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Introduction

by Terry Eagleton

Samuel Beckett is one of those writers about whom almost nobody nowadays has a bad word to say, despite the fact that the first London production of Waiting for Godot was greeted with outraged cries of ‘This is how we lost the Empire!’ Yet this well-nigh universal approval may not be entirely for the right reasons. Beckett’s work is undoubtedly somewhat bleak for the taste of a middle class which has traditionally required its art to be edifying; but it seems on the other hand so exactly the kind of thing the middle class expects its modern art to be – namely, a tolerably obscure investigation of the ‘human condition’ – that its gloom may be largely forgiven. In any case, there are always critics on hand to scour these remorselessly negative texts for the occasional glimmer of humanistic hope, in a world where rank pessimism is felt to be somehow ideologically subversive.

Beckett’s prose is so palpably ‘universal’, so packed with pregnant lines, half-symbols and cryptic allusions, and his drama is so much the sort of thing that the West End theatregoer confidently expects from his evening out, that one wonders whether this stark, gratifyingly ‘deep’ discourse of Man is not at some level as mischievously parodic as the work of his fellow Dubliner Oscar Wilde, who in poker-faced style turned out drawing-room dramas so impeccably well-made that they deferred to the English at the very moment they sent them up.

This existential-cum-metaphysical Beckett, resonant with the pathos of Being, may be a character dear to the heart of Maurice Blanchot, who figures more or less as the villain of this book; but it is far from the astonishingly revolutionary artist that Pascale Casanova presents us with here. This is a Beckett who pursues the logic of abstraction to its most inhuman extremes; who refuses the morphine of idealism even when in severe pain; whose work represents a merciless onslaught on the pretensions of Literature; and who preserves a compact with silence, breakdown and failure in the face of historical triumphalism and the self-flaunting word. As Casanova points out, he is out to dismantle the very conventional conditions of possibility of literature: ‘the subject, memory, imagination, narration, character, psychology, space and time …’ What else is his drama Breath but a response to the question: How can you write a play with no dialogue, scenery, plot, action or character? As for his ‘world view’, it is not out of the question that Beckett himself, despite his lugubrious oeuvre, might have been in private life a sentimental optimist with a Panglossian faith in human nature. We know enough of his life, in fact, to know that he was nothing of the kind; not many Panglossian optimists have landed up on the couch of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. Yet it is worth keeping the possibility in mind, just to remind ourselves of this author’s aversion to the idea that he was somehow ‘expressing himself in his writings. Even if anything as inconceivable as expression is going on, what is being expressed is certainly nothing as drearily passé as a self.

His work, in short, presents us with the scandal of a literature which no longer depends on a philosophy of the subject. The deflation of the rhetoric of achievement, along with the puristic horror of deceit which knows itself even so to be unavoidably mystified: this is no mere purveying of a ‘way of seeing’, but the stamp of a dissident, peripheral author who never ceases to shrink, mechanize and hack to the bone a twentieth-century world swollen with its own ideological bombast. It is no wonder he was such a fan of the evacuative aesthetics of his fellow Dubliner Jonathan Swift. For this politics of lessness, texts which only just manage to exist, statements which evaporate the very instant they flicker ambiguously up, break fewer bones than the declarations of a jiinger or a Heidegger. If Beckett was a great anti-fascist writer, it is not only because he fought with the French Resistance, a bravery for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre, but because every sentence of his writing keeps faith with power-lessness. The sheer contingency of his prose cuts the ground from beneath the sense of destiny and absolute certitudes of his political enemy. Even his decision to write in French, as Casanova points out, was influenced by his sense that French represented ‘a form of weakness’ compared with the opulence of his native tongue.

This, as Adorno recognized, is partly a question of how to write after Auschwitz. Yet it also belongs to a specifically Irish legacy. Like Heraclitus, the Irish have always held that nothing is quite as real as nothing. Medieval Irish theology, with its emphasis on the frailty and littleness of Jesus rather than the august majesty of God the Father, preserves a certain minimalist style, while the greatest of all Irish medieval philosophers, John Scotus Eriugena, was Europe’s most subtle expounder of negative theology in the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius, teaching the doctrine that God is non-being. Ireland’s most eminent modern philosopher, George Berkeley, remarked that ‘for us Irish, something and nothing are near allied’, while his clerical colleague Archbishop King of Dublin wrote that ‘all finite beings partake of nothing, and are nothing beyond their bounds’. The Tipperary-born novelist Laurence Sterne put in a word for nothingness, ‘considering’, he observed, ‘what worse things there are in the world’. For the aesthetician Edmund Burke, as well as for the novelist Flann O’Brien, sublimity includes that which is barely visible as well as the immense and immeasurable, since both are equally ungraspable.

In modern times, these claims for the value of the negative, lowly or humbly unremarkable have a political resonance to them often enough. If Britain is very much something, then colonial Ireland is next to nothing. This inconsiderable afterthought of Europe, as Joyce scornfully dubbed it, was too small to give birth to the prodigal, capacious, ambitiously totalizing fictions of a Balzac or a Dickens. Instead, the short story became one of its most successful genres, pivoting as it does on a caught moment, isolated selfhood or stray epiphany. One of the nation’s premier short story writers, Sean O’Faolain, felt that Ireland was too ‘thin’ a society, too lacking in ‘complex social machinery’, to be fit meat for novelistic fiction. Henry James thought something rather similar about his native United States. If Joyce produced a monstrous tome in Ulysses, it was as much as a parody of the English naturalistic novel as in homage to it. Wilde, who worked for the most part in minor genres, chose to dazzle the world as a major minor writer, while James Clarence Mangan left us with a clutch of poetic fragments and ruins.

Casanova’s riposte to the Blanchot-ing of Beckett is to be both formal and historical in equal measure. This, at first glance, is a surprising combination of approaches, since we normally assume that historical criticism throws open a work to the winds of reality, while formalist techniques seek to seal it hermetically from them. Yet as Lukács reminded us, there is no more truly historical phenomenon in art than form, which is quite as much saturated in social signification as so-called content. And nothing is more historically eloquent than the moment when art comes either despairingly or triumphantly to claim its autonomy from history. There are those on the cultural left, half a century after Adorno did his work, who in their idealist fashion still regard aesthetic autonomy as simply a false way of perceiving artworks – as an ideological illusion rather than a material reality. The antidote to such misperception, so they imagine, is to historicize the work. But for one thing, historicizing, from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott, has by no means always been the prerogative of the political left; and for another thing, form and aesthetic autonomy are historical phenomena in any case.

The story this study has to tell is not one of how Beckett’s writing can be viewed both formally and historically, though its own combination of historical survey and close textual analysis is exemplary. It is rather the narrative of how this artist is forced into the embrace of avant-garde autonomy by virtue of a certain material history – one which is largely the history of his native Ireland. Let us take the question of autonomy first. Beckett’s ‘quasi-mathematical’ art, as Casanova calls it, takes a set of postulates and in quasi-structuralist manner lets them run through their various permutations until the process is exhausted and another, equally rigorous, equally pointless computation takes over. Freed from social function, art can now unfurl its own inner logic. What other critics take to be portentous philosophical questions in Beckett – what? how? why? – Casanova boldly interprets as questions addressed by the texts to themselves, queries about their own procedures and conditions of possibility.

With small-nation perversity, Beckett’s austerely Protestant texts set out to punish themselves by seeking to eke as many permutations as possible out of the scantiest number of component parts. Ingeniously reshuffling the same few poor scraps and leavings, they retain the ritual of Irish Catholicism while rebuffing its sensuous extravagance. A good deal of Irish writing (Synge and O’Casey, for example, or Ulysses) turns on an ironic contrast between the meagreness of the material and the elaborate stylizations of form; but in Beckett the only correspondence now left between words and things lies in their common destitution. There are some astute analyses of this method here, not least a ‘redemptive’ reading of the rather neglected Worstward Ho, which Casanova provocatively sees as the magisterial summation of its author’s ars combinatoria.

As the study illustrates, this Dublin dissident was much taken with the thought of the minor Flemish Cartesian philosopher Geulincx, not least with his doctrine of the mutual autonomy of body and soul. In one sense, this leaves him firmly within the discourse of his own culture. The body as mechanism or automaton crops up in Irish writing all the way from Swift and Sterne to Flann O’Brien’s sinisterly humanized bicycles. It is what happens to the flesh when it is forced in dire conditions to sever its consciousness from its materiality, so that the former becomes abstract and impotent, and the latter is reduced to so much meaningless, mechanical stuff. It is the contrast between Swift’s Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, or Joyce’s Stephen and Bloom. There is also something of this savage somatic reductionism in the work of the great Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon. ‘When man acts, he is a puppet. When he describes, he is a poet’, wrote Oscar Wilde. Men and women can transcend their barren material surroundings only in language, fantasy and imagination.

It is a familiar Irish theme, one which contrasts with the vein of Berkeleyan or Yeatsian idealism which sees the material world itself as a kind of spiritual discourse or divine semiosis. Materiality can either be cut off from the spirit or peremptorily reduced to it. Beckett retains an Irish carnivalesque preoccupation with the body – though it is a carnival turned sour, and what survives of the body is mostly its interminable suffering. Paradoxically, his dualism intensifies a sense of the world’s recalcitrant bulk, rather than simply disembodying it. Ifhe is a Cartesian rationalist, it is partly because such a doctrine shows up the poor forked creature humanity for what it is, rather than simply tidying its fleshliness out of sight. His texts present us with a world of brute objects and elusive meanings.

In another sense, however, Beckett’s interest in this line of philosophical inquiry is one of several ways in which he cuts against the grain of Irish culture, since this impoverished country, deeply marked by religion and bereft of a robust bourgeoisie, gave birth to no major rationalism. Instead, from Eriugena to Berkeley, Yeats and beyond, its central philosophical current has been strongly idealist – a kind of secular competitor to religion, and one influenced in some cases by early Celtic spirituality.¹ What rationalists do crop up in Anglo-Irish writing, like Swift’s Laputans and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, are satirical send-ups, as an excess of enlightenment capsizes into madness. Beckett’s work, by contrast, is distinguished by a rationalist strain, which no doubt played a part in his attraction to France. No doubt it also plays a part in the French Pascale Casanova’s attraction to him.

If this writer trades in ambiguities and indeterminacies, it is part of the irony of his work that he does so in a stringent, efficiently taxonomizing manner. What catches our eye, as Casanova pinpoints so admirably, is not the existential cloudiness or metaphysical portentousness of his writing, but its clear-eyed attempts at an exact formulation of the inarticulable, its monkish devotion to precision, the extreme scrupulousness with which it sculpts the void. In shaving ruthlessly away at the inessential, it reveals a Protestant animus against the superfluous and ornamental. It retains the fading forms of a zealous Protestant search for truth, even if it has scant faith in the truth itself. If it betrays a modernist scepticism of language, it combines it with a quasi-rationalist search for translucency. One might read this crazedly meticulous hair-splitting as a parody of Irish scholasticism, or as the ghost of a Protestant rationalism, or indeed as both.

As for the historical dimension, Casanova recounts with impressive concision the story of Beckett’s fraught relations with the Irish Free State. Encircled by a parochial Gaelic bigotry, the Southern middle-class Protestant class into which Beckett was born had always felt themselves a besieged minority of cultural aliens. In Ireland, it was the rulers as much as the masses who felt dispossessed, which is why Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory and Beckett had such fellow-feeling for vagrants. The Irish Literary Revival portrayed in this book was the eleventh-hour attempt of a liberal wing of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, a class which had been stripped of its economic base in the turn-of-the-century Land Acts, to enter into alliance with ‘the people’, thus substituting a form of cultural hegemony for the political leadership which as a class it had so signally failed to provide them with. Beckett, then, was an internal exile from birth, and like Synge and Wilde found a way of translating his displacement into a deeper fidelity to dispossession.

They also found a way to translate that displacement into a form of modernism. It is the sheer, uncompromising avant-gardeness of Beckett, his remorseless pursuit of a purely abstract literature, which comes through most powerfully in this book, not least in a sparkling discussion of his fascination with the paintings of the Van Velde brothers. In its distrust of psychological interiority and passion for the stylized and externalized, Beckett’s theatre has an affinity with Brecht’s. Casanova sees this break to cosmopolitan modernism, after a purgatorial period of paralysis, as part of Beckett’s break with a claustrophobic native history, and this is surely the case. Yet having made the transition, he never ceases to look back and reinvent his native culture, exactly in the manner of his Parisian colleague Joyce. It is not only that sheer, Godot-like monotony is one of the qualities most regularly ascribed to everyday colonial life by nineteenth-century Irish writing, or that there may be a subliminal memory of Irish history in those barren, famished landscapes. It is also that no one tolerably familiar with Irish culture, not least with its debunkery, self-mockery, savagely ironic humour, carnivalesque strain, satire of pomposity, quick sense of farce and recurrent trope of bathos, can fail to find a distinctively Irish sensibility in these apparently disinherited texts. Above all, perhaps, Beckett remains Irish in his vein of mock-pedantry – the sign of a nation which values its lineages of high learning, but which cannot help playing them off sardonically against a degraded everyday life. Joyce’s mock-heroic Ulysses turns in its very structure on this discrepancy.

Beckett’s move from Dublin to Paris, then, was in one sense a break from nationalist Ireland to modernist, cosmopolitan Europe. Yet there was a good deal of continuity involved as well. For one thing, nationalism (a thoroughly modern phenomenon) has much in common with some currents of modernism. Both seek to move forward into the future with their eyes fixed on the past. For another thing, early twentieth-century Ireland fulfilled all three classical conditions, as Perry Anderson has defined them, for producing a modernism of its own.² It had an impressive lineage of high culture for artists to plunder and dismantle; it was in the throes of political revolution; and it was experiencing the impact of modernization for the first time. What emerged from all this, to be sure, was a modernist movement rather than an avant-garde – a Yeats rather than a Mayakovsky, a George Moore rather than a Piscator, the Abbey Theatre rather than the Bauhaus. In Beckett’s eyes, this failed to cut deep enough.

Even so, Irish culture was hospitable to anti-realist experiment as its English counterpart was for the most part not. Realism had never been the favoured mode of Irish fiction, from the fantasy extravaganzas of the Celtic sagas to the Gothic of Maturin, Lefanu and Bram Stoker, and the great anti-novels of Sterne, Joyce and O’Brien. If Ireland was in some ways a traditionalist society, its traditions were peculiarly fractured and disrupted by a history of colonial intervention; and this meant that it was no stranger to the estranged, fragmented, unstable self, all of which played a role in the flowering of a distinctively Irish modernism. The progressive narratives of realism made little sense in such a stagnant, de-industrialised nation. Nor did realism’s assured totalities. Language in Ireland had for long been a political minefield rather than a taken-for-granted reality, a fact which (as with Joyce) lent itself easily to the verbal self-consciousness of modernist art.

From Dublin to Paris, then, was not so huge a leap. It was a good deal shorter, as both Joyce and Beckett were to discover, than from Dublin to London. The cosmopolitan sympathies of both men helped to drive them out of their provincially minded, inward-looking native land; yet Ireland has also had a long tradition of looking over the heads of the British to the Continent, all the way from the peripatetic monks of the Middle Ages to the corporate executives of the Celtic Tiger. Even nationalism is a thoroughly international phenomenon, and the Irish species of it which Joyce and Beckett spurned had fruitful contacts with India, South Africa, Egypt, Afghanistan and a number of other places. It was not a matter of a simple opposition between home and abroad.

Nor is it a question of a simple coupling of Joyce and Beckett. In an illuminating discussion, Casanova shows how the two men went their different literary ways in the pursuit of similar anti-representational ends. If Beckett aimed to have no style, Joyce sought to imitate every style he could lay his hands on. If Beckett wanted to purge words of their meanings, Joyce dreamt of laying meaning on so thick that the English language would crumble to pieces in his grasp. Beckett, always an ascetic, chooses the via negativa of non-meaning, while his compatriot pursued the carnivalesque path of polyphony. Beckett’s frugal language is among other things a reaction to the baroque hyperbole of Irish nationalist rhetoric. The celebrated avant-garde materiality of the word struck the younger Irish author as, in his own term, ‘terrible’. In his search for a ‘literature of the unword’, language was to be eliminated, not foregrounded.

Since eliminating meaning is an impossible literary project even for a Mallarmé, writing itself becomes for Beckett the very signifier of the failure which so gripped his imagination. In a superb passage in the book, Casanova shows us how it was just this insight into the ineluctability of literary failure which enabled Beckett to find his feet as an author. He would not go the way of Yeats and Dublin, or of Shaw and London; but for a while he could not go the way of the avant-garde either, since an enormous obstacle named Joyce loomed up to block that path. In Bloomian terms, Joyce was the strong precursor to Beckett’s belated ephebe – or, as they say in Ireland today, Ulysses is the nightmare from which Dublin is trying to awaken. Beckett will finally find a way around this daunting presence by placing the very impediment to writing at the centre of his writing, transforming the question of failure into the very form of his art, telling incessantly of the failure to tell. He will accept that though he won’t write, can’t write, has nothing to say and nothing with which to say it, he must write. The act of literature thus becomes a kind of empty Kantian imperative, a law without logic, an obligation without content. Like desire, it is nothing personal.

What finally strikes one most about this book is its remarkably ambitious scope. Packed into its brief compass are reflections on Irish history and European philosophy, some scrupulous analysis of individual texts, speculations on the artistic avant-garde, a fascinating excursus on Beckett and Dante, along with a coherent and provocative viewpoint on Beckett’s work as a whole. One can have no doubt that the maestro himself would have admired its elegant economy.