting word. As Casanova points out, he is out to dismantle the very conventional conditions of possibility of literature: ‘the subject, memory, imagination, narration, character, psychology, space and time …’ What else is his drama Breath but a response to the question: How can you write a play with no dialogue, scenery, plot, action or character? As for his ‘world view’, it is not out of the question that Beckett himself, despite his lugubrious oeuvre, might have been in private life a sentimental optimist with a Panglossian faith in human nature. We know enough of his life, in fact, to know that he was nothing of the kind; not many Panglossian optimists have landed up on the couch of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. Yet it is worth keeping the possibility in mind, just to remind ourselves of this author’s aversion to the idea that he was somehow ‘expressing himself in his writings. Even if anything as inconceivable as expression is going on, what is being expressed is certainly nothing as drearily passé as a self.

His work, in short, presents us with the scandal of a literature which no longer depends on a philosophy of the subject. The deflation of the rhetoric of achievement, along with the puristic horror of deceit which knows itself even so to be unavoidably mystified: this is no mere purveying of a ‘way of seeing’, but the stamp of a dissident, peripheral author who never ceases to shrink, mechanize and hack to the bone a twentieth-century world swollen with its own ideological bombast. It is no wonder he was such a fan of the evacuative aesthetics of his fellow Dubliner Jonathan Swift. For this politics of lessness, texts which only just manage to exist, statements which evaporate the very instant they flicker ambiguously up, break fewer bones than the declarations of a jiinger or a Heidegger. If Beckett was a great anti-fascist writer, it is not only because he fought with the French Resistance, a bravery for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre, but because every sentence of his writing keeps faith with power-lessness. The sheer contingency of his prose cuts the ground from beneath the sense of destiny and absolute certitudes of his political enemy. Even his decision to write in French, as Casanova points out, was influenced by his sense that French represented ‘a form of weakness’ compared with the opulence of his native tongue.

This, as Adorno recognized, is partly a question of how to write after Auschwitz. Yet it also belongs to a specifically Irish legacy. Like Heraclitus, the Irish have always held that nothing is quite as real as nothing. Medieval Irish theology, with its emphasis on the frailty and littleness of Jesus rather than the august majesty of God the Father, preserves a certain minimalist style, while the greatest of all Irish medieval philosophers, John Scotus Eriugena, was Europe’s most subtle expounder of negative theology in the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius, teaching the doctrine that God is non-being. Ireland’s most eminent modern philosopher, George Berkeley, remarked that ‘for us Irish, something and nothing are near allied’, while his clerical colleague Archbishop King of Dublin wrote that ‘all finite beings partake of nothing, and are nothing beyond their bounds’. The Tipperary-born novelist Laurence Sterne put in a word for nothingness, ‘considering’, he observed, ‘what worse things there are in the world’. For the aesthetician Edmund Burke, as well as for the novelist Flann O’Brien, sublimity includes that which is barely visible as well as the immense and immeasurable, since both are equally ungraspable.

In modern times, these claims for the value of the negative, lowly or humbly unremarkable have a political resonance to them often enough. If Britain is very much something, then colonial Ireland is next to nothing. This inconsiderable afterthought of Europe, as Joyce scornfully dubbed it, was too small to give birth to the prodigal, capacious, ambitiously totalizing fictions of a Balzac or a Dickens. Instead, the short story became one of its most successful genres, pivoting as it does on a caught moment, isolated selfhood or stray epiphany. One of the nation’s premier short story writers, Sean O’Faolain, felt that Ireland was too ‘thin’ a society, too lacking in ‘complex social machinery’, to be fit meat for novelistic fiction. Henry James thought something rather similar about his native United States. If Joyce produced a monstrous tome in Ulysses, it was as much as a parody of the English naturalistic novel as in homage to it. Wilde, who worked for the most part in minor genres, chose to dazzle the world as a major minor writer, while James Clarence Mangan left us with a clutch of poetic fragments and ruins.

Casanova’s riposte to the Blanchot-ing of Beckett is to be both formal and historical in equal measure. This, at first glance, is a surprising combination of approaches, since we normally assume that historical criticism throws open a work to the winds of reality, while formalist techniques seek to seal it hermetically from them. Yet as Lukács reminded us, there is no more truly historical phenomenon in art than form, which is quite as much saturated in social signification as so-called content. And nothing is more historically eloquent than the moment when art comes either despairingly or triumphantly to claim its autonomy from history. There are those on the cultural left, half a century after Adorno did his work, who in their idealist fashion still regard aesthetic autonomy as simply a false way of perceiving artworks – as an ideological illusion rather than a material reality. The antidote to such misperception, so they imagine, is to historicize the work. But for one thing, historicizing, from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott, has by no means always been the prerogative of the political left; and for another thing, form and aesthetic autonomy are historical phenomena in any case.

The story this study has to tell is not one of how Beckett’s writing can be viewed both formally and historically, though its own combination of historical survey and close textual analysis is exemplary. It is rather the narrative of how this artist is forced into the embrace of avant-garde autonomy by virtue of a certain material history – one which is largely the history of his native Ireland. Let us take the question of autonomy first. Beckett’s ‘quasi-mathematical’ art, as Casanova calls it, takes a set of postulates and in quasi-structuralist manner lets them run through their various permutations until the process is exhausted and another, equally rigorous, equally pointless computation takes over. Freed from social function, art can now unfurl its own inner logic. What other critics take to be portentous philosophical questions in Beckett – what? how? why? – Casanova boldly interprets as questions addressed by the texts to themselves, queries about their own procedures and conditions of possibility.

With small-nation perversity, Beckett’s austerely Protestant texts set out to punish themselves by seeking to eke as many permutations as possible out of the scantiest number of component parts. Ingeniously reshuffling the same few poor scraps and leavings, they retain the ritual of Irish Catholicism while rebuffing its sensuous extravagance. A good deal of Irish writing (Synge and O’Casey, for example, or Ulysses) turns on an ironic contrast between the meagreness of the material and the elaborate stylizations of form; but in Beckett the only correspondence now left between words and things lies in their common destitution. There are some astute analyses of this method here, not least a ‘redemptive’ reading of the rather neglected Worstward Ho, which Casanova provocatively sees as the magisterial summation of its author’s ars combinatoria.

As the study illustrates, this Dublin dissident was much taken with the thought of the minor Flemish Cartesian philosopher Geulincx, not least with his doctrine of the mutual autonomy of body and soul. In one sense, this leaves him firmly within the discourse of his own culture. The body as mechanism or automaton crops up in Irish writing all the way from Swift and Sterne to Flann O’Brien’s sinisterly humanized bicycles. It is what happens to the flesh when it is forced in dire conditions to sever its consciousness from its materiality, so that the former becomes abstract and impotent, and the latter is reduced to so much meaningless, mechanical stuff. It is the contrast between Swift’s Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, or Joyce’s Stephen and Bloom. There is also something of this savage somatic reductionism in the work of the great Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon. ‘When man acts, he is a puppet. When he describes, he is a poet’, wrote Oscar Wilde. Men and women can transcend their barren material surroundings only in language, fantasy and imagination.

It is a familiar Irish theme, one which contrasts with the vein of Berkeleyan or Yeatsian idealism which sees the material world itself as a kind of spiritual discourse or divine semiosis. Materiality can either be cut off from the spirit or peremptorily reduced to it. Beckett retains an Irish carnivalesque preoccupation with the body – though it is a carnival turned sour, and what survives of the body is mostly its interminable suffering. Paradoxically, his dualism intensifies a sense of the world’s recalcitrant bulk, rather than simply disembodying it. Ifhe is a Cartesian rationalist, it is partly because such a doctrine shows up the poor forked creature humanity for what it is, rather than simply tidying its fleshliness out of sight. His texts present us with a world of brute objects and elusive meanings.

In another sense, however, Beckett’s interest in this line of philosophical inquiry is one of several ways in which he cuts against the grain of Irish culture, since this impoverished country, deeply marked by religion and bereft of a robust bourgeoisie, gave birth to no major rationalism. Instead, from Eriugena to Berkeley, Yeats and beyond, its central philosophical current has been strongly idealist – a kind of secular competitor to religion, and one influenced in some cases by early Celtic spirituality.¹ What rationalists do crop up in Anglo-Irish writing, like Swift’s Laputans and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, are satirical send-ups, as an excess of enlightenment capsizes into madness. Beckett’s work, by contrast, is distinguished by a rationalist strain, which no doubt played a part in his attraction to France. No doubt it also plays a part in the French Pascale Casanova’s attraction to him.

If this writer trades in ambiguities and indeterminacies, it is part of the irony of his work that he does so in a stringent, efficiently taxonomizing manner. What catches our eye, as Casanova pinpoints so admirably, is not the existential cloudiness or metaphysical portentousness of his writing, but its clear-eyed attempts at an exact formulation of the inarticulable, its monkish devotion to precision, the extreme scrupulousness with which it sculpts the void. In shaving ruthlessly away at the inessential, it reveals a Protestant animus against the superfluous and ornamental. It retains the fading forms of a zealous Protestant search for truth, even if it has scant faith in the truth itself. If it betrays a modernist scepticism of language, it combines it with a quasi-rationalist search for translucency. One might read this crazedly meticulous hair-splitting as a parody of Irish scholasticism, or as the ghost of a Protestant rationalism, or indeed as both.

As for the historical dimension, Casanova recounts with impressive concision the story of Beckett’s fraught relations with the Irish Free State. Encircled by a parochial Gaelic bigotry, the Southern middle-class Protestant class into which Beckett was born had always felt themselves a besieged minority of cultural aliens. In Ireland, it was the rulers as much as the masses who felt dispossessed, which is why Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory and Beckett had such fellow-feeling for vagrants. The Irish Literary Revival portrayed in this