Beckett and Academics

7/28/2019 Beckett and Academics

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/beckett-and-academics 1/14

From Acacademy to Aquaquademy: Samuel Beckett and the Challenge to University

Discourse

Arka Chattopadhyay

Beckett qua Academy: The Contestation of Meaning and Knowledge

From the initial Absurdist reception in the 1960s to the more recent Postmodernist andPoststructuralist appropriation in the 1990s, the works of Samuel Beckett have always beeneither celebrated or denigrated for their virulent resistance to the process of meaning-making. To begin with, his works baffled both critics and general audience and readers with what can becalled a misconstrued absurdity or meaninglessness. It was Theodore Adorno who hit the nail on

the head by saying that far from being meaningless, Beckett’s works “put meaning on trial”(Adorno: 1997, 201). In due course, the critical commonplace around Beckett changed from anabsolute foreclosure of meaning to an allowance of free-play to meaning and a foregrounding of the deconstructive aporias in discourse. Beckett became the “poet of the poststructuralist age” inthe words of Lance St. John Butler and Robin J. Davis (qtd in Katz: 1999, 03). Be it theexistentialist approach where meaning is seen in a metaphysical and affective manner andmeaninglessness becomes a form of anxiety and despair or the Postmodernist approach whichhighlights the linguistic inexpressibility of meaning in a pervasive critique of the representational powers of language, Beckett’s treatment of meaning still remains one of the most debatableissues in Beckett Studies. It is from this debate regarding signification that I want to come to the

problem of the academic dissemination of Beckett’s works.

In spite of Beckett’s canonization with the awarding of the Nobel Prize in 1969 and the plethora of research and publication turning Beckett Studies into an industry, teaching Beckett inthe University still seems to be a daunting task. This is not simply due to the problems of teaching theatre textually in the classroom, since with Beckett, more than the challenging later plays or the “dramaticules”, it is his fiction, especially the later fiction, which still remainsuntaught or scarcely taught in the classrooms across the world. To my knowledge, no prose of Beckett is taught in any of the Indian Universities. In the Indian curriculum there is very little of Beckett that goes beyond Waiting for Godot [1953] and Endgame [1958]. Jadavpur University is

the only place where some of the late plays like ‘Footfalls’ [1976] and ‘Rockaby’ [1981] aretaught in a Postgraduate Special Course on Contemporary Theatre. Modules on Modernist andPostmodernist literature too do not contain a single Beckett novel. Let me briefly mention heresome of the responses I got when I enquired Beckett scholars around the world about teachingBeckett in the classroom. Xymena Synak-Pskit, the Polish scholar told me that Beckett’s proseworks are hardly taught in the country. They usually devote their time to the plays, and that tooearly plays like Godot , Endgame and Happy Days [1961] (personal correspondence). Beckett



Studies has established itself as an extremely specialized and niche discipline and Beckett’s later fiction is taught only in specialized universities and by scholars who specialize in Beckett.University of Reading is home to the Beckett Archive and the Beckett International Foundation.Mark Nixon, the Director of the Foundation told me that he teaches prose texts like ‘StirringsStill’ [1989] on his part 3 undergraduate module and either ‘Ill Seen Ill Said’[1981] or

‘Worstward Ho’[1983] (usually the latter) and Beckett’s last poem ‘comment dire’ or ‘What isthe Word’ [1989] to his Masters students (personal correspondence). Carla Taban, another Beckett scholar from the University of Toronto told me that she has taught late prose works like‘Imagination Dead Imagine’[1965] and ‘The Lost Ones’ [1970] in her university. However, sheexpressed her suspicion over longer prose works like How It Is [1964] or ‘Worstward Ho’ beingtaught anywhere in Canada (personal correspondence).

Beckett shares a complex if not contestational relationship with the discourse of theUniversity. Beckett, the fiction writer, may have a rare presence in the academic syllabi, but peculiarly enough, he still happens to be one of the most written about writers in the world. In

critical writing, the fictional works are given as much importance as the plays. Is Beckett moredifficult to teach than to critically write about? The two academic fields of critical writing andclassroom pedagogy have always co-existed, usually sharing a complementary relation.Beckett’s writing seems to throw the cat among the pigeons by introducing a fissure between thetwo. But this fissure is nothing but a figment. It is not that Beckett’s works prefer academicwriting to classroom teaching. They resist academia in a much more general way than thespecific locus of the classroom since his critique is directed at the very nature of academicdissemination, be it in the classroom or on the page. I think this is an academic strategy of incorporating Beckett in the larger rubric of the University outside the centralized locus of the

classroom. The preference of academic writing over classroom teaching is a brilliant instance of academic hegemony seeking to obscure the radically anti-academic nature of Beckett’s later writings. This has something to do with the difference between the roles of the critic and theteacher at the level of mastery and power game. The academic writer or the scholar doescommand a certain kind of power but it is not as direct or immediate as the power of the teacher in the classroom. As deconstructive practice has shown us, it is possible to collapse this fixity of discursive power in academic writing but a Derridean pedagogy in the classroom is much moredifficult to realize. Faced with the bomb-like ‘Wh’-questions in the classroom, it becomestremendously difficult to hold on to the self-jettisoning rhetoric of contradiction and non-knowledge.

Beckett is perhaps the most anti-hermeneutic of the 20th century authors. He wasstaunchly opposed to all kinds of critical interpretation and his work bristles with numerousspoofs and self-reflexive parodies of academic discourse. Lucky’s menacing speech after puttingon the thinking professorial hat, his stuttered pronunciation of “Academy” as “Acacacacademy”(Beckett: 2003, 42) and Estragon’s use of the word “Crritic” (70) as an abusive term in Waiting

for Godot are some early examples of Beckett’s attack on what he would call “the loutishness of



learning” (Beckett: 2006, 09) in a poem titled ‘Gnome’ [first published in Dublin Magazine inthe year 1934]. If the last sentence of his early novel Watt reads: “No symbols where noneintended” (Beckett: 2006, 379), ‘What Where’ [1983], his last work for the stage, ends fittinglywith the characteristic defiance of an anti-hermeneut: “Make sense who may. I switch off.”(Beckett: 2003, 476) When Stanley Gontarski requested Beckett to write a play for his 75 th

birthday celebrations in Ohio University in the year 1981, he produced a short play significantlytitled ‘Ohio Impromptu’ where the reading and listening of the onstage figures named “Reader”and “Listener” and the act of reading from a big fat book—all subtly undercut the form of academic symposium. In How It Is, the mud where the larval humanity engages in mutual torturehas an autobiographic resonance in the “Portora mud” (qtd in Connor) of Beckett’s own school.

As Steven Connor observes, power and pedagogy have their own vicious circle andBeckett never fails to emphasize this point. In one of the very few articles written on Beckett’stroubled tryst with academia, Connor diagnoses a complex double-bind in Beckett’s attitude to

academy. He argues that Beckett’s anti-academism is fraught with a self-realization:

Beckett must reluctantly have come to recognise that he was, if not an academic writer,then certainly an academics’ writer, a writer whose work it would be implausible, even perhaps impossible, to subtract from the contexts of critical and scholarly explication thatframed it (Connor: 2009, 19).

However reluctant he might be, it is not that he rejected the Nobel Prize or the degree of Doctor of Letters from Trinity College. He expressed his surprise at being offered a D.Litt andmaintained that his work had nothing to do with doctoracy and literature but he was honest in

admitting that the offer moved him greatly. He himself donated a lot of unpublished materials toTrinity before his death and also gave allowance for such donations when he would not bearound. So, it is not that he did not pay any heed to the academic preservation of his works.Connor traces the source of this paradoxical attitude in the desire of Beckett’s father that heshould become a professor. According to Connor, Beckett was slightly disappointed somewherewithin that he had not been able to fulfill the paternal desire though he well knew that being aman of letters was not his cup of tea. Taking my departure from Connor’s hypothesis, I will tryand create a trajectory of Beckett’s anti-academism and see how his practice first as a lecturer and then as a creative writer interacts with the academic discourse.

As the Postmodernist Beckett criticism has correctly pointed out, he was acutely aware of the seductiveness of meaning so much so that one often finds in his works, a strategy of invitingthe critic into a neat symbolic identification through the overtly obvious nature of his symbols. If the proper name “Godot” reminds us of the word “God”, that is because it is meant to be areminder. Beckett often anticipates the critical responses to his works and playfully incorporatesthem in his texts so as to create a sort of immunity from them. Beckett had emphatically told



Ralph Richardson: “if by Godot I had meant God I would say God, and not Godot.” (Ackerleyand Gontarski: 2004, 232) The similarity between the two signifiers “Godot” and “God” is aimedat foregrounding the irreducible difference that separates them from one another. When it cameto directing his own plays, Beckett never discussed meaning with his actors but emphasized amusical approach where the cadence and rhythm of the lines were of paramount importance. On

29th October, 1973, in conversation with Charles Juliet, Beckett rubbished the scholarlyinterpretations of his work by using the expression “academic dementia” (Juliet: 2009, 22).When Mel Gussow asked him about ‘What Where’ in a conversation on 24th June, 1983, Beckettreplied: “I don’t know what it means. Don’t ask me what it means. It’s an object.” (Gussow:1996, 42) Gérard Genette in his book Paratexts mentions Beckett as one of those authors whovehemently refuse all forms of paratextual communication (Genette: 1997, 229). As opposed tosomeone like T.S. Eliot, Beckett is indeed the last person to write an introduction to his works or edit a collection of his own texts.

Beckett’s refusal to interpret his own works has always been based on a claim of non-

knowledge [“I don’t know”]. He has claimed “ignorance”, “impotence” and described himself asa “non-knower” and a “non-can-er” (Graver and Federman: 2005, 162). While Mathieu Protinreads this as a rhetorical posture of pseudo-naiveté to counter the ideologically engaged andcommitted figure of the author in contemporary France, I would like to take my departure here. Ithink we need to take Beckett’s insistence on terms like “impotence” and “ignorance” seriously because they are part and parcel of Beckett’s resistance to system-building. This is what markshis problematic and contestational relationship with academia. Once he was asked whether hissystem was the absence of a system and Beckett responded: “I can’t see any trace of any systemanywhere.” (162) I would argue that Beckett’s critique of academic dissemination is centred on

the idea of a literature of non-knowledge which resists all systemic appropriations. Beckett’s is aliterature of evacuating knowledge which turns the “Academy” into “Acacademy” or better still“Aquaquademy”. I think this is the major reason behind the difficulty of teaching Beckett in theclassroom. As I would show, Beckett’s non-system of non-knowledge both subverts and extendsthe discourse of the university and I would develop my argument by focusing on two areas:Beckett’s brief stint as a teacher and his anti-hermeneutic and anti-epistemic authorial practice.

Beckett Teaching: Exploring the Limits of knowledge

I don’t want to be a professor (it’s almost a pleasure to contemplate the mess of this job).

—Samuel Beckett to Tom MacGreevy, 11 March, 1931, TCD (James and ElizabethKnowlson: 2006, 52)

Though he did not want to, Beckett had to take up teaching for a brief period after his graduationfrom Trinity College, Dublin. In the year 1927, he graduated with a First Class degree and aGold Medal and started preparing for an MA thesis on Pierre-Jean Jouve and the French literary



movement Unanimisme [which he would never finish]. While awaiting his appointment aslecteur in English at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, he decided to fill up theinterim by teaching at Campbell College in Belfast in 1928. This was Beckett’s first stint as a professor. Beckett expresses a clear dislike regarding the Campbell experience in his memoirswhile maintaining that he “made some good friends” and “played cricket with the boys” (James

and Elizabeth Knowlson: 2006, 34). It is interesting to note that one of his pupils at Campbel,Brian McConnell attributes Beckett’s discernible discomfort in adjusting with the collegeatmosphere to the overtly British ethos of the institution. In his letter of February 15, 1992 toBeckett’s biographer James Knowlson, McConnell underscores the inculcation of British valuesinto the studentship of Campbell, which comprised the cream of Ulster:

[…] the ethos of Campbell was probably quite alien to Beckett, for it was very Britishindeed. The sterling qualities which made for the successful administration of the BritishEmpire were certainly installed into us […] (35)

This speculative point is crucial because it suggests Beckett’s tension with the dominant culturalideology of the academic institution and the tension is also marked by an alienation from theimperial ethos.

In the fall of 1928, Beckett joined Ecole Normale Supérieure as a teacher in the exchangelecturer programme involving Trinity College, Dublin. He was supposed to teach EnglishLiterature there but as he says, it was quite a joke since there were no takers. In his first year hetaught George Pelorson, the only Anglicist in his batch and also helped some postgraduatestudents like Alfred Péron and Emile Delavenay with their assignments of prose translations.Pelorson, who came to be known as Georges Belmont, remembers his sessions with Beckett as a

friendly and non-academic dialogue which soon shifted from Beckett’s room in the institution toa café or a bar. Pelorson notes:

We soon started just to talk rather than to read Shakespeare. We didn’t have actuallessons; we just chatted…It was a conversation, nothing academic about it at all. (41)

Another student of Beckett was Alfred Péron with whom he shared his Resistance cell ‘GloriaSMH’ when he later took up the fight in French Resistance. This clearly establishes thedifference between Beckett’s discourse and that of the University. What it also tells is thatBeckett was a friend unto his students. He could both play cricket and fight battles with his

students. Now let us have a look at Beckett’s stint as a lecturer in French in TCD in the year 1928

under the same exchange programme which enabled him to teach French in ENS. In the year 1997, under the supervision of James Knowlson and company, Beckett’s Trinity students weresent a circular letter with questions about Beckett’s lectures and pat came the replies. A closestudy of the responses of his students and the class-notes of the Racine lectures taken by LeslieDaiken reveals the rough outline of a fascinatingly different pedagogic practice where instead of



harping on knowledge, Beckett kept approaching the limits of knowledge in highlighting theunknowable, the unnameable and the unstructurable. This counter-emphasis holds the essence of Beckett’s challenge to the academic tradition of exegesis. As Brigitte Le Juez in his conclusionto the book Beckett before Beckett notes: “He [Beckett] later explained, on different occasions,that he could not bear teaching others what he did not know himself.” (Juez: 2008, 71) There is

certainly more than a thesis of humility in this attitude of Beckett. It anticipates his attack onknowledge as a creative writer and does enough to subvert the stereotype of the omnipotent andthe all-knowing professor in the classroom. Let us look at some of the examples from theresponses of Beckett’s students.

Robert Burkitt, one of the students in the Trinity course notes that Beckett always camein informal attire and makes the same point as Pelorson that his lectures were “in the form of personal opinions and friendly chats rather than formal lectures.” (James and ElizabethKnowlson: 2006, 52) Beckett taught the Modern French writers: novelists Stendhal, Flaubert,Proust, Gide and the playwright Racine. He used Balzac’s works as the overarching counter-

example in tackling the question of modernity in the new French writers. Meta Buttnick quotesBeckett saying: “We do not know what a human being is made of.” (52) Not only does Beckettmake this strictly kenotic and anti-exegetical remark but he explains this through a poeticanalogue, hardly typical of academic discourse. As Buttnick recalls, Beckett said that if one put a bunch of tongs in the fire, all would turn red but it is impossible to know whether all human beings would react to the same situation in the same way. Complexity and irresolvable

problematization were Beckett’s forte as a teacher. As Mary A. McCormick remembers, Beckettwould enter into the classroom and draw diagrams on the blackboard and say: “The Proustianequation is not a simple one” (53) [this is how Beckett’s critical monograph on Proust begins]. In

the Valentine edition of the T.C.D. magazine, there was a student who had even poked fun atBeckett by saying: “I wish you would explain your explanations” (54).

Rachel Burrows raises an important point by drawing our attention to Beckett’s pauses:“He had an odd delivery. He would make long pauses between phrases, or very often pause inthe wrong place, after a word, which might make you lose the thread of his thought […]” (56).From the vantage point of the plays, we can say that in Beckett, pause is a crucial device which jettisons the dominant semantic framework of a speech. The pause induces a break which makesthe semantic structure shiver. A classic example of this will be Vladimir’s famous “Was Isleeping, while the others suffered?” speech in the second act of Waiting for Godot where the

final pause is followed by the question: “What have I said?” (Beckett: 2003, 85) The question puts the entire content of the speech under a question mark. For Beckett, the lecturer, the pausesmight have been a way of collapsing the exegetical thread of his arguments and subject the veryacademic nature of the arguments to a proto-deconstructive self-critique. What Grace West,another of Beckett’s students notes is Beckett’s fondness for poeticized metaphors instead of academic vocabulary. She remembers his sentences like “Phèdre is bathed in white light” and



“Rimbaund harpooned his similes, but Verlaine netted his.” (James and Elizabeth Knowlson:2006, 57-58)

Brigitte Le Juez’s comments on Rachel Burrows’s 1982 interview highlights Beckett’s privileging of the “incomprehensibility of the real” (Juez: 2008, 28) in writers like Gide and

Proust, whom he contrasted with the overtly naturalistic writing of Balzac. Burrows says: “he[Beckett] saw Gide and Proust as the successors to Dostoevsky because they dared to preservethe complexity of the real, the inexplicable, unforeseeable quality of the human being” (29).Beckett would often generalize and say in his lectures: “[The] Inner precision [of a text is]contradictory. [The] Confusion irreducible. Final analysis, [the novel is] incoherent” (quoted inJuez, 29). As we can see here, Beckett’s stress falls on that which remains inexplicable in allexplications. This may not be outright radical, but in the anti-hermeneutic nature of this stress,we can clearly see the outline of a pedagogic practice which is located at an angular distancefrom academy. What attracts Beckett to Stendhal is what Juez calls his “deliberately incoherentduality” (29) and Beckett appreciates the “retrospective abolition of logical structure” (29) in

Stendhal’s narratives. Beckett would state Stendhal’s implication like this: “[the] psychologicalreal can’t be stated” (30). He points out Gide’s interest in “liminal consciousness” (quoted inJuez, 37) which cannot be translated consciously and comments: “no explanations inDostoevsky” (quoted in Juez, 39). He could locate the same “liminal consciousness” in the playsof Racine as well. There is a clear privileging of the unspeakable and the ineffable real inBeckett’s discourse and this can be seen as the beginning of a new subversive discourse of theacademy, which will deal with lack instead of substance, infinite problematization instead of simplifying exegesis, questions instead of answers and most importantly truth instead of knowledge. Beckett’s professorial ethics seems to lie in constituting a veritable beyond of

knowledge by approaching its limit instead of trying to fix knowledge in any way. It is thisalternative University of Real Truth that Beckett’s academic practice seems to prefigure. Thiswill be perfected in his practice as a creative writer, outside of the academic world.

Teaching Beckett: Towards a new Analytic Classroom

In the 20th century from Althusser to Lacan, Foucault and Derrida, the politics of the universityhas often been a talking point. There is the Althusserian acknowledgment of the academicinstitution as an Ideological State Apparatus as well as Derrida’s half-hearted critique of thereason-driven university in the article ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of itsPupils’. In his teaching, Jacques Lacan has recurrently marked the centrality of knowledge to

what he has called the “University Discourse”. In the wake of this critical tradition, the task athand is to reconfigure the academic practice by accommodating these points of critique. In anessay called ‘Intoxicated Midnights and Carnival Classrooms: The Professor as Poet’ the writersAllan Irving and Ken Moffatt locate a shift from the universalist and deterministic classroom of

humanist education to the new postmodern classroom of carnival and radical contingency. If theuniversity wants to give up on its status-quoist position, it must uphold radical contingency thatcuts open the traditional rhetoric of professorial mastery. Irving and Moffatt propose the new



classroom as a Foucaultian “heterotopia”, thereby evoking a chaotic multiplicity in the play of language. It is only relevant to note that the writers also refer to Beckett in this essay. They toohighlight Beckett’s attack on rationality and knowledge and wonder if there can be a pedagogyof non-knowledge following the author’s leads. If highlighting the ambivalent plurality of meaning can be a way of building a critical and interrogative line of thought in the students, the

poeticization of the professorial discourse is a celebration of that ambivalence which keeps openthe new possibilities of signification. While I agree with the principal argument of Irving andMoffatt, I think they do not draw a line between knowledge and truth.

Beckett’s literature, as I have said before is a literature of non-knowledge. Hisdispensation with the realistic literature of plot, character, spatio-temporal specificity andnarrative closure is a minimalist movement towards what Alain Badiou would call the generic dimension of truth. In his work on Beckett, especially the later prose, Badiou traces this genericcondition of truth, which has to break with all existent knowledge-circuits. Beckett does awaywith the unnecessary particulars to arrive at the essential functions of a human situation. As

Badiou says, the term “genera” comes from Plato’s book The Sophist where by “genera”, theGreek philosopher refers to the five basic functions of humanity: Movement, Rest, the Same, theOther and Logos (Badiou: 2003, 04). According to Badiou, the subtraction in Beckett is aimed atclarity and not obfuscation. He sees Beckettian ascesis as a method:

For Beckett writing is an act governed by a severe principle of economy. It is necessaryto subtract – more and more– everything that figures as circumstantial ornament, all peripheral distraction, in order to exhibit or to detach those rare functions to whichwriting can and should restrict itself, if its destiny is to say generic humanity. (Badiou:2003, 03)

As opposed to the more conventional idea of a humanist universalism which is inductive,

generalizing and expansive in nature, Badiou’s is a subtractive and minimalist universalism. Thekey distinction here is between knowledge and truth. For Badiou, this is a Lacanian distinctionwhere truth is seen as punching a hole in the existing repository of knowledge.

As opposed to knowledge which is, truth is something which happens and supplementsthe presence of knowledge. Truth always breaks with existing knowledge since it initiatessomething new into the world. It is only by subtracting knowledge that truth can be approachedas a kenotic point where knowledge is lacking or in other words, it is placed in a lack. Following

Lacan’s axiom: “The effect of truth is only a collapse of knowledge” (Lacan: 2007, 186), Badioudevelops his own theory of truth as a rupture in knowledge: “[…] truth causes the failure of knowledge.” (Badiou: 2005, 79) In Beckett’s works, there is an increasing concern with theevacuation of knowledge. We may remember the first line of ‘Lessness’ [1969] here: “Ruins truerefuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind” (Beckett: 1995, 197). Therecurrent expression “all gone from mind” (197) from ‘Lessness’ upholds the essential kenoticmovement of consciousness Beckett’s work dramatizes. Throughout How It Is, the narrator serio-



comically mourns the loss of different categories of specialized knowledge he once possessed:“the humanities I had” (Beckett: 2009, 24), “the history I knew” (28), “the geography I had”(35), “the anatomy I had” (46) and so on. This movement of emptying the mind develops intandem with the evacuation of the signifier which is the declared literary project of the youngBeckett. In the famous German letter to Axel Kaun in 1937 he announced his literary project in

terms of the act of boring holes into the “terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface”(Beckett: 2009a, 518). This act of drilling intends to dissolve the surface and cut open the veil of language “until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through”(518). As an author, Beckett’s words propose to punch holes in the existing register of languageand its given body of knowledge. In his 1956 interview with Israel Shenker, Beckett describedhis literary trajectory as one of impotence and ignorance as opposed to Joycean omniscience andomnipotence:

The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending toward omniscience andomnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance.” (Graver and

Federman: 2005, 162)

Now the question is whether there can be a generic academy based on a principle of impoverishment and not empowerment of knowledge?

Let us look at this truth-knowledge dialectic and its function in ‘Ping’ a tiny prose text,Beckett wrote in July-August 1966. It describes a white world of a fixed body where the narrator tries to come up with exact figures of the space but there is always that “one square yard never seen” (Beckett: 1995, 193). The space described is shorn of all particulars and approached purelythrough its genericity. It is “all known all white” (193) and the white body on the white surface is

almost invisible. Be it a murmur or any other sound or any-thing for that matter, “ping” isimmediately located in another space: “[…] fixed ping fixed elsewhere” (193). The “brief murmurs” which keep happening in this white space are “almost never all known”. There are“traces” and “blurs” but no meaning. So, this is a locus where meaning is subtracted and the truthwhich subtracts it is “ping”. Ping is a strictly meaningless word. If ping is a murmur, it also leadsone to a possible way out of the white world of the body: “Ping murmur only just almost never one second perhaps a way out” (194). Ping is also a trace through which meaning still tempts inthis subtracted world. It is full of the seductions of meaning , nature and image. But it is athreshold where thought reaches the point of its own impossibility. Thus the “elsewhere” of pingalways remains unknown. It bores a hole in knowledge: “Ping elsewhere always there but that

known not” (194). In this white space where planes meet, there always remains one “shining”and “infinite” plane which is “known not” (194). Ping is a proper name of truth that breaks withthe white world of knowledge. The figure of white on white emerges with the invisibility of aninscription under erasure. The text is written in a breathless and telegraphic style and its syntax iscompletely tattered. It has no narrative, plot, event or character. The retreat from realisticrepresentation makes a pure presentation of the text. It is very difficult to read ‘Ping’ withreference to an extra-textual world of reality. The absolute auto-referentiality and self-enclosure



of the text block the symbolic approach. David Lodge’s allegorical reading equating the postureof the fixed body and sewn legs with the posture of Lord Jesus sounds far-fetched. The genericnature of the objectified body stands against any such jaded particularistic approach.

I am certainly not trying to say that texts like ‘Ping’ cannot be taught in the classroom.

One can base the lecture on this very dialectic of truth and knowledge and point out the way ping breaks the register of “all known” with the not-all . But the problem with this approach in pedagogy is that there is no way the point of truth in ‘Ping’ can be defined or concretized. Infact, it cannot be presented as a positive term. It has to be seen only as a hole in knowledge or an“elsewhere” in relation to the white world of the fixed body. Ping as a phenomenon can only begrasped as an ineffable, unnameable term, much like the real which resists all symbolization inthe Lacanian schema. As the teaching of later Lacan goes, truth can only be half-said becausethere is always that one half of truth which topples into the real. One half of truth thus remainsoutside of language and there is no saying that. In Session VIII [‘Knowledge and Truth’] of

Seminar XX , Lacan says: “The true aims at the real” (Lacan: 1998, 91). Truth can never bewholly disentangled from the real and that is why it can never be wholly said: “[…] whole truthis what cannot be told. It is what can only be said on the condition that one doesn’t push it to theedge, that one only half-tells (mi-dire) it.” (92) “Half-saying” is not easy to execute for a professor in the classroom as it makes him encounter the lack of the unspeakable real point in atruth. But having said that, “half-saying” is the only register where a discussion of Beckett’s later prose can perhaps take place. Beckett would himself develop this direction with his emphasis onthe expression “ill-saying” in the later-texts and most evidently in ‘Ill Seen Ill Said’. I am notsaying that pedagogic “half-saying” is impossible. More than impossibility, it is a problem of reluctance and unwillingness. Admitting the lack in knowledge and constituting that lack will

only trash the illusive omnipotence and mastery of the professorial position. In Seminar XVII ,Lacan gives four mathematical schemas for his four fundamental discourses: Master’s discourse,Hysteric’s discourse, Analyst’s discourse and the discourse of the University.These are the four schemas:

If we follow the schema of the University Discourse, it places “S2” or “knowledge” in the position of the “agent”. The knowledge-as-agent bars or eclipses the position of “truth”.University discourse cannot do what the psychoanalyst’s discourse does i.e. putting S2 or



knowledge in the position of truth. While the analytic discourse involves itself in the half-saying

of truth by trying to approach the edge of knowledge, the university discourse suppresses truth byknowledge. Knowledge is its driving force.

The trashing of knowledge and a dialectical focalization of the intersection of knowledge

and truth are at the heart of the psychoanalytic ethic of teaching. The analysand comes to theanalyst with the presupposition that he knows it all and has the key to all his problems. But theend of analysis is constituted by a trashing of what Lacan would call the “subject who issupposed to know”. As Lacan says in Seminar XI , whenever there is a subject-supposed-to-know,there occurs the problem of transference (Lacan: 1977, 232). The analysand will graduallyrealize that the analyst does not know anything. He is a listener who only returns the analysand’swords in an inverted form thus unhiding the truth that was always already there in the speech of the analysand. Therefore, the Lacanian end of analysis consists of a trashing of the subject-

supposed-to-know or in other words it accomplishes itself by annihilating the transferential

supposition of knowledge. In the ‘Overture’ to Seminar I , Lacan evokes the image of theBuddhist master as an analogue:

It behoves the students to find out for themselves the answer to their own questions. Themaster does not teach ex cathedra a ready made science; he supplies an answer when thestudents are on the verge of finding it. (Lacan: 1988, 01)

Apart from allowing the students to find their own answers here, the teacher also comes to knowthe possible answers from the search of the students. He does not know anything on his own; it isthe students who impart to him all that he comes to know in course of the pedagogic process.

This is a dynamic of teaching which is essentially different from the classroom pedagogy. I think it is this psychoanalytic ethic which comes closest to being a suitable pedagogic framework for teaching Beckett and Beckett himself makes a gesture towards this analytic reciprocity bysupplementing knowledge with truth and undercutting the epistemological process with anontological emphasis. At a more general level, taking into consideration, the revisionary insightsof Beckett and Lacan, we can proceed towards building a new pedagogy of the 21 st centuryclassroom where the egotistical power games of teaching will be both unveiled and undone.

List of Works Consulted:

Adorno, Theodore W, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. RobertHullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 2004).



Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation).”In Lenin and Philosophy and Other essays (Aakar Books: Delhi, 2006), 85-126.

Badiou, Alain, On Beckett , eds. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power (Manchester: Clinamen Press,2003).

– , Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, eds. and trans. Oliver Feltham andJustin Clemens (London and New York: Continuum, 2005).

Beckett, Samuel, The Complete Shorter Prose: 1929-1989, ed. Stanley Gontarski (New York:Grove, 1995).

– , The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 2003).

– , How It Is, ed. Édouard Magessa O’ Reilly (London: Faber, 2009).

– , The Grove Centenary Edition (4 Volumes) ed. Paul Auster, (New York: Grove, 2006).

– , The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume I: 1929-1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, LoisMore Overbeck, George Craig and Dan Gunn (New York: Cambridge UP, 2009a).

Connor, Steven, “Literature, Politics and the Loutishness of Learning” (A paper developed froma talk given at the Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies seminar, Regent’s Park College,Oxford, 19 June 2009) http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/loutishness/ (accessed August 25, 2012).

Derrida, Jacques, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils.” In Eyes of

the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2004), 129-155.

Dilks, Stephen, “Teaching Uncertainty: The Danger is in the Neatness of Identifications”http://www.samuel-beckett.net/Uncertain.html (accessed August 25, 2012).

Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1997).

Gontarski, Stanley and C.J. Ackerley, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York:Grove, 2004).

Graver, Lawrence and Raymond Federman (eds.) Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (NewYork: Routledge, 2005).



Gussow, Mel, Conversations With and About Beckett (New York: Grove, 1996).

Katz, Daniel, Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the prose of Samuel Beckett

(Illinois: Northwestern U P, 1999).

Irving, Allan and Ken Moffatt, “Intoxicated Midnight and Carnival Classrooms: The Professor asPoet” http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue4_1/05_irving-moffatt.html (accessedAugust 25, 2012).

Juez, Brigitte Le, Beckett Before Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Lectures on French Literature, trans.

Ros Schwartz (London: Souvenir Press, 2008).

Juliet, Charles, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, trans. Tracy Cooke et

al, (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009).

Knowlson, James and Elizabeth Knowlson (eds.) Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: A

Centenary Celebration (New York: Arcade, 2006).

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar Of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-54,trans. John Forrester, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988).

– , The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques Alain-Miller (New York: Penguin, 1977).

– , The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. RussellGrigg, ed. Jacques Alain-Miller (London and New York: Norton, 2007).

– , The Seminar Of Jacques Lacan: Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and

Knowledge, 1972-73, trans. Bruce Fink, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York and London: Norton, 1998).

Lodge, David, “Samuel Beckett: Some Ping Understood.” In The Novelist at the Crossroads and

Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: ARK Paperbacks, 1986), 172-183.

Nixon, Mark, e-mail message to the author, Arka Chattopadhyay, April 10, 2012.

Protin, Mathieu, “Elective Affinities?: Beckett’s Theatre, between Denial and Philosophy inAction” (an unpublished paper presented in a seminar on ‘Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature’ on Thursday, April 7, Hyatt Regency, New Brunswick).



Synak-Pskit, Xymena, e-mail message to the author, Arka Chattopadhyay, April 16, 2012.

Taban, Carla, e-mail message to the author, Arka Chattopadhyay, April 25, 2012.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Beckett and Academics

Documents

Transcript of Beckett and Academics