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Preface

Ill Seen Ill Read

As depicted in the fearsome, hieratic photographs imposed by official portraiture, Beckett has come to embody, at least in France, the prophetic, sacred mission assigned the writer by devotees of literature. Accordingly, he has been assimilated to a vague metaphysics, in a strange, solitary place, where suffering permits only a well-nigh inarticulate, shapeless language, a kind of pure cry of pain, cast just as it comes on to paper.

As if he alone represented a kind of poetic beyond, Beckett has only ever been read as the messenger or oracle of the truth of ‘being’. The Unnamable, writes Maurice Blanchot, is ‘a being without being, who can neither live nor die, stop or start, the empty space in which the idleness of an empty speech speaks’.¹ This representation of poetic tragedy, which is but one of the countless forms of literature’s annexation by philosophers, reduces the poet to the passive, archaic function of inspired mediator, charged with ‘unveiling being’. (‘Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them’², says Beckett who, in irony at least, surpasses his commentators.) Even though the jargon of ‘authenticity’ was alien to him, the obscurity and strangeness of his texts had to be reduced to the only legitimate form of profundity. 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 garb of poetic canonization.

This heroic imagery has proved one of the surest ways to obscure the specificity of literary form, to refuse Beckett any aesthetic impulse, the search for a form therewith being reduced to an artifice unworthy of the quest for ‘authenticity’. Thus, apropos of The Unnamable, Blanchot writes of a book ‘without cheating or subterfuge … in which aesthetic sentiments are no longer apposite’.³ The (apparent) obscurity of Beckett’s texts has served the obscurantist designs of Blanchot-style criticism.

A reconstruction of Beckett’s trajectory, and of the history of his oeuvre, leads to the conclusion that such hermeneutic glaciation has not simply masked the meaning of his literary project, but inverted it. Thus he has been celebrated and consecrated in the name of an idea of poetry he always fought against. His refusal of the presuppositions underlying realism, representation, and credence in literary ‘truth’ can only be understood ifwe hypothesize that he spent his whole life working on a radical aesthetic revolution: literary abstraction. Yet it is in the name of what he called such ‘outdated conventions’, and above all in the name of the pathos of ‘being’, that he became one of the twentieth century’s most famous and established writers.

Was his oeuvre so prejudicial to the very idea of poetry that it had to be dissolved in the imposing machinery for the normalization of literature?

Obliged to write after Joyce and, so as not to imitate him, beyond Joyce, Beckett embarked on the road of a different modernity at the level of form. The literary abstraction he invented, at the cost of a lifetime’s enormous effort, in order to put literature on a par with all the major artistic revolutions of the twentieth century – especially pictorial abstraction – was to be based on an unprecedented literary combinatory. The art of logic was placed in the service of ‘abstractivation’, a dynamic peculiar to each text, which proceeds from words to the withdrawal of meaning – that is, from meaning to delivering realist representation its quietus. In order to break with signification and the referent, inherent in language, Beckett does not work on the sonorous materiality of the word. Instead, he is led to question, one after the other, all the ordinary conditions of possibility of literature – the subject, memory, imagination, narration, character, psychology, space and time, and so forth – on which, without our being aware of it, the whole historical edifice of literature rests, so as to achieve the gradual erasure of its images in ‘the dim and void’.

Together with Joyce, Beckett is one of the contemporary writers who has prompted the most commentaries and analyses – something compounded in his case by the bilingualism that has entailed the construction of a dual critical tradition, in English and French.⁴ 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. It is therefore a question of engaging in a kind of meticulous examination – and setting out in search of minor indices that in isolation might seem insignificant and even over-interpreted, but which, when brought together, end up forming a consistent pattern. These indices illuminate the oeuvre by rendering the principles of its genesis visible. Better, they make the problems Beckett posed himself – that is, the set of literary possibilities he had to operate with in order to ‘invent’ his own solution – intelligible. Beckett would work for thirty years to bring literature into modernity, to develop an aesthetic answer to personal questions that are also literary investigations: those of defeat, failure, the ‘worst’.

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. 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. From the Second World War onwards, he deliberately situated himself in relation to the whole literary and pictorial avant-garde he mixed with in Paris – and definitely not Existentialism or the Theatre of the Absurd, whose presuppositions were alien to him.

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. 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.

From one book to the next, this search became increasingly systematic, as if Beckett gradually discovered the stylistic constraints and forms required for the coherence of his project. In the end, it would be Worstward Ho that radicalized, and took furthest, the formal combinatory whereby he carried out one of the greatest literary revolutions of the twentieth century.