Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity. III Beckett and its critics My interest in this section...

Samuel Beckett

and the

End of Modernity

III Beckett and its critics

My interest in this section does not seek to make a revision of the enormous critical production on Beckett’s work, but rather to consider some studies judged seminals, that is, studies that have acquired a status of first order regarding the Irish writer.

Introduction

III. Beckett and its critics

Nor is my intention to enter a debate since each researcher has the right to his/her point of view, and particularly because there is no one single approach to Beckett’s work, but much the contrary, there are multiple ones, and no one can assume to have the exclusive rights on Beckett.

Introduction


My interest rather seeks to situate the two most common critical positions vis-à-vis Beckett in order to demarcate them from mine.

One of the most stimulating studies is the one by Richard Begam, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity, who underlines an important current regarding criticism of Beckett’s work:

Introduction


The criticism on Beckett is sufficiently voluminous that any systematic or comprehensive Surrey is impractical.

We may, however, identify two approaches that were specifically influential during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

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The first approach, which treats Beckett as a mimetic nihilist, argues that his literature mirrors the fragmentation and alienation of modern life by giving us works that are paradoxical, confusing, absurd.

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The second approach, which views him as an existential humanist, maintains that he acknowledges the “nothingness” of human existence bur celebrates man’s freedom to choose himself as an être-pour-soi.

[…]

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Yet, as authoritative as these interpretations have been, they are by no means representative of all the scholarship produced during this period on Beckett’s fiction.

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In two landmark studies, both dating from the early 1960s, Hugh Kenner and Ruby Cohn provided suggestive alternatives to the nihilist and humanist readings of Beckett. Kenner was especially useful in revealing Beckett’s fascination with mathematical paradigms and how they relate to issues of rationalism, Cartesianism, and the novel.

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Cohn performed the valuable service of illuminating the comic side of Beckett, helping to dispel the common view that his writing is nothing more than a despairing cri de Coeur. (1996: 15)

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The two approaches cited by Begam suffer from a similar one confronted by the criticism made on Borges’ work about the same period of time, namely, a criticism that could not capture Beckett’s work simply because we had to wait to the emergence of poststructuralism in order to attempt reading Beckett.

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One of the fundamental problems with this criticism consists in an indiscriminate appropriation of the text by imposing a extreme reading, that is, a reading that does not emerge from the texts themselves but rather from the theoretical position of the critic, as the exemplary case of Uhlmann.

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Thus, Beckett’s work is transformed in a sort of floating signifier in the sense of Derrida: the work is pried open to no matter what kind of interpretation. Pascale Casanova is absolutely right when she affirms that,

As if he alone represented a kind of poetic beyond,

Beckett has only been read as the messenger or oracle fo the truth of ‘being’. (2006: 11)

Introduction


As early as the 1950s, Blanchot’s view became in France the sole authorized commentary, helping to ‘fabricate’ a tailor-made Beckett, hero of ‘pure’ criticism. Lacking a history, a past, an inheritance or a project, Beckett disappeared under the flashy grab of poetic canonization. (11)

[...]

Introduction


Everything – or virtually everything – there is to say about him has already been said.

But it suffices to switch critical standpoints and to extend to literature the principle of ‘historical inquiry’ proposed by Spinoza in order to restore to sacred texts their meaning, to discover multiple traces of the formalist intention of his project – traces that have usually gone unnoticed, because they did not form part of explanation via miracles. (12-13)

Introduction


This ‘fabrication’ of Beckett has constituted a remarkable obstacle regarding the understanding of Beckett’s writing project.

Casanova remarks that one cannot simply situate Beckett within the epistemological and cultural context of Modernity without taking into account the resistance which leads Beckett to seek new forms of expression.

Introduction


Casanova takes issue with Beckett’s critics who did research his sources of inspiration which, according to her, were to ‘influence’ his writing. She adds that,

It is therefore a question of engaging in a kind of

meticulous examination – and setting out in search of minor indices that in aisolation might seem insignificant and even over interpreted, but which, when brought together, end up forming a consistent pattern.

[…]

Introduction


Thus, ‘historical inquiry’ will enable us to discover that the project governing Beckett’s writing is not, as official criticism would have it, radically strange in kind – a meteorite abruptly and as if miraculously fallen from the sky, without precedents, referents or descendants.

Introduction


On the contrary, his greatness consists in his confrontation with the set of aesthetic issues and debates that were contemporaneous with him.

Far from being frozen in the bombast consubstantial with the rhetoric of Being, Beckett more than anyone else was concerned with aesthetic modernity.

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Although I agree with Casanova that Beckett had nothing to do with Existentialism or with the Theatre of the Absurd, I profoundly disagree pertaining to Beckett’s precursors or successors:

in fact, I would like to see both in narrative and theatre one example of a writing resembling, before and after, him.

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Furthermore Casanova states that not enough attention has been paid to Beckett’s ‘genealogy’ which could aid in explaining Beckett’s project.

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Nevertheless, I do not see the relevance that could have the ‘locating of Beckett’s sources’ since that type of analysis cannot at all determine what the texts says.

She also places a great deal of weight on the author’s ‘intentions’ which is insignificant facing texts that speak for themselves.

Introduction


Casanova adds that, However, in order to advance exegesis of Beckett’s

intention, and understand why he made such an enormous effort to tear himself away from the commonest presuppositions of literature, we must also understand the desperate impasse he was trapped in, which he could only escape from through abstraction.

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In other words, it is necessary to go further back in his history and the history of his original literary space: Ireland. His project is inseparable from the itinerary, seemingly utterly contingent and external, that led him from Dublin to Paris. (13)

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Casanova determines this genealogy in relation to three ‘influences’ that Beckett encountered, and that, according to her, define the entire Beckett project, namely, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), whose purgatory was central for Beckett (Casanova, 45-55);

he Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669), where Beckett supposedly finds an answer to his writing project (89-92),

Introduction


and finally, the Dutch painters Bram Van Velde (1895-1991) and Geer Van Velde (1998-1977), where Beckett finds the abastractionism which Beckett’s incorporates in his work (84-91)

Even if Cansanova’s posture is valid, and indeed instructive, what is fundamental in my estimation is Beckett’s ‘resistance’ to be assimilated by literary Modernity, and it is this fact that determines his project and his position facing literary Modernity.

Introduction


In addition to the descriptions proposed by the critics, quoted above, on de various approaches to Beckett’s work, Jean Valenti, in a seminal study about The Unnammable, remarks:

Une vaste gamme de regards sur l’œuvre de l’auteur

irlando-français en découlent, si bien que la critique nous propose, comme ne manquent pas de le signaler Lance Butler et Robin Davis, plus d’un « Beckett » :

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In addition to the descriptions proposed by the critics, quoted above, on de various approaches to Beckett’s work, Jean Valenti, in a seminal study about The Unnammable, remarks:

« Beckett as quintessential nouveau romancier, Beckett

the Cartesian, Beckett the Existentialist, these have rubbed shoulders with Beckett the Nehilist, Beckett the Mystic and, of course, Beckett the dramatist of the Absurd and Beckett the Explorer of the liminations of language».

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Énumération fort incomplète au demeurant, car on pourrait aussi y ajouter Beckett le moderniste, voir le postmoderniste. (2006: 199)

What is worth underlining is the comment by Lance

Butler and Robin Davis quoted by Valenti. Although critics have treated all the topics conceivable about Beckett, is an error to consider Beckett as a Nouveau Roman writer, this is a type of narrative that concentrate on the descriptions of ‘objects’;

Introduction


projecting a personal vision on these objects that constitute the world as Alain Robbe-Grillet states in Pour un nouveau Roman:

“Que ce soit d’abord par leur présence que les objets et les gestes s’imposent […]” and that “Dans les constructions romanesques futures, gestes et objets serons là avant d’être quelque chose […] (1963 : 23).

Introduction


However, in Beckett’s what we have is the obliteration of objects since the narrative voice does not describe anything and all we have is an utterance completely fractured, self-reflexive, that only isconcern with itself.

Furthermore, What Robbe-Grillet postulates is that each narrator creates a new novel in each act of writing:

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“Chaque romancier, chaque roman, doit inventer sa propre forme” (1963: 12), and this is not at all Beckett’ case who, in my estimation writes only one work.

All his writing is a journey towards Worstward Ho and Breath, leading to a total reversal of meaning.

Jean Valenti comments on the complexity of these interpretations underlining,

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Le conflit des interprétations accentue ici deux pôles diamétralement opposées : interprétations symboliques (prolongement de la tradition humaniste) vs inscription de l’œuvre beckettienne dans la déconstruction du sens, du logocentrisme et des grandes mythes territoriaux (le sujet, la conscience, la pensés). (2006: 200)

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After having underlined come central traits, approaches and themes regarding Beckett’s work, in what follows I propose a different approach, one that does not follows the criticism produced to date.

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My approach does not attempt to be original, much the contrary, since my reflexion is marked by my readings of exceptional studies such as those by Begam (1996), Casanova, Wiesberg, Valenti (2006), Ben-Zvi (1986), Connor (1988), Hassan (1967), Albright (2003), Janvier (1964), Hill (1990), Dearlove (1982), Iser (1974), only to mentioned some studies from the prolific critical production on Beckett’s work.

Introduction


My contribution resides not so much in what I have in common with these brilliant studies, but rather in approach I attempt to produce, one that is different in as much that it has not quite been present in the studies on Beckett.

Thus, I joint then, my approach to all the other readings which have informed my own. In this, I follow Roland Barthes who in the “Death of the Author” (1988), statutes that,

Introduction


Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.

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The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. (189)

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Then, we have to do with a collective reader where each one of them contributes with something different to the reading of Beckett’s texts in our case, leaving always open the play of signification, which is an infinite sliding of meaning, always differed, inaccessible, but the will to read it is inevitable.

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Why this language of failure? Beckett had a great suspicion with respect to language, particularly y his incapacity to inscribe de Subject:

language does not allow him to express the empirical Subject, since language does not belong to, it, and from here the aporistic dimension of is writing.

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Beckett creates a slippery, nomadic and rhizomatic writing which only leaves a trace of words, words without any meaning but its own reflection that is inscribed in the Other, and that Other is language which precedes it and because it does not belong to it.

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Then, what to do? Say something in order not to say anything, and to leave the signified in an infinite search, as the rhizome that has not origin neither beginning, neither ending. In this manner Beckett’s writing, but also his textuality, have no origin or point of arrival.

Introduction


All one can legitimately do is to attempt to capture the textual strategy.

This is why what I propose, instead of superimposing a series of interpretation whose encoring is the outside to the texts, is to let the texts speak for themselves and to explore this aporistic strategy we have proposed.

Introduction

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