Samuel Beckett. Pascale Casanova
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 Yet it is in the name of what he called such ‘outdated conventions’, and above all in the name of the pathos of ‘being’, that he became one of the twentieth century’s most famous and established writers.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.
With his first publications in French in the 1950s, critical prejudices emerged in a kind of double-blind to obstruct access to each of Beckett’s texts. They have had enormous theoretical consequences.1 Commentaries on Beckett’s writing as testimony to the ‘unsayable’, the ‘essential’, and even – the height of misinterpretation the ‘inarticulate’ are now too numerous to count. Refusal of the formal character of this literary undertaking, and belief in a kind of inspired passivity on the writer’s part, have resulted, for example, in the emergence of a critical consensus around the notion of ‘confusion’. ‘Criticism,’ writes Bruno Clement for example in summarizing the various hermeneutic positions on the subject, ‘converges in regarding the increasing scarcity, and sometimes disappearance, of signs of formal organization (parts, chapters, paragraphs, and even sentences) as the positive mark of an essential disorder that has affected the oeuvre, thereby stripping it of any genuinely technical characteristics.’ 2
It is perhaps with Worstward Ho, one of Beckett’s last texts, that the distance between the standard interpretation (derived from Blanchotien presuppositions), which confers on this text – as on all the others – a disorder considered inherent in the ultimate expression of existential suffering, and the interpretation imposed by a systematic analysis, becomes most apparent.
On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. Say for be said. Missaid. From now say for be missaid.
Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still.
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.3
A first reading of Worstward Ho, it is true, conveys the impression of a discourse that fades out in a kind of paratactic inarticulation. Beckett had seemingly never gone so far in the direction of hermeticism and literal obscurity. But the power of critical bias precludes observing and understanding Beckett’s project as it unfolds in this text. If we overturn the prejudice of non-meaning and confusion associated with Beckett’s writing, we can bring out strict rules of composition and organization. Worstward Ho is a summit of Beckett’s ars combinatoria, prodigiously controlled and devised, the magisterial conclusion to the whole oeuvre.
So we have the worst, posited in the title as a goal to be reached, as a professed project, and which is to be understood not as an approximate, random evocation of the oeuvre, but precisely as an algorithm, a generative formula from which Beckett has produced the ensuing text. The title is, of course, a parody of Charles Kingsley’s well-known Westward Ho and, through this migratory irony, signals both motion and direction. The worst is what must now be striven for – the end aimed at but not yet attained. Attesting to this is the first word of the text – ‘on’ – expressing continuation, effort, movement, a kind of resolute ‘forward’. Beckett immediately raises the problem with a quasi-mathematical rigour: how to say the worst and how to work incessantly to worsen the worst? If, by definition, ‘said is missaid’ whatever one says, how, stylistically, can one convey the idea of the worst and say it ever worse? How can one win the incredible wager of a ‘better’ that would be a successful statement of the worst? To this question of the how, Beckett responds in the first paragraph