Those who are constrained to find anything that can be defined as “joy” or “happiness” in Samuel Beckett’s work may have a formidable opponent in the author himself. (Perhaps one finds “courage,” but that’s a different quality entirely.) Beckett’s friend Harold Pinter once asked the dramatist to comment on the form of his work; Beckett replied in a letter: “If you insist on finding form [for my plays] I’ll describe it for you. I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silences I could hear his screams continually. That’s the only kind of form my work has.” In this one finds an echo of Rothko’s description of his work, which I paraphrased in an essay written in 2009 and which appears in my book Word Made Flesh: “Once, an observer called Rothko’s canvases of bright yellows and oranges optimistic ‘celebrations.’ Rothko responded that these colors, to him, were the colors of an inferno.”
It is not hard to discover the reason for the continuing, perverse misreadings of Beckett’s and Rothko’s work, but according to the artists themselves these are deliberate misunderstandings. Hypnotized by the surface qualities of comedy and beauty, not to mention the celebrity of these two artists (for no truly sensitive and cosmopolitan person, of course, could fail to admire this work), spectators remain on these surfaces and refuse to acknowledge the tragic qualities beneath. But the spectators lack the very courage of the artists themselves to confront the darkness at the center of these visions. If Beckett’s work were truly conceived from the perspective of Beckett’s own pessimism, as Rothko’s, it’s unlikely that the work would continue to be produced at all in the current atmosphere of a Culture Industry dominated by optimism above all things. The names Rothko and Beckett, as well as their work, are co-opted by this Industry, which utilizes them to their own blinkered ends. They represent not a will to power, or a will to life, or a will to express, but a will to renunciation and resignation, to transcend the screams through silence.
Many thanks to Rhys Tranter of A Piece of Monologue for the Beckett quotation. Word Made Flesh will be published by EyeCorner Press in the next few days; a Facebook page for this book is here.
Greatly enjoyed that.
Beckett is certainly not an optimist. A Leibnizian view of the world remains in contempt for him. And the Cartesian influence has been greatly overstated (as Matthew Feldman’s Beckett’s Books has shown well). There’s something else going on–an asceticism, but in a novel form. If Beckett suffered from depression, he was able to make it an instrument better than most. Which reminds me of George Steiner’s thought that Proust and Dostoevsky were artists who used their own illnesses as great perceptive instruments. It’s in Beckett’s rejections (that we start to see in the first volume of letters), for instance going from a positive to a negative on Jane Austen, that we start to see something like depression become a true instrument.
His revulsion to Scenes, to New York, to awards, to Circulation, reminds me more than anything else of Simon Hantaï. I’ve never seen mention of Hantaï in Beckett’s words, but the connection is, I think, powerful. Hantaï’s resignation in the face of the art market, his refusal to operate in the gallery system, and the work itself bears a strong resonance with Beckett’s work. The difference might be that Hantaï has not been quite co-opted in the same way, perhaps due to the nature of the difference in distribution between painting and literature/theater.
A more obvious resonance lies between Beckett & Avigdor Arikha. Arikha subtracted himself from a culture of abstraction that had become saturated to the point of the basic loss of a strong abstract capacity. Beckett was one of the few early supporters of Arikha’s turn to figuration. Of course, now Arikha’s work has been appropriated AS figurative work within the frame of a kind of neo-figurative trend, which is not quite right. Arikha’s work is absolutely dialectical–completely shot through with abstraction. It isn’t a return. But I think that the designation of a ‘return’ is a kind of optimist projection: it is nostalgia at work.
Anyway, here’s a lovely piece on Hantaï in relation to Pollock (in the positive) and in relation to Warhol (in the negative, mostly). A good bit on the artist’s response to the culture industry:
http://www.paulrodgers9w.com/?method=Blog.Writings
The question of whether an artist can be said to be “optimistic” or “pessimistic,” or whether the work of somebody like Beckett, Rothko or Feldman can be characterized in that seemingly binary fashion, has often been a source of considerable meditation for me. In part I’m loathe to make the distinction; on the other hand, certainly a vision that arises from melancholy or a pessimistic or a tragic consciousness shouldn’t be soft-pedaled as somehow possessed of a silver lining.
The Culture Industry co-opts and absorbs this melancholic project as it co-opts everything else. It’s good to be reminded of the examples of Hantai and Arikha that you mention here, Charlie — I’m beginning to become convinced that a retreat like Hantai’s may be essential to the full contemplation of the melancholic vision. Thanks for these.
I wouldn’t assert that your position veers towards idolatry, but what you’re espousing is certainly redolent of obeisance of some kind. Granted, errant interpretations are generally indulgent and without value, and many interpretations of art and literature can be myopic, a possible evasion of art’s more exacting elements as you note; however, refuting interpretations based upon the creator’s view of the work is exceedingly dubious, even if one isn’t partial to the interpretive fallacy, or the death of the author. An artist isn’t the sole authority of his or her work and if we begin capitulating to such, we close out the manifold richness of art and end in subservience to the artist, rejecting our very autonomy. What Beckett (or anyone) says of his work may or may not be ‘true’ or accurate; it certainly can be either, but whatever the case, the work itself must substantiate the interpretation, whether it is the artist’s or the critic’s or the spectator’s.
Often, artists such as Beckett are deliberately evasive regarding the construction and ‘meaning’ or force of their work; Bela Tarr has been similarly evasive regarding the form of his work, but I must exercise suspicion against their evasions. It’s frankly difficult to believe, if not at all convincing that the ONLY form in Beckett’s plays is as amorphous as that of the screams of a man dying of cancer. In fact, they are far more precise and well-wrought, if not geometrically so, and definitely not as spontaneous and reactive and uncontrolled as a dying man’s coughs. And we would have to speak of different Beckett’s too depending upon which texts of his we’re reading, by which I mean the French or the English translations. As Badiou noted, “Who can fail to see that in English any of Beckett’s fables simply do not sound the same? They are more sarcastic, more detached, more mobile. In short, more empiricist. French served Beckett as an instrument for the creation of an often very solemn form of distance between the act of saying and what is said. The French language changed the paradoxes of the given into metaphysical problems. It is inscribed into verdicts and conclusions what, in the English, lead to irony and suspension. French—the language of Descartes, Beckett’s great philosophical referent—changed picaresque characters into the witnesses of the reflexive Subject, into victims of the cogito. It also permitted the invention of a colder poetics, of an immobile power that keeps the excessive precision of the English language at bay. Beckett’s French substitutes a rigid rhetoric that spontaneously lays itself out between ornament and abstraction for the descriptive and allusive finesse of English.” One could go on, but that point is clear enough.
In addition, although Beckett is not a cheery optimist, there are pervasive clichés regarding his work, much the result of subservience to his own view of it, and these can impede our pure experience of them. I don’t know if he was the first, but Badiou is one of the more prominent figures to challenge the standing views of Beckett’s work. Here is a representative passage: “The caricature of a Beckett meditating upon death and finitude, the dereliction of sick bodies, the waiting in vain for the divine and the derision of any enterprise directed towards others. A Beckett convinced that beyond the obstinacy of words there is nothing but darkness and void. It took me many years to rid myself of this stereotype and at last to take Beckett at his word,” by which I take it he means, the word of his texts themselves, not what he says of them. “No, what Beckett offers to thought through his art, theatre, prose, poetry, cinema, radio, television, and criticism, is not this gloomy corporeal immersion into an abandoned existence, into hopeless derision, a concrete flavor, a ‘thin Rabelais.’ Neither existentialism nor a modern baroque. The lesson of Beckett is a lesson in measure, exactitude and courage.” This is an invigorating viewpoint, and, without question, this kind of stoicism is evident in Beckett’s work, and Badiou offers us novel ways of reading Beckett, yet equally so, one would have to test his interpretations against the work itself, and that would be the task of each reader.
The only real silence as far as I see it would be actual silence, the very refusal to articulate experience or transfigure it in some way into some precise and exact form. A pure or true and absolute will to renunciation and resignation can end in nothing but muteness and inactivity. If one seeks to transcend the death throes, that is a will beyond them, a drive to surpass and supersede them; to transcend them through silence would be to remain completely and wholly mute, not to articulate silence into form.
It is not easy to say what “taking Beckett at his word” would mean, whether it’s his comments on his own work or the work itself. I believe that Badiou may himself be inventing that stereotype of Beckett (“nothing but darkness and void”) as a straw man, since critical work on Beckett has from the beginning sought to find some kind of amelioristic relief from his darkness (Ruby Cohn’s subtitle to her first book on Beckett, “The Comic Gamut”; Kenner’s characterization of him as an exemplary “stoic comedian”).
And if we turn to Beckett’s oft-quoted “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” we can see the dichotomy most clearly. Many readers and critics seem to acknowledge the latter half of this statement as some kind of declaration of courage, of strength. If, however, Beckett like Schopenhauer (and like the sympathetic reader) assumes that life is a pensum to be worked off, then “I’ll go on” is nothing more than a resignation to fate; there is nothing necessarily positive in the remark, indeed, there may be only future tortures of which the speaker is fully aware. Whatever invigoration or courage to be found is within the (futile?) work process, not the artistic product, itself, since as you succinctly note, “A pure or true and absolute will to renunciation and resignation can end in nothing but muteness and inactivity.” But there is nothing entirely pure and true, and that includes renunciation and resignation; and so it’s a murmuring that aspires to muteness, and a gesture that aspires to stillness.