Seeing darkly: notes on T.W.

Adorno and Samuel Beckett

Author(s): W.J. McCormack
Source: Hermathena, No. 141, BECKETT AT EIGHTY: A TRINITY TRIBUTE (Winter 1986), pp.
22-44
Published by: Trinity College Dublin
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23040843
Accessed: 19-01-2018 18:58 UTC

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 Seeing darkly: notes on
T.W. AdornO and Samuel Beckett

by W.J. McCormack

I. BEGINNING WITH 'MOLLOY'

The state of nature is not unjust, and for that very reason we must
leave it behind us. (Hegel, Erste Druckschriften)1

For some time it has been usual to regard Samuel Beckett as unpur,
unconcerned with and uncontaminated by anything beyond the
realm of artistic creation. Of course, a comprehensive critique of
his writings would jeopardise all this, with their acknowledgement
that 'to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail.'2 The customary
view, however, is bolstered by powerful (if concealed) pre
suppositions about integrity and the exemplary status of the bour
geois subject. Is this not ironic in an artist who wrote of the artist
as one who recognised a 'breakdown of the object', amendable
perhaps to a 'breakdown of the subject', concluding 'it comes to the
same thing — rupture of the lines of communication'?3 Despite this,
Beckett's artistic integrity has come in for its share of vituperation
(mainly, though also passingly, from the pen of Gyorgy Lukacs) as
well as approval. It remains to be seen if a finer insight into his art
does not proceed from a philosophical stance, Marxist, too readily
dismissed as readily hostile. It is this limited objective which is
attempted here.
It might be argued that Beckett was not always a 'creative' writer
in the sense approved by his admirers. 'Having launched himself
with a prize poem on the set theme of Time, Joyce's amanuensis
went on diligently to publish dialogues on contemporary painting,
and to translate a large body of Mexican poetry . . .' the argument
might go. Such a perspective has been rejected by Beckett, of course,
but in highly questionable terms. To Gabriel d'Aubarede in 1961:

I'm no intellectual. All I am is feeling. Molloy and the others came to me

the day I became aware of my own folly.4

And twelve years later:

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 Seeing darkly: notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett
I realised that I knew nothing. I sat down in my mother's little house in
Ireland and began to write Molloy.5

Leaving aside the re-enactment here of Descartes' inaugurating

doubt, we see the juxtaposing of intellectualism and emotion as
misleading, however deft. After all Molloy begins:

I am in my mother's room„It's I who live there now. I don't know how I

got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I
was helped. I'd never have got there alone. There's this man who comes
every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. He says not. He gives me
money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money.6

If the opening sentence appears to identify the fictional moment

and the moment of the fiction's composition, the passage proceeds
quickly to establish more complex, alternating currents —
there/here etc. If, to Beckett, all that he was was feeling, then the
narrator of Molloy has chosen the specialised feeling of intellection
as his initial subject matter. In the novel, Molloy considers that his
mother may well be dead — 'I mean enough to bury' — and that
he has taken her place. The novelist, on the other hand, left Ireland
and his mother to return to France and the writing of the novel.
While making allowances for 'perhaps' as the key word in Beckett,
we can still say that movement, as regards narrator and novelist
(narrator as pseudo-novelist, and novelist as pseudo-narrator) is
antithetical. If writing is the subject matter of this writing, it is
presented more as a matter of commerce and exchange than High
Art.
The day upon which Beckett became aware of his own unknowing
marks a kind of intersection between historical and personal lines.
Deirdre Bair tells us that Molloy was begun in September 1947 and
completed by the following January, and throughout this period
Beckett was in France. His visit home to Ireland had occurred
earlier in 1947, and was in fact organised round his birthday which
he wished to spend with his mother. Two years earlier, he had
promptly left France for Ireland (in April 1945, even before the war
was over), repeating the visit in 1946.7 Thus, either the day of
extreme Cartesian doubt may be taken as hypothetical, or a date
for the commencement of work on Molloy must be pressed back in
time. Though it was not his immediate post-war return to Dublin
the occasion — as Beckett himself presents it — links the family
reunion and the opening of his career as a novelist writing in French.
It marked his survival of the second world war, of years spent in
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 W. J. McCormack
hiding and earlier years of active resistance to the German occup
ation of France: it marked also his absolute realisation of his
mother's approaching death, of family dissolution.
Antithesis and exchange characterise much in Beckett's pro
longed struggle to comprehend the barbarism of his age. Molloy was
composed in French with the aid of Marie Peron who had been a
member with him of the same resistance cell in Paris. The earlier
novels were written on different assumptions: Murphy is articulate
to a fault, in contrast to Murphy; Watt possesses a geometrical
audacity which leaves Watt cutting a very poor figure. But now,
adopting monologue at the same time that its author adopts French,
the new novel leaves behind the seedy solipism of omniscient
narration. This recourse to monologue is replete with rich paradox,
not only in its power to banish solipsism. If, to some degree, Beckett
required Madame Peron's linguistic assistance — and Beckett's
fluency in French had allowed him pass among natives even in time
of war — we should note also that Molloy in English is presented as
a translation not by the author, but 'by Patrick Bowles in col
laboration with the author.'8 In the preface to The playboy of the
western world, J.M. Synge had written that 'All art is a collaboration';
his successor was uniquely placed in post-war France to savour the
bitter ambiguity of the term.9
This richly paradoxical, inclusive monologism is accompanied in
Molloy with Beckett's growing concern with 'the pair' — Molloy
and Moran, Malone and Macmann — which becomes central in
the plays from Waiting for Godot onwards. In the fiction also, the
concept of 'the pair' is deeply problematic, intractable and yet
irresolute in itself. Molloy reports a singular experience:

And when I see my hands, on the sheet, which they love to floccillate
already, they are not mine, less than ever mine, I have no arms, they are
a couple, they play with the sheet, love-play perhaps, trying to get up
perhaps, one on top of the other. But it doesn't last. I bring them back,
little by little, towards me, it's resting time. And with feet it's the same,
sometimes, when I see them at the foot of the bed, one with toes, the other
without. And that is more deserving of mention. For my legs, corresponding
here to my arms of a moment ago, are both stiff now and very sore, and I
shouldn't be able to forget them as I can my arms, which are more or less
sound and well. And yet I do forget them and I watch the couple as they
watch each other, a great way off.10

The integral privacy of the Beckettian character and his aesthetic

insulation from historical process, as rendered fabulous by the
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 Seeing darkly: notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett
critics, may yet be illuminated in a way which interprets the central
concern with 'the pair' as part of a post-war literary conflict of the
greatest political and philosophical interest.

II. ADORNO'S ESSAY ON 'ENDGAME'

Ah the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!
(Beckett, Endgame)n

There is a significant deviation in Michael T. Jones's translation

of T.W. Adorno's essay, 'Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen'.12
Insisting that in Beckett's play an important and new historical
moment is revealed, Adorno identified it with the experience cited
'im Titel des kulturindustriellen Schundbuchs "Kaputt"'.13 Jones,
at once eager to vivify Adorno for English readers and a mite
neglectful of his master's talent for lethal allusion at imperceptibly
acute angles, renders the passage as follows:

French existentialism had tackled history. In Beckett, history devours

existentialism. In Endgame, a historical moment is revealed, the experience
of which was cited in the title of the culture industry's rubbish book
Corpsed. After the Second World War, everything is destroyed, even re
surrected culture, without knowing it; humanity vegetates along, crawling,
after events which even the survivors cannot really survive, on a pile of
ruins which even renders futile self-reflection of one's own battered state.
From the marketplace, as the play's pragmatic precondition, that fact is
stripped away: [quotes playscript, concluding]:

clov: What all is? In a word? Is that what you want to know? Just
a moment, (lie turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope,
turns towards hamm.) Corpsed. (Pause) Well? Content?14

'Corpsed', Clov's verdict/description of 'the without' has been

appropriated by the translator to name the culture industry's junk
book. The deviation (from 'Kaputt') is a nice one, especially if we
are alert to the verb to corpse as a piece of actor's jargon —
'deliberately to confuse a fellow actor on stage, preventing him from
speaking or acting as required'. To the question implicit in Clov's
laconic epithet — in the cosmic Trauerspiel what fellow-player has
corpsed the without? — Adorno implicitly answers by directing
attention to 'the within', the inner sanctum privileged once again
by the 'jargon of authenticity' he detected in Karl Jaspers's exis
tentialism.15 But, more particularly, in the detail lost in Jones's
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 W. J. McCormack
translation, Adorno indicts a particular kind of writing — ultra
'verismo' reports of second world war experiences — summed up
and dismissed in the obliquity of that nominal reference to Curzio
Malaparte's Kaputt (1945). Adorno's 'historical moment' was not
simply the second world war, but the resultant domination of all
humanity by nuclear terrorism, and of western society by (in
addition) the culture industry.16 It is in this context that he regards
Endgame as an exemplary work which refuses assimilation.
Adorno's writings on Beckett, scattered and fragmentary though
they are, constitute a unique occasion in which a sophisticated
Marxist aesthetician attends to the works of a dramatist and novelist
conventionally associated with very different company. Adorno's
name is inseparable from that of the Frankfurt Institut fur Sozi
alforschung from its early years in the Weimar republic, through exile
in the United States of America in war-time, to re-establishment in
the federal republic.17 The Beckett industry, on the other hand, is
a concern either French or Irish, with heavy American investment
certainly, but hardly German. The German philosopher's fam
iliarity with Beckett appears to have begun after the war, and
the essay at present under discussion is dedicated in English (or
American!) !to S.B. in memory of Paris, Fall 1958', the essay itself
first appearing in 1961.18 A prolific and (in a superficial sense)
unsystematic writer, Adorno began in May 1961 to draft his Aesthe
tische Theorie. When he died in August 1969, the work was unfinalized
but essentially complete; among the author's preparations for pub
lication was a decision or intention to dedicate the Theory to Beckett.
It is in keeping with the monastic charity of all parties to this
intention that it should be recorded rather than displayed in the
posthumous publication.19 The Aesthetic theory is peppered with
allusions to Beckett's work, the plays for the most part, but it
contains nothing as extended as the 1961 essay on Endgame.
Adorno's appreciation of Beckett is part and parcel of his sus
tained campaign against existentialism. By extension Beckett is
embroiled in a larger German philosophical struggle between the
phenomenologists (Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger) on
the one side and the Frankfurt critical theorists on the other.20
Furthermore, Adorno uses the occasion of Endgame to settle a
few scores with his old fellow-Marxist sparring partner, Gyorgy
Lukacs.21 The extracts (non-continuous) which follow are intended
to summarize the essay as it bears upon our present concerns:

Anything Beckett offers us by way of philosophy he at the same time

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 Seeing darkly: notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett
reduces to culture-trash, no different from the countless scraps of learning
which he employs in the wake of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, particularly
that of Joyce and Eliot.

The interpretation of Endgame cannot pretend to proclaim the play's

meaning with the aid of philosophical mediation. Understanding it can
involve nothing else than understanding its incomprehensibility, or recon
structing its meaning-structure — to the effect, that it has none. Isolated,
thought no longer pretends, as the Idea once did, to be itself the meaning
of the structure — a transcendence which would be engendered and
guaranteed by the work's own immanence. Instead, thought transforms
itself into a kind of second-class material, like the philosophemes in Thomas
Mann's The magic mountain and Doctor Faustus whose destiny it is to replace
that sensate immediacy which is diminished in the self-reflective work of
art.

Whereas pre-Beckett existentialism carved up philosophy for poetic con

sumption as if it were Schiller Incarnate, Beckett, erudite as anyone, insists
on presenting the bill: philosophy, or spirit itself, responds by showing
itself to be the insubstantial dross of an experiential world, the poetic
process shows itself up as bankrupt. Disgust (de'gout) a productive force in
the arts since Baudelaire, is insatiable in Beckett's historically-mediated
responses.

This historical emphasis, however, this parody of Kierkegaard's 'note bene'

convergence of time and eternity, imposes at the same time a taboo on
history. What existentialist jargon would term the condition humaine is the
image of the last human being, which is devouring all earlier ones —
humanity itself.

The catastrophes that inspire Endgame have exploded the individual whose
substantiality and absoluteness was the element common to Kierkegaard,
Jaspers, and the Sartrean version of existentialism. Even to victims of the
concentration camps existentialism had attributed freedom either inwardly
to accept or reject their inflicted martyrdom. Endgame destroys such
illusions. The individual as a historical category, as the result of the
capitalist process of alienation and as a defiant protest against it, has
become openly a transient thing.

Endgame is exemplary. It yields to the impossibility of dealing with

materials, of representation according to nineteenth-century practice. And
yields also to the insight that subjective modes of reaction, which mediate
the laws of form rather than reflect reality, are themselves no absolute first
principle but rather a last principle, objectively posited. All content of
subjectivity, which necessarily hypostatizes itself, is trace and shadow of
the world, from which it withdraws in order not to serve that semblance
and conformity the world demands. Beckett responds to that condition
not with unchanging reserves or 'provisions' (Vorrat), but rather with
what is still permitted, precariously and uncertainly, by the antagonistic
tendencies. His dramaturgy resembles the fun that Old Germany used to
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 W. J. McCormack
offer — knocking about between the quaint signposts of Baden and
Bavaria, as if they fenced in some domain of freedom. Endgame takes place
in a zone of indifference between inner and outer; it remains neutral
between — on the one hand — the 'materials' in the absence of which
subjectivity could not manifest itself nor even exist, and — on the other
— an animating impulse which blurs the materials as if that impulse had
breathed on the glass through which they are seen.

The misery of the participants in Endgame is the misery of philosophy.

Dramatic categories as a whole are dealt with just as humour is. They are
all parodied. But not ridiculed. Parody, in an emphatic way, entails the
use of forms precisely in the epoch of their impossibility.

Beckett's rubbish-bins are the emblems of a culture restored after Ausch

99
witz.

The twin priorities of Adorno's lengthy analysis thus emerge as t

specification of a historical moment to which the play is intimat
related, and the elaboration of its formal characteristics. At
polemical level, the first point is directed against the existentiali
the second against Lukacs and the socialist realism (rather unfair
identified with him. But there are other, more important, levels
the Aesthetic theory, Adorno presents Beckett's plays as exemplify
'the proper relation betwen . . . two contradictory desiderata
successful figuration and adequate social content'.23 Furtherm

Beckett focusses on the negativity of the subject as being the true form
objectivity — a theme that calls for radically subjective figuration
Those childlike but bloody clowns' faces in Beckett are the historical tr
about the subject: it had disintegrated. By comparison, socialist realism
really infantile. Waiting for Godot revolves round the theme of lordship
bondage grown senile and demented in an era when exploitation of hum
labour persists although it could well be abolished. This motif, truly
of the essential characteristics of present-day society, is taken up again
Endgame. In both instances Beckett's technique pushes this Hegelian the
to the periphery: lordship and bondage are reduced to an anecdot
terms of both dramatic function and social criticism.24

III. A HEGELIAN THEME

There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can d

(Beckett, 'McGreevy on Yeats')25

If, in Endgame, Beckett's technique pushes a Hegelian the

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 Seeing darkly: notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett
periphery it may still be true that it pushes that theme to the
extreme also. Dialectical Aufhebung of the Hegelian kind is both
overcoming and fulfilment. And, as we shall see, anecdote in Beck
ett's drama is more than once an occasion of peculiarly profound
implications. The historical moment of Adorno's own Aesthetic theory
cannot be omitted from consideration. Writing at the height of the
'economic miracle' in post-war federal Germany, even the ever
sceptical critical theorist tacitly accepted that the conditions existed
for the possible abolition of human labour, and it is in the context
of these conditions as perceived by Adorno that we should read his
diagnosis of Beckett. It is characteristic of Adorno's mandarin,
highly allusive style that the Hegelian theme he spots in Beckett is
left untreated — or virtually so —just as his initial, contemptuous
half-reference to the culture industry's 'rubbish book' hides and
releases a post-war critique.
In The phenomenology of mind (1807), Hegel argued that 'self
consciousness exists ... in that, and by the fact that, it exists for
another self-consciousness.'26 His treatment of the consequential
movements is at once monumentally dull and intrinsically dramatic,
coming to concentrate on two 'moments' which:

stand as two opposed forms or modes of consciousness. The one is inde

pendent, and its essential nature is to be itself; the other is dependent, and
its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or
Lord, the latter the Bondsman.27

In elaborating this parable further, Hegel acknowledges the crucial

role of human labour in transforming relations between these
moments, and concludes that 'just as lordship showed its essential
nature to be the reverse of what it wants to be, so, too, bondage
will, when completed, pass into the opposite of what it immediately
is. . . '28 In time, Marx will take up this Hegelian dialectic to show
that the Phenomenology had reversed the relations between labour and
consciousness, and the materialist re-writing of Hegel re-emerges in
the twentieth century, notably in certain texts of Lukacs.29 For
Adorno, this legacy posed peculiar problems but there can be no
doubt that the Hegelian theme in Endgame is precisely that of
consciousness-as-pair, the complex dramatic monologue of Hamm
and Clov which is in turn counterpointed by the pathetically
intrusive contributions of Nell and Nagg in their dust-bins. For
Marxists, of course, Hegel's recourse to parable as a means of
approach to the actual social processes of human labour only serves
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 W. J. McCormack
to emphasise his incorrigible Idealism. Yet, by the same token, the
'pairs' in Beckett's work articulate equally fundamental human
concerns, even if a not-dissimilar remoteness of social reality mani
fests itself both formally and materially.
A further dimension to Adorno's linking of Hegel and Beckett
deserves attention. The phenomenology, for all the ponderous abstrac
tion of its tonalities, was deeply concerned with historical reality.
Hegel's famous formulation of'the unhappy consciousness' (ungluck
liches Bewusstein) derived from his analysis of post-mediaeval
attempts to establish permanent and reliable connections between
man's mental insecurity and some Immutable Reality. More
immediately topical were the late pages of the Phenomenology, the
section called in English 'Absolute freedom and terror', in which
Hegel gave his philosophical response to the French Revolution
and, in particular, to the 'reign of terror'.30 The essay on Endgame
concerns itself intensively with the unprecedented problem of the
writer 'after Auschwitz'.
Working on his Minima moralia (1951) in exile during the second
world war, Adorno turned a distinctly ironic eye upon the author
of the Phenomenology. The twenty-ninth section of the Minima, one of
the most thoroughly epigrammatic sections, commences with Proust
and concludes with an inversion — 'The whole is the false' — of
Hegelian dogma.31 Two associates of the Frankfurt School wrote
less cryptically on related matters. In Reason and revolution Herbert
Marcuse insisted that

the relation of lord to servant is . . . neither an eternal nor a natural one,

but is rooted in a definite mode of labour, and in man's relation to the
products of his labour.32

And whereas Hegel had posited a general model of human existence

according to which

life proceeds to negation and its pain; and only through the resolution of
opposition and contradiction will it gain its affirmation. If however, it
should remain in contradiction without overcoming it, then it will perish
in it. . . 33

Ernst Bloch reformulated this position in terms appropriate to

the political priorities and historical condition which — broadly
speaking — he shared with Adorno, Lukacs and Marcuse, a refor
mulation apt to Adorno's reading of Beckett:
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 Seeing darkly: notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett
History does not repeat itself; yet wherever something did not become
history and did not make history, then history will be all means be
repeated.34

This central notion of the critical theorists — that historical process

and philosophical reflection have a complex conjuncture — is
energetically reformulated by Adorno in various writings on the
'culture industry', as he contemptuously termed the restructuring
of relations between production and the arts in the era of fascism
and post-fascism. Minima moralia nowhere mentions Samuel Beckett,
and it is likely that Adorno was not familiar with Beckett's pre
war writings, but the collection of extended aphorisms sub-titled
'Reflections from damaged life' may yet cast a new light on Beckett's
unusual combination of bourgeois rectitude and — simply — cour
age.

IV. THE JEWISH QUESTION

Eye and hand fevering after the unself. (Beckett, 'For Avigdor
Arikha')35

It is fitting that so many of the Marxist critics involved in this

discussion of Beckett and Adorno should be Jewish — not only
Adorno himself, but also Bloch, Lukacs, Marcuse, and the as-yet
unmentioned Walter Benjamin. For Beckett's engagement with the
public events of his lifetime has been repeatedly prompted by his
loyalty to Jewish friends. This is true both of events locally in
Ireland (and so of little political consequence) and of events in
France under German occupation when the consequences were of
the most unspeakable kind. In Ireland, these friends included Leslie
Daiken and A.J. Leventhal; in Paris, Paul Leon (murdered 1942); in
Rousillion, Henri Heyden. According to Richard Ellmann, Beckett
spoke to Joyce about Nazi persecution of the Jews when the creator
of Bloom once praised German precision.
Beckett's renowned entanglement in the Dublin court-case arising
from Oliver St. J. Gogarty's anti-semitism took the form of his
giving evidence for his Jewish relatives, the brothers Sinclair.36 His
father's sister, Cissie, had married William Abraham Sinclair, and
their daughter Peggy exercised a powerful influence on Beckett's
emotional development, before her death from tuberculosis in Ger
many. The Sinclairs were bohemian art-lovers with an interest in
the antiques business. Shortly after the first world war, they had
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 W. J. McCormack
left Dublin for Kassel in Germany, disturbed by the resurgence of
chauvinism in Ireland. (A dozen years later, they fled from Hitler's
Reich to the Irish Free State.) Deirdre Bair claims that Beckett's
mother was distinctly anti-semitic, though Sinclair bohemianism in
itself would have distanced her from them. Ireland is remarkable
among European nations in that its intelligentsia has included few
individuals with a Jewish background, though it should be recorded
in turn that the Jewish community in Ireland is very small and (in
the early twentieth century) of very recent arrival.
In September 1928, Samuel Beckett made his first visit to Ger
many, and in 1931-2 he spent six months there as a guest of his
Jewish relatives. Even after the Sinclairs had returned to Ireland,
it was their introduction which put him in touch with several Jewish
intellectuals on his visits to Germany in the late '30's. Among these
were a number of art-historians in Berlin and Dresden.37 There is
no suggestion that Beckett met any of the Frankfurt critical theorists
— though Benjamin in particular shared his interest in the visual
arts, and Benjamin also was in Paris during the immediately pre
war years. Jewish intellectuals, who were Marxist also, had left
Germany before the period of Beckett's longer sojourns there.
William ('Boss') Sinclair died in May 1937 in Rathdrum, county
Wicklow. Before his death he had read Gogarty's As I was going
down Sackville Street, and obliged his brother Morris Sinclair to seek
legal redress for the libel on their family. The case was heard in
November. Beckett gave evidence for the plaintiff and was duly
humiliated by Gogarty's counsel, J.M. Fitzgerald, K.C., who, in
referring to Beckett as the 'bawd and blasphemer from Paris',
upheld the best traditions of the Irish bar. But the jury found for
the plaintiff. By December Beckett was once more in Paris, set upon
the course which led to his involvement in the resistance and to the
writing of Watt.
Beckett's war-time experiences do not require summary here.
Suffice it to say that distress at the fate of Jewish friends prompted
his involvement. After the break-up of the cell to which he belonged,
he and Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil (later his wife) made their
way to relative safety in 'Vichy France'. From late 1942 until the
liberation of France, they lived in the mountain village of Roussillon,
above Avignon. During this period Beckett suffered the recurrence
of his earlier illnesses, aggravated by feelings of anguish and self
hatred generated by the war, the death of friends, and his own
relative comfort. He was intermittently active with the local maquis,
and wrote Watt, a labyrinthine novel admired by some particularly
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 Seeing darkly: notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett

for its mastery of Dublin middle-class tonalities. In the oblique light

of Adorno's comparison of Beckett's post-war writing and Curzio
Malaparte's Kaputt, it is worth noting that Beckett's initial attempts
to get his novel published were countered by suggestions that
he should not have disguised 'his wartime memories within the
framework of fiction' but written a 'realistic account' of them
instead.38 Unknown perhaps in 1946, he was not immune to those
pressures which launched the post-war culture industry. But he
resisted them. In addition note the unmistakeable Jewish sig
nifications which Beckett inscribed in his post-war work — the
controlling figure Youdi in (or not-in?) Molloy, the name Levi in
drafts of Waiting for Godot, and the concealed Jewish jokes which
(only?) Adorno detected in Endgame39, these including not only the
classic story of the Tailor and the Creator:

my dear Sir, look — (disdainful gesture, disgustedly) — at the world — (pause)

— and look — (loving gesture, proudly) — at my trousers!40

but also a version of the circus routine in which the Jewish husband,
discovering his wife and his best friend making love on the sofa,
throws out the sofa, rather than break up either of the bogus pairings
upon which his life depends.41 These anecdotes with which Hamm
and Clov pass their death-after-life are thrown-away lines by which
the abandoned subjects sustain themselves. In the early essay
where he had commented on a decisive rupture in communications,
Beckett allowed that 'the artist who is aware of this may state the
space that intervenes between him and the world of objects.'42 The
exact delicacy with which his post-war writing acknowledges 'the
Jewish question' without capitulating to demands for a 'realistic'
account of his wartime experiences and activities testifies to the
strength of this initial aesthetic observation, while echoing in an
uncanny way Adorno's meditations on the problematic of
subject/object. Writing on Proust and Valery, Adorno later defined
the work of art not as 'pure Being' in any sense 'but rather as a
"force-field" between subject and object'.43

V. CURZIO MALAPARTE (1898-1957)

And I for my part have always preferred slavery to death, I mean

being put to death. For death is a condition I have never been able
to conceive to my satisfaction and which therefore cannot go down
in the ledger of weal and woe. (Beckett, Molloy)44
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 W. J. McCormack
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen.
(Wittgenstein, Tractatus)45

The final sentence of Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921) is given in

the original German, partly as a link across the gulf thought to
separate central European culture and traditional insular phil
osophy, partly also to indicate the metaphysical potential of an
'exact delicacy' like Beckett's. It is time to approach Malaparte's
Kaputt (1945). That book's remarkable licence in turn compels
Adorno's attention and his most oblique, his almost silent con
demnation. At first peep Malaparte appears to be an odd point of
comparison. A captain in the Italian army and sometime war
correspondent for Corriere della Sera, Malaparte wrote about his
experiences of the eastern front (Lapland to the Ukraine, including
Poland), where he was attached to various German and Romanian
units. Kaputt, however, has a pronounced narrative squint as it
attempts to accommodate prince Eugene of Sweden, as addressee,
with — among other topics — Himmler naked in a sauna. For
Adorno it was a travesty of writing.
Even the prefatory note revealed several priorities from which he
can only have retreated (initially) in shock:

The chief character is Kaputt, the gay and gruesome monster. Nothing can
convey better than this hard, mysterious German word Kaputt — which
literally means, 'broken, finished, gone to pieces, gone to ruin' — the sense
of what we are, of what Europe is — a pile of rubble. But I prefer this
Kaputt Europe to the Europe of yesterday — and of twenty or thirty years
ago.46

'The sense of what we are' pinpoints exactly what, in existentialism,

Adorno opposed — an unreflective, savouring worship of existence
per se. The substance of Kaputt offended in more intimate and more
professional ways also. Its first section gratuitously entitled (after
Proust) 'Du Cote de Guermantes', the book systematically yet
casually applied the arts to the business of ennobling barbarism
even while officially decrying it. Though he implicitly condemned
Reichsminister Hans Frank (self-styled 'deutscher Konig von
Polen') for his boast that 'Furtwangler and Karajan will come to
Cracow next spring to conduct a series of concerts',47 Malaparte
himself compared lines of corpses in the Warsaw ghetto to art. Far
from confirming some anticipatory realism in the painter, he sought
to render the dead unreal — 'they were stiff and hard, they looked
like wooden statues. Just like the dead Jews in a Chagall canvas.'48
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 Seeing darkly: notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett

When he was at Jassy (in Moldavia, June 1941) a pogrom of

between 500 and 7,000 Jews took place; he was reading Harold
Nicholson's biography of Lord Dufferin at the time — the 1937
printing, to be exact.
Attentive to the assimilated Jewish jokes of Endgame, Adorno's
response to the ease with which Malaparte referred to the most
central experiences of Judaism in the twentieth century remains
unwritten. A gestapo officer who accompanied the author through
the ghetto 'moved among the Jews like an angel ofjehovah'.49 Such
double blasphemy was even enshrined in the book's epigraph with
a parade of philological scruple concerning the Jewish derivation
of the word 'kaputt':

(von hebraischen Kopparoth, Opfer, oder franzosisch Capot, matsch)

zugrunde gerichtet, entzwei . .

the source given as Meyer's Conversationlexicon of I860.10 And here

one encounters the ironic significance of the translator's substitution
of 'corpsed' for 'kaputt', for the emendation neglects Adorno's
scornful neglect of Malaparte's implication that the Jews, in pro
viding German with a root for their verbal trash, did for themselves.
This enlightened blindness, this total inability to recognise the
dreadful historical actuality of the present, stood in utter contrast
to Beckett's Endgame. Malaparte's timely account of his horror at
the events he oversaw promptly became a component in post
war Europe's crash-course in amnesia, an amnesia effected by the
proliferation of strictly useless aides memoires. This larger phenom
enon Adorno recognised as the historic mission of 'the culture
industry'. But, more particularly, Endgame is singled out for com
mendation because for Beckett — as for Paul Celan and Agnes
Nemes Nagy — even the survivors cannot survive. Nor does their
art pretend otherwise. In that there are bodily survivors, such art
declines to resume its old reputation for spirituality. The master
and-slave anecdotes of client and tailor, tailor and Creator, possess
ironically the dialectic which Hegel intended and Adorno denied
in the original philosophical fable. The 'pairs' actually incorporated
to Beckett's plays find no comparable resolution, though they
elegantly endure. Adorno turns a related kind of irony on Malaparte.
He who named the unnameable remains unnamed.
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 W. J. McCormack
VI. 'passing away these things reveal themselves'

not that chewing gum undermines metaphysics but that it i

physics — that is what must be made clear. (Max Horkheime

We record the decline of education, and yet our prose. . .

common with the culture industry cadences unsuspected b
(Adorno, Minima moralia)52

Adorno's essay on Endgame is attentive to the problem of

and object, a philosophical issue discussed in greater dept
paper published in the year of his death. He held to a po
wljereby the necessary link/gap between subject and object is
tigated so as to comprehend the processes by which 'self m
constituted. Beckett's 'space between' is analogical to some
though the broader intellectual background is of course well k
The essay on Endgame contributed to the development of A
thought in this area, the paper on 'Subject and object'
contemporary with the Aesthetic theory and its proliferating refer
to Beckett.53
The political context of these developments extends back
as far as the late 1930s when Adorno began to examine the
of what he termed the culture industry. Commercialised h
under the Weimar republic, the highly fetishised parapher
Nazism, the consumerism of dreams in Hollywood — the
stages of a historical process he observed with fastidious d
Dialectic of enlightenment (1944/47), which he wrote with Ma
heimer, consisted of five substantial essays scrutinising the c
of enlightenment, its engagement with myth, with morality
concluding with 'Elements of anti-semitism: limits of
enment', the authors devote their longest essay to 'The c
industry: enlightenment as mass deception'. Undoubtedly l
his empirical work on authoritarian personality, the film ind
and so forth, this analysis is also part and parcel of A
metaphysical interests, subjected of course to the actuali
history, 'Everything derives from consciousness: for Male
and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art, fr
consciousness of the production team.'34 Intellectual spleen pe
Euro-centric misgivings about jazz, and a carefully difficu
inured Adorno to the blandishments of America. Yet, show-b
Nazism had something in common:

The enlightened self-control with which the assimilated Jews mana

forget the painful memories of domination by others . . . led them
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 Seeing darkly: notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett
from their own long-suffering community into the modern bourgeoisie,
which was moving inexorably toward reversion to cold repression and
reorganization as a pure 'race'.55

Adorno's preoccupation with the theme of domination in the

immediately post-war years led him to see in Endgame a suitably
damaged anticipation of nuclear catastrophe and a strangely in
tegral after-image of the Jewish holocaust:

The dramatis personae resemble those who dream their own death, in a
shelter where 'it's time it ended'. The end of the world is played down as
if it were a matter of course. Every drama supposedly set in the atomic
age would mock itself, if only because its plot would hopelessly falsify the
historical horror of anonymity by shoving such horror into the characters
and actions of men and women. . . The violence of the unspeakable is
mimicked by a reluctance to mention it. Beckett keeps it nebulous. One
can only speak in euphemisms about what is incommensurate with all
experience, just as in Germany one speaks of the murder of the Jews.56

As with the progress from Berkeley to mass art, the individual

human subject remained even here a central problematic. It was
not simply an illusion to bejettisoned, as the advanced structuralists
proposed. It was not to be easily collectivised with Lukacs and
others, and certainly not worshipped after the manner of the exis
tentialists. Of the three options, the Lukacsian was the least unat
tractive for all that Adorno had come to despair of the working class
as the great 'subject' of future history. Central to this pessimism
was his appreciation of the power behind what had appeared to
many as merely superficial changes in the relations between art and
production inside western capitalism. 'The rising collectivist order
is a mockery of a classless one.'57
The early pages of Minima moralia, where this line of thought is
pursued, are given over to rapidly alternating estimates of the
bourgeois's place in the new order. The argument runs back to Hegel
who 'in hypostasizing both bourgeois society and its fundamental
category, the individual, did not truly carry through the dialectic
between the two.'58 But there is an unexpected bonus:

In the period of his decay, the individual's experience of himself and what
he encounters contributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely
obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively
as the dominant category. In face of the totalitarian unison with which
the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part
of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the
individual sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is not only with a bad
conscience.1'

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 W. J. McCormack
The succeeding meditations on altering forms of private housing,
family manners, modes of address, and other aspects of bourgeois
differentiation, are taken up in the essay on Endgame where Adorno
speculates on the psychic material behind the play:

There sticks in Beckett's memory something like an apoplectic middle

aged man taking his midday nap, a cloth over his eyes to keep out the
light or the flies; it makes him unrecognizable. This image . . . becomes a
sign only after one has become aware of the face's loss of identity, and
aware also of the repulsive nature of that physical concern which reduces
the man to his body and places him already among corpses. Beckett
focusses on such aspects until that family routine — from which they stem
— pales into irrelevance. The tableau begins with Hamm covered by an
old sheet; at the end, he places near his face the hankerchief, his last
possession.

In Molloy, the first narrator's 'physical' concern with his body

produces a comic yet sustained consciousness-as-pair. But the bour
geois routine, emblemised in a pater familias dominant in his solitude,
is significant here in that Adorno had elsewhere used very similar
phrases to describe the victim of fascist torture.61 Again, Endgame
has both anticipatory and retrospective powers, just as the bourgeois
retains a possible worth in the era of his decay and parodic re
juvenation.
In the Dialectic of enlightenment, the authors had already perceived,
with searing irony, the gulf between classical philosophy and this
utterly new culture — 'amusement carries out that purgation of the
emotions which Aristotle once attributed to tragedy. . . the culture
industry reveals the truth about catharsis as it did about style.'62
In the posthumous Aesthetic theory, Beckett exemplifies the artist
who recognises the equally unacceptable extremes of 'nuanced
expression' and a starkly superficial mimesis:

Between poetic euphemisms and discursive barbarity there is indeed

precious little room for true art. It is this small in-between space that is
Beckett's terrain.63

This metaphor of the in-between requires careful attention lest it

be prematurely taken up as a omen of some imminent re-estab
lishment of easy relations between subject and object. Beckett's
drama is all too often summarised as dealing with 'the modern
break-down in communications' — as if break-down itself were not
a highly revealing metaphor of incompetent mechanism. Adorno
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 Seeing darkly: notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett
accepted no such explanation, with its covert nostalgia for a sup
posed era of unimpeded unanimity between subjects who were
never objects to each other. Thus, Waiting for Godot and Endgame
exemplify a dictum of Adorno's according to which 'art maintains
its integrity only by refusing to go along with communication.'64 At
one and the same time an unrepentant Hegelian and a diagnostician
of aesthetic malaise, he insists that 'what is called "communication"
today is the adaptation of spirit to useful aims and, worse, to
commodity fetishism'.65
Despite this seemingly arcane and advanced philosophising, one
is brought tantalisingly close to the possible source for a sociology
of Irish literature in Adorno's treatment of Samuel Beckett's decent
bourgeois origins. In the past, literature in Ireland together with
its criticism proceeded along amiably agreed paths, conducting
any intellectual transactions which arose in a spirit of easy-going
relaxation — like friends on a country walk of a Sunday afternoon,
sorting out discrepancies in the petty cash. In other words, the
bourgeois character of the literature was glossed over by veneerings
of local (Parnellism for Joyce, Ascendancy for Yeats) and inter
national (Primitivism for Synge, Decadence for Wilde) manu
facture. Meanwhile, a distinctly bourgeois style of criticism,
affectionate, anti-intellectual, dismissive, thrived. Gradually, this
was augmented by the arrival of foreign scholarship, but the Amer
ican scholars were happy to pretend that anecdotal incon
sequentially was one of the very things they most admired in their
new property. The literature per se was not slow to take a hint, of
course, and for several years now the Culture Industry has been
thriving in Ireland, with the help of a refurbished sectarianism.
This is the new factor which complicates even as it requires an
acknowledgment that, from Spenser onwards, literature in Ireland
has been part and parcel of a complex if in part self-concealed
bourgeois formation.
It is worth pondering, therefore, whether Beckett's renowed
discretion is not his early apprehension of the salesman on the
doorstep rather than the manifestation of an innate rectitude. Cer
tainly, Malaparte's Kaputt takes its place in a grossly obvious pattern
of development from the brutal amnesia of the post-war years to
the antics of Rambo in an empire ruled by B grade stars. Compare
this with the rare discretion with which Beckett privately assumes
the metaphor of trench war for his own engagement in the writing
of Endgame.

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 W. J. McCormack

If I don't get away by myself now and try to work I'll explode, or implode.
So I have retreated to my hole in the Marne mud and am struggling with
a play.65

And, compare again the unrelenting insouciance with which Deirdre

Bair seeks to establish Beckett as 'a-politicaP even while docu
menting his involvement in the French resistance.67 In this, she has
not been without influence: at the launching of Sam's first tape in
the Abbey theatre, C.J. Haughey found it possible to act out a
debate in Dail Eireann as re-written in the style of Waiting for
Godot. A few weeks later in the summer of 1986, Samuel Smiles
ostentatiously cited a personal conversation with 'no less than'
Samuel Beckett in the two-minute god spot which is Radio Eireann's
genuine tribute to Irish fidelity. The work of Samuel Beckett is
currently being more thoroughly built into the Irish culture industry
than that of any writer since Ulysses emerged from under the counter
of Hodges Figgis. If this enterprise succeeds, Adorno's essay on
Endgame fails, and the heirs of Malaparte will be the provisional
beneficiaries.
For critical theorists like Adorno, literature is not simply an
achievement worthy of celebration: 'there is no document of civi
lization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.'68
However, works of literature are also acts of resistance, conditioned
but never wholly determined by what is resisted. Even a deliberately
awkward style functions as a means of impeding a too facile appreci
ation — or denunciation. For Beckett's Molloy, as for Adorno,
'seeing darkly' involved a perception of change, that distinctive
form of change which is waiting.69 That, certainly, both Beckett
and Adorno attend to, each in the devastation of a faith inherited
and lost, rejected and imposed, protestant and Jewish respectively.
No passage is more thoroughly dark yet appropriate to the glare of
publicity now descending on Beckett's work than this, from Minima
moralia:

To identify culture solely with lies is more fateful than ever, now that the
former is really becoming totally absorbed by the latter, and eagerly invites
such identification in order to compromise every opposing thought. If
material reality is called the world of exchange value, and culture whatever
refuses to accept the domination of that world, then it is true that such
refusal is illusory as long as the existent exists. Since, however, free and
honest exchange is itself a lie, to deny it is at the same time to speak for
truth: in face of the lie of the commodity world, even the lie that denounces
it becomes a corrective.7"

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 Seeing darkly: notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett

The historical moment of this present essay is not the same as

that in which Adorno wrote of Endgame, nor that of the Aesthetic
theory. It is exactly that of a parodic bourgeois revolution in which
the old values and the old answers are broadcast by means of the
most advanced sub-liminality. Take for example the supposedly
cynical celebration of family in Dallas and Dynasty, and the more
thoroughly retrograde transformation of Nazi German occupation
into material for a not-dissimilar television 'sit-com' series. These
are inculcations, premonitions. Beckett's bourgeois origins may give
the lie to various fables about the social background of Anglo-Irish
literature, but if a corrective literary history is to be written, one
must remember the kind of society in which that enterprise will be
carried on.71

Notes

1. See G.W.F. Hegel, Erste Druckschriften (ed. Lasson). Leipzig, 1898, p. 405.
Quoted in Georg Lukacs, The young Hegel; studies in the relations between dialectics and
economics (trans. Rodney Livingstone). London: Merlin Press, 1975, p. 145.
2. 'Three dialogues: iii, Bram van Velde' [1949], in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta:
miscellaneous writings and a dramatic fragment. London: Calder, 1983, p. 145. John
Pilling (Samuel Beckett. London, Boston: Routledge, 1976. p. 199) compares Hegel's
view of romanticism as necessarily an 'art of failure'.
3. 'Recent Irish poetry' [1934] in Disjecta, p. 70.
4. Quoted in Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977. p. 36.
5. Ibid. p. 161.
6. Samuel Beckett, Molloy: a novel (translated from the French by Patrick Bowles
in collaboration with the author). New York: Grove Press, 1970. (Collected works)
p. 7.
7. Biographical details extracted from Deirdre Bair, A biography: Samuel Beckett.
London: Cape, 1978. pp. 336, 348, 364-366 etc.
8. See title-page transcript in n.6 above: the citation differs in other editions.
9. J.M. Synge 'Preface' to 'The playboy of the western world': Collected works;
(vol iv; plays, bk ii). Oxford University Press, 1968. p. 53.
10. Molloy p. 89.
11. Samuel Beckett. The complete dramatic works. London, Boston: Faber, 1986.
p. 110.
12. T.W. Adorno, 'Trying to understand Endgame' (trans by Michael T.Jones),
New German critique no 26 (1982) pp. 119-150.
13. T.W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur II. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1961.
Subsequent page references to the German text relate to the volume of the same
name in the Surkamp Gesammelte Schriften (1970 onwards).
14. New German Critique loc. cit. p. 122; Beckett, Complete dramatic works p. 106.
15. Adorno's principal account of existentialism — half argument, half satire
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 W. J. McCormack
— is The jargon of authenticity (trans Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will). London:
Routledge, 1973.
16. On this topic see Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialetic of enlight
enment (trans John Cumming), London: Verso, 1979; Theodor Adorno, Minima
moralia; reflections from damaged life (trans E.F.N. Jephcott), London: New Left
Books, 1974; Theodor W. Adorno 'Culture and administration' Telos, no 37 (fall
1978), pp. 93-111. A useful bibliography of works in English by and relating to
Adorno can be found in Eugene Lunn, Marxism and modernism: an historical study of
Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno. London: Verso, 1985.
17. For Adorno's career during these stages, see Martin Jay, The dialectical
imagination: a history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-50,
London: Heinemann, 1973. Jay has also published a short study of Adorno in the
Fontana modern masters series.
18. See New German Critique loc. cit. p. 119.
19. T.YV. Adorno, Aesthetic theory (edd. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann,
trans C. Lenhardt). London, Boston: Routledge, 1984. p. 498.
20. Adorno's opposition to Husslerian phenomenology is the subject of his
Against epistemology; a metacritique (trans Willis Domingo). Oxford: Blackwell, 1982.
21. The extended debate about modernism is documented in Ernst Bloch, Georg
Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and politics
(trans ed Ronald Taylor; afterword by FredricJameson). London: New Left Books,
1977.

22. These extracts are taken from Noten zur Literatur II pp. 281, 283, 286, 290,
292, 295, 302, 311; the translation is basically that of Michael T. Jones, with
modifications; see New German Critique loc. cit., pp. 119, 120-121, 123, 126, 127,
130, 136, 143.
23. Adorno, Aesthetic theory p. 353.
24. Ibid. p. 354.
25. Disjecta p. 95.
26. G.W.F. Hegel, The phenomenology of mind (trans J. B. Baillie). London: Allen
& Unwin, 1931. (2nd. rev ed) p. 229. The section from which these quotations
come is reprinted in Paul Connerton (ed), Critical sociology; selected readings, Har
mondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 41-50, an anthology which contains a useful
selection of material by Frankfurt School thinkers.
27. Hegel op. cit. p. 234.
28. Ibid. p. 237.
29. See in particular Lukacs's Young Hegel (nl above).
30. Hegel op. cit. pp. 599-610.
31. Adorno, Minima moralia p. 50; cf. Hegel op. cit. p. 81.
32. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and revolution: Hegel and the rise of social theory.
London: Routledge, 1955. (2nd ed) p. 115.
33. G.W.F. Hegel Aesthetik (ed. F. Bassenge) Frankfurt, 1951) vol 1 p. 104.
Quoted in Hans-Joachim Schulz, The hell of stories: a Hegelian approach to the
novels of Samuel Beckett. The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1973. Schulz's short book is
disappointing; for a consideration of Hegel's legacy in this immediate connection
see, W. Martin Ludke, Ammerkungen zu einer 'Logik des Zerfalls': Adorno-Beckett.
Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. pp. 114-131 ('Herr und Knecht in der
Geschichte des Verfalls'). For an orthodox Marxist point of view see Thomas
Metscher, 'Geschichte und Mythos bei Beckett' in Das Argument vol 26 (1963).
34. See Oskar Negt, 'Ernst Bloch — the German philosopher of the October
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 Seeing darkly: notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett
revolution', New German Critique no 4 (winter 1975) pp. 3-16; see also Bloch's own
essay 'A jubilee for renegades', loc. cit. pp. 17-25.
35. Disjecta p. 152.
36. Bair op. cit. pp. 259, 266-269.
37. Ibid. pp. 245-247. See also Jack Zipes 'Beckett in Germany/Germany in
Beckett', New German Critique no 26 (1982) pp. 151-157.
38. Quoted, ibid. p. 348.
39. See Adorno, Noten zur Literatur II pp. 299, 301; also Jones's translation in
New German Critique no 26 (1982) pp. 133, 135.
40. Beckett, Complete dramatic works p. 103.
41. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur 301; Jones (trans.) p. 135.
42. Disjecta p. 70.
43. Quoted in Martin Jay, Dialectical imagination p. 177.
44. Molloy p. 91.
45. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Routledge, 1961
(2nd rev. imp. 1963), p. 150.
46. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt (trans Cesare Foligno). London: Redman, 1948,
p. 9.
47. Ibid. p. 73.
48. Ibid. p. 94.
49. Idem.
50. I take this detail from the text in Malaparte's Opere complete (Kaputt, Vallecchi
Editore, 1963, p. 7). It appears to have been omitted from English language
editions.
51. Quoted Martin Jay, op. cit. p. 173.
52. Adorno, Minima moralia p. 27.
53. The essay appears in an English translation in Andrew Arato and Eike
Gebhardt (edd), The essential Frankfurt School reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1978, pp.
497-511.
54. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of enlightenment p. 125.
55. Ibid. p. 169.
56. See Adorno, Noten p. 286; Jones (trans), p. 123.
57. Adorno, Minima moralia p. 23.
58. Ibid. p. 17.
59. Ibid. pp. 17-18.
60. See Adorno, Noten p. 297; Jones (trans), p. 131.
61. Jones refers the reader to Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
p. 234, without comment on the content of the passage referred to.
62. Dialectic of enlightenment, p. 144.
63. Adorno, Aesthetic theory, p. 47.
64. Ibid. p. 443.
65. Ibid. p. 109.
66. Beckett to Alan Schneider, 27 December 1955; published Disjecta p. 106.
In Endgame, Nell and Nagg exchange ambiguous recollections of some disaster
(laughter-inducing in retrospect) — 'It was in the Ardennes . . . [or] On the road
to Sedan' and with the growing precision of these allusions to first world war
locations their laughter diminishes.
67. Bair op. cit. p. 308. This is not the only declaration of its kind in the
biography.
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 W. J. McCormack
68. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt; trans Harry Cohn,.
n.p.): Fontana/Collins, 1973. p. 258.
69. Molloy p. 58.
70. Adorno, Minima moralia p. 44.
71. The very recent background to this enterprise is the subject of my The battle
of the books: two decades of Irish cultural debate. Gigginstown: Lilliput Press, 1986.

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