Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

Godot, table for one

OK, here it is, the post some of you thought would never arrive. Sorry about the delay! I’ve been thinking about this for over a week now, but didn’t start writing it down ‘til this afternoon. And it took me all afternoon, so there.

On July 6, my second day in Dublin (after seeing the Yeats exhibit in the National Library), Janet said, “I’ll take Jamie to the café for breakfast, and you can go check out the Book of Kells exhibit at Trinity College.” Janet advised me that I should arrive promptly at 9:30 when the doors open, because the Book of Kells is quite popular among students, tour groups, graphic designers, and the International Ninth-Century Illustrated Manuscript Society. And I had my own reasons to check out the Book of Kells, not least of which was the fact that when I was a senior at Regis High School in 1977-78, I helped to paint an enormous version of the front page of the Gospel of John for the gymnasium of St. Ignatius Loyola across the street. You know, Jesuits think that this kind of thing intimidates visiting basketball teams, and they’re usually right.

The Book of Kells just happened to be on exhibit right down the street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that year, but the crowds were so intense that I barely caught a glimpse of the manuscript itself. So I was especially grateful to get a second chance, nearly thirty years later.

But lo! When I arrived at Trinity College, the doors were closed and would remain closed (so we were told) until 11. Janet and Jamie were planning to meet me at 11 to go to the Dublin Zoo, and of course in this foreign land we had no cell phone contact with each other, so I was stuck with 90 minutes to kill on a chilly Dublin morning. Fortunately, I was in Dublin! Did I mention that yet? And that meant that I was surrounded by all manner of cool things to see, in all manner of media. So I simply walked a few blocks to the National Gallery, where, as Janet had informed me, there was an exhibit titled “Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings.”

The exhibit itself was like a dream of fair to middling women, consisting mostly of paintings that had drawn Beckett’s sustained attention for one reason or another (he spent entire days in the National Gallery in his youth) and, a bit later on, art inspired by or related to his own work. I wanted especially to see the Bram van Velde paintings that inspired Beckett’s short essay, “Three Dialogues” (the interlocutor in these dialogues is Georges Duthuit). That’s the piece to which legions of Beckett critics turn when they’re looking for Statements About Art That Are Really Commentaries On Beckett’s Own Work, such as this bit on Tal Coat:

B. – The only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat is a certain order on the plane of the feasible.

D. – What other plane can there be for the maker?

B. – Logically none. Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.

D. – And preferring what?

B. – The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.

D. – But that is a violently extreme and personal point of view, of no help to us in the matter of Tal Coat.

B. –

D. – Perhaps that is enough for today.

You just gotta love B.’s final contribution to that conversation. Which, together with the “nothing to express” bit, pretty much encapsulates Godot, Endgame, The Unnamable, How It Is (Comment C’est), The Lost Ones, All That Fall, and maybe even Krapp’s Last Tape as well, together with everything else in the postwar Beckett canon, except for the really funny parts.

The dialogue on van Velde includes these nuggets:

B. – Others have felt that art is not necessarily expression. But the numerous attempts made to make painting independent of its occasion have only succeeded in enlarging its repertory. I suggest that van Velde is the first whose painting is bereft, rid if you prefer, of occasion in every shape and form, ideal as well as material, and the first whose hands have not been tied by the certitude that expression is an impossible act.

D. – But might it not be suggested, even by one tolerant of this fantastic theory, that the occasion of this painting is his predicament, and that it is expressive of the impossibility to express?

B. – No more ingenious method could be devised for restoring him, safe and sound, to the bosom of Saint Luke.

The terms of this little exchange will be recapitulated, in different form, in Theodor Adorno’s famous essay “Trying to Understand Endgame,” which argues (if I so may reduce it for the purposes of reconciling the aliment to its manner of dispatch) that it is a mistake to make a “meaning” out of the meaninglessness of Endgame, because “understanding it can mean nothing other than understanding its incomprehensibility, or concretely reconstructing its meaning structure—that it has none.” Adorno’s complaint about existentialism (which underwrites his reading of Beckett, whom he sees as a fellow traveler in this regard) is that it actually rehabilitates meaninglessness, in a sophomoric “alors! ze meaning is zat zere is no meaning!” kind of way. And it is hard for criticism of art and literature to take this argument on board properly, you know, precisely because so much of it is invested in the hermeneutic enterprise of deciphering meaning(s), intended and otherwise.

Back to Sam, talking to Georges:

The history of painting, here we go again, is the history of its attempts to escape from this sense of failure, by means of more authentic, more ample, less exclusive relations between representer and representee. . . . My case, since I am in the dock, is that van Velde is the first to desist from this kind of estheticized automatism, the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.

The claim that van Velde is the first to abandon the “occasion” of painting (the object, the aliment, the donneé) is silly, because you could speak about almost any abstract artist in this way. But you see, no doubt, how handy these remarks are as glosses on Beckett himself. And if you want to read more, you can pick up a copy of Disjecta, which also includes Beckett’s very early essay on Joyce, “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce” (actually, ridiculously early—the precocious lad was all of 23) as well as excerpts from “Dream of Fair to Middling Women.”

Anyway, I tooled around the exhibit in a state of mild pleasure for about half an hour, and stopped to hear the audio accompaniment to Jack Yeats’s 1942 painting, “Two Travellers,” which looks like this . . .

. . . and which the exhibition cannily links to the opening pages of Molloy, which contain a description of two travelers meeting (and the fine line, “they looked alike, but no more than others do”). And that reminded me, in turn, that I’d been meaning to reread Murphy for many years, and why not stop and pick up a copy on my way back to meet Janet and Jamie at Trinity College? It turned out that there is a little bookstore called “Books Upstairs” right across the street from Trinity, and they were happy to sell me a copy of Murphy and a copy of Beckett’s early collection of short stories, More Pricks than Kicks.

_______

Now for a detour into graduate school. I first read Murphy in 1983, in a Modern Novels class taught by Daniel Albright. I met Janet in that class, as it happened. I thought she was cool.

However, we quickly learned that we had strikingly different tastes in literature. We agreed on the brilliance of Yeats, of course. But I tended toward the Beckett-Borges end of the late-modern early-postmodern spectrum, with its endless halls of mimesis mirrors and its twisted sense of humor, and she preferred literature that, oh, I don’t know, involved actual “people” doing actual “things.” If I had a lamentable weakness for pointless metafictional play, she had a lamentable weakness for Lawrence’s Women in Love, which, in the immortal words of Andy Bienen, our good grad-school friend and eventual co-writer of Boys Don’t Cry, “reads like someone put a pistol to Nietzsche’s head and forced him to write a Harlequin romance.” (The other problem with Lawrence, especially in that book, is that he just doesn’t trust you to read him: here, dammit! he says, this is what I mean! why won’t you listen to me Birkin? He is a genius, I tell you! And then Gudrun dances in front of a bunch of cows.) Janet suggested, at the time, that at the heart of the Beckett-Lawrence Impasse was a larger distinction between “dry” writing and “wet.” To date, this critical distinction has not drawn nearly the attention it deserves. And as our lives gradually intertwined, she gave up some of her enthusiasm for the excessively wet, and I gave up some of my enthusiasm for the excessively dry, and we were married. Now she teaches (among other things) women and the avant-garde, decadence, manifestoes, and things with twisted senses of humor, and she handles Women in Love with the appropriate protective outergear. And I teach American literature, though I have to say these recent posts are reminding me that I used to do other things too.

I remained a Beckett partisan all through Albright’s Auden-Beckett Seminar of 1984, partly because no one else wanted the job and partly because Beckett is really very, very funny. I don’t know why everyone forgets this, in the midst of all his expressions that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. In Molloy, for example, you can find

the pretty quietist Pater, Our Father who art no more in heaven than on earth or in hell, I neither want nor desire that thy name be hallowed, thou knowest best what suits thee, etc. The middle and the end are very pretty.

-- which is a good deal funnier (in my humble opinion) than that other writer’s much more famous “nada” routine. And although Adorno wouldn’t say so, parts of Endgame are downright knee-slappin’ and rib-ticklin’:

HAMM: Nature has forgotten us.

CLOV: There’s no more nature.

HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate.

CLOV: In the vicinity.

HAMM: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals!

CLOV: Then she hasn’t forgotten us.

HAMM: But you say there is none.

CLOV: (sadly): No one that ever lived ever thought so crooked as we.

HAMM: We do what we can.

CLOV: We shouldn’t.

(Pause.)

HAMM : You’re a bit of all right, aren’t you?

And then there’s Clov with the telescope:

CLOV: Things are livening up.

(He gets up on ladder, raises the telescope, lets it fall.)

I did it on purpose.

(He gets down, picks up the telescope, turns it on auditorium.)

I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy.

(Pause.)

That’s what I call a magnifier.

The last line would not be harmed by being delivered in a Groucho Marx voice.

And Murphy is widely acknowledged to be one of the funniest things in the Beckett oeuvre. So funny, in fact, that when Janet and I shared a pint in that Sandycove pub the next day (you remember, when Jamie snapped this picture), we took turns opening the book to random pages, reading aloud, and making each other laugh, much to Jamie’s delight. For who could resist lines like

Murphy had lately studied under a man in Cork called Neary. This man, at that time, could stop his heart more or less whenever he liked and keep it stopped, within reasonable limits, for as long as he liked. This rare faculty, acquired after years of application somewhere north of the Nerbudda, he exercised frugally, reserving it for situations irksome beyond endurance, as when he wanted a drink and could not get one, or fell among Gaels and could not escape, or felt the pangs of hopeless sexual inclination.

Or this?

How different it had been on the riverside, when the barges had waved, the funnel bowed, the tug and barge sang, yes to her. Or had they meant no? The distinction was so nice.

Or this?

For an Irish girl Miss Counihan was quite exceptionally anthropoid.

Or this?

Some days later he was taken up for begging without singing and given ten days.

There’s even a deft little one-sentence parody of Lawrence (perhaps even Birkin himself!), when Murphy cries, “My God, how I hate the charVenus and her sausage and mash sex.” And the exchanges between Wylie and Neary are priceless, particularly this one:

“Do not quibble,” said Neary harshly. “You saved my life. Now palliate it.”

“I greatly fear,” said Wylie, “that the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech’s daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.”

Finally, for those of you who have not read the novel (and my household now has four copies—perhaps we’ll give one away to the five millionth visitor to this site), don’t miss the thrilling game of chess between Murphy and Mr. Endon. It is a classic all by itself.

But before I finished Murphy, late the next week somewhere in the south of France, a shocking thing had happened (that’s the final sentence of chapter five, for those of you keeping score at home): I had turned against it. I was no longer convinced that any of us should care what happens to Murphy (and he does meet an early and inexplicable end, and his remains are treated in a most unfortunate manner), and I began to want to read literature that, oh, I don’t know, involves actual “people” doing actual “things.” At one point Beckett writes,

All the puppets in this book whinge sooner or later, except Murphy, who is not a puppet.

And I thought, yes, very well, but you know, André Gide managed to pull off this kind of puppetry in Lafcadio’s Adventures (Les Caves du Vatican) and The Counterfeiters (Les Faux-Monnayeurs), and still write novels of considerable emotional power. (The image of men stationed at the ends of lifeboats to cut off the hands of people who, in trying to save themselves, would capsize the boat. . . .) Beckett, by contrast, is just gaming. Some of it is good fun, as when he relays various characters’ tales—“Celia’s account, expurgated, accelerated, improved and reduced, of how she came to have to speak of Murphy, gives the following”—and has other characters comment unkindly on the results: “‘But I beseech you,’ said Mr. Kelly, ‘be less beastly circumstantial. The junction for example of Edith Grove, Cremorne Road and Stadium Street, is indifferent to me. Get up to your man.’” But some of it is a bit tedious, like “the above passage is carefully calculated to deprave the cultivated reader,” and some of it, like “MMM stood suddenly for music, MUSIC, MUSIC, in brilliant, brevier, and canon, or some such typographical scream, if the gentle compositor would be so friendly,” stands as, well, part of the nothing new on which Murphy’s sun perpetually shines.

I began to think I was getting old and tired. Nearly 45 now, and have I wearied of the verbal play that delighted me in my youth, so much so that I want only good stories about recognizable people? I thought of the Säure Bummer - Gustav Schlabone debate over the relative merits of Rossini and Beethoven in Gravity’s Rainbow, in which Gustav mocks Rossini fans:

“Why doesn’t anybody go to concerts anymore? You think it’s because of the war? Oh no, I’ll tell you why, old man—because the halls are full of people like you! Stuffed full! Half asleep, nodding and smiling, farting through their dentures, hawking and spitting into paper bags, dreaming up ever more ingenious plots against their children—not just their own, but other people’s children too! just sitting around, at the concert with all these other snow-topped old rascals, just a nice background murmur of wheezing, belching, intestinal gurgles, scratching, sucking, croaking, an entire opera house crammed full of them right up to standing room, they’re doddering in the aisles, hanging off the tops of the highest balconies, and you know what they’re all listening to, Säure? eh? They’re all listening to Rossini! Sitting there drooling away to some medley of predictable little tunes, leaning forward elbows on knees muttering, ‘C’mon, c’mon then Rossini, let’s get all this pretentious fanfare stuff out of the way, let’s get on to the real good tunes!’”

Now, I didn’t turn completely against Murphy, mind you. (And for the record, Säure Bummer does have a few rejoinders, chief among which is, “a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor, I tell you.”) I will continue to sing its praises in a qualified fashion, as I have here. I know its place in literary history, and I know that Beckett was deliberately taking aim (wicked aim, at that) at the already-calcified tradition of Enormous Modernist Characters, both of the Stephen and Bloom variety (whose inner lives are so finely wrought and complex that the narration of a single day takes hundreds of pages) and of the Kurtz and Gatsby variety (whose mysterious elusiveness renders them renderable only by eloquent yet compromised participant-observers who somehow manage to survive to bring us the tale). Those puppets (Neary, Wylie, Celia, Miss Counihan) may be puppets, but they’re puppets for a reason, and they’re treated quite differently than is Murphy, about whom Beckett claimed to have written with a “mixture of compassion, patience, mockery and ‘tat twam asi’ . . . with the sympathy going so far and no further (then losing patience) as in the short statement of his mind’s fantasy on itself” (this from a 1936 letter to Thomas McGreevy, also reproduced in Disjecta). What’s more, a little playful narrative self-consciousness isn’t a bad thing at all, at all. Nor is that distinctly Irish madness in the literature-of-ideas vein that also gives us the likes of Flann O’Brien. So don’t get me wrong. I may be middle-aged, and I may be increasingly impatient with certain kinds of narrative noodling, but I’m not going over to the Other Side just yet. They’ll have to put a pistol to my head before I reread Women in Love.

But the point remains that Beckett was a fair to middling novelist . . . and a simply amazing, groundbreaking playwright. For all kinds of reasons, the theater proved more congenial than did the novel to his curious mixture of whimsy and rigor, his facility with bringing some of the drier strains of Western philosophy together with the work of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. And as I say in an aside in What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, I think his influence on French poststructuralism—on Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard especially—has been underestimated. I suggested this kind of obliquely about ten years ago, when I remarked that the debt of Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins to Lyotard (which is profound) could be rendered by way of Beckett, like so:

HAMM: What is the relation of the subject to the nation-state?

CLOV: There’s no more nation-state.

HAMM: No more nation-state! You exaggerate.

CLOV: And no subject, either.

HAMM: So what is there to keep us here?

CLOV: The dialogue.

People who have better reading knowledge of French than I (for Beckett wrote his late works in French, then translated them back into English) might disagree with this little intuition of mine. But I toss it out anyway, for what it’s worth. Whereas with regard to Beckett’s influence on Harold Pinter and thousands of other living playwrights, there is nothing more that can be said.

Nothing more! I exaggerate. We can’t go on, we’ll go on.

Posted by on 07/25 at 04:39 PM

NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!f MY NARRATIVE EXPECTATIONS ARE SHATTERED!!! HOW SHALL I LIVE?!?! YOUR WROSE THAN HILTER!!1!!11

Posted by on 07/25 at 07:19 PM
It must be the synchronicity in the day, or just the predetermined path within this time, but just a bit ago, a new AP story reports that an ancient psalmistry was found in an Irish bog. The story concludes:

Ireland already has several other holy books from the early medieval period, including the ornately illustrated Book of Kells, which has been on display at Trinity College in Dublin since the 19th century.

Now above i see the ornate book itself. Perhaps only Beckett could have made sense of the rest of this story, or maybe Yeats would throw caution into the bay and create a verse that captures this bizarreness:

The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations’ attempts to wipe out the name of
Israel.

Wallace said several experts spent Tuesday analyzing only that page — the number of letters on each line, lines on each page, size of page — and the book’s binding and cover, which he described as “leather velum, very thick wallet in appearance.”

as for mimesis: Laszlo Hortobagyi has a CD under that title (well spelled slightly different) that renders into some wonderful pomo music Borges sensibilities.

Posted by on 07/25 at 07:21 PM
For milk-out-the-nose moments from Beckett my favourite was always “unutterable and ineffable, and therefore not to be uttered or effed.”

For art criticism, that very early novel where he complains about how the Irish National Gallery had put glass in its picture frames and transformed itself into a hall of mirrors where you could only see the paintings by holding up your hand to shadow different patches - a teethgrinding problem in almost all galleries (together with - and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this mentioned elsewhere - the loss of an inch of picture at the top of every bloody picture where the sharp shadow of the frame falls)

Comparable to the acts of the bastard who trimmed the edges of the Book of Kells.

Posted by Chris B on 07/25 at 07:34 PM
a new AP story reports that an ancient psalmistry was found in an Irish blog

Well, that figures, doesn’t it?

Chris B., the National Gallery exhibit mentions that bit, too—and includes the painting about which he was complaining, freed this time from its glass frame.

And Brad, shattering narrative expectations is what we’re all about. That, and other literary crimes like typos and solecisms and annoying degrees of self-referentiality.

Posted by Michael on 07/25 at 07:47 PM
Don’t you mean anrcissism?

Posted by on 07/25 at 08:44 PM
Snark aside, I think the reading aloud is crucial. I’m not too familiar with Beckett, being kin to those who (in your useful distinction) tend toward books about actual “people” doing actual “things,” but in the case of Joyce, I can say that reading him aloud (properly, doing the voices as well as you can) will earn you more converts than passing out a deadweight hardbound and exhorting the class to Read carefully, now, people. I only began to really love Joyce after participating in one of those marathon Bloomsday readings of Ulysses. Almost all of it is freaking hilarious if read properly.

Same was true for Eliot’s Wasteland, actually, which I studied with the herein-oft-mentioned Michael Levenson at UVA. We read the facsimile edition with all Pound’s scribblings, which allows you to see that the thing originally began with a quote from Dickens: “He do the police in different voices.” Very helpful gloss, that was.

Posted by on 07/25 at 09:03 PM
I’ve never shorted anyone before, but I think Beckett could arguably be reduced to this:

“There’s a one percent chance that Godot will show up.”

Posted by on 07/25 at 09:31 PM
I, at the ripe old age of 44, find myself returning again and again to Beckett, so I’m a bit more sympathetic than you to those infernal novels.

But as to you comment on Beckett and French Post-structuralism, I would point to a near passing comment by Derrida in the interview published in “Acts of Literture.” There he states that he will never write on Beckett, as he feels too close to the language.

So indeed, there is some evidence for your insight.

Posted by on 07/25 at 09:57 PM
Amanda, reading Beckett aloud also works very well. I had a few students in a freshman comp class act out the bit from Endgame Michael posted ("I see a multitude in transports of joy") and immediately much of the class had a very deep appreciation of what B. was getting up to.

Michael, I didn’t know you went to Regis, but I should have guessed. I graduated in ‘99. May ours be the &c.

Posted by on 07/26 at 12:31 AM
Never thought about Beckett’s influence on the French post-structuralists, but it makes sense.

Beckett’s influence on the sit-com has been underplayed as well. Why the television “Odd Couple” is superior to the original play: nothing ever changes, there is no resolution, Felix and Oscar are forever waiting, forever frustrated, forever stuck with each other.

“No Exit” was remade as “Gilligan’s Island.” Except worse: In Sartre’s play, there’s no hope for reprieve. Gilligan & Company have hope, but it is continually dashed, their humanity repeatedly rejected. Damned in a situation where salvation is possible—much worse than being damned when everybody else is damned too.

These “anti-expressive” types are always so hugely, distinctively expressive! Beckett—gloom and pity with flashes of goofy sardonic humor; versus John “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry” Cage, always cheerful and buoyant and dogmatic, both claiming the same inexpressivity. Like what Rexroth said about Eliot’s claim to be Anglican (or was it Anglo-Catholic?), Classical, and Royalist: No, says Rexroth, Eliot is supremely romantically subjective and individualist.

This intellectual fad for “inexpressivity” (Eliot touted it too)—I don’t get it, but there must have been something there. Reaction to the collapse of confidence in both romanticism and rationalism in the conflagration of 20th century wars?

Posted by john on 07/26 at 12:58 AM
Actually, john, Eliot was all about “impersonality,” which isn’t exactly the same thing. But yes to the postwar collapse of confidence in pretty much everything, and to Beckett’s influence on sitcoms—and btw, Beckett acknowledged that Buster Keaton was among his own influences, and even asked him to appear in a brief film, the 1965 film “Film.”

Chip: Thanks so much for the corroborating evidence! I always came at it the other way around—I was looking at a manuscript page of Comment C’est in the National Gallery and thinking, “the language is so much like Derrida’s.” And then there are all those Derridean/ Beckettian prolegomena about the difficulty of initiating a decent commencement about the impossibility of ever beginning. . . . With Lyotard and Baudrillard, it’s the discourse of the “ne plus.” I dare someone to go through those two and count all the “ne plus"es they find.

And as for Amanda, who now has an apparently insurmountable lead in the “Read My Mind” competition for the month of July (I didn’t announce it, because worthy contestants don’t need an announcement): I was remarking to Janet how wonderful (and distinctly Irish) some of Beckett’s prose is when read aloud. Exhibit A from early in Murphy:

But as there was no possibility of his finding in himself any reason for work taking one form rather than another, would she kindly procure a corpus of incentives based on the only system outside his own in which he felt the least confidence, that of the heavenly bodies.

Again, a nice parody of the modernist batshit nuttiness I mentioned last week—but also a most mellifluous sentence when read with a light Irish lilt.

Posted by Michael on 07/26 at 10:59 AM
Michael—Eliot’s quest for “impersonality”—yep, you’re right. I was misremembering this quote:

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

Gah—the ridiculous snobbery! “only those who have a personality,” indeed!

Rexroth’s point—and I agree—is that Eliot’s is richly personally expressive (as is Beckett’s).

Hopefully Aaron Sorkin’s new show about TV comedy writers will continue his tradition of preternaturally erudite and articulate characters, and the comedy writers will quote Beckett! I can imagine a harried Bradley Whitford running his hand through his hair with a cup of coffee in his other hand, saying, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Posted by john on 07/26 at 11:19 AM
It is snobbery, and oddly gratuitous. At that point (Tradition and the Individual Talent”, almost at the end) one can see the need for a disclaimer—“Of course, in denying that poetry expresses personality, I don’t mean that poets don’t have personality!” But instead he kicks it up a notch, implying with a superior swipe that in escaping from personality, poets actually display more personality than some unidentified unpoetic rabble.

But for me, this extra flick of venom is part of what makes the piece so great, considered maybe not so much as criticism but as literature in its own right—as a poem. It manages to be dense and rambling, hermetic and nontechnical at once, full of odd touches (like the splendidly unnecessary chemical simile, deployed as a cliffhanger between sections I and II). The writing is alive with purpose throughout, and yet it’s not smoothly shaped for persuasion. It would be a mistake, I think, to treat anything in it as an uncomplicated manifestation of Eliot’s own personality.

Posted by on 07/26 at 11:58 AM
the only system outside his own in which he felt the least confidence, that of the heavenly bodies.

In an email this morning from an astrologer friend of mine (well come on, sniggering aside, he is making a fortune from people like Nancy Reagan), he was sharing some of his new material. The line that i find most appropriate is “There is an eleventh commandment, that Moses had covered up with his hand when he read down the list: Thou shalt not bore God!” Maybe it said Godot???

Posted by on 07/26 at 12:54 PM
We can’t go on, we’ll go on.

I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

I think the comma is the authoritative punctuation. Makes a big difference.

Re Eliot and TatIT, I wish I could suggest without actually arguing that the “Only those who have a personality” line could be, like, a joke. Audible if read aloud, say in a Groucho Marx voice, which would be uncannily appropriate. But I can’t suggest it without in effect arguing it, and I’m not willing to argue it, so I simply won’t mention it.

spyder, oddly enough, that line from your astrologer friend is almost exactly the same line I say to my students when I assign them essays: Thou shalt not bore me. Yea, verily, if thou dost, I will smite thee with a burning C+.

Finally, here’s a Joyce passage I Bloomsday blogged that would be most excellent to read aloud. Note the huge buildup to the lovely self-mocking joke at the very end.

Posted by on 07/26 at 02:14 PM
I read Becket originally in French and was surprised how much more astringent he seems in that language. I would suggest that he is better (less of the “zut alors” and what-not) in English precisely because he was unable to prevent a certain degree of “wetness” (of a rather Joycean kind) and allusiveness from creeping in (which he recognized, and this was partly why he wrote in French). For me, arbitrarily enough, though not Friday, I prefer the late trilogy of novels, in English, to the plays. And please God forgive me for agreeing with Harold just this once.

Posted by on 07/26 at 02:31 PM
Layers upon layers of Irishness, unified by a desire to escape the bog either by rising to the surface or by plunging deeper. Maybe sideways. Ironic humor the means to escape the inescapable (language), fueled by Guinness and whiskey. There is no God, there is a God. God is weak. (Thanks for the day’s quantum of wantum, Michael).

Posted by on 07/26 at 02:38 PM
well, the book of kells is just “delay of game” John. no match for touchdown Jesus.

Posted by on 07/26 at 02:44 PM
"Beckett seemed interested in the philosophy lectures which Bernold was attending, asking about Derrida and Deleuze, the style of their lectures, their voices and what kind of men they were. When Bernold replied that they were nobles, edle Menschen, Beckett seemed happy with the response.”

- Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist,
Anthony Cronin

Posted by on 07/26 at 03:00 PM
Re: Beckett and the post-structuralists: Check out Deleuze’s “The Exhausted” in Essays Critical and Clinical co-translated by my good buddy Dan Smith (Philosophy, Purdue). BTW, if you’re interested in that sort of thing (IYIITSOT?), Smith’s Intro to the translation is the single best intro to Deleuze, IMHO.

Posted by John Protevi on 07/26 at 03:04 PM
There’s a great line in Flann O’Brien’s “At Swim Two Birds”, quite Murphy-era Beckettian: “Two men entered the room. One was taller than the other, as is so often the case in Ireland.” Published in 1939, so it would be interesting to know if he had read Murphy (1938).

For aural Beckett/Joyce: there was a fine collection put out a while back by Claddagh records, featuring some excellent readings (performances, really) by Jack McGowran, including passages from the novels, from Endgame, etc. It was available on CD, might still be found on ebay. Beckett supervised the recording (in 1969, I think) and even plays the light gong used to punctuate the sequence of readings. Ubu.com has recordings available of various pieces, including, iirc, the BBC version of All That Fall. Joyce reading from FW is better known, and a total joy - there’s a recording of it here
http://www.finneganswake.org/joycereading.htm

Finally, in James Miller’s pop-but-OK biography of Foucault, he tries to make a bit of a narrative turning-point out of MF’s having seen Godot in the original Paris production: the moment at which MF discovered the terrible abyss beneath the signifier, that sort of thing. I don’t have the book to hand and it seemed a bit overdone, but I think it had various quotes from MF about the play.

Posted by on 07/26 at 05:02 PM
I’m in a Peet’s Coffee today, and there’s this blindingly blonde little boy who looks like he’s just gotten his good walking legs under him and is now at the dangerously “grabby” stage. His mom is trying to wrangle him in, but she’s also got a baby to deal with.

So being the good (female) citizen that I am, I start engaging the little boy to play with me before he pulls everything in reach off the shelves - he’s rapidly moving from the invincible car mugs to the porcelain breakables.
Operation distraction is working (I’m great with kids!), but I need to know his name. What’s his name?

Beckett.

This happened today. What are the odds? It may be a popular name elsewhere, but so far, it’s extremely rare here. I did not ask the mom about the story behind Beckett’s name. I simply choose to believe he comes from a family good old fashioned down home NY Yankee haters. (And the boy’s age would be right on, too!)

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/playoffs/2003-10-26-beckett-folo_x.htm

Posted by on 07/26 at 05:03 PM
I believe the only expression for what (Josh) Beckett did to the Yankees in 2003 involves the phrase “like a rented mule.”

Posted by John Protevi on 07/26 at 05:12 PM
Lattice of coincidence, O-Girl, lattice of coincidence. You wouldn’t by any chance have been eating the plate of shrimp special?

I ran into the Chevy Malibu from Repo Man on my way to Syracuse with Jamie, as it happened, so I’m especially sensitive to these little rips in the fabric of spacetime.

Posted by Michael on 07/26 at 05:48 PM
*shudder* Theodore Adorno *shudder* I’m not familiar with most of his writing, but the bits of his music criticism I’ve read lead me to only one conclusion: he should have stuck to writing about anything --belly button lint, are puppies or kittens cuter? anything-- other than music. Awful, awful, awful and a baleful influence on at least two generations of musicologists and music critics.

Posted by on 07/26 at 07:37 PM
Wow - I can’t believe how close that is to The University In Ruins! That could have saved me a week! Although Beckett doesn’t provide a lot of information about German universities.

Posted by on 07/26 at 08:53 PM
PS:

. . . and one cannot underestimate the importance of the geisteswissenschaften!

Posted by on 07/26 at 09:28 PM
Actually, JWS, I should have had Clov saying “the dissensus” in response to Hamm’s “what is there to keep us here?” For (as you’ve no doubt gathered) Readings was against all that Habermasian dialogic-understanding stuff, “consensus” most of all. And I hope everyone agrees with that!

Henry, Adorno’s essay on Beckett is actually quite rewarding. But on music, feh. However, his late work, Aesthetic Theory, has some fine passages on the superiority of kittens to puppies in the cuteness department. Some think those passages have inspired an entire genre of “Friday blogging.”

Posted by Michael on 07/26 at 10:26 PM
Michael,

Well, you may have made us wait but you always deliver the goods. I think you have to add “Krapp’s Last Tape” to your list of supremely funny Beckett works, especially when you experience it as theater.

What puzzles me about the source of your complaint, mild though it is, against Beckett’s fiction is that much the same thing could be said of his plays. Don’t you find that the same distancing that occurs in the novels is present in the plays as well? The plays do nothing to build sympathetic identification with the characters, but I get the impression that you continue to find them a source of pleasure whereas the novels have lost some of their charm. Why is that?

I’ll admit that Beckett’s appeal is cerebral rather than emotional, but given the ease with which contemporary culture attempts to appeal to the emotions for everything from the humanization of repellant political figures (a la the appearance of George and Laura Bush on Larry King as a way of rehabilitating his piss-poor image [that the president of the U.S. engages in the same behavior as disgraced pop-stars like Michael Jackson must surely rank as one of the odder aspects of contemporary life, but I digress]) to the marketing of various commercial goods (I’m thinking here of the ubiquitous infomercials complete with heartwrenching testimonies about how Proactiv/hair-transplants/Jimmy Tango’s Fatbuster Program/what-have-you saved some poor soul from a humiliating lifetime of acne/hairlessness/obesity/etc.)--given the ease with which contemporary culture enlists the emotions for these purposes, perhaps the astringent of Beckett’s cerebralism is just what we need. Now don’t get me wrong--I’m not saying that literature ought to cede this ground to advertising and politics simply because they have enlisted narrative techniques for their own dubious purposes. I’m only saying that for me the continuing appeal of Beckett is the resistance and, indeed, respite his novels offer from the commodified world and its affective narratives.

Posted by on 07/26 at 10:48 PM
Henry H.: what didn’t you like about Adorno? You don’t say what it was. You seem to have a pretty clear grasp on the effect his writing has had (on two generations, no less), but at the same time, as you say, little or no grasp on what his writing says. So what was it that bugged you so much?

Posted by on 07/27 at 12:20 AM
Eric J-D,

the experience of reading a novel and the experience of seeing a play are fundamentally different—and the former takes a lot longer! If Beckett’s plays took 4 to 8 or more hours to stage rather than the customary 2 (or shorter), it’s hard to imagine them being so successful.

The solitariness of the reading experience underlines the isolation of so much of Beckett’s imagery. Experiencing his (deeply emotional!) stuff in a social setting is more pleasurable for most people; plus, laughter is contagious, and people laugh louder when others are too. Thinking about Beckett’s generous showpersonship makes me feel all warm and fuzzy toward him!

Amanda, you’re right, the comma does make a difference, it gives a jitteriness to the line that a period dulls—and, imagining Bradley Whitford speaking it, the jitteriness makes it funnier.

Posted by john on 07/27 at 01:23 AM
John,

Thanks for pointing out the obvious difference between the reading and theatrical experiences, though I’m sure I had such a distinction in mind when I wrote what I wrote.

Where I’m hung up is the point at which Michael speculates that perhaps what he wants are “good stories about recognizable people.” Now people can of course want whatever they want, but what I fail to get is why this demand should not extend to the plays as well. Hamm and Clov are not any more emotionally developed or recognizably human than Murphy, and yet it seems to be only the latter that Michael has come to dislike. Why?

I suspect that you are on to something about the genre distinction, though I think you obviously bring something quite different to your experience of Beckett’s plays than I do. Deeply emotional? Not from where I sit, unless of course you simply mean that they are intensely funny. You’ll get no argument from me there, though I don’t think this alone entitles Beckett to the phrase “deeply emotional.”

So, Michael, is it that John is correct and that what saves Beckett’s plays--which admittedly possess few recognizable people--is the experience of partaking of their absurdity in an audience composed of recognizable people? In other words, the audience’s human reception of the absurdity (through laughter, etc.) gives the lie to Beckett’s absurdist view of human life.

What say you?

Posted by on 07/27 at 07:29 AM
Eric, two quick things. One, I don’t think that a preference for good stories involving recognizable people is the same thing as a preference for lachrymose bullshit, and for that matter, I don’t think that all narrative appeals to emotion (which are themselves not the same thing as good stories involving recognizable people) are politically suspect. And two, as I tried to suggest via Pynchon, I think a simplistic preference for good stories etc. is as bad as a simplistic preference for good tunes.

But yes, the difference between the novel and the drama is dispositive here, though not because novel-reading takes longer. John’s right that the public quality of theater renders it qualitatively different from other genres, and someday I wish someone would explain to me why Bakhtin gave it such short shrift (in a theory about the dialogic nature of language, no less). The difference between the interior monologue of The Unnamable and that of Krapp’s Last Tape lies precisely in the fact that the creator of Krapp knows that his puppet will be overheard. Showpersonship, and all that. Beckett, I think, did extraordinary (and astringent!) minimalist things with this public genre, partly because of his ear for language, his ear for silence, and his acute sense of how the conventions of the form enhanced both.

Besides—and this opens up another door altogether—pace Aristotle, I don’t always bring a “good stories about recognizable people” criterion with me to the theater. I don’t even expect to see an “action.”

And I’m still a Borges fan, as this old thing will go to show.

Posted by Michael on 07/27 at 08:43 AM
Message from your fan base: I am loving and learning so much from these post-Ireland posts!

Posted by on 07/27 at 09:35 AM
It’s worth pointing out that Joyce, the amazing, groundbreaking novelist, was at best a fair-to-middling playwright. Not for want of trying, either, at least in his early career.

Eric, thank you for explaining why I can never click away from those Proactiv infomercials. I could never figure out why they’re so riveting before. Hans Jauss theorized that things that grab us do so not primarily because of their content but because they disrupt our generic “horizon of expectations,” and I see now that that’s exactly what those ads do. I click hastily away from lachrymose bullshit when it’s in the form of a miniseries or a talk show, but the spectacle of seeing it in an advertisement is just too fascinating.

Posted by on 07/27 at 09:45 AM
I recall going to see Godot performed when I was studying it in high school. We were stuck near one of those English teachers who laughs falsely and uproariously at all the things you think you are supposed to find hilarious if you are dead clever. The actors became visibly annoyed at him, hard staring him when he interrupted their flow. After a while a cabal of students (well, me and my mates) decided to join in, so every time he guffawed his head off we did also. What this says about anything I can’t say. I just thought it was funny at the time.

Posted by saltydog on 07/27 at 09:56 AM
along the synchronicitously bizarre, funny, and strange thread: this taken verbatim from AP report this AM

Beckett has publicly criticised the United States over reports that a Scottish airport was used as a stop-off for flights carrying arms to Israel.

Beckett accused the US of not following the right procedures over arms flights and threatened a formal protest after raising the matter with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Would that Beckett had quoted Beckett to Rice, though Condi never would have got it? But i also suspect that Condi may have inadvertently paraphrased Beckett with no intentionality, to describe the US position on the current debacle. “We can’t stop the bombing until we stop the bombing, and we are not going to stop the bombing so we can’t stop it.”

Posted by on 07/27 at 11:26 AM
Eric, the intense emotion of “Godot” comes from the self-recognition of one’s own stucknesses—at least for me. The later plays aren’t funny at all and develop a deeply melancholic lyricism.

Also, a supremely bad production I saw in college was intensely emotional as well, but the irritation bordering on fury wasn’t really about Beckett. I was there with my theater friends, and one whispered “If anybody goes up as Godot, I’ll pay the bail.” Sorely tempted! But none of us went up.

Some of this same group went on to “discover” and produce “The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett as Found in an Envelope (partially burned) in a Dustbin in Paris Labeled ‘Never to be performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I’ll Sue! I’LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!!!’ “ Here’s a review.
http://www.theateroobleck.com/at_mag.html

The most notorious of the “Lost Works” consisted of an ancient woman with tangled white hair sitting in a rocking chair listening to “If” by Bread, and as the song ends she hoarsely whispers, “Again!”, and the song plays again. And again. And again. And again. I don’t remember how many times, but it went from hilarious to excruciating. Intentionally.

A five-act Godot wouldn’t work. Beckett knew that, and was generous about his theatrical intentions.

Posted by john on 07/27 at 11:27 AM
I’m half joking about length; a better way to say it would be, Godot wouldn’t be produced nearly as often were it 5 hours long. It still might be effective, but it wouldn’t be pop, and Steve Martin and Robin Williams wouldn’t have acted in it, nor would have Bert Lahr.

Posted by john on 07/27 at 11:49 AM
Well, plus ca change ... The only way to get a decent look at the Book of Kells at the Metropolitan in 1977 or ‘78 was to get there early, too, and I did, arriving at opening. New Yorkers don’t get up so early on Sunday mornings (or didn’t then), and I had twenty to thirty delicious minutes looking at it more or less alone before the crowd descended, pushing me away.

I recommend you give it another try.

Posted by on 07/27 at 03:53 PM
Henry H.: what didn’t you like about Adorno? You don’t say what it was. You seem to have a pretty clear grasp on the effect his writing has had (on two generations, no less), but at the same time, as you say, little or no grasp on what his writing says. So what was it that bugged you so much?

I grasp what his *music* writing is about, from having read it in an Adorno anthology--he wrote TONS and I won’t even begin to claim to have read more than a fraction of it. That little bit, which was drawn from across his career, was consistent in tone and that’s enough. What he had to say about structuralism or post-modernist literature or television doesn’t interest me in the slightest, only music.

First off, he was a racist. His diatribes against jazz and Russian music are almost purely based on *who* created it--subhuman Negroes and Slavs in his eyes--rather than the music itself. It was really stunning to have read that stuff in the early 90’s; it’s blatant and the “well, that was the common attitude at the time, don’t impose your current views on those matters” doesn’t cut it.

Secondly, only German (and by extension, Austrian) orchestral and operatic music had validity in his eyes. He dismissed the entire Russian school (Stravinsky, Prokofiev etc.) out of hand, as well as the French (Debussy, Ravel etc.) simply because they weren’t German. The fine Danish, Finnish, Italian and English composers, among others, who were writing great stuff at the time weren’t even worth his time to berate. Jazz, folk music, Gypsy music etc. was barely music in his eyes. Wow, that’s really a basis for criticism!

Third, his insistence on putting a Marxist gloss on music, a fool’s errand if ever there was one. A chord progression in a Wagner opera can not tell us about the struggle of the urban proletariat, full stop, and to pretend otherwise is pretentious twaddle.

He was a baleful influence because he’s namechecked all the time by critics and musicologists and because of that influence, we’re treated to some of the most absurd writings about music ever written by his acolytes because they seem to want to write about anything *but* the actual music. Page after page about the social conditions in the Weimar Republic as Krenek was writing Jonny Spielt Auf, but you know, a paragraph or two about the actual notes on the page.

A pox on Theodore Adorno’s music writing and his followers.

Posted by on 07/27 at 07:31 PM
When I was a young college student home on break, my friends and I betook ourselves to the city to see Waiting for Godot in a tiny theater. We sat in the front row, where we were intermittently spattered by Lucky’s drool.

captcha: eye, as in “for the love of god, close your eyes before the drool hits you”

Posted by Orange on 07/27 at 08:43 PM
Man, I’m sooooo out of my depth here, never having read any Beckett.

Anyway, it seems to me, from my uneducated position, that as the 20th century wore on that art became more and more concerned with examining art. If I read correctly, some of Beckett’s art is a commentary on the futility of art.

Anyway, it seems that if you continue down that path you eventually have a work of art that describes only itself, and perhaps ann infinate recursion (IE, This entance is made up of the words This sentance is made up of the words This sentance is… etc.),

So I think the whole process should be taken even further then that.

Essentially, I envision a book (Or perhaps play), ostensibly narrative in form, whose subtext is that it is impossible to express meaning, but whose text does, indeed, express meaning, thus rendering the subtext meaningless and therefore the text itself equally meaningless, thus proving the point, and so, ultimately, failing to prove the point.

Also, I envision the meaning of the text being impossible to ascertain without careful work from critical theorists; in other words, at face value it would appear to be meaningless, but an examination of the subtext (Which in fact announces this meaninglessnes) would reveal that the text actually encodes an entirely comprehensible meaning, as derived from clues in the subtext, which is too quick to denounce certain avenus of textual analysis.

And then it turns out that the essentia meaning of the text is the telling of an obscure intellectual joke, one which requires extensive knowledge to untangle, but whose punchline is as bad as the worst sitcom groaner (perhaps a punchline so obtuse as to suggest an utter absence of meaning, therefore acquiring meaning, and thus losing it. as explained above).

I call it the “Recursive Shaggy Dog”.

Did that make any sense at all? Or did it only seem to because it’s 4AM?

It also occurs to me that you could actually title the work “The Recurssive Shaggy Dog”, thus making the entire excercise of deciphering it’s meaning meaningless, and therefore proving that it has a meaningful point, except when it doesn’t.

Posted by on 07/28 at 07:32 AM
Thanks for sharing, “Orange” in #42. Thank you very effin’ much, indeed. I was having a perfectly lovely time eating my dinner and reading the latest comments, (time stamp is correct folks, graveyard shift), until I got to yours.

I’m going Stephen Colbert on your ass, and putting you officialy on notice.

Posted by on 07/28 at 08:55 AM
It’s worth pointing out that Joyce, the amazing, groundbreaking novelist, was at best a fair-to-middling playwright. Not for want of trying, either, at least in his early career.

Dang. I can’t believe I missed this opportunity to trot out the old joke about how someday I’d like to adapt Exiles for the stage. . . . Sorry I dropped the ball, Amanda. Usually I can spot a straight line when I’m fed one. . . .

And Christopher, your intuition of the increasing self-referentiality of twentieth-century art is pretty much on target. The astonishing (or depressing) thing is, though, that we reached that shaggy-dog level of recursivity somewhere around the 1960s, with Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, John Cage’s silences, and John Barth’s fiction. Everything since then has been post-meta-recursive, or post-post, or post-post-post. . . .

Posted by Michael on 07/28 at 02:54 PM
As a chess player I would have to say that Murphy v Edon is one of the most disturbing games of chess I have ever seen. The only game that might beat it would be the “Immortal Zugzwang game” (Friedrich Samisch vs Aron Nimzowitsch).

Posted by on 07/29 at 12:13 AM
astrongmaybe, I was going to say I saw the “one was taller than the other “ line in Spike Milligan’s Puckoon. I know I did, but now I’m wondering if Milligan ripped it off (I think Puckoon was written in the sixties). It’s a good line, so I wouldn’t really blame him.

Posted by on 07/31 at 12:34 PM
PS Michael-

I was in “Play” back when I was a frosh in college. One of the things no one ever knows about me, because I landed in the English dept instead of the theatre where I belonged. But it was pretty spectacular - the light, the urns, the whole bit. Tons of fun.

Reread Murphy just this summer, in the spankin’ new Grove Press box set business, because I had little else to do. My favourite moment is still the Ticklepenny lecture on the extendability of tubes and wires.

captcha - “working,” as in everybody’s doing it in order to advance themselves ever close toward the weekend.

Posted by Arkadin on 08/01 at 12:26 AM
"I helped to paint an enormous version of the front page of the Gospel of John for the gymnasium of St. Ignatius Loyola across the street.”
Can we have a picture? Is it still there?

Posted by on 08/03 at 08:13 AM

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