Stage and Screen Studies 10

Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama

Works for Stage and Screen 1962-1985

vonErik Tonning

1. Auflage

Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama – Tonning

schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG

Peter Lang Bern 2007

Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet:www.beck.de

ISBN 978 3 03911 022 3

Inhaltsverzeichnis: Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama – Tonning

13

Chapter 1

Towards an aesthetic of abstraction

Beckett’s abstract style: Preliminary orientations

It is a commonplace within Beckett criticism that Play (1962–1963)1

is the first example of a distinct new ‘late dramatic style’. In S.E.

Gontarski’s summary (1997: 93), for example:

From Play onward Beckett’s stage images would grow increasingly de-

humanized, reified and metonymic, featuring dismembered or incorporeal

creatures. It became a theater finally static and undramatic in any traditional

sense. It is a theater of body parts and ghosts, a theater striving for transparency

rather than solidity. And the playing space is always delimited, ritualized,

circumscribed, framed. The proscenium arch is central [...] to these works,

defining and emphasizing the playing space, delimiting the margins so that the

works from Play onward make little sense performed on more modern, fluid or

thrust stages or in the round. They are as much paintings, snapshots, or since

they are textured and three-dimensional, as much bas-relief sculptures as drama.

These observations are apt, yet they remain post hoc. As my next

chapter will demonstrate, Beckett himself saw Play as an aesthetic

breakthrough, and specifically one that had led him towards an ‘ab-

stract’ formal language. This study accordingly takes its cue from

Beckett in arguing that the concept of ‘abstraction’ is an indispensable

one for analysing the stylistic development of the late works for stage

and screen.

However, this concept is far from self-explanatory. Furthermore,

Beckett used it in a variety of ways, on occasion even dismissively.

Indeed, the evidence suggests that before Play, Beckett did not think

of his work in terms of ‘abstraction’. Neither did he take a particular

interest in ‘abstract’ art per se – although, as we shall see, some of the

works that drew his attention were in fact of this kind.

1 Dates of composition for Beckett’s works are given in parentheses.

14

The key to understanding Beckett’s statements on abstraction, as

well as the marked shift towards an ‘abstract language’ in Play, is

Beckett’s own aesthetic standpoint: his insistence on the inescapability

of the ‘rupture of the lines of communication’ (D 70) between subject

and object, and the ‘ferocious dilemma of expression’ (PTD 110) that

follows from it. This provided him with a definite criterion by which

to judge artistic styles and individual works. He considered abstract

styles valid in so far as they emerge from a continuous, unflinching

confrontation with this dilemma: thus, an increasingly abstract formal

language may become necessary for an artist as this confrontation

proceeds to new levels of complexity. However, inventing such a

language is by no means an aim in itself.

This also indicates how Beckett’s own ‘turn’ should be under-

stood: as a necessary development from the point to which his artistic

trajectory had brought him. This chapter will attempt to define that

point through a selective review of core features of his aesthetic

thought and its manifestation in The Unnamable (1949–1950) and in

the pre-Play drama. We shall see how Beckett’s characters are caught

in an inscrutable, inhuman, ultimately irrational system, against which

they painfully struggle in vain. In Play, where a spotlight extorts the

same rapid, fragmented responses from three urn-bound and highly

depersonalised figures twice over, the characters may easily be

regarded as puppet-like products of an utterly indifferent schematism.

This explicit and structurally decisive foregrounding of the ‘system’

involves a fundamental shift of emphasis, which draws attention to the

characters’ epiphenomenal insubstantiality: Gontarski’s ‘dehumanisa-

tion’, ‘reification’, ‘dismemberment’, ‘incorporeality’ and ‘ghostli-

ness’ all emerge from this shift.

Chapter 2 will explore two analogies to the formal language

developed in Play, both suggested by Beckett himself as comparative

reference-points: Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, and Vas-

sily Kandinsky’s early abstract painting. While I do not consider

either of these formal models to be decisive influences upon Beckett’s

shift by themselves, they do provide two specific and complementary

ways in which his new language may be characterised as ‘abstract’.

This analysis will also show that any ‘abstract language’ must develop

specific technical means of achieving new kinds of expressive force if

15

it is to be artistically effective after having abandoned the resources of

more traditional forms. In Play, this entails that the emphasis on

‘insubstantiality’ is counterpointed by a paradoxical sense of weak-

ness, failure and distress (those crucial Beckettian keywords) in the

face of this condition itself. We shall see how new technical pos-

sibilities for significant intercutting and the ‘musical’ repetition of

motifs in Play are exploited to convey a mounting implicit anguish at

the characters’ entrapment within a dead language and clichéd roles –

in fact at their very inability to communicate. The analysis cannot,

then, be allowed to conclude either in exclusively formalist terms

(‘Beckett’s interest in patterns’) or philosophical concepts (‘Beckett’s

demonstration of the insubstantiality of identity’). This theme is

further pursued by examining Beckett’s creative evolution towards an

‘abstract language’ in drafts towards Play and Come and Go (1965).

This material reveals a continuous dialectic between an emphasis on

formal schematisation and the reduction of realist background, and

efforts to compensate for the resulting losses of expressive force by

utilising new technical possibilities.

In addition to providing an indispensable background for detailed

analysis of Beckett’s new formal language in Play, my focus in the

present chapter on the origin of that shift in his aesthetic thought and

practice also draws attention to another sense of ‘abstraction’ which

will be important for my argument throughout this book. This is

abstraction as ‘distillation’. On the most obvious level, the fore-

grounding of an inhuman schematism in Play condenses years of

artistic engagement with the idea of an irrational Will, or nothingness,

or ‘incoherent continuum’ at the heart of reality. More specifically, we

will discover a massive weight of significance surrounding the sim-

plest movements, gestures, postures, images, structures, objects and

words in these late pieces for stage and screen, which reflects

Beckett’s practice of ‘abstracting from’ a wide range of individual

sources as a continual means of artistic rediscovery.

In keeping with his general habit of bringing artists as diverse as

Paul Cézanne, Jack Yeats, Franz Marc, Karl Ballmer, and Bram van

Velde into the ambit of his own ‘violently extreme and personal point

of view’ (PTD 103) by finding the ‘dilemma of expression’ at work in

them all, Beckett’s sources (drawn from art, music, religion, phil-

16

osophy, psychology, literature and personal biography) are always

appropriated to the developing needs of his abstract style. In spite of

this seamless integration, however, there is to my mind little doubt

that Beckett’s use of specific sources (whether from memory or from

notes) during the writing process, so evident in his allusion-saturated

early work (see Pilling 2004 and Ackerley 2004), was carried on into

his later period in submerged form.2 This assumption necessitates

empirical research; and while some of my hypotheses about Beckett’s

sources are no doubt riskier than others, they are all intended to be

open to falsification or supplementation by documentary evidence.

This approach will enable us to see how these submerged sources

often function as an underlying ‘scaffolding’,3 motivating particular

structural choices. The topic of abstraction-as-distillation will there-

fore also prove a crucial one for understanding the actual development

of Beckett’s formal language in these late works for stage and screen.

Chapters 1 and 2, then, concentrate on Beckett’s aesthetic

thought and the initial development of an ‘abstract dramatic style’ for

the theatre, respectively. Chapter 3 analyses Beckett’s first pieces for

film (Film, 1963) and television (Eh Joe, 1965) as attempts to adapt

the formal language of Play to new media, the active spotlight

becoming an active camera. While neither attempt was finally suc-

cessful, surrounding records demonstrate a continuing concern with

achieving a quality of ‘abstraction’ on Beckett’s part.

2 This conviction is supported by a broader realisation by scholars of the con-

tinuing importance of the learning and experience garnered by Beckett during

his years of intellectual formation in the 1920s and 1930s. An important

influence here has been Matthew Feldman’s work on the ‘interwar notes’.

Feldman crucially dislodges the assumption that Beckett read ‘everything’, and

conclusively demonstrates the centrality of certain closely studied synthetic

texts (chief among them Wilhelm Windelband’s 1901 A History of Philosophy)

and specific extracts from texts to the task of unearthing Beckett’s sources.

Furthermore, Feldman documents that Beckett returned to his notes again and

again (see especially his comments on Beckett’s 21 November 1957 letter to

Alan Schneider, Feldman 2006: 32–3).

3 J.D. O’Hara’s useful term for ‘the basic structures of thought that uphold

Beckett’s works’ (1997: 1). Feldman (2004: xi n.3) points out that Beckett

himself used the term in Proust (PTD 11).

17

Chapter 4 traces the emergence of a new compositional focus in

Not I (1972), That Time (1974–1975) and Footfalls (1975), which no

longer depends on the foregrounding of a particular structural device.

Instead, Beckett relies on the internal tensions created by a series of

formal divisions: between a disembodied mouth, the broken speech it

delivers, and a silent djellaba-clad figure in Not I; between a mute

head seemingly hovering in mid-air and the voices which assail it

from three sides in That Time; and, in Footfalls, between a ghostly,

grey-clad pacing woman and the offstage voice of the mother, as well

as between four sharply contrasting scenes which unsettle all in-

ferences about what exactly is being enacted before us. While these

stage-images have a pronounced Expressionist flavour, Beckett is also

reshaping this tradition by splitting his figures into multiple images,

narratives, and voices. Expressionist Angst, derided as sentimental by

Beckett in his ‘German Diaries’ (1936–1937), is displaced by a sense

of detachment, numbness and absence. This is akin to pathology, and

Beckett’s 1930s notes on psychology define several mechanisms of

psychic division, along with a psychoanalytical picture of the mind as

a conglomerate of inherited traumas, originating in the trauma of

birth; this congenial vision directly impacted Beckett’s shaping of

these plays.

Chapter 5 shows how Beckett’s abstract style was transferred to

television in Ghost Trio (1975) and ...but the clouds... (1976) by

means of a ‘painterly’ circumscription of the image, possibly inspired

by the interiors of the Dutch seventeenth-century artist Johannes

Vermeer. The use of fragments from Beethoven and W.B. Yeats, and

allusion to the Lady of the eleventh- and twelfth-century troubadours

and Dante, paradoxically converge on a distinctly anti-Romantic anal-

ysis of desire as inherently unfulfillable.

Finally, Chapter 6 examines A Piece of Monologue (1977–1979),

Rockaby (1980), Ohio Impromptu (1980), Quad (I & II) (1981), Nacht

und Träume (1982) and What Where (1983) in relation to Beckett’s

rediscovery (initially in the prose work Company [1977–1980]) of

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s theory of ‘monads’, an underestimated

presence within Beckett’s thought. His appropriation of Leibniz as

‘scaffolding’ for these pieces became a rich quarry for formal in-

novations, allowing him to rework the topics of the self’s hermetic

18

solitude, porous insubstantiality, and ineluctable involvement in an

inhuman, non-rational system. Furthermore, the self-reflexive analysis

of ‘Beckettianness’ in these pieces is underpinned by the idea of the

monadic self: the artist is ultimately shown to be entangled, in the

very act of writing, in the same condition as his invented figures.

Beckett on abstraction: Documented attitudes

Since Beckett’s references to ‘abstraction’ before Play are sometimes

polemically negative, it seems advisable to begin this review by citing

one which will enable us to put this attitude in context. During his

visit to Hamburg in 1936, at the home of the son of the late art critic

Max Sauerlandt, Beckett saw ‘a lot of [Christian] Nass. He does not

interest me. The will to escape from “abstraction”, that is senseless,

that ends in photography’ (GD 26 November 1936).4

These quotation-marks are also to be found elsewhere in the

diaries: they signal a scepticism on Beckett’s part towards artistic

efforts to bypass the world of objects entirely for the sake of a self-

sufficient formalism productive of ‘pure’ balances or harmonies of

colour and shape. For example, Beckett praised Kandinsky’s Träu-

merische Improvisation (1913), which he saw at Ida Bienert’s Dresden

house on 7, and again on 15, February 1937, for being ‘the biggest and

brightest and least “abstract” I have seen – a magnificent work’ (GD

7 February 1937, my italics).5 The negative reference here is clearly to

the idealised geometrical configurations of Kandinsky’s later Bauhaus

period (1922–1933). Beckett had previously dismissed a ‘small room

full of “abstractions”’ (GD 23 January 1937) by Kandinsky in the

4 My thanks to Mark Nixon for supplementing my transcription.

5 Beckett’s encounter with this work is mentioned in DF 252. I give German

names for works Beckett saw in Germany throughout this study.

19

Moritzburg gallery in Halle (including the Giftgrüne Sichel [1927]).6

Also, another of Bienert’s Bauhaus Kandinskys,7 grouped together

with two Mondrians called Komposition (c.1922–1925, and 1925) in

her late husband’s study, is described sarcastically in his diary as a

type of bourgeois ornament: ‘2 Mondrian and a Kandinsky, whose

organics aid her meditations, if they do not go with the furniture’ (GD

7 February 1937). Eleven years later, Beckett’s attitude had not

changed; in the 1948 ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’, he summarily

dismisses the ‘estimables abstracteurs de quintessence [estimable ab-

stractors of quintessence] Mondrian, Lissitzky, Malevitsch, Moholy-

Nagy’ (D 135) from serious consideration. Similarly, in a 1949 letter

to Georges Duthuit, he describes two contemporary movements – the

decorative colour harmonies of post-Delaunay-style painters such as

Jacques Villon, Jean-René Bazaine and Alfred Manessier on the one

hand, and the Paris School heirs of Constructivism and de Stijl on the

other – as forms of masturbation, ‘the pure manstuprations of Orphic

and abstract art’ (in French, trans. George Craig, cited in Gunn 2006:

15). A central motivation behind this whole tradition of self-conscious

‘purity’ or ‘quintessence’ is the imitation of some form of cosmic

harmony, from Mondrian’s aim of ‘direct representation’ of the ‘or-

iginal unity’ shown by ‘pure vision’ to be the ‘enduring force in all

things’ (1987: 48), to Bazaine’s emphasis on the ‘interpenetration’ or

‘profound kinship’ between ‘man and world’ (cited in Haftmann

1976: 332). This, as we shall see, is a profoundly alien emphasis for

Beckett.

It seems likely, then, that Beckett would have sympathised

somewhat with Nass’s impulse to avoid this type of scare-quoted

‘abstraction’. Yet a willed flight into mimetic realism, with its servile,

photographic attempt to ‘transcribe the surface, the façade’ (PTD 79),

6 Beckett does not give any names, but this work (acquired in 1929 and

appropriated by the Nazis not long after Beckett’s visit) is mentioned in

Romanus (ed.) 1985: 52.

7 According to the catalogue (Grohmann 1933), her collection included Spitzen

im Bergen (1927), Schwer und Leicht (1930), Weiß auf Schwarz (1930), Grauer

Kreis (1923), Brücke (1930), Starr (1931) and Verschwimmend (1932), all

Bauhaus works.

20

is no alternative. This is so not least because the realist attitude is for

Beckett essentially naïve:

Le ‘réaliste’, suant devant sa cascade et pestant contre les nuages, n’a pas cessé

de nous enchanter. Mais qu’il ne vienne plus nous emmerder avec ses histoires

d’objectivité et de choses vues. De toutes les choses que personne n’a jamais

vues, ses cascades sont assurément les plus énormes (D 126).

The ‘realist’, sweating before his waterfall and cursing the clouds, still enchants

us. But we would prefer him not to bother us with his talk of objectivity and the

observation of things. Of all the things nobody has ever seen, his cascades are

certainly the most enormous.

The word ‘abstract’ derives from the Latin abstractus, meaning

‘drawn away’; among the senses given by the OED are derivation,

extraction, removal, separation, and withdrawal from the contem-

plation of present objects, from material bodies, from practice, or from

particular examples of something. Beckett is pointing out that all

painting is at one remove from the cascading flux of perception, and at

another remove from an ultimately inscrutable ‘reality’; in this

particular sense, ‘representational’ and ‘non-representational’ styles

may both be said to be ‘abstract’, irrespective of the painter’s in-

tentions. The ‘abstractors of quintessence’ and the naïve realist are in

fact at one in thinking that this situation – the ‘rupture of the lines of

communication’ between subject and object (or the ‘breakdown’ of

both) used as a criterion of authentic poetry in the 1934 review

‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (D 70) – can be somehow ignored. On the other

hand, there can be any number of ways of responding seriously to this

situation, which may involve the use of a representational or a non-

representational idiom, or some combination. Shane Weller’s dis-

cussion (2005: 62f) of ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’ ably focuses this

issue:

Rather than freeing the artist to pursue some absolutely non-representational

art, recognition of the object’s resistance to representation inaugurates an art

whose theme or matter will be that resistance itself: ‘Est peint ce qui empêche

de peindre’ (D 136). Art will therefore be forever in mourning for its object:

‘deuil de l’objet’ (D 135). This art of mourning will be endless precisely

because the object’s resistance to representation can neither be overcome nor

21

ignored. Abstract art – grounded in the notion that art can simply free itself

from the object – is not art at all: ‘Il semble absurde de parler, comme faisait

Kandinsky, d’une peinture libérée de l’objet. Ce dont la peinture s’est libérée,

c’est de l’illusion qu’il existe plus d’un objet de représentation, peut-être même

de l’illusion que cet unique objet se laisse représenter’ (D 136).8

My only disagreement here is with Weller’s contention that Beckett

condemns abstract art as such: as we shall see, Beckett strongly

approves of some painters, such as Karl Ballmer and Bram van Velde,

whose work contains only residual gestures towards figuration.9 The

will to escape from ‘abstraction’ and the will to indulge in it are

equally senseless. Yet an abstract formal language may still become

necessary for the artist who attempts to confront the ‘one object of

representation’ that there is left after art has freed itself from the

illusion that there can be any realism that is not remote from ‘reality’;

this object, the ‘only terrain accessible’ to the artist, is ‘the no man’s

land that he projects around himself, rather as the flame projects its

zone of evaporation’ (1949 letter to Duthuit, in French, trans. George

Craig, cited in Gunn 2006: 15).10

Furthermore, since the underlying

drama of the artist’s struggles in this obscure region, and the ‘absurd

and mysterious drive towards the image’ (‘d’absurdes et mystérieuses

8 Weller’s final quotation may be translated as follows: ‘It seems absurd to speak,

as Kandinsky did, of an art that has freed itself from the object. That from

which painting has freed itself is the illusion that there exists more than one

object of representation, perhaps even from the illusion that this unique object

lets itself be represented’.

9 As for Kandinsky, he is on Beckett’s list of ‘the great of our time’ who bring

light to ‘the issueless predicament of existence’ (D 97). It is Kandinsky’s

rhetoric that Beckett is attacking in Weller’s last quotation, not necessarily the

painter’s work as such.

10 This letter provides striking evidence of the consistency of Beckett’s concerns

over time and across art-forms; he recalls coming out with ‘an angry article on

modern Irish poets, in which I set up, as criterion of worthwhile modern poetry,

awareness of the vanished object. Already!’ (to Duthuit, 1949, cited in Gunn

2006: 15). In ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, Beckett had written: ‘The artist who is

aware of [the “rupture”] may state the space that intervenes between him and

the world of objects; he may state it as no-man’s-land, Hellespont, or vacuum,

according as he happens to be feeling resentful, nostalgic, or merely depressed’

(D 70).

22

poussées vers l’image’ [D 123]) that they convey, here become far

more important than any individual material or technique employed,

one might argue that to conceive oneself as occupying this terrain is

already to have actively ‘drawn away’ from whatever is actually

presented on the canvas.

This idea of the canvas as a site where the drama of the authentic

artist’s navigation of the ‘no man’s land’ which surrounds him is

concretely enacted in fact provides the basis for a much more positive

conception of abstraction on Beckett’s part, in distinct opposition to

his polemic against the ‘abstractors of quintessence’. This conception

is already formulated in his German diary. However, this complex

formulation needs to be understood against the background of his

encounter with the art of Karl Ballmer.

Commenting on Ballmer’s painting Kopf in Rot (c.1930),11

Beckett wrote:

Wonderful red Frauenkopf, skull earth sea and sky, I think of Monadologie and

my Vulture. Would not occur to me to call this painting abstract. A

metaphysical concrete. Nor Nature convention, but its source, fountain of

Erscheinung [Appearance]. Fully a posteriori painting. Object not exploited to

illustrate an idea, as in say [Fernand] Léger or [Willi] Baumeister, but primary.

The communication exhausted by the optical experience that is its motive and

content. Anything further is by the way. Thus Leibniz, monadologie, Vulture,

are by the way. Extraordinary stillness. His concern with Renaissance tradition

(GD 26 November 1936, cited in DF 240).

The bulk of the canvas (the entire left-hand side, the lower region, and

a little more than half the right-hand side) is a crude uneven red, with

a few dirty streaks of yellow, green and blue; the upper right-hand

corner is an uneven light blue, with streaks of green. The red is

thickened in the central region, forming a border which indicates the

neck and the very elongated shape of the ‘head’. Within this border

(literally in red) is a tripartite ‘facial’ area: at the bottom, light red

with roughly horizontal stripes which might vaguely hint at mouth and

nasal area; in the middle, darkish blue with some green, and with more

stripes in black, suggesting two possible eyes and perhaps a forehead

11 Reproduced in Wismer (ed.) 1990. My thanks to Mark Nixon for identifying

this picture.

23

at the border between this and the uppermost area; and finally a light

blue. These three areas can also be seen as ‘earth’, ‘sea’ and ‘sky’,

with the ‘forehead’ line marking the receding horizon (hence perhaps

‘Renaissance tradition’). The painting clearly has the barest of claims

to figuration; yet Beckett is at pains to deny that it is ‘abstract’ in the

sense of the geometrical games of a Léger or a Baumeister, who for

him simply illustrate pre-formed concepts. Instead Ballmer’s ‘object’

– meaning here the painting itself, the ‘optical experience’ – is

primary, and any suggestion of the ‘Erscheinung’ of things found in

nature does not depend on any conventional mimesis, but emerges in

the form of hints created by the self-consciously rough application of

red, blue, yellow, green and black. Such hints are secondary, or a

posteriori; the concrete act of painting, the concrete fact of paint,

comes first. Yet however ‘by the way’ he finally deems it, Beckett

also infers the presence of a specific thematic in the work, which

makes its very ‘concreteness’ a ‘metaphysical’ one. This is associated

with Leibniz’s theory of ‘monads’ and with Beckett’s own poem ‘The

Vulture’ (published 1935). Briefly, the relevant features of the

‘monad’ are its ‘windowlessness’, or utter simplicity and isolation

from all other monads, and its nature as a ‘mirror’ of the entire

universe, registering and containing all representations potentially,

though without conscious ‘apperception’. The appearance of an ‘outer

world’ of nature is generated from inside the monad itself, as per-

ceptions pass from ‘virtual’ to ‘actual’; but no monad will ever

encounter anything (or anyone) genuinely ‘other’.12

In ‘The Vulture’

(CP 9), the bird is ‘dragging his hunger through the sky / of my skull

shell of sky and earth’; sky and earth are solipsistically enclosed

within the skull, and the hunger for contact with a world outside the

skull is impossible to satisfy; all experience undergoes a deathly

translation into mere subjective appearance, ‘till hunger earth and sky

be offal’. Beckett clearly found an acute awareness of the ‘rupture of

the lines of communication’ between subject and object in Ballmer’s

painting. Yet Ballmer’s ‘skull earth sea sky’ image does not, for

Beckett, simply illustrate a concept. This solipsistic image itself

derives from an explicitly painterly act: an act which produces a

12 An extended treatment of Beckett and Leibniz is given in Chapter 6.

24

world, but which simultaneously turns that world into ‘offal’, im-

muring itself in subjectivity through the very generation of ‘ap-

pearances’. It was this implicit drama in Ballmer’s work – his

‘stillness and the unsaid’ (GD 26 November 1936) – that principally

captured Beckett’s attention.13

In conversation with the art historian Rosa Schapire, Beckett

formulated a vision of abstract art which appears to be modelled

precisely on Ballmer’s ‘fully a posteriori painting’:

Her raptures over [Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s] latest work, esp. watercolour

landscapes. I disagree with all she says, on subject of abstract painting, Ballmer,

Brouwer, Giorgione, Signorelli & so on. For her all Metaphysik is by def.

‘seelisch’. Pfui! Ballmer therefore too intellectual, too ‘Klug’ to be meta-

physical. S.R. of course metaphysical. I say but what about the metaphysic of

say Descartes. And so on. On my antithesis, that painting is abstract when

reality is post sum, the best examples would be Dalí and Italian primitives. Why

not (GD 26 December 1936).14

Schapire’s supreme criterion of value seems to have been rooted in the

German Romantic notion of Nature as Spirit: Schmidt-Rottluff’s

painting is ‘soulful’ because his landscapes seem to her to com-

municate this pantheistic metaphysic.15

Against this view, Beckett

poses the ‘metaphysical concrete’ of Ballmer’s art: here, ‘meta-

physics’ does not mean an immersion in Nature-as-Spirit, but rather

13 Beckett later read Ballmer’s pamphlet Aber Herr Heidegger! (1933), recording

those parts of Ballmer’s ‘superb’ closing quotation from Rudolf Steiner that he

felt elucidated the painter’s work, e.g. ‘Das Wesen der ganzen übrigen Welt

schöpfe ich aus mir, u. mein eigenes Wesen schöpfe ich aus mir [The essence of

all the rest of the world I create (or: extract) from out of myself, and my own

essence I create (or: extract) from out of myself]’ (GD 20 March 1937). Beckett

here asks ‘Where does this differ from the Monadology?’, and goes on to

comment that ‘The object that he paints is the concrete real spirit of the

concrete real Ballmer, Nature come to herself, the “Wesen der Dinge [essence

of things]”’. Thus, Ballmer’s painting is ‘not a mindlessness before Nature,

because that is “Vorgang ohne Wesen [process without essence]”’, nor is it

‘abstract’ (in the sense, as we have seen, of a Léger or a Baumeister), ‘because

that is “Wesen ohne Vorgang [essence without process]”’; Ballmer’s resistance

to both these stances is evidently at the core of Beckett’s interest.

14 My thanks to Mark Nixon for supplementing my transcription.

15 For further discussion of German Romanticism, see Chapter 5, pp.179–85.

25

the world-corroding scepticism of a Descartes, capable of viewing all

phenomena as illusory except thinking itself. Now, contact with

‘reality’, with a world outside the mind, feebly salvaged by Descartes

by means of the wild hypothesis of the pineal gland, is as we have

seen decidedly ‘post sum’ – inessential, of secondary importance – in

Ballmer’s Kopf in Rot: instead, the act of generating appearances from

paint is primary. If Schapire suggested in conversation some version

of the common idea that the value of abstract art is to put us in touch

with a spiritual reality through a purified harmony of colour and form,

Beckett’s ‘antithesis’, that ‘art is abstract when reality is post sum’,

would here precisely assert the primacy of the painterly act as a

concrete response to the impossibility of contact with ‘reality’. Ab-

straction is, as we have seen, here positively conceived in terms of an

active painterly grappling with the condition of all art as irremediably

‘withdrawn’ from such contact.

This interpretation is indirectly supported by a later use of the

phrase ‘post sum’ by Beckett: responding to an exhibition of the

works of the painter Max Klinger, he lamented that ‘Throughout

concepts [are] projected on to canvas (i.e. on the world), the optical

experience post sum, a hideous inversion of the visual process, the eye

waiving its privilege’ (GD 28 January 1937). If this is an ‘inversion’,

and the correct order of priority is that all concepts should be merely

‘by the way’ (like monads and ‘The Vulture’ in Beckett’s response to

Ballmer, and unlike the ‘illustration of ideas’ in Léger and Bau-

meister), then it seems natural to infer that Beckett’s earlier charac-

terisation of reality as ‘post sum’ in (at least some) abstract art must

have reflected a version of the correct order of priority, involving the

primacy of the optical experience. This characterisation cannot there-

fore have been a negative one: on the contrary, it suggests a positive

ideal of abstract art. Beckett closes his diary entry with an acknow-

ledgement that he and Schapire have been talking completely past

each other; her suggestions of the contrived surrealist dream-

world of Salvador Dalí and the heavily doctrinal paintings of the

26

thirteenth- and fourteenth-century ‘Italian primitives’16

as ‘examples’

of his own novel conception of abstract art are so far from the mark as

to elicit only a resigned ‘why not’.

We have noted Beckett’s decisive antipathy towards the self-

sufficient formalism of the ‘abstractors of quintessence’; yet we have

also established his approval of the use of an abstract language as long

as this is conceived as a means of responding to the ‘rupture of the

lines of communication’ between subject and object; and we have

further explored the possibility that the notion of a ‘metaphysical

concrete’ in Ballmer’s art, emphasising the primacy of the act of

painting and the optical experience as a specific outworking of the

disconnect between painter and world, may at one stage have been

proposed by Beckett as a model for a more authentic abstract art.

However, it is obvious that Beckett had no wish to propound any

systematic theory of abstract art; his interest is entirely focused on

concrete artistic struggles taking place within the ‘no man’s land’. In

fact, his deference to the ‘optical experience’ became so marked in his

art criticism that these texts tend to depict critical description itself as

a kind of violation.17

This trend is particularly evident in his writings

on the Dutch painter Abraham (‘Bram’) van Velde:

Nous avons affaire chez Abraham van Velde à un effort d’aperception si

exclusivement et farouchement pictural que nous autres, dont les reflexions sont

tout en murmures, ne le concevons qu’avec peine, ne le concevons qu’en

l’entraînant dans une sorte de ronde syntaxique, qu’en le plaçant dans le temps

(D 125).

16 This term, coined in the nineteenth century, was used about Italian painting

before Raphael, roughly from Giotto (1267–1337) to Fra Angelico (c.1395–

1455), to denote the allegedly more ‘primitive’ state of painting before the

sixteenth-century Italian High Renaissance. My thanks to Gervase Rosser for

this information.

17 His texts tend simply to assume that the artist is responding to the ‘rupture’,

while also denying the relevance of commentary. For example, Jack B. Yeats is

said to be an artist ‘from nowhere’ who ‘submits in trembling to the un-

masterable’; yet the very idea of a ‘gloss’ is denied by ‘images of such breath-

less immediacy as these’ (D 149).

27

In the case of Abraham van Velde, we are dealing with a striving towards

apperception so exclusively and fiercely pictorial that we others, whose re-

flections are reduced to mere murmurings, are only just able to conceive of it,

are only able to conceive of it by drawing it into a kind of syntactic round-

dance, by placing it in time.

There is no doubt that Beckett sees van Velde’s art as responding to

the ‘rupture’ no less than Ballmer’s: the Dutchman is said to start from

the realisation that ‘I am unable to see the object in order to represent

it because I am what I am’ (‘Je ne peux voir l’objet, pour le

représenter, parce que je suis ce que je suis’ [D 136]). He attempts to

paint ‘the impediment-eye’ (‘l’empêchement-oeil’ [D 136]), the thing

which prevents him from seeing. But there is an important difference

of emphasis here in the dominant preoccupation of these texts – and

especially the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit – with the utter

impossibility and necessary failure of this project itself. For Beckett,

van Velde’s is an art that not only confronts the ‘one object of

representation’ left for the artist; it also comes closest to actually

shedding the illusion that the ‘no man’s land’ could ever be repre-

sented. He is an artist who ‘fails, as no other dare fail’ (PTD 125);

while other artists, ‘literally skewered on the ferocious dilemma of

expression’, continue to ‘wriggle’ (110) by making ‘a new occasion, a

new term of relation’ out of ‘impossibility’ itself (125), Beckett’s van

Velde submits entirely to the condition of having ‘nothing to express,

nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no

power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to

express’ (103). We will soon return to the topic of the ‘nothing’, and

the paradox that any attempt to express or approach ‘it’ must fail

because of the very enactment of that attempt itself. At this point, I

only wish to note that a central purpose of this aporetic rhetoric, which

finally leaves poor van Velde ‘incapable of any image whatsoever’

(113), is precisely to resist any implication that conceptual gen-

eralisations about the ‘dilemma of expression’ can replace artistic

confrontation with this condition from within: the hypothesis of van

Velde’s ‘fidelity to failure’ (125) even in the face of the temptation to

make this fidelity itself a new index of achievement thus functions

28

here as a symbol of the ultimate inescapability of that condition, and

the endlessness of the task of confrontation itself.

Beckett reacted strongly, even vehemently, to attempts by journ-

alists, critics, academics, directors and actors to reduce his own work

to any mere illustration of concepts. To Alan Schneider, he famously

characterised his work as a matter of ‘fundamental sounds (no joke

intended) made as fully as possible’, with ‘Hamm as stated, and Clov

as stated, together as stated’ being ‘all I can manage, more than I

could’ (AS 29 December 1957, D 109). This may in fact have been

rooted in a fear that his characters and fictional worlds would be

understood as nothing but ‘abstractions’:

Nor is [Waiting for Godot], for me, a symbolist play, I cannot stress that too

much. First and foremost, it is a question of something that happens, almost a

routine, and it is this dailiness and this materiality, in my view, that needs to be

brought out. That at any moment Symbols, Ideas, Forms might show up: this

for me is secondary, is there anything they do not show up behind? In any event

there is nothing to be gained by giving them clear form. The characters are

living creatures, only just living perhaps, they are not emblems. I can readily

understand your unease at their lack of characterisation. But I would urge you

to see in them less the result of an attempt at abstraction, something of which I

am almost incapable, than a refusal to tone down all that is at one and the same

time complex and amorphous in them.18

This sense of ‘abstraction’ as a type of emblem or allegory – ‘that

glorious double-entry, with every credit in the said account a debit in

the meant, and inversely’ (D 90) – is, then, yet another one of which

Beckett remained extremely wary. And not without reason; in the

1950s and 1960s, he seems to have been acutely aware of the

tendency to assimilate his work to the conceptual apparatus of French

existentialism. Theodor Adorno, with whom Beckett appears to have

discussed this issue in Paris in the autumn of 1958, points out that for

18 Letter to Karl Heinz Caspari, 1953; in French, trans. George Craig, cited in

Gunn 2006: 14.

29

Beckett ‘absurdity is no longer an “existential situation” diluted to an

idea and then illustrated’ (1991: 241), as in the Sartrean thesis-play:19

‘To this kind of unacknowledged abstraction, Beckett poses the

decisive antithesis: an avowed process of subtraction’ (246).20

These

statements to Caspari and Adorno demonstrate a continuing anxiety to

avoid the simple identification of his own artistic project with any

metaphysical thesis; and while his concept of the ‘metaphysical

concrete’ in Ballmer in fact had the exact opposite intention, it is not

difficult to understand why he did not make any systematic use of it.

His favoured term in 1958 for the direction in which his work was

going seems to have been ‘subtraction’. This certainly implies a

reduction to essentials: Beckett’s unaccommodated men and women

of the pre-Play drama are placed in essentially simple situations,

caught up in their everyday routines, preoccupied with their material

wants; for only this will elicit ‘fundamental sounds’ of a kind which

does not tone down the complexity and amorphousness of these only-

just-living creatures. Yet he may also have hinted at a complementary

meaning to Adorno, one closely allied to the notion of continuous,

inescapable confrontation with the ‘dilemma of expression’. Adorno

learned from Beckett that he ‘views his task as that of moving in an

infinitely small space toward what is effectively a dimensionless

point’ (1997: 224). This comment seems to me to be of the same cast

as his later remark to Charles Juliet that ‘I am up against a cliff wall

yet I have to go forward. It’s impossible, isn’t it? All the same, you

can go forward. Advance a few more miserable millimeters’ (25

October 1968, CBV 141).

It was, I believe, the internal dynamic of ‘subtraction’ in this

latter sense that eventually led Beckett towards his own ‘abstract

19 Two later statements to Charles Juliet, 29 October 1973 and 11 November 1977

(CBV 148, 165), confirms Beckett’s long-standing scepticism towards the easy

existentialist rhetoric of ‘absurdity’, e.g. ‘It is absurd to say that something is

absurd. That is still a value judgement. It is impossible to protest, and equally

impossible to assent’ (165).

20 My thanks to Shane Weller for alerting me to the Adorno material in this para-

graph, originally brought to his attention by Jean-Michel Rabaté’s 9 February

2006 talk ‘Beckett’s philosophies and Beckett’s philosophers’ at the Florida

State University Beckett centenary conference.

30

language’ in Play. This yields three methodological consequences.

First, a survey of the shaping of Beckett’s ‘dilemma of expression’ is

needed to understand how ‘impossibility’ and ‘failure’ combine with

the imperative of ‘advancing’ within an ever-decreasing space, to-

wards an unreachable ‘dimensionless point’. Second, we must explore

how this thematic became an enabling one for Beckett, providing him

with a definite aesthetic criterion for judging others’ art and his own

as well as a specific formal ideal of ‘disintegration’; for it was his use

of this principle as an increasingly explicit matrix of structural

organisation in the pre-Play drama that prepared the way for Play

itself. Third, given the fierce scepticism that has been documented

here against the ‘abstractors of quintessence’ on the one hand, and the

notion of abstraction-as-allegory on the other, we may infer that

Beckett’s later willingness to describe his own development in terms

of ‘abstraction’ indicates an entirely new confidence that he has dis-

covered a way to avoid both formalism and the possibility of con-

ceptual reductivism. Therefore, any adequate analysis of Beckett’s

own ‘metaphysical concrete’ in Play must be acutely responsive to the

primacy and irreducibility of the dimension which corresponds to the

‘optical experience’ in painting: the moment-by-moment texture of

audience experience.

The ‘dilemma of expression’: A background sketch

It is immediately obvious from the above use of terms such as ‘sub-

ject’, ‘object’ and ‘representation’ that Beckett’s formulation of the

‘dilemma of expression’ contains a prominent philosophical com-

ponent. That said, his philosophical reading does not seem to have

begun in earnest until at least after he had finished a degree in modern

languages at Trinity College, Dublin, in Michaelmas term 1927, and

probably not until his time as lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure