Category Archives: Samuel Beckett

The ascetic aesthetic

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Where philosophy ends, art begins. In a sense, after Schopenhauer’s “Nothing,” the word which concludes The World as Will and Representation, there is the emergence of the chord that opens Tristan und Isolde. It is not therefore a philologist who properly “corrects,” if that is the appropriate word, a philosophy which reaches its furthermost end, but a musician.

In this, the most Schopenhauerian of operas, Wagner repurposes eros as a means to renunciation and repudiation of the world as a means to experience the thing-in-itself, that which lies beyond the world. Below, a post from last June, in which I discuss a few associated issues. It has been slightly revised.

At the beginning of his 2001 book The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, Beckett’s friend and publisher John Calder writes:

Voltaire considered himself to be a novelist, a poet, a dramatist and a writer of opera libretti, but we think of him today largely as a philosopher. The same fate may overtake Samuel Beckett, because what future generations can expect to find in his work is above all an ethical and philosophical message; the novels and plays will increasingly be seen as the wrapping for that message. This will [in] no way detract from the originality and daring of the stage works nor from the power and craftsmanship of the fictions. They were however written for a purpose: to make us face, head-on, the realities of the human condition; and nowhere does he offer us a hopeful message, only a positive attitude and an injunction to face those realities with courage and dignity.[1]

I was reminded of this passage as I reached the midpoint of the new Cambridge University Press translation of The World as Will and Representation this weekend. If Beckett’s work might be seen as a philosophy wrapped in the guise of art (imaginative prose and drama), then Schopenhauer’s might be seen as a work of art wrapped in the guise of a philosophy (expository prose). This perspective may provide one explanation for Beckett’s continuing appeal to philosophers, and Schopenhauer’s to artists. As Calder suggests, the generic form of this content partakes of a certain oscillation of any given work among various forms, in this case the imaginative and the expository. Schopenhauer’s work has its longeurs and repetitions, like Beckett’s, like that of any artist who works in forms that express a problematic relation to time. The title of Ulrich Pothast’s book on Beckett and Schopenhauer, The Metaphysical Vision, points to the same kind of oscillation. There is metaphysics and there is art: and they may be separate or fused.

I have written before of the architectonic structure of Schopenhauer’s main work (not dissimilar to that, in its power and sublimity, to Beethoven’s Choral Symphony), and he is widely considered to be one of the most accomplished prose stylists of 19th-century Germany in whatever form. It is also relevant to note Schopenhauer’s valuation of aesthetic work as a means to renunciation and resignation as superior to that of the philosophical treatise, the genre in which he pursued his project. The pursuit of philosophical ends through aesthetics, as Calder conceived Beckett’s enduring reputation, is mirrored by that of the pursuit of aesthetic ends through philosophy, which permits both Beckett and Schopenhauer to maintain significant footings in both genres. As Pothast notes, it’s not as if Beckett conceived of his project as putting Schopenhauer’s philosophy on stage or in the novel, and Pothast argues that as Beckett’s career went on it resembled Schopenhauer’s metaphysics less and less. I think the first part of his note is quite true but the second is not necessarily true, but even if it were, it only indicates that the work of no philosopher or artist constitutes a final end, but only a dynamic of concerns that evolve and change through an artist’s work.

That some philosophers and artists have elective affinities with each other is a lesson that Schopenhauer’s enduring influence on artists, and Beckett’s enduring appeal to critics and philosophers, demonstrates perhaps better than any other philosopher. Any mental or creative dialogue that an artist or a philosopher maintains through a lifetime must include a dialogue with the dead, and the communication of these affinities within groups of like-minded writers and artists permits of revision and reconsideration. Schopenhauer famously refuted what he considered Kant’s missteps in an extended appendix to WWR, but there’s no reason why an artist may not also participate in this revision and consideration as well.

To take one example particularly relevant to my own project, Richard Wagner was the first major artist to have his life’s work stopped and radically revised in the middle of his career as a result of a reading of The World as Will and Representation. It was through Schopenhauer’s work that this reconsideration occurred, but Wagner also revised his mentor. In his important new book Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, Laurence Dreyfus cites an 1858 letter to Mathilde Wesendonck in which Wagner, then at work on Tristan und Isolde, does just this:

It is really a matter of proving — something no philosopher has done, not even Schopenhauer — that the recognized redemptive path to the complete pacification of the Will is through Love, and in fact not an abstract human love but rather by means of sexual love, that is, a love germinating in the attraction between man and woman.[2]

It is also important to note here Dreyfus’ gloss on Wagner’s letter:

Far from being doomed to failure and eternal disappointment as in Schopenhauer’s clear exposition, Wagner’s notion of sexual love becomes a means to assuage the gnawing desires of the Will-to-live. Even Schopenhauer admitted in his second volume that there is a difference between understanding renunciation as a philosopher and practicing it as an ascetic mystic, a statement that undercuts the effect of his philosophical conclusions … . Perhaps Wagner intended to air a legitimate criticism of Schopenhauer’s unconvincing pseudo-Buddhist account of renunciation. But as soon as one examines the composer’s assertion about sexual love, its logical inconsistency becomes glaring. For if sexual desire (according to Schopenhauer) embodies the essence of the Will-to-live, it is nonsense to allow sexual love to pacify the Will. It is like giving whiskey to cure an alcoholic, or pornography to treat a sexual obsessive.[3]

True enough, and Dreyfus here has stumbled upon a central paradox of Schopenhauer’s conclusion — that is, how can the will be turned by a helpless vehicle of that will, the human individual, against itself? The paradox is insoluble except through an appeal to mystery and mysticism — but it is this mystery and mysticism itself which constitute the possibility of any kind of true, redemptive aesthetic experience as well. That it is logically inconsistent, as Dreyfus notes, perhaps makes The World as Will and Representation poor philosophy (though only if philosophy must abjure any appeals to a mysticism and mystery — and this does not necessarily mean God or purposiveness — which is beyond human understanding). But that does not make it bad art — indeed, in its openness to aesthetic and imaginative possibility, it makes it very good art indeed. And it confirms that Kant, Schopenhauer and Wagner can all ascertain new forms and understandings of experience from each other’s work without ignoring the weaknesses and mistakes of each.

It is instructive to note that great philosophy that aspires to the condition of art has similar effects in the best critics and expositors of that philosophy. Bryan Magee concludes his magisterial The Philosophy of Schopenhauer not with a summation chapter, but with a poem — as if expository prose could not contain the enduring value and appeal of Schopenhauer’s work to that writer. More recently, David Ian Rabey’s two-volume survey of Howard Barker’s career is as much philosophy and art as it is literary criticism, as James Balestrieri noted upon the publication of the first volume: “Rabey mobilizes powerful metaphors, almost as responses in kind to Barker’s lines, in sentences that have the quality of muscular poetry. …  At the border between criticism and theatre, Politics and Desire stands opposite Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues, challenging critical boundaries of theatre, and inviting us to experience the catastrophic throes of tragic transformation.” All of this argues for the possibility, indeed the value and the necessity, of an art which strains towards philosophy, and a philosophy which strains towards art.

Footnotes
  1. John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder Publications, 2001, p. 1. [↩]
  2. Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 71. [↩]
  3. Ibid. [↩]

Samuel Beckett’s “The Vulture”

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dragging his hunger through the sky
of my skull shell of sky and earth

stooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk

mocked by a tissue that may not serve
till hunger earth and sky be offal

According to Lawrence E. Harvey’s Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), Beckett’s early poem was a response to Goethe’s “Harzreise im Winter”:

As a vulture would,
That on heavy clouds of morning
With gentle wing reposing,
Seeks for his prey –
Hover, my song. (Tr. Edwin H. Zeydel)

Harvey contrasts the two poems thusly:

The optimism, expansive joy, and religious mysticism of the original are missing in Beckett’s poem. … “The Vulture” might be called (by a critic) “The Artist on his Art.” It is the most explicit account in Echo’s Bones of the author’s views on the nature of poetry. While the model and its offshoot have in common the theme of artistic creation, even here the views disclosed differ greatly. Goethe’s “Geier” might well be a hawk in search of its prey, for there is nothing in the above lines that suggests the carrion-consuming Accipitridae of science. Even the “heavy clouds” are heavy only in order to furnish a stable resting-place, and the poet’s heart is light. His poem is a song waiting to be born, and its author in his joyful moment of expectant creativity is in the state of poetic grace. There is little doubt that the poem will be born a healthy, happy offspring. Not so with the somber song of Samuel Beckett. (113)

“The dark is in reality my most precious ally”

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After the Three Dialogues, Samuel Beckett tended to embed his aesthetic statements within his drama and fiction themselves, and central to his postwar aesthetic was the “revelation” or “vision” of 1946, dramatized in the 1958 play Krapp’s Last Tape. This dramatization, however, was incomplete, and appears in only a fragmented form in the tape that the character recorded at the age of 39:

Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indulgence until that memorable night in March at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision, at last. This fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening … What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely — (Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape forward, switches on again) — great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality — (Krapp curses, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again) — unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire.

Beckett borrows for this image the visual sense of German Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich. It is in part autobiographical, based upon Beckett’s own experience, which he told his biographer James Knowlson was in fact much less wild: “Krapp’s vision was on the pier at Dun Laoghaire; mine was in my mother’s room. Make that clear once and for all,” he told Knowlson in about 1987.[1] What Knowlson’s biography also provides, however, is the missing key to Krapp’s (and Beckett’s) revelation. Beckett completed Krapp’s “The dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality” in preparation for the theatrical notebook on Krapp’s Last Tape that Knowlson edited in 1987:

However, one element in particular of the Krapp passage relates it directly to Beckett’s own experience: the darkness of an inner world was, indeed, an image that Beckett reproduced with friends to whom he spoke about his revelation. Beckett explained precisely what he meant by this part of Krapp’s “vision.” He wrote that the dark was “‘in reality my most –’ Lost: [that is, when Krapp switches off the tape recorder and runs the tape forward] ‘my most precious ally’ etc. meaning his true element at last and key to the opus magnum.” Light was therefore rejected in favor of darkness. And this darkness can certainly be seen as extending to a whole zone of being that includes folly and failure, impotence and ignorance.[2]

Beckett and Krapp are of course not equivalent (when he wrote the play, Beckett was much closer to the 39-year-old Krapp than he was to the 69-year-old Krapp that holds the stage). And Krapp’s irritable, angry, and perhaps fearful desire to skip over or repudiate the lessons of his revelation certainly was not a rejection shared by his creator, who would use this darkness as the mine from which he would bring out the great postwar plays, novels, and prose. But it does confirm Beckett’s essential pessimism: as Knowlson puts it, “Light was … rejected in favor of darkness.” And it should also be noted that, as Knowlson points out, this was less a sudden revelation than a crystallization of tendencies to which Beckett’s work had been leading for years. It was a synthesis of suspicions about the nature of existence that, first, became clear, and second, provided the basis for extended aesthetic discipline, productivity, and experience. But make no mistake: this is pessimism. And Beckett — if not Krapp — learned to embrace it not in celebration but in contemplation. It is a difficult embrace but one that must be made once the recognition is experienced; if not, the work and the life are lies.

On another note, it is sometimes an unexpected pleasure to have one’s biographical information about Beckett corrected. I wrote both last week and a few years ago that Beckett had an indifference, if not distaste, for Wagner’s music, but apparently this did not extend to all of Wagner’s operas. In doing the research for the above, I came across a brief memoir by Duncan Scott, the lighting engineer at the Royal Court Theatre where Beckett directed several of his own plays in the 1970s. Discussing music with Beckett, Scott noted, “We spoke of Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok and Wagner. He said he did not like Wagner in general, only Tristan und Isolde. When I suggested that Parsifal was Wagner’s definitive statement, he showed interest, but said he didn’t know the music.”[3] So perhaps my drawing of a parallel between Beckett’s work and Tristan, at least, was not entirely without biographical basis as well.

Footnotes
  1. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 319. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]
  3. James and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds.,  Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration. New York, NY: Arcade Publishing, 2006, p. 215. [↩]

Thoughts of winter

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The worst is not
So long as we can say “This is the worst.”

King Lear (IV.1)

During a long sad cold train ride yesterday I had the opportunity to read once again[1] Anne Atik’s How It Was, her 2001 memoir of Samuel Beckett. Atik, the wife of Avigdor Arikha, one of Beckett’s closest friends, provides an intimate portrait of the writer from the late 1950s through his death in 1989. It is, largely, a collection of Beckett’s table talk, though this erudite writer’s distrust of erudition is clear — his admiration for Yeats’ late poems, Leopardi, Kant, Schopenhauer, Swift, Sam Johnson, and Dante; his preference for the music of Webern, Schubert, and Haydn’s late string quartets over Mahler, Bach, and Wagner; his concern with the ways in which poetry should be read aloud. How It Was also chronicles, however, a few of Beckett’s personal traits, such as his clear, uncondescending pleasure to be in the presence of children of all ages; his wit; his occasional dark silences. The volume is lovingly illustrated with reproductions of holograph letters from Beckett and several of Arikha’s drawings. A good holiday present, I think, for Beckett enthusiasts.

On the second leg of the journey I re-read Company, Beckett’s 50-page “novel” of 1980 and available in Nohow On. And once again I was moved by the mastery of Beckett’s late work; this, along with Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho, constitute Beckett’s final major prose texts. The simple chronicle of a man lying on his back in the dark, listening to a series of fables that his imagination creates (“lie” and its various permutations are among the most frequently repeated words in the text), is a profoundly expressive exploration of solitude in the waning hours of existence; lacking the cruelty of How It Is or even Beckett’s final stage play, What Where, these three pieces constitute a slow putting-away of an artist’s tools. The implicit comparison with Shakespeare’s The Tempest is deliberate; Ruby Cohn says that “a new gentleness suffuses Company, not unlike Shakespeare’s late romances after the tragedies”[2] — a gentleness also reflected in the writer’s own behavior, as Atik’s book testifies. I am looking forward to revisiting the other two works in the volume, and leave you this Friday with the conclusion of Company:

You now on your back in the dark shall not rise to your arse again to clasp your legs in your arms and bow down your head till it can bow down no further. But with face upturned for good labour in vain at your fable. Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were.

Alone.

Footnotes
  1. I am at that point in my life, I think, when I am more drawn to revisit those books and artworks that have meant so much to me in the past, for they continue to remain new with each new encounter; this preferred to so many so-called “new” things which to my understanding seem old and inadequate. [↩]
  2. Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2001, p. 354. [↩]

Repeat season: Harold Pinter in Krapp’s Last Tape

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While John Hurt continues his run at BAM in the Gate Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, those who lack the wherewithal to attend this (through lack of time, money, connections, what-have-you) should note that the Beckett on Film project recorded the same production several years ago; it can be found on YouTube here. This is not the only major American presentation of the play these days — concurrently, Brian Dennehy is appearing in the play at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre through 18 December. A Krapp-tastic winter here on these shores; there must be something in the air; an Effi Briest revival, perhaps.

Also from YouTube, in five separate parts, comes Ian Rickson’s notable 2006 Royal Court Theatre production of Krapp’s Last Tape, with Harold Pinter as Krapp. (You can expand the video to full-screen viewing by clicking on the “expand” button in the lower right-hand corner of each segment.) I first posted these videos here in September of 2010.