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Beckett and Radio

A Cosy Genre Subverted

Radio and cinema were the media that monopolized 1950s Ireland. Radio was a very different thing then from what goes by that name now, being carefully structured into programmes that belonged to specific genres, as opposed to the constant flow of talk and music today, when radio functions mostly as background noise. Postwar radio seems to have been a cosy medium on the whole, often reproducing the sounds of a quiet suburb or rural town. Of iconic standing for this period in radio culture is Mrs Dale’s Diary, the pioneering BBC radio serial drama (1948-1969). Readers of Beckett will note with interest the novel device whereby each episode begins with the voice of Mrs Dale speaking as if she were writing in her diary. ‘In February 1962, the serial was renamed The Dales. The linking narratives by Mrs. Dale were dropped at this time. The reason behind the changes was that the BBC were very conscious that the series was considered by the media to be twee and hopelessly old fashioned’ (Wikipedia).

An educative outreach to a more rural, agricultural audience was provided by The Archers, first aired on Whit Monday 1950 and still running in 2007. ‘It was used as a propaganda vehicle to reinforce notions of Englishness, and to foster and inculcate notions of rebuilding in post-war Britain’ (Wikipedia), just as Mrs Dale’s Diary may have aimed to educate its listeners in the refinements of middle-class speech and behaviour. (The patriarch of the Archer family is called Dan, perhaps the source for the name of Beckett’s Dan Rooney, who far from being a patriarch is childless and probably a child-murderer.) The Kennedys of Castleross (1955-1975), with the formidable Marie Kean, was a popular Irish equivalent of these British serials.

Beckett’s radio play All That Fall, written in 1956 and broadcast by the BBC Third Programme on 13 January 1957, plays with the conventions and the particular atmosphere of the medium at that time, and perhaps particularly with those of Radio Eireann plays set in rural locations. The harp introduction to Mrs Dale’s Diary could have suggested the use of a Schubert quartet at the beginning and towards the end of Beckett’s piece. Mrs Rooney’s self-conscious relationship to language could reflect the stilted diary-format of Mrs Dale’s introductions. ‘Do you find anything… bizarre about my way of speaking?... I do not mean the voice… No, I mean the words. Then ‘More to herself”, I use none but the simplest words, I hope, and yet I sometimes find my way of speaking very… bizarre’ (CDW, 173).[1] The Rooneys feel they are ‘struggling with a dead language’ (194). If one listens to excerpts online, it is quite apparent that the actors are reading their lines in a studio; the stiffly unnaturalistic effect appealed to Beckett for its novel potential. The play is heard as a studio piece, the alleged movements of its characters annulled by the factitious and ad hoc character of the sounds supplied to indicate them.

The nostalgic quality of such broadcasting is reflected in the fact that Beckett’s play is set in the Foxrock of the 1930s. The human imitations of animal sounds, the sounds of approaching and departing vehicles, the insertion of musical passages (the record of Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ quartet), are among the features of this play, preserved by the BBC in its original form, that give it its quaint ‘period’ quality. But again and again Beckett undercuts the cosiness of the genre. A string of rural chats, as Mrs Rooney labours to the station, have grotesque turns. What could be cosier than the opening words: ‘Is that you, Christy?’ ‘It is, Ma’am.’ But what follows is disturbing: ‘Why do you halt? [Pause.] But why do I halt? [Silence.]’ The second sentence here may be in Maddy’s mind. The ‘voice-over’ character of Maddy’s ruminations, enabling an identification of the hearer with the character, is an expressive device that was probably common at that time, as in the inner monologue of the beleaguered father in ‘The Foley Family,’ another staple of 1950s Irish radio. Beckett leaves it unclear which of her words represent unspoken thoughts. Subversion is in evidence again when so harmless as phrase as, ‘But will it hold up?,’ repeated ‘with emotion’ (CDW, 172), gives a sinister edge to chat about the weather. Again, though Mrs Rooney and Miss Fitt are middle-class like Mrs Dale, their status, even in upmarket Foxrock, is undercut by the mockery of the locals. Miss Fitt is ‘twee and hopelessly old-fashioned’ in the classical Dale mould. Mrs Rooney’s façade of gentility cracks again and again with violent outbursts: ‘Give her a good welt on the rump’ (173).

Paradoxes: The Inner Voice and the Suspension of Time

Beckett seems to have discovered and exploited an affinity between radio and the Theatre of the Absurd. The subversion of logic, shifts from farce to tragedy, Sisyphean repetitions, of this genre (first given its name by Martin Esslin) can be effected more easily in the radio medium where the solid reality of stage props does not get in the way and where space and time are more easily made elastic. The relationships between the characters are all marked by an eerie disconnectedness, in a way that would be undercut by their physical presence on the stage. Christy’s ‘Nice day for the races, Ma’am’ (172), occurring in mid-conversation, is a conventional gambit filling a ‘silence’. The conversation can scarcely be said to ‘hold up’, especially if the listener is conscious that it consists of lines read into studio microphones.

Radio like the silent moving picture is a paradoxical medium. The silent film represents colour in black and white, speech in silence, and its representation of movement is subverted by the static stills filling in the dialogue. The conventions of the radio play represent the wet by the dry (the waves in Embers), the animate by the artificial (the animal imitations), the silent by the loud (Mrs Rooney’s thoughts), the heavy by the light (the cart, car, train, bodies), movement by stasis (the journey to and from the station is conveyed by voices that stay in the same place, before the microphone). Even its representation of time is paradoxical. Forward movement in time seems to collapse into repetition of the same moment. Has it been noticed that the events on the soundtrack do not always correspond to real linear time? Time is interrupted by Maddy’s inner monologue, and there is a replay of the moment preceding it.

Mr Tyler: Come, Mrs Rooney, come, the mail has not yet gone up, just take my free arm and we’ll be there with time and to spare.

Mrs Rooney: [Sobbing.] What? What’s all this now? [Calmer.] Can’t you see I’m in trouble? [With anger.] Have you no respect for misery? [Sobbing.] Minnie! Little Minnie!

Mr Tyler: Come, Mrs Rooney, come, the mail has not yet gone up, just take my free arm and we’ll be there with time and to spare.

Mrs Rooney: [Brokenly.] In her forties now she’d be, I don’t know, fifty, girding up her lovely little loins, getting ready for the change…

Mr Tyler: Come, Mrs Rooney, come, the mail –

Mrs Rooney: [Exploding.] Will you get along with you, Mr Rooney, Mr Tyler I mean, will you get along with you now and cease molesting me? (CDW, 176)

The reminiscence of Minnie is probably interior monologue. Maddy is markedly histrionic here in a way that radio drama favours, as if the disembodied voice were a more malleable channel for emotive attitudinizing. Her psychodrama is played for herself, disconnected from the outer world, which is marking time in this passage. There is a similar effect later:

Miss Fitt: She said she would be on the last train.

Mrs Rooney: Do not imagine, because I am silent, that I am not present, and alive to all that is going on.

Mr Tyler: [To Miss Fitt.] When you say the last train –

Mrs Rooney: Do not flatter yourselves for one moment, because I hold aloof, that my sufferings have ceased. No. The entire scene, the hills, the plain, the racecourse with its miles and miles of white rails and three red stands, the pretty little wayside station, even you yourselves, yes, I mean it, and over all the clouding blue, I see it all, I stand here and see it all with eyes… [The voice breaks.] … through eyes… oh if you had my eyes… you would understand… the things they have seen… and not looked away… this is nothing… nothing… what did I do with that handkerchief? [Pause.]

Mr Tyler: [To Miss Fitt.] When you say the last train – (185)

Clearly we hear an inner monologue here; Mrs Rooney says she is silent; and the words of Mr Tyler are repeated, as if time had stopped for the monologue. There is a suggestion that Maddy is a Berkeleyan observer, that the scene she evokes exists because she perceives it (esse est percipi). Another example:

Mr Tyler: Now now, Miss Fitt, do not –

Mrs Rooney: [With vehement sadness.] Poor Dan!

Mr Tyler: Now now, Miss Fitt, do not give way… to despair. (186)

A Mystery Play

Radio drama had an affinity with the detective story, strewing clues and riddles in a sound-space that allowed special concentration. The mystery element was central in the radio dramas of my childhood – the boss who bullies all his employees, but is never seen, turns out to be a giant computer; the terrifying footsteps in Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight turn out to be those of the husband. In All That Fall there is much that we want to find out – why is the Schubert lady so sad, who was little Minnie, what happened on the train?

Discussing Beckett’s second radio play, Embers, Marjorie Perloff writes: ‘All the more reason, then, for the radio artist – and Beckett is surely one of the finest – to turn this information function, this relaying of messages from A to B, inside out.’ Indeed, every function of language is deflected, thwarted or suspended in All That Fall. The voices fall back on themselves, unable to leave the artificial radiophonic space. Maddy is trapped inside her mental bubble, as is the equally histrionic Miss Fitt, while the loud, hearty, cursing mens’ voices becomes stage noises like the artificial sounds of animals and vehicles. Perloff quotes Michel Serres on the disruption of communication: ‘in spoken languages: stammerings, mispronunciations, regional accents, dysphonias, and cacophonies… In the technical means of communication: background noise, jamming, static, cut-offs, heteresis, various interruptions. If static is accidental, background noise is essential to communication.’[2] But in All That Fall the failure of communication has deeper roots, of which these disruptions are only surface manifestations.

Mysteries and solutions do not unfold logically in Beckett’s play, but are crossed by invasive noises, and leave a residue of unresolved ambiguity. The listener is left asking not, ‘What is the solution?’ but ‘What is the question?’ In this play of noises amid which the human communications fall flat, it is as if the characters were building up to ‘an overwhelming question’, à la Prufrock, but the question never gets asked. Perloff claims it is a very visual play, but, as in Maddy’s evocation of the racecourse above, do we not have the impression that the scene-painting is fictive, the projection of a quasi-authorial consciousness? The more she insists on seeing, the more we are aware that she is a voice before a microphone in a studio where there is no racecourse, no white rails, no red stands. The radio studio is the true space of the play, a black box or skull-like enclosure like the space in Company, the solitary mindspace where the author projects his fictive world. When such massive objects as trains move into this space, we know that they are only make-believe trains: ‘Immediately exaggerated station sounds. Falling signals. Bells. Whistles. Crescendo of train whistle approaching’ (187).

Perloff quotes Esslin: ‘radio is an intensely visual medium… Information that reaches [the listener] through other senses is instantly converted into visual terms. And aural experiences, which include the immense richness of language as well as musical and natural sound, are the most effective means of triggering visual images’.[3] But does this really apply even to All That Fall, the most apparently mimetic of Beckett’s radio plays? Is even the language really so immensely rich, or it is not rather shown up as depleted, listless? ‘What happens’, Perloff asks, ‘when, as Klaus Schoening points out in a discussion of the new acoustic art, words are combined with “nontextual language, nonverbal articulations, quotation, original sound [i.e., ambient sound], environmental noises, acoustic objets trouvés, musical tones, [and] electronic technology”? What do we visualize then?’ But even in All That Fall it is not clear that there is any substantial visualization. The various modes of transport presented – feet, hinny, bicycle, car, train – are a schematic sequence existing only as noise, not really visualized by the listener. The noises indicate not the reality of the objects but their malleability to aural perception: ‘Go, Mr Tyler, go on and leave me, listening to the cooing of the ringdoves. [Cooing.]’ (176). Here the conventional literary phrase summons into existence the sound it denotes, but the actual physical ringdoves themselves are not present or visualized at all.

Perloff continues: ‘After All That Fall, whose characters are still represented as “real” people in a “real” Irish country setting, Beckett’s radio art becomes more abstract and mediumistic, engaging in a dialectic of disclosure and obstacle, information and noise, in which the soundscape – which includes silence – provides conflicting, and hence tantalizing, testimony.’ But Mrs Rooney can already be described as ‘mediumistic’; her consciousness is the medium through which we hear the other voices and sounds, which seem to stall in time when she does not attend to them and to come into existence when she bids them too. All the non-auditory contents of her consciousness, such as her view of the landscape or her memories of Minnie, summon up their objects in a way that again suggests a medium, in the sense that we cannot be sure that these fantasy-projections are real; all objects in the play are ectoplasmic.

Perloff remarks that ‘Embers is an exciting whodunnit. Inevitably, the audience tries to construct the plot, doled out in dribs and drabs of information… Normally and conventionally, radio is the purveyor of messages: who killed whom and why?... But in Embers, there are no findings, no announcement, no “late bulletin.” Indeed, it is these features of radio discourse that Beckett parodies: the radio audience’s demand for fact is consistently undercut by verbal and phrasal repetition, by unanchored visual image… and by rhetorical and sonic excess.’ Again, all this applies to the earlier play as well. There is no clear resolution of the mystery of the child’s death, though we are left with the darkest suspicions. The very question, ‘Did Mr Rooney kill the child?’ seems inapposite; that is not the kind of play we are dealing with. The aura of mystery that radio plays can create is diffused over all the incidents of the drama, to suggest the uncanniness of life itself as recorded in the perceiving consciousness. The soundtrack so blurs the barrier between reality and fantasy that to ask the realistic questions of detective fiction is beside the point. ‘The Rooneys of Foxrock’ pays little tribute to the canons of realism of a lunchtime radio serial. All the realistic references – to characters’ illnesses, for example – are deliberately ‘off’ and create a bizarre or grotesque effect.

Metadrama

    Having registered the ‘special effects’ thus produced, we are ready to understand Beckett’s misgivings about the idea of staging the play:

All That Fall is a specifically radio play, or rather radio text, for voices, not bodies. I have already refused to have it ‘staged’ and I cannot think of it in such terms. A perfectly straight reading before an audience seems to me just barely legitimate, though even on this score I have my doubts. But I am absolutely opposed to any form of adaptation with a view to its conversion into ‘theatre.’ It is no more theatre than End-Game is radio and to ‘act’ it is to kill it. Even the reduced visual dimension it will receive from the simplest and most static of readings... will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing’s coming out of the dark.[4]

Anthony Cronin, in his biography of Beckett, claims that Irish households would turn off the light in order to experience the full impact of a radio broadcast in the dark – something that would no doubt add to the spine-chilling effect of such broadcasts as Gaslight. It corresponds to the scenario of Company (1980), two excerpts from which were published as ‘Heard in the Dark,’ 1 and 2 (1979). Barry McGovern notes that its opening words ‘encapsulate the situation of the radio voice. It is a world where sound and silence and the only coordinates. It is the world of the imagination.’[5] Company also recalls a radio play in its adjustments of the ‘voice’ as if arranging microphones in a radio studio, and in its evocations of the past in a spoken style that one finds only in radio drama.

Beckett exaggerates the typical traits of whatever medium he tackles, so that his writing is hyper-theatrical (Play, 1963), hyper-mime-like (Act Without Words, I and II, 1956), hyper-radiophonic in the series of radio plays dating from 1956 to 1963 (All That Fall, Embers, Rough for Radio, I and II, Words and Music, Cascando, The Old Tune), hyper-tape-recorded (Krapp’s Last Tape), hyper-cinematic (Film, 1963), hyper-televisual in the series of television plays from 1965 to 1982 (Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, …but the clouds…, Nacht und Träume). Thus he signals the limits of the medium in its conventional forms at the same time as he wrings from it new potential – just as some modern composers writing for traditional instruments or ensembles parody the conventions of the medium and then force it to do unprecedented things, which nonetheless remain pianistic, violinistic or ‘string-quartet-ish,’ as the case may be. The ‘hyper’ of parody becomes the self-reflexive ‘meta’ that makes the performance a representation of the medium itself as such.

In Embers Beckett underlines even more emphatically the artifices of the radio play medium and the resulting paradoxes. The medium this time is almost literally mediumistic, for Henry seems to conduct a séance. At the beginning he is addressing his father’s ghost: ‘That sound you hear is the sea. [Pause. Louder.] I say that sound you hear is the sea, we are sitting on the strand. [Pause.] I mention it because the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea, that if you didn’t see what it was you wouldn’t know what it was’ (253). As addressed also to the radio listener, these lines signal how the radio medium represents sounds and what they are supposed to signify in a quite artificial way, so that the listener’s suspension of disbelief is based on subscription to quite elaborate conventions and on skill in decoding the radio code. Those conventions were taken for granted and had become transparent to the radio listener of those days, whereas when we listen to such programmes now they stick out quaintly and embarrassingly; but most likely they are already ‘defamiliarized’ in Beckett’s original use of them.

Henry then has a colloquy with the ghost of Ada – whom he has summoned up as a voice in his head. The ambiguity of her status – ghost or inner voice? – does not demand to be cleared up; ghostly presences are easier to handle in the medium of sound, where the undecideable can reign, without the awkwardness of visual representation (the Furies in Eliot’s The Family Reunion) that sometimes oblige directors to the unsatisfactory expedient of leaving the ghost, when not a speaking role, invisible. Before Ada appears, and after her disappearance despite Henry’s desperate pleading, Henry tells an obscure story to himself about Bolton and Holloway. This is a kind of play within the play, equal in obscurity and ominousness to the main action. At the centre of Embers are placed the wails of Addie, Henry’s daughter, suffering under a music master and a riding master. Here romantic music, a waltz by Chopin, takes the central place that the noisy trains have in All That Fall (in which we heard Schubert at the beginning and the end). To some extent a musical rather than narrative logic presides over the succession of sounds. The tendency of radio drama is to foreground sound in a way that gives it an autonomy it cannot have on stage or screen, so that the voices and sounds take the lead in the drama, reducing the movement of bodies and the gestures and interactions of characters to a secondary, if not shadowy role.

Embers, as its title indicates, can be seen as a memory play; Henry is stirring the dead or dying embers of old obsessions. It does not use the device of the radio flashback, which is perhaps more difficult to manage than its cinematic counterpart. As an intimate voice, radio is attuned from the start to dream and memory, whereas visual drama constantly thrusts one toward the outer real and the present tense. The sound of hooves that is heard several times after Harry has named them may be thought to be created by him, as if he were directing the play (compare Maddy’s ringdoves); one is left with a vague suspicion that Addie may have been killed by the galloping horse in the riding master scene, though according to the literal plot she is alive. As in Company the events of this radio play are projections of the voices – Harry’s corresponding to the Deviser in Company and Ada corresponding to the Voice that narrates a past.

In the end, radio plays were destined to remain a minor strand in Beckett’s oeuvre, perhaps because the effects he could aim at in them were more economically and more fully realized in the medium of quiet prose pieces such as Company. The genre, as he knew it, belonged to a quite narrow strip of time, like the silent film, so that is became pointless to parody it and to exploit its resources (though Film, 1964, is a ghostly revisiting of the silent film decades after its demise). As perhaps in the case of Harold Pinter, Beckett’s ‘apprenticeship’ as a radio dramatist (All That Fall is only his second long play, after Godot, and Embers his fifth, after Endgame and Krapp) may also have given him techniques that will be used in the later stage plays such as Footfalls.[6]

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[1] Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1990).

[2] ‘The Silence that is not Silence: Acoustic Art in Samuel Beckett’s Embers,’ in Lois Oppenheim, ed. Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media (New York: Garland, 1998). 

[3] ‘Samuel Beckett and the Art of Radio,’ Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett and the Media [New York: Grove Press, 1982], 125-54; rpt. in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 366.

[4] Samuel Beckett, letter to Barney Rosset, his U.S. publisher [Grove Press], 27 August 1957, cited in Everett C. Frost, ‘A “Fresh Go” for the Skull: Directing All That Fall, Samuel Beckett’s Play for Radio,’ in Directing Beckett, ed. Lois Oppenheim (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 191. 

[5] Barry McGovern, ‘Beckett and the radio voice,’ in Christopher Murray, ed. Samuel Beckett 100 years. Dublin: New Island, 2006, 132-44; here, 132.

[6] See also: Katherine Worth, ‘Beckett and the Radio Medium,’ in British Radio Drama, ed. John Drakakis. Cambridge University Press, 1981; Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television. Abo: Abo Akademi, 1976.

Intertextuality in "The Lost Ones"

Le dépeupleur (Paris: Minuit, 1970), translated into English as The Lost Ones (London: Calder & Boyars, 1972), is a text in fifteen paragraphs, which may be summarized as follows:

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Part I: The Abode

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The ‘first aperçu of the abode’ in which ‘lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.’ The paragraph is structured by a series of headings or ‘stage directions’ (characteristic of Beckett’s later style): ‘The light’; ‘The temperature’; ‘The ladders’; ‘The niches or alcoves’. The initial description of the shape of the cylindrical abode is followed by an account of the light, its restless oscillation and its ‘consequences’, then an account of the temperature, its oscillation and its consequences, then a section on the sounds, then the ladders, and finally the niches to which the lost ones are entitled to climb.

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2. The bodies are divided into four kinds – those constantly in motion, those who sometimes pause, the sedentary, and the vanquished. The latter are closest to the final state of ‘this little people’ (‘ce petit peuple’), in which ‘light and climate will be changed in a way impossible to foretell. But the former may be imagined extinguished as purposeless and the latter fixed not far from freezing point’.

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3. A resumé of what has been expounded so far with some new precisions.

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Part II: The Creeds

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4. The two rival beliefs about ‘a way out’. ‘One school swears by a secret passage branching from one of the tunnels and leading in the words of the poet to nature’s sanctuaries. The other dreams of a trapdoor hidden in the hub of the ceiling giving access to a flue at the end of which the sun and other stars would still be shining’.

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5. The possibility of a cooperative venture to search the ceiling, the ‘inviolable zenith’, a possibility thwarted by the absence of ‘fraternity’ among the searchers.

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Part III: The Code

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6. A first aperçu of the climbers’ code’, based on ‘the fundamental principle forbidding ascent more than one at a time’. This long paragraph is followed by three particularly short ones:

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7. The rule for the transport of ladders within a belt along the wall.

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8. The ‘sedentary searchers’ and four of the five ‘vanquished’ within this belt.

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9. A further belt at the edge of the arena where some searchers scrutinize those in the outer belt, creating ‘two narrow rings turning in opposite directions about the teeming precinct’.

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Part IV: Recapitulation

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10. An augmentation of the details about the bodies given in paragraph 2: their age and sex, their different states, their number: 5 vanquished, 20 sedentary, 60 who pause, and 120 constantly moving.

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11. The light and then the temperature, augmenting the summary description in paragraph 1.

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12. The movements between the three zones, augmenting the information given in paragraphs 8 and 9.

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Part V: Further Augmentation

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13. The effect of the climate on the soul, the skin, the eye of the searchers, augmenting elements from paragraphs 1 and 11. Love-making in this climate: ‘The spectacle then is one to be remembered of frenzies prolonged in pain and hopelessness far beyond what even the most gifted lovers can achieve in camera’.

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14. Augmentation of the climbers’ movements and code, as in 8, 9 and 12. The dim light, making the niches invisible from below, the role of ‘the woman vanquished’ who ‘squats against the wall’ as a point of orientation, and the ‘ethics’ of examining one another’s faces: ‘not to do unto others what coming from them might give offence’.

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Part VI: Imagining the End

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15. Added in 1970, four years after the composition of the rest, this paragraph envisages the last searcher staring into the face of the woman vanquished as ‘the unthinkable end’ closes in. This confers a rather specious 'closure' on the text by visualizing what had been presented so far as completely unknowable, ‘impossible to foretell’ (par. 2).

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David Taylor informs me that this text was first published as a series of separate paragraphs in various high-class reviews, illustrated by leading artists, under titles such as ‘Ladder Law’ (par. 6) and ‘The North’ (par. 14). One suspects here a case of making a mountain out of a molehill, or the mischievous charlatanism of a writer who knows that his every word will be the topic of alert and devoted commentary. The later Beckett writes in constant awareness of the lynx-like readers, teasing and setting traps for them, while affecting to be utterly oblivious of their existence. The later Henry James, Joyce and T. S. Eliot are past masters of the same game, a game that can be played only by authors of assured fame, with a critical industry growing up about them. Other esoteric modernists such as Mallarmé or Pound do not play this game; they have not entered into such a cat-and-mouse symbiosis with their public. One aspect of this game is seen in the confusion Beckett creates about the dimensions of the cylinder (the English translation correcting the French original) and the number of its inhabitants; it must be 205, yet Beckett sometimes writes as if it were 200: if the fifteen ladders were put out of service, ‘the spectacle would finally be offered of one hundred and eighty-five searchers less the vanquished committed for all time to the ground’ (par. 6); the correct figure here would be 190. Does Beckett deliberately stumble to offer something for the critics to feed on?

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A Parody of Dante

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The Lost Ones is one of the most plainly intertextual of all Beckett’s performances, being a parody of Dante’s Inferno. Dante is named in the text (par. 2) and the last line of the Commedia – ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’ – is quoted: ‘a flue at the end of which the sun and the other stars would still be shining’ (‘une cheminée au bout de laquelle brilleraient encore le soleil et les autres étoiles’, par. 4). The flue corresponds to the subterranean gallery, the ‘natural burella’ and ‘pertugio tondo’ (Inf. 34.98, 138) by which Virgil and Dante make their way back from the bottom of Hell at the centre of the earth.

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The Lost Ones is the text that marks the arrival of the impersonal Olympian style of late Beckett. It is also the strongest exemplar of this style, largely due to the stern Dantean model. Yet, like the poet of the Commedia, the narrator has both a god-like aspect and a searching, doubting human side. As Lawrence Graver writes: ‘Gradually, as we attend to the words cut and then positioned as if each were a precious stone, we hear surprising modulations not apparent at the start. The voice begins to doubt, qualify, and contradict its earlier observations; and from behind the screen of detachment comes the torment of the searching creatures… Time and again, the alien events inside the cylinder… send chills of recognition out to more familiar spheres” (in L. Graver and R. Federman, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, 326-7).

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It might be thought that the reference to Belacqua, as well as the shape of the flattened cylinder – closer to the conic shape of Dante’s Mount Purgatory than to the vast and complex geography of Hell with its nine circles, one divided into four gironi, another into ten bolgie and the last into four zone – point to the Purgatorio rather than the Inferno as the relevant intertext. But the title The Lost Ones suggests Dante’s ‘genti dolorose/ch’hanno perduto il ben dell’intelletto’ (unhappy ones who have lost the Good of the intellect; Inf. 3.17-18). Enoch Brater, quoting Beckett’s remark that the ‘purgatory’ of Finnegans Wake ‘is spherical and excludes culmination’, thinks of a purgatorial space in which ‘the ritual of movement offers footfalls only vertical or concentric, never “unidirectional” or end-stopped’ (‘Mis-takes, Mathematical and Otherwise, in The Lost Ones’, Modern Fiction Studies 29, 1983, 93-109; 95).

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A hunt for specific echoes of Dante in Beckett’s text would be a demanding enterprise. The references to light and gloom and to heat and cold recall many passages in Dante. Hell is a place of darkness, from the first circle on: ‘Io venni in loco d’ogni luce muto’ (Inferno 5.28). The ninth circle of Hell is an icy place, where tears are frozen. ‘The bodies brush together with a rustle of dry leaves’ (par. 1) recalls the comparison of lost souls to autumn leaves in Inferno 3.112-13: ‘Come d’autunno si levan le foglie/l’una appresso dell’altra’. Brater (107) sees ‘the two storms’ (par. 11) or ‘twofold storm’ (par. 13), created by the perpetual oscillation of the light and of the temperature, as ‘a postmodernist’s version of those cruel but never-ending winds assaulting Paolo and Francesca’ in Inferno 5.

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The gravity of tone (‘woe the body…’, par. 1; ‘woe the rash searcher’, par. 14) and the features of tautness, quirkiness, ironic wordplay, controlled laconic idiom, and consequent opacity are all close to Dante. The construction of an infernal cosmos recalls the meticulous geometrical proceedings of Dante, and indeed Beckett highlights in Dante’s texts an obsessive concern with control and mapping.

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In the last paragraph, an echo of the Primo Levi title, Se questo è un uomo in ‘si c’est un homme’, ‘si ce fut un homme’ is lost in the English ‘if a man’. This allusion brings the world of Nazi concentration camps into the connotative range of the text. The French title, Le dépeupleur, carries chilling overtones – the depopulator, the depeopler. The cylinder is a machine of death, guaranteeing the total extinction of its population. The bodies in the cylinder are dehumanized by the cold gaze of the ‘intelligence’ observing them. Auschwitz, too, was a depopulator and a depeopler. Beckett plays with the dreary thought that the universe itself is one vast death-camp.

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Such an allusion is in very doubtful taste, but it is one that Beckett could scarcely avoid evoking, in his account of an univers concentrationnaire, any more than the horror of a nuclear holocaust could be kept out of Endgame. The text had to negotiate the connotation in an explicit allusion so as to prevent it being introduced from outside as a potent distraction. Beckett’s allusion manages to connect Dante with concentration camps. There is an abstraction and inhumanity in Dante’s art that troubled Francesco De Sanctis in his Storia della letteratura italiana (1870) and that caused Stephen Dedalus in one of the closing diary entries in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to refer to ‘the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri’.

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Parody of Science

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The space is vigilantly surveyed by ‘the thinking being coldly intent on all these data’ (par. 11; cf. ‘an intelligence’, par. 10), who constructs the space and observes it like a scientist in a laboratory, advancing hypothetically, as indicated by the recurrent phrase ‘if this notion is maintained’ (par. 10, twice; ‘if it is maintained’, par. 2; ‘as long as it holds’, par. 4), which as the final phrase of the whole text qualifies it in its entirety as a nightmarish supposition about the universe.

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The narrator decides the height and circumference of the cylinder ‘for the sake of harmony’ (‘pour l’harmonie’, par. 1; par. 3) and seems uneasy with some aspects that do not meet this ideal, as in the recurrent phrase ‘without regard to harmony’ (‘de façon peu harmonieuse’, par. 1, twice); ‘with scant regard to harmony’ (‘de façon peu harmonieuse’, par. 15). Generally he is comically admiring of the structure of the cylinder – ‘Such harmony only he can relish whose long experience and detailed knowledge of the niches are such as to permit a perfect mental image of the entire system’ (‘Harmonie que seul peut goûter qui par longue fréquentation connaît au fond l’ensemble des niches au point d’en posséder une image mentale parfaite’, par. 1). But in a paradox reminiscent of Bishop Berkeley, the narrator adds: ‘But it is doubtful that such a one exists’. In the cylinder there is no such observer, but the narrator and the reader have the capacity for such observation – or imagination. The creator and inspector of the cylinder-world commands ‘an unrecognizable perspective in which we are uncomfortable and which transcends the normal human capacities for glance and gaze’ (Brater, 96). But such a perspective is riddled with aporias: ‘the representational coherence of Le Dépeupleur fails in respect of the unspoken and unanswerable question of its production. If what the text says can be accepted as a fictional representation, then its own writing becomes an impossibility’ (Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 1990, 155). The paradox suggests the ‘indeterminacy principle’ of contemporary physics. As the narrator combines scientific scruple with an air of authority he uncovers the impossibility of his enterprise.

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There is parody of the social sciences as well. The narrator delights in the perfection of the searchers’ social organization, in accord with ‘conventions of obscure origin which in their precision and the submission which they exact from the climbers resemble laws’ (par. 6); ‘One example among a thousand of the harmony that reigns in the cylinder between order and licence’ (par. 12). Disorder troubles him: ‘Not to mention the intolerable presence of properties serving no purpose’ (par. 6). The hatred of disorder translates into a hatred of life, and the best state of the cylinder is its last, when all life ceases. The cylinder is haunted by the threat of violence, as the narrator lets slip from time to time: ‘The missing rungs are in the hands of a happy few who use them mainly for attack and self-defence’ (‘Les échelons manquants sont entre les mains d’un petit nombre de privilégiés. Ils s’en servent essentiellement pour l’agression ou pour se défendre’, par. 1). While the English vocabulary is sometimes grimmer, ‘c’est toujours la même obligation de la faire jusqu’au bout’ becomes ‘the queue must be suffered to the end’ and ‘fait un queue jusqu’au bout’ becomes ‘suffered one queue to the end’ (par. 12), the French text is perhaps graver and sterner overall, as the quirky elements in the English relieve the stress. The tone of the English is drawn into proximity with Jonathan Swift, heightening the aspect of deadpan irony.

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The style parodies scientific discussion. For instance, ‘a faint stridulence as of insects which is that of the light itself and the one invariable’ (par. 11) recalls the physicists’ identification of background radiation going back to the Big Bang and omnipresent like the light in the cylinder-world (here ‘the one invariable’ has a scientific sound not in the French ‘le seul qui ne varie pas’). The objectifying manner in which the anthropological sciences view humans is another object of parody, as the narration scrutinizes the habitat and mores of the population described.

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The overriding law of this mini-cosmos is entropy, assuring a final state of complete stillness. Thus the meaning that the narrator finds in the various laws he details is overshadowed by ultimate meaninglessness. In addition, the structure and regulation of the cylinder world give scant satisfaction to its inhabitants in their endless quest for their ‘lost ones’. The reader who asks, ‘what is the point of this construction?’ (a question one is also tempted to put to Dante) may be led to put to himself the further question, ‘what is the point of the construction of the universe in which humans actually live?’ The viewpoint of the text is Swiftian rather than Dantesque. It holds the mirror of satire up to humans, but does not offer any theological explanation of their condition.

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Buried Nostalgia

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In the translation of the title, there is a loss of intertextual reference. Le dépeupleur comes from Lamartine’s line ‘Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé’. The sardonic use of the term ‘son dépeupleur’ in the first line produces a piquant intertextual effect. ‘Séjour ou des corps vont cherchant chacun son dépeupleur’ – it is not souls or hearts who are bereaved but bodies. Yet the movement of the bodies can be interpreted according to a romantic code. ‘Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one’ is more directly romantic, for the sardonic allusion is gone. A buried elegiac mood of romantic longing pervades the text as an elusive perfume.

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Romance is insinuated in sentences such as: ‘One school swears by a secret passage branching from one of the tunnels and leading in the words of the poet to nature’s sanctuaries’ (‘Pour les uns il ne peut s’agir que d’un passage dérobé prenant naissance dans un des tunnels et menant comme dit le poète aux asiles de la nature’, par. 4). The English is a little more melodramatic. Intertextually, a rather Wordsworthian phrase replaces Rousseau’s ‘asiles de la nature’ (‘Je transporterais dans les asiles de la nature des hommes dignes de l’habiter. Je m’en formerais une société charmante…’, Troisième lettre à M. de Malesherbes). The two faiths set in opposition, in ‘nature’s sanctuaries’ and in Dante’s sun and stars, both dying out, correspond to literary Romanticism and Classicism respectively. Classicism is winning, since ‘of these two persuasions the former is declining in favour of the latter but in a manner so desultory and slow and of course with so little effect on the comportment of either sect that to perceive it one must be in the secret of the gods’ (‘de ces deux partis le premier se dégarnit au profit du second. Mais de façon si lente et si peu suivie et bien entendu avec si peu de répercussion sur le comportement des uns et des autres que pour s’en apercevoir il faut être dans le secret des dieux’, par. 4). Note how the words ‘persuasions’ and ‘sect’ bring out the allegorical reference to religious controversy. See also par. 10: ‘the faithful who endlessly come and go’ (‘ceux restés fidèles qui inlassablement vont et viennent’); Come and Go is the title of a dramaticule written in 1965, in which three women, Flo, Vi and Ru, come and go, changing places on a bench.

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Very Swiftian is the notation, ‘and of course with so little effect...’ Does a nostalgia for a purer, more convincing religion haunt the text as it does Swift? Note the deadpan tonality of the evocation of the Golden Rule: ‘It is enjoined by a certain ethics not to do unto others what coming from them might cause offence’ (par. 14).

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Intertextual play between the French and English versions

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Beckett wrote in two languages, and made the play between his texts and their translations a very complex one, translating himself from French to English and from English to French and sometimes having a hand in translations by third parties (as in the English version of Molloy). Another bilingual author, Vladimir Nabokov, did the same thing: his English rewriting of Kamera Obskura (1932) as Laughter in the Dark (1938) has a complex relationship to a prior English translation Camera Obscura (1936), which Nabokov disliked; his 1968 Russian translation of Lolita (1955) makes it a different book from the English original.

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Though the translation of Le dépeupleur is relatively straightforward, if compared with such radical rewritings as Mercier and Camier (1974), an exuberant transformation of Mercier et Camier (1946), in which we see Beckett returning or regressing to the linguistic high jinks of his More Pricks and Kicks (1934) and Murphy (1938), which bring him into the neighbourhood of Flann O’Brien, a mordant Joycean wit, author of At Swim Two Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1940). 

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Despite this sobriety, close study of the two texts nonetheless indicates some characteristic features of Beckett’s practices as a self-translator:

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(1) A first effect to be noted is a sort of parasitic opportunism, whereby the translation smuggles in extra dimensions of significance. Sometimes something is lost, but the general movement of the French to English translations is towards enrichment and complexity. One loss is the weakening of the intertextual echo of Candide: ‘Tout est donc pour le mieux’ becoming ‘So all is for the best’ (par. 11), and the quirky variation on this, ‘tout n’est pas encore tout à fait pour le mieux’ becoming ‘all is not yet quite for the best’ (par. 15); the echo of Voltaire’s actual French words, ‘Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles’, is more audible in the French text. One sentence not easily translatable without loss of effect has been dropped: ‘Dans les feux sombres du plafond le zénith garde encore sa légende’ (par. 15), which poignantly confirms the prediction of paragraph 4: ‘Its fatuous little light will be assuredly the last to leave them always assuming that they are darkward bound’ (‘Sa petite lumière inutile sera bien la dernière à les quitter si tant est que le noir les attend’).

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As an example of enrichment, note for instance a parasitic intertextual effect when ‘ceux qui s’agitent encore’ becomes ‘those still fitfully fevering’ (par. 8), echoing ‘life’s fitful fever’ from Macbeth. A more literal translation would be ‘those stirring still’, but the English makes more explicit the allegorical overtone. ‘Fevering’ then recurs as a rather cryptic keyword: ‘in the midst of the fevering’ (‘au milieu des agités’, par. 10).

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(2) Another feature of Beckettian self-translation is the infiltration of the text with Beckettian key-words, notably the word ‘still’. This is an exercise in intertextuality in which the intertext is Beckett’s own oeuvre. These keywords increase the elegiac tone, as when ‘Le halètement qui l’agite. Il s’arrête de loin en loin tel un souffle sur sa fin. Tous se figent alors’ (par. 1) becomes ‘Its restlessness at long intervals suddenly stilled like panting at the last. Then all go dead still’. The last sentence is repeated on the first page.

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‘Stillness’ translates ‘calme’ (par. 1), ‘immobilité’ (par. 11). ‘Still’ translates ‘encore’ (par. 10, three times ; par. 13); ‘immobiles’ (par. 10). ‘Sans que pour autant la tête bouge’ becomes ‘in heads dead still’; ‘came to a standstill’ translates ‘s’immobilise’; 'font halte’ translates as ‘stand still’ (par. 10). ‘Qu’ils se rapprochent encore’ becomes ‘Let them move on still till they are close enough to touch’ (par. 10). ‘Immobilité de mort’ becomes ‘deathly still’ (par. 13). ‘Se figent’ becomes ‘go still’ (par. 13), ‘figés’ ‘dead still’ (par. 15). ‘A last body… is searching still’ (‘Un dernier cherche encore’); ‘the others dead still’ (‘les autres corps figés’) (par. 15). The end-point of the cylinder-world is alluded to at the beginning (‘the end of their abode’) and discussed further in paragraph 2; it is such that both the temporal and the other sense of ‘still’ are pointers to it: ‘And far from being able to imagine their last state when every body will be still and every eye vacant they will come to it unwitting and be so unawares’ (‘Et loin de pouvoir imaginer leur état ultime ou chaque corps sera fixe et chaque oeil vide ils en viendront là à leur insu et seront tels sans le savoir’).

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Another key-word of Beckett (at the end of The Unnamable and in Company and Ill Seen Ill Said) is ‘on’. It occurs in paragraphs 12 and 15, ‘So on infinitely’ (‘Ainsi de suite à l’infini’). Other Beckettian keywords are ‘weary’, ‘alone’, ‘bowed’, ‘end’, but it is not clear if they have attained keyword status in The Lost Ones.

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(3) A third characteristic is the introduction of wordplay, as a kind of grace-note added to the original. ‘Cette rémission ne dure jamais plus qu’une seconde’ becomes ‘This remission never lasts for more than a little less than a second’ (par. 3). The wordplay sometimes makes it feel as if the language is tumbling over itself, in a clowning failure to say what it means. Translation becomes an opportunity to show Beckett’s art of failure.

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Repetition of the same word frequently marks the English text where the French has no such repetition, as in ‘for some time and more precisely the highly variable time it takes…’ (par. 12); ‘the obligation once in the queue of its choice to queue on to the end’ (par. 12); ‘if it does not please it is only by going right that a more pleasing can be found’ (par. 12); in ‘stranger still at such times all the questing eyes that suddenly go still’ (par. 13) we have this effect along with punning on a keyword.

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French wordplay, as in ‘faire l’infaisable amour’ becomes slightly stronger in English, ‘making unmakable love’ (par. 11). ‘The quidam then quits his post’ (‘Le quidam quitte alors son poste’, par. 2) is stranger in English than in French.

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(4) The allegorical and apocalyptic aspects of the narrative are enhanced when phrases such as ‘Tout va peut-être finir’ are translated in a slightly more solemn manner, ‘It is perhaps the end of their abode’ (‘Leur séjour va peut-être finir’), ‘It is perhaps the end of all’ (‘Tout va peut-être finir’, par. 1). The translation reaches for a more idiomatic expression, but with a quirkiness that is connected with the constraints of the situation of the translator. In general, idioms are oddly obtruded in the course of translation; thus ‘juge préférable de changer de queue’ becomes ‘feel like a little change of queue’ (par. 12), which is an unidiomatic use of a common idiom (‘feel like a change of air’ would be an idiomatic use).

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It was said of Salman Rushdie that he was the only writer who could use the words ‘rutputty’ and ‘lassitudinous’ in the same sentence, both with equal necessity. In Beckett we observe similar conjunctions, but with what appears a deliberate failure of necessity, as in the colloquial ‘slap’ and the strained, unidiomatic ‘untenable’ in the following sentence: ‘For if for the sake of the shortcut it were permitted to carry the ladder slap through the press or skirting the wall at will in either direction life in the cylinder would soon become untenable’ (‘Car s’il était permis au nom du chemin le plus court de porter l’échelle au travers de la cohue ou en suivant le mur dans les deux sens indifféremment la vie du cylindre deviendrait vite impossible’, par. 7). Note how ‘cohue’ becomes the keyword ‘press’.

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‘Woe the body that rashly enters here to be compelled finally to crawl back backwards as best it can the way it came’; ‘Malheur au corps qui s’y aventure à la legère et doit au bout d’un long effort rebrousser chemin comme il peut en rampant à reculons’ (par. 1). ‘Woe the body’ is an elliptic idiom, and ‘to be compelled’ for ‘et doit’ is a less paratactic phrase that demands a slight effort of interpretation, a choice between ‘in order to be compelled’ and ‘only to be compelled’. ‘Back backwards’ is a droll verbal effect which places the movements of the bodies in a more comic light. The English in this sentence has a humour not in the French.

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(5) Gallicisms like ‘fluctuant’ for ‘fluctuante’ or ‘comportment’ for ‘comportement’ (par. 4) abound in the English text and give it a tangy flavour. Sometimes the text exhibits a failure to find the proper English idiom, providing instead a chunky Gallicism. Consider the following Swiftian parody of theological quarrels and the decline of religious belief: ‘Thus by insensible degrees the way out transfers from the tunnel to the ceiling prior to never having been. So much for a first aperçu of this credence so singular in itself and by reason of the loyalty it inspires in the hearts of so many possessed’; ‘Ainsi insensiblement l’issue se déplace du tunnel au plafond avant de n’avoir jamais existé. Voilà un premier aperçu de cette croyance en elle-même si étrange et par la fidélité qu’elle inspire à tant de coeurs possédés’ (par. 4). ‘Aperçu of this credence’ is a quaintly Gallican phrase that further diminishes the Lilliputian theology of ‘this little people of searchers’ (par. 15), as does ‘so much for’ translating ‘voilà’. The latter recurs at the end of paragraph 6 again in the last sentence of the entire text: ‘So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder’ where the placing of ‘roughly speaking’ is quirky; the French is ‘voilà en gros’. The fact that the text has no punctuation apart from periods has a great effect in making the English text laconic and quirky, as here. Among other minor instance, ‘soon or late’ unidiomatically translates ‘tôt ou tard’ (par. 2, par. 10), yet it has a solemn tone that the more normal ‘sooner or later’ would lack, and is more memorable as a recurrent motif.

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(6) Concentration and concreteness are effects easier attained in English than in French, and generally mark Beckett’s translations into English. For instance, ‘bolt upright’ has more physical force than ‘debout’ (par. 1, par. 5).

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The Dantesque observation, ‘L’identification est rendue difficile par la presse et par l’obscurité’ (par. 2) is tauter in English, ‘The gloom and press make recognition difficult’; compare paragraph 10, ‘Press and gloom make recognition difficult’, translating ‘La presse et l’obscurité rendent difficile l’identification’. ‘Gloom’ replaces French abstraction with Anglo-Saxon vividness – though this sense of ‘gloom’ is somewhat archaic or poetic (cf. Newman’s ‘amid th’encircling gloom’), and ‘press’ is rather a Gallicism. ‘Gloom’ translates ‘pénombre’ in par. 11.

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‘Recognition’ for ‘identification’ brings out the state of mutual recognition of lost ones. The phrase ‘wrung from Dante one of his rare wan smiles’ (‘arracha à Dante un de ses rares pales sourires’) has alliteration (wrung, rare) and visual alliteration (wrung, wan) and its eight monosyllabic words again give tautness. The genius of English for concreteness and brevity carries a stage further the attainment of these effects in French, where it was limited by the polysyllabic and abstract nature of the Latinate vocabulary. Compare ‘fast but not so fast that the pulse is no longer felt’ and ‘à une vitesse qui pour être élevée ne dépasse jamais celle qui rendrait la pulsation imperceptible’ (par. 11) – thirteen syllables in English, thirty-four in French! Why did he not write in French: ‘vite mais pas si vite que la pulsation n’est plus perçue’? The style of the French sets its own stately pace. In the same sentence, ‘vibre de façon régulière et continue’ becomes ‘throbs with constant unchanging beat’, which eliminates the abstract ‘façon’ and gives physical force to the adjectives. The opening page spoke of the ‘more measured beat’ of the oscillating temperature (for ‘une respiration plus lente’).

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(7) Compression often creates opacity as in: ‘Sucklings who having no longer to suck huddle at gaze [a heraldic terrm] in the lap or sprawled on the ground in precocious postures’, translating: ‘Bébés à la mamelle qui n’ayant plus à téter cherchent des yeux depuis le giron ou à croupetons par terre dans des poses précoces’ (par. 10). The elliptical character of Beckett’s writing is increased in English, applying a steady pressure on the reader, a demand for interpretative alertness. As Brian T. Fitch notes, the English version tends to humanize the characters and gives the narrator a more insistent presence, ‘unobtrusive to be sure and intermittent in manifesting itself in a tangible linguistic form, but unmistakably there in so many turns of phrase’ (Beckett and Babel, University of Toronto Press, 1988, 117).

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Listing these effects indicates that translation for Beckett is not a matter of siphoning sense from one linguistic milieu to another but creating a verbal artefact that carries marks of its translational status, deliberate clumsinesses, which invite us to study the translation as a textual performance. As Leslie Hill observes, the role of translation ‘is not to formulate ideas, but more nearly to dissolve them, to use them as pretexts for the silent motion of language itself’ (50).

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The constructed imaginary space of the cylinder is a shape that the language labours to evoke in both versions. This effort at statement is made to seem a difficult and delicate matter, as if the narrator were not fully in control of his scenario, and the difficulty thickens in the English version. ‘He has therefore merely to watch at the mouth of his niche for a ladder to present itself and immediately start down quite easy in his mind knowing full well that whoever below is on the point of mounting if not already on his way up will give way in his favour’ (par. 6). This is clear, despite the absence of punctuation, yet oddly convoluted and angular. There is a redundancy in ‘quite easy in his mind knowing full well’ and an economy in the placing of ‘below’ that suggest translation. Looking at the French we find that it reads more normally, and less grippingly: ‘Il n’a donc qu’à guetter à la bouche de sa niche qu’une échelle vienne se présenter pour l’emprunter en toute quiétude et avec l’assurance que celui en bas sur le point voire en train de monter lui cédera le pas’. The denormalization of the text through passing it through the filter of translation lends a certain uncanniness to Beckett’s tone in English, a tangentiality of his speech to that of which it speaks.

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Tragic Qualities in Beckett

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Beckett’s works wrestle with severe psychological problems. His works can be seen as self-therapies, or as efforts to wrest universal ciphers of the human condition from the material of his suffering. However, there is a danger of facile projection of ‘everyman’ typologies into the nightmare scenarios he imagines, and a too free use of intertextuality can court this danger. The accumulation of intertextual resonances in Endgame is perhaps less an aid to universality than an obsessive collecting-technique. The critics’ fun in unearthing such allusions militates against the reception of his texts as having tragic depth.

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Is Beckett in fact a tragic author? Does he produce the tragic fear and pity that bring a purified apprehension of the terrors of the human condition, the katharsis of which Aristotle speaks? Tragedy ‘through pity (eleos) and fear (phobos) achieves a purgation (katharsis) of emotions (pathêmatôn) of this sort’ (Poetics 49b). Lessing sees this tragic effect as realizing the moralischer Endzweck, the moral goal of tragedy (Hamburgische Dramaturgie, no. 77). He insists that the phobos cannot be mere Schrecken but must be a Furcht based on insight into the human significance of the tragic action.

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Classicists recently have been busy deflating the Aristotelian dictum that has played so great a role in theories about the essence of the tragic. Roselyne Dupont-Roc and Jean Lallot in their edition of the Poetics (Editions du Seuil, 1980) translate phobos as frayeur or terreur. The phrase ‘pity and terror’ was merely a cliché, not at all a special insight. Aristotle is merely reporting on the aesthetic effect whereby tragedy induces a frisson which it at the same time robs of its painfulness and transforms into a pleasure. Lessing, as Nikolaus Müller-Schöll insisted at the international colloquium on Corneille et le théâtre classique (Sophia University, November 2006), projects onto Aristotle an eighteenth-century ideology of universal human nature, and his own didactic project of using theatre to create a more just and peaceful civilization. Indeed there is no essence of the tragic, Christian Biet added, and it is futile to pursue the old game of judging that, say, Corneille replaces tragedy with reflective tragi-comedies whereas Racine, in his stricter adherence to Aristotelian precepts as then understood did attain something like the tragic effect that Aristotle would have admired in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

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Against all this, I would object that in context the Aristotelian fear and pity concern the unfolding of a plot; they do not arise only at the climaxes but they suffuse the entire action followed with grave attention by the spectators – ‘Anteil am integralen Ganzen der Aktion’, Walter Benjamin calls it, reminding us also of the ‘cultic character of Greek theater’ and linking katharsis with the religious ‘purification through the Mysteries’ (Ges. Schriften I, 241). The fear aroused is of a moral order – the matricide of Orestes, for instance, strikes fear in the soul; its physical gruesomeness is of little account, and physical violence is always kept offstage to keep the focus on the moral terror. The pity, likewise, is not a passing emotion but a reflective pity, laced with insight, something like Wilfred Owen’s ‘the pity war distilled’.

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Lessing speaks of humanity in the eighteenth-century style, but this does not disqualify all talk of ‘the human condition’ into which the tragic experience gives a special kind of insight. Lessing’s critique of Corneille is not at the service of an anti-tragic didactic conception of theatre, but seeks precisely to save the tragic effect from the diluting and rationalizing interpretation given in Corneille’s Trois Discours sur le poème dramatique (which as Michael Desprez showed is indebted to Italian scholars who had developed a flexible understanding of Aristotle). In his own plays, such as Emilia Galotti, he attained a measure of tragic intensity, not to be found in French theatre after Racine, and the tragic pitch would be attained again in Schiller, Goethe (Faust I), Kleist, Hölderlin (Empedokles and the Sophocles translations). This suggests that the Germans did have a sensitive grasp of the power of Greek tragedy, and that in their rejection of rule-bound classicism they were in fact close to the phenomenon to which Aristotle’s empirical notes were pointing (just as Shakespeare was, though writing in the Senecan tradition of bloody spectacle). The aesthetic effect of tragic fear and pity is one of the most easily recognizable and locatable aesthetic phenomena – it is what we encounter in Oedipus, Lear, Macbeth, Phèdre – and its ‘purgative’ or tonic aspect is rather clearly connected with insight into the human condition. The nominalism that invokes the historical pluralism of ideologies and genres to dispute the reality of the tragic effect spells the loss of an important category in discussion of authors such as Corneille, Racine and Beckett.

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Beckett admired Racine’s Bérénice, an elegiac rather than tragic play, a play of suspended action, in which ‘nothing happens’. His own plays do not gather toward the climax of a tragic plot, but dwell in a state that certainly induces fear and pity – the state of Winnie in Happy Days for example. The relation of Beckett’s art to tragedy is tangential rather than direct. The tragedy has already happened and the characters find themselves in a posthumous penumbra; or the tragedy is unable to happen and the characters are condemned to a steady decay rather than a cathartic catastrophe. Texts like The Lost Ones, by their ironic and distancing style, would seem to freeze the intense pathêmata that the represented situation should produce (and that Dante’s depictions of Hell produce). However, I have heard of people bursting into tears on reading what look like very dry paragraphs of Beckettian prose. Beckett has in any case the undoubted ability to create emotions of depression. Does his style ease the pain of these emotions and transform it into a bitter-sweet pleasure? He also forces the reader to undergo periods of painful boredom – but does the irony or comedy of such passages change that also into aesthetic pleasure?

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Perhaps the answer is, ‘Often, but not always’ – the ‘failures’ that Beckett’s art courts are often paradoxical successes, he ‘fails better’, but sometimes they are merely failures. In the present case, much turns on one’s response to the figure described as ‘the north’ in paragraph 14 and the final encounter of the last searcher with that figure in paragraph 15. My own feeling is that the evocation of the futile searching throughout the text has a deep elegiac impact, but that the effort to provide these minor highlights rather falls flat, marking the impossibility of raising the mournful vision to a more dramatic or tragic level. Indeed, later Beckett might be seen as in recession from the tragic pitch attained in such works as Happy Days and as absorbed in a mellower musing on ends and the impossibility of ending. He had trouble completing The Lost Ones and the added paragraph, an exercise in apocalyptic carried over from Endgame, may indicate that he still clung to a certain ideal of closure, unprepared to accept the full implication of the ‘residual’ character of his writing. A better ending would have been to advance to fuller insight into the aporetic character of the narration, as happens in Company.

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Joseph S. O’Leary (paper for international conference, ‘Borderless Beckett’, Waseda University, Tokyo, September 29, 2006 (English Literature and Language 43, 2006)

Beckett's Intertextual Power

I shall argue that the full impact of Beckett’s texts is appreciated only when their intertextual dimension receives the attention it deserves. Beckett’s allusions to literary classics serve not merely to enhance his writing but also to carry on the modernist project of a critical revision of Western literary tradition. From each of the classics he alludes to – especially from Dante, Milton and the Bible – he distills a distinctively Beckettian element, thus changing our reception of the classics and at the same time staking out the place of his own oeuvre in literary tradition. The judgment implied in Beckett’s use of the classics may at first sight seem nihilistic, the reduction of literature to a rubbish-heap of language. But I shall argue that the ultimate effect is to retrieve the vibrancy of the tradition by facing up to the broken, fragmented form in which it speaks to us now.

The intertextual practice of modernism

The term ‘intertextuality’ stems from the Tel Quel group of the late sixties. Launched by Julia Kristeva, it was taken up enthusiastically by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They understood it not merely as the use of sources and allusions but as the idea that no text makes sense on its own, that every text is related to others of necessity, or more sweepingly, that every text is related to all others: ‘One text reads another... Each "text" is a machine with multiple reading heads for other texts’ (Derrida 1979: 107). Sported as a revolutionary slogan, ‘intertextuality’ undermined conventional ideas of the autonomous author, the self-contained text and the stability of meaning.

This revolutionary promise was only in part fulfilled. As developed in deconstruction, intertextuality has had a flattening effect, tending to put all texts on the same level. This thwarts the signifying power of individual texts and the reader’s capacity to respond to that power. I shall argue that some texts have more intertextual power than others. A text with few literary allusions, as most of Beckett’s are, may have more intertextual power than one with many. When such power is present the text itself acquires great density of import and in addition exerts a revisionist impact on the classics to which it alludes. It is distinguished from the average text by its capacity both to read the precursor texts more actively and to offer itself to richer intertextual readings.

In reaction to the Tel Quel thesis of generalized intertextuality, more conservative, literature-based critics such as Genette (1982) want to define intertextuality as just ‘the set of devices with which one text pointedly refers to another, its “pretext”. Only those references count as intertextual that are clearly intended by the author, distinctly marked in the text and recognized and realized by the reader’ (Pfister 1991: 210). On this definition, clearly some authors and some literary periods are more intertextual than others. The modernism of Joyce, Eliot and Pound is marked by a frenetic use of quotation, allusion and literary subtexts, often with myth-building ambitions. Beckett inherits this modernist intertextual sensitivity; indeed his early writings offer a rather uncontrolled display of erudite literary fireworks.

Postmodernism is another movement marked by self-conscious intertextual allusion, but rather than gravitate toward some mythic centre its use of intertextuality serves to dislodge and decentre all stable structures, master-narratives and logocentrisms. Some have classed later Joyce and later Beckett in the postmodernist camp, but I find in both a mythic conatus, a striving for definitive vision and a cult of form that remain characteristic of modernism. Such jargon has only limited value, of course. If I elect to approach Beckett as a modernist intertextualist, others may find it more revealing to approach him as a postmodernist one. The difference, perhaps, is more one of emphasis than of substance.

In Beckett’s later texts literary allusion is a discreet but pervasive practice. It could be argued that despite the limited range of his references as compared with the dense Joycean palimpsest, his use of allusion has a more concentrated critical effect, serving to defamiliarize and recontextualize, in a subversive way, the literary precursors he targets. He is thus a writer who marks and inflects the entire literary tradition, in accord with the vision that T.S. Eliot expounded in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: ‘The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them... Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’ (Eliot 1966: 50).

Beckett is too quirky a figure to be enclosed in conceptions of an ideal order, but nonetheless his work takes on its full significance when seen as a reading of the texts it quotes, a reading that alters these texts. The classics retain their privileged status; not for him the postmodernist aesthetic which would replace Eliot’s ideal order with ‘a random medley of past and present, classic and pop, art and commerce, all of them reduced to the same status of disposable materials and surface stimuli’ (Pfister 1991: 219). In John Barth’s ‘literature of exhaustion’ the hollowed out styles and genres of Western literature are recycled in a ludic spirit, as toys, simulacra, distorting mirrors for those ‘lost in the funhouse’. Beckett’s sounding of the exhaustion of language is a graver matter. It will target a single classic and wear it down – drip, drip, drip – until it acquires the ruined, stony, elemental shape of a skull. Company, for instance, is a parody of Proust’s autobiographical fiction, with its triad of experiencing subject, remembering narrator and devising author. Beckett operates a deflation of Proust’s ideal and lays bare the underlying motivations of self-narration and its inbuilt aporias (see O’Leary 1991: 89-94). This is not purely destructive: it saves the truth of autobiographical fiction from Proustian mystification. The Lost Ones does something similar for Dante. These exercises could be placed in the tradition of ‘imitation of the ancients’, which is also exemplified in Henry James’s practice of rewriting and improving on the plots of celebrated novels and stories – slyly leaving it to readers with the detective flair of an Adeline Tintner to uncover the originals being ‘imitated’ (see O’Leary 1999-2001).

Striving toward the essence of literature

It might be objected that Beckett was not interested in offering new readings of Dante or Milton, and that it is the professional deformation of the literary critic that seeks a literary critical upshot in the work of creative writers as well. Beckett is not so ‘ferociously literary’ as James claimed to be; he may even have disliked literature and sought refuge from it in the ‘cleaner’ world of music or the plastic arts. James was a very prolific literary critic, and we can expect to find more literary critical implications in his texts, though he does not draw attention to his intertextual games (unlike Joyce and Eliot). However, the seeming casualness of Beckett’s literary allusions is deceptive; they are deployed in a very calculated way and invite close scrutiny. He is a writer for whom the nature of literature is at stake in what he writes, and who, like Mallarmé, is engaged in a vigilant battle to liberate literature into its essence.

As in Mallarmé, the chief target of Beckett’s critical intertextual allusions is his own earlier texts. Each Beckett text reads the preceding ones and is read by them. Consider the relationship between All That Fall (1956) and Happy Days (1961), both centred on a middle-aged female protagonist. The plight of Winnie in the latter play is more desperate than that of Maddy in the former. It is exhibited in a more abstract, purified symbolic scenario. Maddy’s movements were paced and patterned, and a thematic of ‘falling’ governed the entire play. But Winnie’s movements are reduced to the barest essentials, and further reduced in the second act. Further along the same trajectory lie the still more reduced presentations of trapped female protagonists in Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby and Ill Seen Ill Said. Further material for the study of intertextual relations within the oeuvre is provided by the revised versions or the variants for some of the plays and the shorter prose pieces and above all by the relationships between the French and English versions.

These intertextual relationships between earlier and later works could be seen as continuing on another plane the ‘intratextual’ relationships Beckett sets up between earlier and later parts of the same work – between the two acts of Waiting for Godot (1952), between Maddy Rooney’s journey to the station in All That Fall and her return, between the two acts of Happy Days and between the two halves of Play (1963), the second being a repetition of the first (the entire play is an intertextual revision of Sartre’s Huis-clos [1945]). In each of these cases there is an effect of crushing repetition, with a shift toward a worsening of the situation depicted. Even the straightforward repetition in Play confirms the infernal entrapment of the characters. In many of the shorter prose texts, phrases are recycled in such a way that the text seems to feed on itself, and the protagonist is seen to be constructed of recurring linguistic habits. Joyce’s ‘Circe’, in which the preceding chapters of Ulysses are ransacked for linguistic syntagmas to be recycled, so that the entire fabric of the fictional Dublin is revealed retrospectively as a verbal artefact, provides a model for this practice (see O’Leary 2002).

The trajectory Beckett follows as he rewrites his own texts is one toward an extreme reduction of literature to a handful of charged and cryptic words that summon up an intense silence. In his quotations of the classics he suggests that the whole of Western literature is destined to follow the same trajectory. Like Mallarmé or Celan, he positions himself as the last writer, the one in whom the tradition undergoes its decisive crisis, or its entry into a posthumous mode of being. His minimalist forms pass judgment on more capacious predecessors, just as Mallarmé’s perfectly voided verses pass judgement on the verbosity of all previous French poetry including his own early verse. Intertextuality, so steered, summons literature to an encounter with the void, inviting it to look into a mirror which may suck it in like a black hole.

That Beckett survived so well, literarily, the ordeal he imposed on himself, promises a future for literary creation. His work does not spell the final demise of literature, but rather sets the rich intertext of Western literature vibrating anew with the tensions and questions that his intervention has awakened in it. His texts seem at first to dissolve both the human identity of the creatures exhibited and the literary identity of the writer. But Beckett is working like a sculptor, whittling away in order to let a new form appear, a craggy and elemental identity born of despoliation. As a creator, he follows the Neoplatonic principle: ‘Subtraction is more divine than addition’

In postmodernist intertextuality ‘both author and reader become a mere chambre d’échos (Barthes), resounding with the resonances and noises of other texts’; ‘corresponding to the dissolving of subjects there is, at the same time, a dissolving of the text as a coherent and self-contained unit of meaning’ (Pfister 1991: 213). This is not what happens in Beckett. The figures he creates have a problematic identity, in their relation to the past, to their language and to the general purpose of their activities. Their minds are echo-chambers, but they retain a clear-cut profile just as the situation in which they find themselves, however bizarre, is meticulously defined. To be sure, the defining itself is shown up as an artful defence of a wilfully stabilized self-image against a threatening void. Such is the effect of Mr Rooney’s stilted narration in All That Fall, and, more elaborately, of the scrupulous narrator’s arrangements in Malone Dies and Company. Dissolving of self, mirrored in a linguistic dissolution, is overtaken by a new retrenchment, a new configuration of the perennial Beckett quandary. Beckett constructs extremely reduced forms of self-identity, almost subhuman or even sub-animal forms of existence as in The Unnameable and How It Is. Yet, as if to prove Dostoievski’s aphorism that ‘man is the animal who can get used to anything’, the effort of consciousness and speech – both of the protagonist and of the observing ‘deviser’ of the scenario (a figure who looms ever larger in Company) – continues through it all. Correspondingly the artist’s effort to create a coherent and self-contained literary form continues unabated, each failure of received form a success in gestating new possibilities of form.

Dante and Milton as Beckettian writers

As Beckett works over his own earlier texts to reduce them to their essential pith, he resculpts the classics along the same lines, choosing especially texts that present mythic representations of the human condition. Mythic narratives have great intertextual valency, and myths are best reread in the creation of new myths. Beckett has created a series of mythic situations that not only resonate with the deepest anxieties of his time, but revive old mythic scenarios in a new key. Thus Waiting for Godot revives even as it mocks them the old Christian myths turning on anxiety about salvation and damnation, drawing especially on the Gospel of Luke in its allusions to the thieves crucified with Jesus (Luke 23:13-15) and to the disciples’ recognition of the risen Christ at Emmaus in the breaking of bread (Luke 24:25-6). A chicken replaces bread in this communion; as Luigi Cerantola points out (in an unpublished essay), the chicken is a traditional iconographic motif in paintings of the Emmaus scene. The Easter chicken, an emblem of new life, is reduced to dead bones: ‘Pozzo eats his chicken voraciously, throwing away the bones after having sucked them’ (26); Vladimir and Estragon then beg for the bones (27-8). The myths are dead, and the Emmaus-inspired communion scene falls flat, like the many scenes of failed communion in Joyce’s Dubliners. Nonetheless, the dead words and images of the biblical story emit radiation, dogging Beckett’s creatures as troubling memories.

As Beckett shapes these new myths in which the distressful human situation is staged in strange and arresting postures, the author he most recalls is Dante. Some critics such as De Sanctis have seen Dante’s world as abstract and inhuman; some theologians such as Von Balthasar have worried about the lack of salvific significance in his vision of Hell. On both scores, Beckett could be seen as restoring human relevance to Dante by transferring Dante’s suffering shapes from beyond the grave to a kind of limbo before the grave, and from ultimate damnation to a twilight region which leaves open some faint glimmers of obscure hope. Like Giacometti, he fixes emaciated but eloquent shapes that capture the tension and drama of human existence against the background of a void (see Megged). He confers heroic dignity on his suffering figures. The entire series of sculptures form a macro-sculpture that constitutes a geography of the human condition comparable to that of the Inferno.

Dante emerges again and again in Beckett’s texts as in a palimpsest. But more remarkably, in reading Dante we sometimes see the face of Beckett emerge, so that the old text acquires an uncanny modernity. Let me quote a few lines from the Inferno that we can now read in a new key, as ‘Beckettian’:

nouvi tormenti e nouvi tormentati

      mi veggio intorno, come ch’io mi muova,

e ch’io mi volga, e come ch’io mi guati.

Io sono al terzo cerchio della piova

eterna, maledetta, fredda e greve;

regola e qualità mai non l’è nova.

Grandine grossa, e acqua tinta, e neve

per l’aer tenebroso si riversa;

puta la terra che questo riceve. (VI 4-12).

(New torments I behold, and new tormented

Around me, whichsoever way I move,

And whichsoever way I turn, and gaze

In the third circle am I of the rain

Eternal, maledict, and cold, and heavy;

Its law and quality are never new.

Huge hail, and water sombre-hued, and snow

Athwart the tenebrous air pour down amain;

Noisome the earth is, that receiveth this. Trans. Longfellow)

Gravity, severity, sometimes laced with cruelty, sometimes with compassion – the tone of Dante resonates in a new way for the reader of Beckett. It takes a very strong literary personality thus to alter one’s reading of the great classics.

Dante’s visual and spatial imagination rather than his actual language is what prevails in Beckett’s scenarios. On the purely verbal level Milton sometimes acts as a stand-in for Dante, being the nearest equivalent to Dante in English, and providing a source of easily recognizable quotations in Beckett’s English texts. The sun beats down ever more fiercely on Winnie in Happy Days. In a show of unconquerable optimism she acclaims it at the opening of Act II (a horrific moment, which discovers Winnie now ‘embedded up to neck’ in the mound in which she was ‘embedded up to above her waist’ in Act I), directly quoting Milton: ‘Hail, holy light!’ (CDW 160).

Hail, holy Light, offspring of heaven first-born,

Or of the eternal co-eternal beam

May I express thee unblamed? since God is light... (Paradise Lost III 1-6)

Milton’s association of light and heaven is echoed in the opening words of Act I: ‘Another heavenly day’ (138). But Winnie soon mixes the light of heaven with the light of hell, as evoked in Book I of Milton’s poem:

A dungeon horrible, on all sides round

As one great furnace flamed, yet from these flames

No light, but rather darkness visible

Served only to discover scenes of woe... (I 61-9)

The passage is quoted in Company: ‘To darkness visible to close the eyes’ (24), as a signal of the hellish hopelessness of the protagonist’s plight. Winnie, as she polishes her spectacles, mutters: ‘holy light... bob up out of dark... blaze of hellish light’ (140), shifting from the celestial to the infernal light in a way that undercuts her professed optimism. Even the association of light with God lives on eerily in Winnie’s mind: ‘Hail, holy light... Someone is looking at me still... Caring for me still... That is what I find so wonderful... Eyes on my eyes... What is that unforgettable line?’ (160). Earlier she said: ‘Strange feeling... Strange feeling that someone is looking at me. I am clear, then dim, then gone, then dim again, then clear again, and so on, back and forth, in and out of someone’s eye’ (155). The torment of Beckett’s creatures involves the ghost of God as a pitiless eye that stares down on them in judgment. Or should we rather say that the divine presence lingers as an ambivalent possibility, vaguely threatening, yet perhaps promising, like the figure of Godot.

Another Miltonic echo occurs early in Act I: ‘What is that wonderful line?... oh fleeting joys – ... oh something lasting woe’ (141). She is thinking of the speech in which the fallen Adam reproaches his Maker, in terms that take on new colour when read in light of Beckett:

‘O fleeting joys

Of Paradise, dear bought with lasting woes,

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me man...?

‘How gladly would I meet

Mortality my sentence, and be earth

Insensible…

... Yet one doubt

Pursues me still, lest all I cannot die…

...then in the grave,

Or in some other dismal place who knows

But I shall die a living death?’ (X 741-8; 773-88)

Beckett’s salvages these lines from relative obscurity and reveals in them an unsuspected dramatic and existential sinew when prised out of the obsolete context of biblical epic. We learn that a spare, modern Milton remains to be excavated from the baroque monument in which he entombed himself. Eliot and Joyce shone their flashlight into dusty classics with similar effect. But Beckett’s engagements with tradition are more selective, guided by a single, persistent question. He has forsworn the self-conscious literariness and the encyclopaedic scope of the modernist masters. Eliot and Joyce, too, were steeped in Dante and invoked Milton as a supplement, but there is a residual conventionality in their handling of these classics. Beckett approaches them not as summits of literary imagination but as authors who told it ‘how it is’ – crawling in the mire of hell or gnawing on the tedium of life. He comes closer to the quick of their imagination than the bookish Eliot and Joyce could.

Beckett’s Bible

As in the case of Dante and Milton, there is a fascinating two-way interaction between Beckett’s texts and those of Scripture. Beckett reads the Bible and the Bibles reads Beckett. Grim moments in the Psalms acquire extra bite in light of Beckett. ‘Some deadly thing has fastened on him; he will not rise again from where he lies’ (Ps. 41.8) could be a scenario of a late Beckett novella. Beckett has set his oeuvre under the sign of Golgotha, claiming to be born on Good Friday: ‘You first saw the light and cried at the close of the day when in darkness Christ at the ninth hour cried and died’ (Company, 77). In the Church’s management of biblical intertextuality, the scenes of suffering in Job and the Psalms connect smoothly with the sufferings of Christ, of which they are the ‘type’ within a scheme of typological correspondences: Christ’s passion is read in light of the Psalms in the Gospel accounts, and over centuries the Old Testament is correspondingly read in light of Christ. Beckett inscribes his texts in the margin of this tradition.

From a purely literary point of view, the Bible is a text of great intertextual potency. It is itself a library of texts, and within each of the biblical books there is a vibrant intertextual tension between different layers dating from different epochs or deriving from different sources. This internal intertextual ferment is more than matched by its relationships with other texts, due to its historical prominence, wide dissemination and varied reception, which enabled it to realize its full intertextual potential as few texts have been able to do. The process may have come close to a saturation point. Many authors shun biblical myths and biblical language because of an ‘anxiety of influence’ induced by the strong grip of the Bible on Western culture.

Maddy in All That Fall and Winnie in Happy Days share a Protestant piety, in which the text of Scripture (in the Authorized Version) looms large. Amid the fragments of other literary classics lodged in their minds, which are imperfectly recalled and whose meaning has become opaque or obsolete, the echoes of Scripture do not stand out as enjoying special authority or sacredness. The characters have a streak of irreverence, more pronounced in Maddy, and when they realize the biblical language has gone dead they are likely to reject it in mockery:

Mrs Rooney: ‘The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down’. [Silence. They join in wild laughter...] (CDW 198)

The ‘wild laughter’ anticipates a scene in Happy Days:

Willie: ‘Formication’. [Pause. She lays down spectacles, gazes before her. Finally.]

Winnie: [Murmur.] God. [Pause. Willie laughs quietly. After a moment she joins in. They laugh quietly together...] I suppose some people might think us a trifle irreverent, but I doubt it... How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?... I think you would back me up there, Willie... Or were we perhaps diverted by two different things?... Oh well, what does it matter... so long as one... you know... what is that wonderful line... laughing wild... something something laughing wild amid severest woe. (150)

The line she recalls is from Thomas Gray:

And moody Madness laughing wild

Amid severest woe. (‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’)

The wild laughter of the Rooneys is not directed at the psalm verse itself, but as it is announced as the text of their vicar’s sermon. No doubt the vicar puts forward the text with the complacency of a Job’s comforter. Indeed in laughing at the text, the Rooneys could claim a precedent in the Bible itself, for the speeches of Job’s comforters are parodies of just such complacent piety. The book of Ecclesiastes is another text in which the Bible turns on itself with a grimness and mordant wit worthy of Beckett.

To venture for a moment onto a theological plane, I would note that when we go beyond the purely literary interplay between Beckett and Scripture to bring in the transcendent authority claimed for the Bible in the Christian community, intertextuality shifts into a new gear. The Bible, despite all the internal debates and wrangles enshrined in its pages, is heard in Church as a word that judges the world and that offers it salvation. Even at this level, it does so in dialogue with the culture it addresses, lending itself to imaginative rereadings in successive cultural contexts. The pluralism and internal contradictions of the Bible, though long denied, are part of the secret of its intertextual power. A religion without inconsistencies, inner conflicts and unanswered questions, would be a totalitarian ideology. Medieval Christianity could integrate the contradictions of the world, decking its cathedrals with gargoyles. Today’s pluralistic Christianity, which admits inner tensions and open questions, should be able to enter into a two-way dialogue with Beckett.

If we set the Bible in dialogue with Beckett as a representative of the contemporary cultural context, allowing it to confront his texts as an agent of divine judgement and salvation, two dangers must be avoided: an authoritarian rejection of Beckett’s world, or worse, a condescending recuperation of his images into a pretty, edifying pattern. Suppose one of Beckett’s texts were used as a liturgical reading alongside a Gospel passage. The suffering figures Beckett invents could stand alongside the cripples and paralytics of the Gospels as expressing human need and desperation. But they cannot be forced into the posture of faith that the biblical sufferers adopt. The liturgy would have to let Beckett be Beckett just as the art of biblical narrative allows David to be David, a gripping literary character, and does not hasten to iron out all the moral kinks in his behaviour. The Gospel and the Beckett text could obliquely illuminate one another, but any salvific connections would have to be drawn in the imaginative contemplation of the assembly rather than intruded into Beckett’s text.

Nostalgia and entropy

A feature of Beckett’s literary allusions not often noticed is that they are steeped in romantic longing. Like Milton’s fallen Satan or banished Adam, Beckett’s characters are cut off from a past, which sometimes takes on the aura of a lost paradise – freedom seen from prison, health seen from hospital, youth seen from age. It is irrecoverable, even unimaginable, in their present restricted existence. Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ is evoked in Company as emblematic of this exile. Winnie occasionally speaks in ‘the sweet old style’ (146) – but it is as ancient and irretrievable as il dolce stil nuovo that came before Dante and his baleful posthumous realms. She harks back to a past, but with a scarcely repressed sense of the futility of nostalgia: ‘My first ball! [Long pause] My second ball! [Long pause. Closes eyes.] My first kiss!... A Mr Johnson, or Johnston, or perhaps I should say Johnstone... Within a toolshed, though whose I cannot conceive. We had no toolshed and he most certainly had no toolshed’ (142-3). The past cannot be remembered properly; indeed it has become a flimsy fiction; and if one broods on it too long it turns to ashes, to nightmare: ‘Suddenly a mouse ran up her little thigh and Mildred, dropping Dolly in her fright, began to scream [Winnie gives a sudden piercing scream] – and screamed and screamed...’ (165).

Beckett’s characters are fascinated and absorbed by a haunting past – witness the flashbacks in Company, the atmosphere of Footfalls, or the ‘down memory lane’ character of the radio play All That Fall. The latter is a parody of a radio programme evoking the sounds of an old-fashioned rural Ireland and parading a series of eccentric Irish ‘characters’, as if designed to charm American audiences who regret that Vladimir and Estragon were not named Paddy and Sean. Its quaintness is increased by its dependence on now outdated broadcasting conventions. Beyond its mimicry of rural speech, it reveals that the entire heritage of language has become something problematic. Maddy Rooney feels she is speaking a dead language. Various linguistic items are exhibited as odd conventions: ‘So hinnies whinny. Well, it is not surprising’ (173). She asks, ‘Do you find anything... bizarre about my way of speaking?... I do not mean the voice... No, I mean the words... I use none but the simplest words, I hope, and yet I sometimes find my way of speaking very... bizarre’ (173). Words like ‘hinnie’ and ‘whinny’ come in quotation marks; they are texts for intertextual treatment, for parody.

Like Winnie, Maddy has not forgotten her classics: ‘So long ago.... No! No!... “Sigh out a something something tale of things. Done long ago and ill done”’ (174). But the grandiose world of classical literature crumbles into a set of relics of the once normal but now defunct past life that is only dimly remembered. These fragments of dead language and dead religion become almost meaningless refrains in the characters’ minds. Even their present language is already afflicted with obsolescence, threatening to die away into a broken babble or final silence. Like Flaubert, Beckett shows up the emptiness of conventional speech in a mocking style – the laboured banalities that punctuate All That Fall show a world where language has broken down into something like a clown’s routine. Breakdown, entropy holds sway in Beckett’s universe – exemplified in the way the toothpaste and lipstick is running out in Happy Days or the pain killer runs out in Endgame. It holds sway over language especially, as it winds down to a final void, not in a simple collapse but in a phased diminution.

Mr Rooney’s self-conscious narration of his train journey, complete with literary references to Dante and Fontane, conveys the sense that he is screening from others and from his own awareness the truth about what happened on the train (his connection with the death of the child). His artificial speech falters due to Maddy’s inattention, and her attempt to encourage him to resume compounds the sense of linguistic alienation:

Mr Rooney: You have ceased to care. I speak – and you listen to the wind.

Mrs Rooney: No, no, I am agog, tell me all, then we shall press on and never pause, never pause, till we come safe to haven.

[Pause.]

Mr Rooney: Never pause … safe to haven … Do you know, Maddy, sometimes one would think you were struggling with a dead language.

Mrs Rooney: Yes indeed, Dan, I know full well what you mean, I often have that feeling, it is unspeakably excruciating.

Mr Rooney: I confess I have it sometimes myself, when I happen to overhear what I am saying.

Mrs Rooney: Well, you know it will be dead in time, just like our own poor dear Gaelic, there is that to be said. (194)

We are moving to a point at which everything the characters say can be heard as quotation. They are sinking in linguistic habit, and uneasily sense that they are living on the capital of a dead past, which cannot sustain them in the reality of their present anxiety. As in Derrida, intertextuality ladders into generalized ‘citationality’. The web of language becomes a prison from which there is no escape.

But over against language, Beckett places music. The counterpoint between words and music could be seen as another kind of intertextuality. The first cultural artefact encountered in All That Fall, after the opening animal imitations, is Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ on a gramophone record played by one whom Maddy, in the play’s opening words, evokes as: ‘Poor woman. All alone in that ruinous old house’. Then, ‘Music dies. Mrs Rooney murmurs melody. Her murmur dies’ (172). Toward the end of the play the music is heard again; Mr Rooney identifies it and weeps. Mr Rooney’s groan, shortly afterward, when the boy talks of the ‘little child’ that ‘fell out of the carriage’ (199) can be interpreted as a confession of guilt and tied in with the grief the music occasions. The wordless music has the power to pierce the defences of his verbal performance. Amid all the dead, false sounds of the play this music, which invites to death, is the one true, living sound. It is the wordless music of the ‘Death and the Maiden’ string quartet, but recalls the original song. in which death assures the maiden: ‘I am a friend, and come not to punish’. This music pervades the entire play, placed towards the beginning and end to from an inclusio, standing out from the surrounding noises as a grave utterance of high culture, and setting up a four-beat rhythm that is continued in the rhythm of the characters’ movements. Its theme of death snatching away young life is echoed in Maddy’s grief at the loss of ‘Minnie! Little Minnie!’ (174) and in the death of the child who fell from the train (see Grant). Its promise of peace in death hangs over the play as a possible consolation: to ‘fall’ is no longer a regrettable fate; entropy and nostalgia join hands.

Beckett’s fondness for Schubert in later years may suggest a soft centre to his pessimism. John Montague was somewhat displeased to hear Beckett laud Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ as ‘beautiful’, perhaps suspecting him of sentimentalism. If Beckett felt he had never been properly born, and longed for death all his life, he may have looked with affection and envy on these romantic artists whose wish for death was swiftly granted. To hear Keats’s lines with Beckett’s ears injects new sternness into Keats and reveals a lyric element in Beckett:

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme.

To take into the air my quiet breath...

The poem is among Winnie’s ‘classics’; she alludes to ‘beechen green’ and even her refrain ‘no pain’ could be an allusion to the line, ‘To cease upon the midnight with no pain’.

The languages of the past are dying or dead, yet Beckett’s writing acclimatizes itself to their ‘dying fall’, accentuates and continues it. Is he merely indulging the charms of failure, and ceding to the lures of a suicidal defeatism? Or does something live in these embers?

The radioactive half-life of tradition

At the mid-point of All That Fall we hear a second piece of music, Newman’s hymn ‘Lead Kindly Light’:

[Miss Fitt hums her hymn. After a moment Mrs Rooney joins in with the words.] … the encircling gloo-oom … [Miss Fitt stops humming.] … tum tum me on. [Forte.] The night is dark and I am far from ho-ome, tum tum –

Miss Fitt: [Hysterically.]  Stop it, Mrs Rooney, stop it, or I’ll drop you!

Mrs Rooney: Wasn’t it that they sung on the Lusitania? Or Rock of Ages? Most touching it must have been. Or was it the Titanic? (182-4)

When Maddy takes up Miss Fitt’s hymn she intrudes on the private cocoon of the pious lady and translates the fantasy of a wraithlike progress through ‘encircling gloom’ into the less glamourous spectacle of a fat woman toiling up steps. Miss Fitt reacts with rage to this expropriation of her inner life. Miss Fitt (= misfit) is an anorexic creature, another of whom it could be said: ‘The trouble with her was she had never really been born!’ (196). Her stilted, old-fashioned speech betokens a disconnection from the living world:

Ask Mother, if you do not believe me. Hetty, she says, when I start eating my doily instead of the thin bread and butter, Hetty, how can you be so distray? [Sighs.] I suppose the truth is I am not there, Mrs Rooney, just not really there at all. I see, hear, smell, and so on, I go through the usual motions, but my heart is not in it, Mrs Rooney, my heart is in none of it. Left to myself, with no one to check me, I would soon be flown … home.

In this exchange, the language of religion, which pretends to the stability of the Rock of Ages, serves only as a ‘touching’ diversion on a sinking ship. Religion, too, has become anaemic, anorexic: Miss Fitt offers her arm to Maddy with the words, ‘Well, I suppose it is the Protestant thing to do’. The classics are cherished voices of the past, linked with images of childhood and lost parents, and tempting one to cling to them with a longing that would become escapist and narcissistic. Beckett lures us into that romantic attitude again and again only to dislodge us from it by reminders that the past is dead, and that the present has its own reality that cannot fit into past paradigms. As for the future, the effort to descry its possibilities is unrewarding: ‘hope deferred maketh the something sick’ (CDW 12; cf. Proverbs 13:12). Whereas Miss Fitt could be seen as one who succumbs entirely to nostalgic entropy, sinking into autism, Maddy, like Winnie, represents the protest of life against this relinquishment. With the protagonist of The Unnameable, she could say: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’.

Despite the decay of language, which represents an universal entropy, something lives on, something we can apprehend only if we accept the decay. ‘Christy’s "Nice day for the races" is repeated by Tommy at the station (172). Mr Tyler greets Mrs Rooney with “Divine day for the meeting”, and repeats himself at the station with “Lovely day for the fixture” (174, 184). Yet these expressions are also infiltrations into another level of expression; the deeper melody which is concerned with the pain of existence’ (Grant). Schubert’s music is the purest expression of that pain, but language, too, both in its classical and everyday forms, acquires a new taut vibrancy, an intense pathos, when we recognize its mortality. Like the dust left by an atomic explosion it throbs with radioactive half-life.

The unconvincing artificiality of the Rooneys’ formal speech and the depredation wrought on the classics by defective memory work in the entropic direction that is seen at a more advanced stage in Lucky’s tirade in Waiting for Godot (42-3). Yet, as in Finnegans Wake, the fall of language generates new language, in a rhythm of resurrection. Lucky’s speech is a marvelous piece of Surrealist écriture automatique. At each stage in the failure and exhaustion of language, a new form of saying emerges. Language may want to die into silence, but it is condemned to live on, creating new and wondrous forms which one could call nocturnal, or posthumous.

In conclusion, then, Beckettian intertextuality is both ravage and salvage. He replays cracked records of the past on a gramophone that is breaking down. At first he seems to be mocking these hallowed sources by this clownish, clumsy presentation. But then we begin to realize that in this broken-down form the voices of tradition are beginning to make a new music. Beckett’s texts thus act as judiciously aimed pebbles cast into the great lake of mythic and literary memory. Each sudden splash in the dark sends great circles of association rippling forth, and thus links the poverty of a denuded present to a rich heritage of collective memory, shaking it rudely so that it begins to speak anew.

REFERENCES

Beckett, Samuel (1986). The Complete Dramatic Works [= CDW]. London: Faber.

---- (1980). Company. London: John Calder.

Derrida, Jacques (1979). ‘Living On’. In: Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury.

Eliot, T. S. (1966). The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen.

Genette, Gérard (1982). Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil.

Grant, Stefan-Brook. ‘Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays: Music of the Absurd’. http://www.samuel-beckett.net/ch2.html

Megged, Matti (1985). Dialogue in the void: Beckett and Giacometti. New York: Lumen Books.

O’Leary, Joseph S. (1991). ‘Beckett’s Company: The Self in Throes’. English Literature and Language (Sophia University) 28:83-124.

----- (1999-2001). ‘Anathemata for Henry James’. English Literature and Language 36: 63-99; 37: 59-118; 38: 37-84.

----- (2002). ‘The Heightened Gaze of Exile: Dublin in Ulysses’. English Literature and Language 39.

Pfister, Manfred (1991). ‘How Postmodern is Intertextuality?’ In: Heinrich Plett, ed. Intertextuality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991), 207-24.

Joseph S. O'Leary

God in the Dark: Beckett's Theological Ghosts

A man lies on his back in the dark. If we meditate on this image, it conjures up various representations that seem to arise naturally, but that owe more than we realize to various strands in the Western religious and cultural heritage. One of the ideas that will occur to us is that God may lie hidden somewhere in the depth of this dark. One does not need to be mystically inclined for such a thought to occur. It is a notion so deeply lodged in our tradition that it can be seen as a facile cliché, which may devalue such lines as T. S. Eliot’s: ‘And let the dark come upon you/Which shall be the darkness of God’ (‘East Coker’ III). What Beckett does in Company and elsewhere is to parade such clichés, affecting scorn for them, yet paradoxically allowing them to resonate and to recover some of their dormant power.

The dark is a major dimension of Beckett’s imaginative world. It is a visual, physical dark, not an abstract metaphysical obscurity or a metaphorical spiritual darkness. As Junko Matoba shows, the dark area in the late plays is ‘not just a normal theatrical blackout, but a darkness of a different order’ (2000:31) – not only as carrying metaphysical or spiritual significance, but also as having a qualitatively different visual and physical impact. Matoba compares this handling of the dark to the use of blank spaces in Chinese and Japanese art. She suggests that this dark conjures up, or gives body to, Buddhist emptiness.

Beckett is well aware of the theological suggestiveness of the image on which Company is based, ‘the proposition’ (8) that is the germ of the entire textual performance: ‘A voice comes to one in the dark’ (7). The first elaboration, or fuller ‘imagining’ of this is: ‘To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past’ (8). The ‘voice’ itself is a theologically charged image, recalling above all the voice of God in Exodus, speaking to Moses from the burning bush (Exod. 3.4) or from the dark cloud (Exod. 19.9). The situation could also be taken as a parody of the way prophets are addressed by a divine voice: ‘The word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Jeremiah, what seest thou?’ (Jer. 1.11); the book of Jeremiah was on Beckett’s mind as he wrote this text (see Brater, 130). Company raises theological associations without confirming them, or even explicitly denying them, yet they nonetheless lodge themselves in the reader’s awareness. Even an interpretation only fleetingly entertained can add to the harmonics of a text. Even common words like ‘hope’ and ‘despair’ (20, 22, 34, 42, 62) carry theological potential. Though the situation Company imagines and reasons about is defined exclusively on its own narrow terms, it nonetheless resonates with traditional and contemporary discourses about the human condition, those of religion, philosophy and psychoanalysis. The construction of an inconsequential fiction parodies these more grandiose enterprises, and in doing so it seems itself to take on grandiose significance.

The problematic that the text explicitly stages is that of the act of writing or ‘imagining’ itself; this act is the core of Beckett’s personal religion. The penumbra of theological implications spreads out around this, but is not allowed to develop an autonomous substantiality independent of the explicit puzzles of the imagined situation. Thus the text enacts an exploration which is sui generis, neither religious nor psychoanalytical nor philosophical. In giving writing an import comparable to that of religion or psychoanalysis, Beckett short-circuits the more direct addressing of the riddles of existence in the great modernists. He is composing an opaque hieroglyphic, but he is not dabbling in symbolism. The apparent triviality of a text that seems to be about nothing but the problems of its own composition shocks the reader into confronting language as language rather than merely as a window on reality. Each word is presented as a problem to be analysed; and each word keeps recurring for further analysis – the non-recurrent words – ‘saltation’ (43), ‘repent amble’ (68), ‘philoprogenitiveness’ (71), ‘rectigrade’ (74), etc. – stick out by their strangeness, take on a dramatic impact, as if secreting in themselves the entire enigmatic opacity of language. Thus the writing makes us ‘undergo an experience with language’ (Heidegger, 159) as we listen intently to what is being said, sensing its momentousness, though aware also of the exasperating inconsequentiality of the surface meaning, a combination that climaxes in the long analysis of the movement of the hands on a watch (80-3). Language reproduces all the bother and frustration of life, but in a medium that leaves room for the lucid, creative intervention of the writer. The difference between Beckett and other writers is that instead of using the freedom of composition to create a compensatory fulness he uses it to refine and sharpen the experience of emptiness which life's deficiencies point to. Words are shaped into a ‘form’ revelatory of ‘emptiness’, to use the terms of the Heart Sutra.

Beckett’s style advances painfully, making us feel the recalcitrance of speech, the breakdown of its naming function before that which constantly withdraws before its advance. He provides the comic spectacle of a man fumbling with words, unable to get to the end of a sentence, baffled by the endless difficulty of getting said even the simplest thing. This reveals the enigma of language much as a gloriously penned Chinese character confronts us with the silent majesty of the word, which seems to mean so much more than it says. Moreover, the writer's performance serves as a cipher of irresoluble metaphysical dilemmas. Its excruciating quandaries resonate with the intimate questionability of existence, never in an obvious allegory, but obliquely, elusively, and all the more tellingly for that. The text never gets written because human beings never manage to be; their very inability to be is the mark of their existence, as the very stamp of a Beckett text is its inability to attain rounded articulation. Each of his texts is a dramatic scenario, culminating not in some masterful statement but in a huge gap where the statement should be; what has been dramatized is the impossibility of making the statement.

Through a sprinkling of subtle allusions, Beckett brings into play the other ‘darks’ and the other ‘voices’ of the tradition, from Milton, Dante, Kant. When the protagonist’s memories bring ‘visions in the dark of light’ (84), the religious dimensions of this image again come into play, with allusions to Wordsworth. The echoes of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth recall the school curriculum, the texts Beckett would have memorized as a boy. The ‘father’s shade’, which accompanies the protagonist for a time after his father’s death, recalls Anchises, whom Aeneas encounters in Hades in another common school text, Aeneid VI. It also recalls the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Hamlet, in the wake of Montaigne, mirrors the theological crisis of the sixteenth century in the ‘reason-ridden’ (45) imaginings of its protagonist, and is a major predecessor text for Company.

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The father’s ghost evokes purgatory, and the hearer’s situation is a limbo; allusions to Milton's hell, Dante’s hell and purgatory, and Beckett’s own infernal scenario The Lost Ones enrich our sense of the strange posthumous place that the text invents and explores: ‘darkness visible’ (24) is from Milton: ‘No light, but rather darkness visible/Served only to discover sights of woe...’ (Paradise Lost I 63-4); ‘In its trembling shade’ (66), recalls Dante, nell'aura che trema (Inferno IV 150). Note that some allusions double as references to their previous occurrences in Beckett’s own oeuvre. Belacqua, from Purgatorio IV 106-135, has figured as Beckett’s alter ego from his earliest writings. His final appearance at the end of Company, ‘the old lutist cause of Dante’s first quarter-smile’ (85) echoes his most recent one in The Lost Ones, ‘sitting for the most part against the wall in the attitude which wrung from Dante one of his rare wan smiles’ (CSP 205).

The text seems to fall into five distinct phases, each containing three of the biographical paragraphs, which I shall call ‘flashbacks’, spoken in the second person by the ‘voice’ to the hearer. I shall comment on each phase in turn, focusing on the theological overtones.

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Phase I: The Initial Situation (paragraphs 1-10).

The hearer, lying on his back, attempts to verify what the voice says to him: ‘Only a small part of what is said can be verified’ (7) – the same epistemological problem faced by Hamlet in checking the ghost’s story. In both cases the implication of the doubt spreads beyond its immediate context, suggesting a theological allegory. Like Beckett’s hearer, Western man, at the end-point of an exhausted tradition, listens to the religious voices of the past and checks them skeptically.

We soon encounter a third instance besides the hearer and the voice: ‘in another dark or in the same another devising it all for company. Quick leave him’ (8). Speculation about the deviser, ‘that cankerous other’ (9), will prevail increasingly as the text proceeds. It echoes the conundrums of Western philosophical theology. Of course the deviser is a projection of the author, the merely human inventor of the text. Yet his appearance within the text is analogous to the presence of God within his creation, and from the first his presence is enshrouded in mystery, as an unthinkable ultimate. The riddle of the deviser’s identity is the central neuralgic point of the text, causing increasing bewilderment, which eventually builds to a frenzy.

The flashbacks to the past punctuate the text like windows opening on a dark room (though ‘the place is windowless’ [85] where the hearer lies, like a Leibnizian monad). But these epiphanal scenes are themselves pervaded by the doubt and questioning that has become the element in which the hearer lives. The ‘small boy’ of the first one is already an anxious questioner: ‘Looking up at the blue sky and then at your mother’s face you break the silence asking her if it is not in reality much more distant than it appears. The sky that is. The blue sky’ (12-13). The boy’s hantise de l’azur carries theological resonance, as an inchoate reflection on the distance of God. Throughout the text human faces are an elusive emblem of this distance: the pronoun ‘it’ is so placed that at first it seems to refer to the mother's face. Awareness of the mother’s distance is displaced onto the sky, and the child’s question probes deeper than he realizes, as an accusation of or demand on the mother, in response to which ‘she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never forgotten’ (13). The mother’s distant face contrasts with ‘the loved trusted face’ (21) of the father, and with that of the beloved: ‘a moment later that seems an eternity her face appears at the window’ (56), both now lost. The phrase ‘hand in hand’ (12) echoes the same phrase in Paradise Lost IV 321, XII 648, where it is a motif of the communion between Adam and Eve. When the mother shakes off his little hand he is cast out from paradise. The hearer's suspicion of the voice is subliminally connected with his broken trust in the mother. 

  The text begins its treacherous career of self-emendation when it undertakes to correct the hearer’s faulty reasonings: ‘So with what reason remains he reasons and reasons ill… Were it not of him to whom it is speaking speaking but of another it would not speak in the second person but in the third… It is clear therefore that if it is not to him the voice is speaking but to another it is not of him either but of that other and none other to that other’ (14-15). It is not the hearer whom he has imagined but the deviser himself who is responsible for the confusion, and his admirable clarification is advanced in language that is likely to baffle the reader. The comedy of the diction could be directed at logicians, grammarians, lawyers or theologians. It shows the deviser firmly, cockily in control of his creature, the hearer. But this assurance masks a deeper insecurity, concerning the status of the deviser himself. Pedantic expertise goes hand in hand with radical disorientation.

The third flashback shows an aged wanderer: ‘You halt with bowed head on the verge of the ditch... Halted too at your elbow during these computations your father’s shade... Finally on side by side from nought anew’ (18-19). These images have a long pre-history in Beckett’s writing. Company can be seen as ‘a kind of cryptic memorial to all the texts that have gone before’, the chain of associations from text to text reflecting ‘a buried world of unconscious fantasy’ (Hill, 160, 34). The writer works on this material in the cogitations that fill the framing narrative surrounding these emblems. The objects associated with the father – staff, greatcoat, etc. – are fetishes clung to in order to assuage the trauma which has placed the self in a state of irremediable alienation, a state felt to have begun at birth, figured as expulsion or excretion into a world in which one has no natural place. The father himself, or his ‘shade’ is a fetish, summoned up as company in a narcissistic fusion: ‘And this evening again it seems to be working, I’m in my arms, I’m holding myself in my arms, without much tenderness, but faithfully, faithfully’ (CSP 103-4).

The space of the framing narrative is a sterile and controlled one, like a psychanalyst’s office or a confessional. The silence that surrounds what goes on there allows each sentence to resonate with a suggestive power in excess of its explicit content, as in a psychoanalytical session. ‘The central fact of psychoanalysis – from the analyst’s side at least – is the fact of this silence... While the patient is speaking, the analyst’s silent attention is the necessary other (or unconscious) which the patient is “racked” by and “in search of” – towards which the patient's words can be said to be “en route”. The patient's words thus form a sort of ceaseless commentary on the silence of the analyst... The patient carries out his search by way of the detour of the pronoun “you”’ (Gunn, 216-17). The search shared by hearer, deviser and reader consists in a painful exposure to vacuity and silence. Or perhaps the mood is best described as one of mourning and elegy. The game the texts play is rather like that of the child observed by Freud who dealt with the anxiety caused by his mother’s absences by making a little bobbin disappear (Fort!) and reappear (Da!). Beckett sets up imagined figures who are dying bit by bit interminably in a confined space. The problems of creating and sustaining these figurines become associated eerily with the basic problems of human living and dying. The labour of composition and imagination is as an assertion of life and meaning – the Da! of Freud’s infant – and the falling to pieces of these efforts is an enactment of failure, futility, death, corresponding to the child's Fort! and having the same function of self-therapy.

‘Silence’ and ‘listening’ could have associations with a divine presence. The hearer, mourning for vanished company, projects a comforting hearer, a residue of God. The text dismisses such a possibility, yet in raising it again and again it explores the space of religious attention. It is rather as if one were to write love poems to a non-existent beloved.

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Phase II: The Deviser Contemplates Improvements (paragraphs 11-25)

The text now focuses attention on the voice, with more detail on its location, direction and tone. The voice’s recurrent phrase ‘you first saw the light’ (8, 10, 14, 15) acquires a more explicitly religious overtone when it becomes: ‘You first saw the light at Easter’; but the anticlimax that follows is all the more disheartening: ‘and now. Then a murmur in his ear, You are on your back in the dark’ (19-20). Indeed, ‘Easter’ turns out to mean Good Friday: ‘You first saw the light of day the day Christ died’ (20), as if the hearer were born to spend his life buried in the tomb. The superimposition of the dead Christ on the scenario lends a further layer of indeterminable religious suggestiveness to the figure of the man on his back in the dark.

A new restlessness arises as alterations are contemplated to the scenario as thus far imagined. The first such suggestion is that the hearer might respond to the voice: ‘What an addition to company that would be! A voice in the first person singular’ (20-1). But this improvement will never be enacted. For the hearer to say ‘I’ would be a lie. ‘The road is blocked into the personal pronoun with which language would open its gates to the formation of a human (desiring) subject’ (Gunn, 67). The self relates to its past personae as comforting memory-fragments, relics for elegiac musing, but does not assume them in a project of self-creation.

The fourth flashback presents an old beggar woman, half blind, fumbling at the gate of the house of another woman who is ‘stone deaf and not in her right mind’ (21). Yet in this world of miserably failing communication, it is the blind woman who communicates touchingly with the hearer: ‘She blesses you. What were her words? God reward you little master. Some such words. God save you little master’ (21-22). Like the father’s ‘far call’, ‘Be a brave boy’ (23, 24), these encouraging words from the past become a kind of viaticum to the hearer, a promise of hope.

  Another amendment to the scenario might be to tamper with the silence and the dark by introducing the occasional sound and a dim light: ‘That were perhaps better company. For what odd sound? Whence the shadowy light?’ (23). The sound might be that of ‘some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more’ (24). Movement of the hand or eye of the hearer is envisaged as a further improvement (26-7) and again the idea of having him speak is toyed with. Intervening on these cogitations, the sixth flashback, a childhood suicide attempt, speaks of the underlying trauma which the inventions of the deviser are dealing with. The suggested improvement concern stirrings of life, but they are overruled by the movement of entropy governing the Beckett persona, the death-drive that prevents him from affirming himself as ‘I’.

‘What with what feeling remains does he feel about now as compared to then? When with what judgment remained he judged his condition final. As well inquire what he felt then about then as compared to before. When he still moved or tarried in remains of light!’ (29). Entropy has erased any ‘felt’ connection with the past, yet the last phrase here conveys an elegiac pathos denied on the surface. It recalls the light-imagery of Wordsworth ‘Immortality Ode’. The elegiac cry of that poem: ‘Whither is fled the transitory gleam?’ echoes in Beckett’s writing, but in a stifled, repressed way. The association of east with the light and west with death again recalls the theme of the Ode: ‘The Youth who daily farther from the East/Must travel’. The biographical flashbacks are confined within a radius of one league (three miles) from home (85), between the sea on the east and the mountains on the west. The boy walks westward in the first of them; the room in which he is born looks west (15). In the later flashbacks west dominates more and more. This trajectory resembles that of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. ‘The white pasture afrolic with lambs in spring and strewn with red placentae’ (48) may again echo the Ode: ‘while the young lambs bound/As to the tabor’s sound’. Even the framing narrative recalls the Ode’s ‘Blank misgivings of a Creature/Moving about in worlds not realised’.

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Phase III: The Deviser Turns on Himself (paragraphs 26-33)

Another phase of the narration begins when the question of the deviser’s identity is at last confronted: ‘In another dark or in the same another devising it all for company. This at first sight seems clear. But as the eye dwells it grows obscure. Indeed the longer the eye dwells the obscurer it grows. Till the eye closes and freed from pore the mind inquires, What does this mean? What finally does this mean that at first sight seemed clear? Till it the mind too closes as it were. As the window might close of a dark empty room’ (29-30). Here is a parody of a Platonic ascent from sense knowledge to mental insight to a dimension beyond mind, an ascent into perfect darkness. But the bliss of mystical unknowing is not granted: ‘Pangs of faint light and stirrings still. Unformulable gropings of the mind. Unstillable’ (30). ‘For why or? Why in another dark or in the same? And whose voice asking this? Who asks, Whose voice asking this? And answers, His soever who devises it all’ (32). The questions that trouble the hearer’s – or rather the deviser’s – mental peace are a parody of the metaphysical constructions of God as ‘unmoved mover’ (Aristotle) or causa sui (Spinoza). The deviser indeed devises himself, but that is more a mark of his arbitrary, shoddy half-existence than of any rational impregnability of the divine. Far from being an unmoved mover, he wobbles clumsily. ‘“Creature”, “creator”, the coined phrase “His soever” and most particularly, for all its derisive jingle, the term “devised deviser” [64] all point to an old theological debate, the argument from ultimate causes, which St Thomas Aquinas derived from Aristotle… For Beckett, the argument splits, fragments, stops short’ (Long, 147).

Deviser as speaker has split himself from deviser as object spoken of, and deviser as speaker is himself objectified in his own speaking. The regress threatens to be infinite: ‘Who asks in the end, Who asks? And in the end answers as above? And adds long after to himself, Unless another still. Nowhere to be found. Nowhere to be sought. The unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I. Quick leave him’ (32). These ‘self-conscious discursive comments on the story which challenge or modify the terms of the text’ proliferate from this point on. ‘The result of these two oscillating regimes of speech, the one inventing stories and the other calling narrative into question, is to undo the unity of the narrating voice’ (Hill, 74). The deviser, up to now an authoritative narrator, becomes himself the principal character, subject to altering and duplication in a potentially uncontrollable process. The text tries to call this process to a decisive halt: ‘Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company. Leave it at that’ (34). But to resign oneself to ‘confusion’ is no happy resting-place either: ‘Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken. Company too up to a point. Better a sick heart than none. Till it starts to break’ (34). The allusion to Proverbs 13.12, ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick’, doubles as an echo of Waiting for Godot: ‘hope deferred maketh the something sick’ (CDW 12).

Soon imagination becomes restless again, reminding itself that it has yet to imagine in what dark and in what position the deviser is: ‘which of all imaginable positions has the most to offer in the way of company. And similarly for the other matters yet to be imagined. Such as if such decisions irreversible’ (35). This last phrase introduces the dizzying idea that the basic rules of the narrative game are themselves open to alteration, even perhaps the basic criterion of good and bad rules, their value for the creation of company.

Phase III ends with the last of the childhood flashbacks, which tells once again of thwarted communication: ‘You take pity on a hedgehog’ (38); ‘Kneeling at your bedside you included it the hedgehog in your detailed prayer to God to bless all you loved’ (40). This ends in disaster: ‘You are on your back in the dark and have never forgotten what you found then. The mush. The stench’ (41). The phrase ‘you have never forgotten’ was also used for another trauma, the mother’s ‘cutting retort’ (13). Rather than bring the blessing of Proustian involuntary memory, the voice insists on what has never been forgotten. A short story in itself, the hedgehog episode corresponds well with the desperately unimprovable position of the hearer as thus far imagined.

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Phase IV: A Radical Crisis of Imagining (paragraphs 34-48)

Now the entire imaginative scenario is put in question, inaugurating a new phase of the narrative: ‘Impending for some time the following. Need for company not continuous. Moments when his own unrelieved a relief. Intrusion of voice at such. Similarly image of hearer. Similarly his own. Regret then at having brought them about and problem how dispel them’ (41-42). The basic rule of the construction was the optimization of company, but now the value of company is relativized; it even threatens to become oppressive. From this point on the deconstruction of company begins, leading to the final ‘Alone’ (89). This might remind one of Genesis 6.6: ‘And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart’. The hearer, the place where he lies, the deviser and the voice are successively reviewed in the following four paragraphs, without any advance on the preceding. The voice is now imagined saying ‘You were born on an Easter Friday after long labour’ (46-7) and there is a dark echo of Shakespeare’s ‘It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath’: ‘As best to erode the drop must strike unwavering. Upon the place beneath’ (47). Portia’s discourse is subverted by a glancing intertextual thrust. The ensuing flashback is the longest yet, and does indeed have this insistent, wearying impact. The same is true of the obsessive counting in the following, even longer flashback, the first evoking the ‘bloom of adulthood’ (53): ‘Simple sums you find a help in times of trouble’ (54). This flashback attains a note of serene bliss: ‘In that rainbow light. That dead still’ (59).

A new pitch of crisis is marked by the ensuing general collapse: ‘Wearied by such stretch of imagination he ceases and all ceases’ (59). (The ‘stretch’ here alludes to the cogitations preceding the two flashbacks.) This dead point of exhaustion reveals the flimsiness of the constructive imagination. The literary imagination has been the last resource of modern humanity for imposing order and meaning on a world which has lost its religious, philosophical and ideological frameworks and finds itself increasingly consumed by a technological order which itself is becoming splintered and rudderless. Now this imagination, so confident in the era of Romanticism, has reached its last gasp, and with its failure all fails. The desolation of the protagonist is associated with the desolation of the human race: ‘There in the same dark as his creature he leaves himself to these perplexities while wondering as every now and then he wonders in the back of his mind if the woes of the world are all they used to be. In his day’ (61).

Yet the deviser starts again. Slowly and carefully he resumes the conditions of the imagining as worked out up to now, deciding to call the hearer M and himself W. This attempt at stability crumbles as he looks at it more critically: ‘Is there anything to add to this esquisse? His unnamability. Even M must go. So W reminds himself of his creature as so far created. W? But W too is creature. Figment’ (63). The unnameability of M recalls the novel The Unnameable, where the impossibility of naming the subject recalls the debates in apophatic theology about the name or namelessness of God.

Panic grows as the repressed division of the deviser resurfaces: ‘Yet another then. Of whom nothing. Devising figments to temper his nothingness. Quick leave him. Pause and again in panic to himself, Quick leave him’ (64). He turns away from the devising deviser to imagine improvements of the devised deviser. A creative fiat of some consequence licences a movement of the deviser, now permitted to crawl: ‘Then let him move. Within reason. On all fours’ (64). The degradation of the deviser to a crawling figure could recall the degradation of Satan in Paradise Lost X 514: ‘A monstrous serpent on his belly prone’. Milton’s Satan was one of the heroes of the Romantic imagination (a model for Blake, Byron’s Cain, Shelley’s Prometheus, even Keats’ Hyperion); Beckett follows this figure to its final degradation, which images the degraded status of imagination as a source of futility and deceit.

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Phase V: The Final Crawl (paragraphs 49-59)

In pathetic contrast with the romantic twelfth flashback we come back to the deviser's increasingly undignified efforts to keep himself company: ‘Crawling again and falling again. If this finally no improvement on nothing he can always fall for good. Or have never risen to his knees’ (67).The deviser is trapped in his fiction as Milton’s Satan is trapped in his futile combat with omnipotence; hence the appropriateness of the Miltonic jargon of creator and creature, both trapped in the dark. Yet because it is fiction, it can always be made not to have happened. The mathematics of the crawl are painfully worked out, an imaginary continuation of the career of the walker evoked by the voice. But ‘crawl as he will no bourne as yet. As yet imaginable. Hand knee hand knee as he will. Bourneless dark’ (69). The deviser’s inability to imagine the end of his fiction emblematizes the unfigurability of death, ‘that undiscovered country from whose bourne/No traveller returns’. Except that the quandary is more radical than Hamlet’s because there is no bourne in sight.

  Back to the hearer, whose various senses are considered, including the possibility of allowing him to hear or to smell and be smelled by his creator. The theological overtones are strongest in the conclusion of this section: ‘Some sixth sense? Inexplicable premonition of impending ill? Yes or no? No. Pure reason? Beyond experience. God is love? Yes or no? No’ (73). In stopping off the concrete deliveries of the senses, as well as of reason and divine revelation, Beckett's satirical intimation is that he is revealing the naked core of human existence. The review of various modes of privileged cognition imagined by philosophers and theologians reduces them to suspect shortcuts.

The ‘crawling creator crawling in the same create dark as his creature’ (73) suggests a parody of God’s creation of Adam, or his generation of the eternal Son. For the adjective ‘create’ is derived from the Miltonic ‘increate’, as in ‘Bright effluence of bright essence increate’ (Paradise Lost III 5), referring to the eternal light streaming from God. ‘Crawling in the dark in the way described was too serious a matter and too all-engrossing to permit of any other business were it only the conjuring of something out of nothing’ (74). Here what sounds like a theological discussion concerns in reality only the physical arrangements that have to be made for the deviser, who has not been able to maintain his purity as transcendental self. The enigma of the deviser's identity has dissolved into purely physical imaginings. After a flashback in which the wanderer has come to a halt, the deviser too is tempted to come to a halt: ‘Why not just lie in the dark with closed eyes and give up? Give up all. Have done with all. With bootless crawl and figments comfortless’ (76-7). It is the ‘craving for company’ (77) that revives him, a residual, delusive avatar of the craving for the divine presence, or more concretely for a capacity to identify with the dying or dead Christ, which would make paralysis and depression easier to bear: ‘The need to hear that voice again. If only saying again, You are on your back in the dark. Or if only, You first saw the light and cried at the close of the day when in darkness Christ at the ninth hour cried and died’ (77). The reference to Christ at this pitch of desolation suggests that Beckett’s preoccupation with Jeremiah, mentioned earlier, had to do with the Lamentations of Jeremiah used in Holy Week: ‘He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light… He hath set me in dark places… He hath hedged me about, that I cannot get out’ (Lam. 3.2, 6-7).

The penultimate flashback, in which the mathematical calculations reach an extreme as the now immobile wanderer studies the movement of the hands on the watch, again associates his agony with that of the human race: ‘numb with the woes of your kind’ (80). Beckett might claim to be a prophetic witness to the woes of the race, creating a sequence of emblems of the varieties of Angst afflicting post-war Europe. The futile study of the watch’s hands and the rhythm of their motion is a relief from this consciousness of agony, as is the game of composing his literary worlds, but the agony seeps in: ‘unable to continue you bow your head back to where it was and with closed eyes return to the woes of your kind’ (83).

The deviser’s last appearance shows him stuck in his quandary: ‘What visions in the dark of light! Who exclaims thus? Who asks who exclaims, What visions in the shadeless dark of light and shade! Yet another still? Devising it all for company. What a further addition to company that would be. Yet another still devising it all for company. Quick leave him’ (84). Here we see the slippage from transcendental to empirical becoming an infinite regress: at first the empirical hearer was clearly distinguished from the transcendental deviser; then the deviser, ceasing to be a lofty third person voice, become an empirical or objectified presentation of the self, increasingly physical, to the point of crawling and smelling, and the narrative presenter of this crawling deviser assumed the transcendental role; now it appears that this presenter is himself materializing as yet another empirical ego. This final portion of the framing narrative names once more the central enigma of the piece, that of the deviser's ultimate identity. But the question is left unanswered, it juts out as a precipice. The last flashback brings the wanderer to his final halt: ‘Huddled thus you find yourself imagining you are not alone while knowing full well that nothing has occurred to make this possible. The process continues none the less lapped as it were in its meaninglessness’ (86). (The last sentence is perhaps too direct, breaking the poetic spell of the text.)

Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were.

  Alone (88-89).

This final ‘Alone’ is not a dramatic collapse, for the deviser has never ceased to be alone, and the trajectory mapped by the flashbacks converges logically on this final solitude. Is this a downbeat ending, a sigh of exhaustion? Or is there a sense that the labour lost of composition has made the silence deeper, even richer? It abolishes the infinite chain of devisers by accepting the identity of hearer, deviser and voice as aspects of the fabling self. The multiplication of devisers is the result of language; when language ceases the self will return to its solitude. This is still in the future; the task of composition is not abandoned; its end is only proleptically envisaged. The present work has perhaps whittled away some possibilities of creation which can no longer be used; at each stage in his trajectory Beckett drops some of the trappings and techniques of fiction, to start yet again with a narrower range of more elementary imaginary givens in the succeeding.

  What is the nature of the silence and darkness into which the text finally leads us? It is nothingness given a precise contour, opened up through the artful deployment of minimal form. If it is the ineffable, it is an ineffable that makes itself precisely felt where words break off. This combination of the precise and the ungraspable is the mark of mystery. All mystery, even when tragic, has a gracious character, and can be taken as pointing to a divine presence. As Beckett’s kenotic art points to this dimension again and again, it can be aligned with Buddhist emptiness and even with Christ’s self-emptying. What emerges from this emptiness is not the glorious affirmation of Easter, but the subtle insistence of a sustaining grace. The Beckettian self is constantly crumbling into the dust of death, yet even in the process of its dissolution the silence that deepens about it is a space of communion. In Worstward Ho the figures with which the Beckettian imagination plays are reduced still further, to dim shapes that finally vanish into a grey background. The result is an epiphany: ‘Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void’ (46-7). Alain Badiou suggests that this is Beckett’s version of the ‘constellation’ that emerges at the end of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés (Badiou 2004).

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Self and God

The riddles of Beckett’s text concern explicitly the nature of self-identity, but by parodic implication the question of God is also rehearsed. The deviser pursues elaborate logic-chopping in the manner of a philosopher, one who, instead of checking and verifying the contents of his consciousness and cautiously building up a series of deductions in the manner of Descartes, instead cautiously creates a fictional figuration of the self. He thinks by ‘imagining’, in his many decisions and revisions parodying the procedures of Descartes, with the suggestion that the philosophical exploration of the psyche is no more than a tale giving the illusion of self-possession. Beckett’s figures cogitate incessantly, but they are fractured cogitos, characteristically expressing themselves in oxymoron and chiasmus, as they oscillate between their contradictory constituents in a purgatorial movement (see Hill, 6-11). Even to say they express themselves is misleading: the cogito is not in control of the words it produces but is their creature; from the moment the speaking or writing begins the position of the cogito has been irretrievably abandoned, and the speaker is aswim in a sea of words in which he or she struggles desperately to stay afloat. The cogitations flounder in searches for the appropriate word or in questions of grammar and syntax.

  The modern self, which made its debut with Descartes, is located essentially in the cogito, the ‘I think’. Lucid, transparent self-awareness guarantees the self’s identity and autonomy, and transcendence of material nature. But this self slowly came to sense that its apparent freedom was a prison, its autonomy another name for sterile isolation, its transparency constantly disturbed by obstacles to insight, and even its apparent unity and stability an illusion. The Beckettian self is the last variant of the Western individual: ‘I am down in the hole the centuries have dug’ (CSP 101). His quest meets defeat at every point at which Kant’s seemed to succeed. The transcendental self now lacks all synthesizing power, and the fictive world it begins by positing with a show of authority crumbles in aimless rearrangements, which indicate a lack of secure identity on the part of the ultimate deviser. This collapse can be seen as enacting the ‘death of man’ in Foucault’s sense, the demise of the Kantian empirical-transcendental structuration of human existence. Instead of a sovereign consciousness, we have a scriptor toiling at the impossible task of assembling a text, fiddling with opaque words which cannot attain the clarity of the concept but remain clogged in their materiality. Sometimes the Beckettian narrator puts on a Flaubertian air of sovereignty, but this breaks down as the writing proceeds, until the lofty deviser declines to a ‘crawling creator’ who rejoins his creature in the dark.

The empirical pole in Beckettian selfhood is obscenely physical; but even at this level identity cannot be securely established; the body falls to pieces, becomes dismembered, or is reduced to a partial representation, a mouth or a head, or is crippled, or rigidly confined in a carceral or sepulchral space, or is subject to bizarre metamorphoses as in The Unnameable. If the relations between transcendental and empirical selfhood are a source of unease in the Kantian system, in Beckett the split between them is irremediable and takes a great variety of forms. Much of the comedy and poignancy of Company comes from the disjunctions, and the even more bizarre conjunctions, between transcendental and empirical ego, between the ‘unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I’ and the body of the hearer, or the body of the crawling deviser, who is its ignoble incarnation.

 

In undergoing the purgatorial disintegration of the Cartesian self the protagonist attains something like the detachment the Buddha teaches: ‘I am is a vain thought; I am not is a vain thought; I shall be is a vain thought; I shall not be is a vain thought’. Beckett’s minimalism aims at a quasi-sculptural detachment of the essential gesture which becomes a cipher of human existence: ‘The more naked his characters became, the more stripped of the external traits of daily life – possessions, clothes, behavior – the more they approached basic elements of human confrontation with life: loneliness, fear of loneliness, the need for communication, the impossibility of communication, the cry for help, the confrontation with decay and death’. (Megged, 46). Each text is an action of kenosis, of descent into vacuity, and the reader is drawn into the process, shares in the spiritual exercise. This process is an end in itself, worth pursuing on its own terms or not at all. It instills a sense that it is bringing us into touch with something essential.

All of this has a theological dimension insofar as the fortunes of the self in literature and philosophy have been linked with corresponding metamorphoses of the idea of God. The interventions of the voice in Company play a role similar to that of God in Descartes’s Meditations, relieving the cogito of the task of self-constitution at the price of introducing an incoherence into the logical unfolding of its self-construction. Descartes’ infinite God arises in his consciousness with the same suddenness and luminous evidence as the cogito. Beckett re-imagines both in a deconstruction that consigns them both to deepest obscurity.

The labour of rewriting the self connects with the contemporary experience of selfhood, and the labour of rewriting God equally reflects a contemporary experience of the withdrawal of origins, that may be a new mode of divine presence. It is problematic to speak of a salvific dimension to Beckett's efforts. ‘Writing is no longer attached in any way to salvation: salvation appears neither in the work nor outside it as its justification. Writing recognizes itself to be not only unjustifiable but as a stranger to a problematic of justification’ (Collin, 195). Such writing cannot confront death as a challenge to be overcome; death is the unfigurable, a process of negation at work in the constant paring away of identity that is going on in the prose style, the disillusioning background noise that undercuts any projection of a grandiose self-identity, that recalls the presumptuous self to the modesty of the anonymous ‘one’ or ‘it’.

Nonetheless, Beckett keeps before his imagination mythic figures of the self and of God, figures of heroic endurance in the former case, figures of some ultimate silent presence in the latter. Mythic figures, such as those of Scripture, grip and stimulate the imagination, urging it to reinterpret them through the creation of new myths. The mythic scenarios Beckett creates not only resonate with the deepest anxieties of his time, but revive old myths in a new key. As a novelist, exploring what Milan Kundera calls the ‘terminal paradoxes’ of modern European civilization, Beckett is neither a theist nor an atheist. His task is to lay bare an existential situation, with all its ambiguity and incertitude. Readers impatient with ambiguity will dub him, along with Flaubert, Joyce and Kafka, a ‘nihilist’. But a great fiction does not present ideas or creeds. It is a ‘mirror on the roadway’ of our existence, catching the chiaroscuro of our situation (see Kundera 1995).

As we become increasingly aware of the kenotic character of Beckett's art, let us note that theology, too, needs to unearth the essential Christ-shape which alone can give Christian discourse contemporary universality. ‘Infinities of space cannot be grasped in themselves: they must be caught by some tightly defined form’ (Megged, 50). The infinity of God is caught by the tightly defined form of Christ crucified; a form being sculpted anew in the contemporary historical struggle. Theology, if it lends an undogmatic ear to voices like Beckett’s, can find in literature an ally in its task of discerning this emergent figure of the Crucified.

                    

References 

Badiou, Alain (2004) On Beckett. Manchester: Clinamen.

Beckett, Samuel (1980) Company. London: John Calder.

─ (1986) The Complete Dramatic Works [CDW]. London: Faber.

─ (1995) The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989 [CSP]. New York: Grove Press.

─ (1999). Worstward Ho. London: John Calder.

Brater, Enoch (1989) Why Beckett? London: Thames and Hudson.

Buning, Marius, et al., ed. (2000) Beckett and Religion. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Collin, Francoise (1986) Maurice Blanchot et la question de l'écriture. Paris: Gallimard.

Gunn, Daniel (1988) Psychoanalysis and Fiction. Cambridge University Press.

Heidegger, Martin (1959) Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske.

Hill, Leslie (1990) Beckett’s Fiction in Different Words. Cambridge University Press.

Kundera, Milan (1995) L’art du roman. Paris: Gallimard.

Long, Joseph (2000) ‘Divine Intertextuality: Beckett, Company, Le Dépeupleur’. In Buning et al., pp. 145-57.

Megged, Matti (1985) Dialogue in the Void: Beckett & Giacometti. New York: Lumen Books.

Matoba, Junko (2000) ‘Religious Overtones in the Darkened Area of Beckett’s Later Short Plays’. In Buning et al., pp. 31-41.

----- (2003). Beckett’s Yohaku: A Study of Samuel Beckett’s Empty Space on Stage in His Later Shorter Plays. Tokyo: Shinsui-sha.

O’Leary, Joseph S. (1991). ‘Beckett’s Company: The Self in Throes.’ English Literature and Language (Sophia University) 28:83-124.

─ (2003) ‘Beckett’s Intertextual Power’. Journal of Irish Studies 18:87-101.