Unlike Beckett’s English journalism, the French counterpart wears its learning lightly, with witty sallies and exposed clichés. Although his van Velde interpretations are idiosyncratic, they are also perceptive. They testify to his continued preoccupation with the rupture of relation between subject and object, but the continuation is almost parenthetical to a subtextual plea to the art-lover to trust his eyes rather than words, which this essay contains in abundance.
As all Beckett scholars know, 1946–1950 was his most fertile period, but it was not until the mid-1950s that he could live on his royalties. Even during the momentum of writing the Trilogy, he accepted odd assignments, and, again on commission, he continued his defense of an art critical of its object. ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’ (1948) was originally entitled ‘Le Nouvel objet’. Aware of repeating himself on the breakdown of the subject-object relation, Beckett weaves that repetition into critical irony. With tongue in cheek, he maintains that constant statement and restatement of opinions about painting can free one from looking at individual paintings.
Beckett sums up three possibilities for the modern artist: 1) to be an antiquarian in the old subject-object tradition, 2) to risk a few uncertain steps toward a new tradition, or 3) to discover in the absence of traditional relation and object a new relation and object. Immersed as Beckett was in his own exploration of a new relation and object — an immersion of elan — he ends the essay with comparable elan at the third way of art.
A year later elan is submerged in Three Dialogues, Beckett’s best-known art criticism. Requested rather than commissioned, the piece is ascribed to Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, the editor of the postwar transition. However, Beckett alone wrote the dialogues that ‘merely reflect, very freely, the many conversations we had at that time about painters and painting.’ To Martin Esslin, Beckett remarked that he wrote the talks up rather than down. Like Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues, those of Beckett are dramatic enough to perform.
The scene is readily imaginable—street, cafe, or gallery where two art critics, B and D, air their differences. Although Beckett does not refer to his most recent essay on impediment-painting, he selects three painters who illustrate the three possibilities of modern art: Tal Coat (and, incidentally, Matisse), despite prodigious painterly talent, is an antiquarian in his subject-object relation; Masson, influenced by the Orient, yearns for a void, but through that very yearning flaunts his possession of space; the third way of passive acceptance of crisis belongs to Bram van Velde (with Geer nowhere in sight). For ‘object’ Beckett substitutes the word ‘occasion’, which seems less stable and solid. In Beckett’s radical esthetic of failure, it is no longer sufficient to replace the old relation and occasion with new ones. It is unsatisfactory to convert ‘fidelity to failure’ into ‘a new occasion’. Bram van Velde simply paints, without relation and without waving the banner of his failure. Or at least that is B’s ‘fancy’ of what Bram van Velde does. B flees from the scene without presuming to pronounce what van Velde ‘more than likely’ does. B’s last words undermine all he has said: ‘Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken.’ — circling round to the Descartes of Beckett’s 1930 Wboroscope: ‘Fallor, ergo sum!’
Three Dialogues is so well worn as a springboard for Beckett interpretation that one may recall D’s injunction to B: ‘… the subject under discussion is not yourself. Nevertheless, Beckett’s hyperawareness of an unsteady eye on an evanescent occasion is the fulcrum of his recent (1982) fiction Mal vu mal dit. In his 1952 tribute to Henri Hayden, Beckett phrases it as ‘a self, such as it is, and an impregnable nature’. But the man-painter paints.
Beckett’s other brief tributes to artist friends — Bram van Velde again, Jack Yeats again, Henri Hayden again, and Avigdor Arikha — convey his appreciation of their respective ‘needs’. One might describe these pieces as lyrics of criticism, and the two he translated display his matchless skill in that craft.
5) The Self-Critic
Although refusing interviews, Beckett has chatted informally with all too many people who have rushed into print. Only in private letters has he written about his own writing, and since their publication is scattered, they are here reprinted.
* * *
Apart from Beckett’s criticism is another disjectum, ‘Human Wishes’, a fragmentary scene of 1937. It was left at my Paris hotel when I did not even know of its existence, and only recently has Beckett consented to its publication, fulfilling a few human wishes.
Finally, the generosity of Samuel Beckett is happily infectious, and in the editing of this volume I am indebted to James Acheson, Linda Ben-Zvi, Martin Esslin, Martha Fehsenfeld, Stan Gontarski, Jan Hokenson, James Knowlson, James Mays, Dougald McMillan, and David Robertson, whom it is a pleasure to thank warmly. I also acknowledge assistance from Research funds at the University of California, Davis. Above all, I am beholden to Samuel Beckett for overcoming his reluctance to see publication of these delectable disjecta.
RUBY COHN
Part I
Essays at Esthetics
1. Dante … Bruno . Vico . . Joyce
The danger is in the neatness of identifications. The conception of Philosophy and Philology as a pair of nigger minstrels out of the Teatro dei Piccoli is soothing, like the contemplation of a carefully folded ham-sandwich. Giambattista Vico himself could not resist the attractiveness of such coincidence of gesture. He insisted on complete identification between the philosophical abstraction and the empirical illustration, thereby annulling the absolutism of each conception — hoisting the real unjustifiably clear of its dimensional limits, temporalizing that which is extratemporal. And now here am I, with my handful of abstractions, among which notably: a mountain, the coincidence of contraries, the inevitability of cyclic evolution, a system of Poetics, and the prospect of self-extension in the world of Mr Joyce’s Work in Progress. There is the temptation to treat every concept like ‘a bass dropt neck fust in till a bung crate’, and make a really tidy job of it. Unfortunately such an exactitude of application would imply distortion in one of two directions. Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers? Literary criticism is not book-keeping.
Giambattista Vico was a practical roundheaded Neapolitan. It pleases Croce to consider him as a mystic, essentially speculative, ‘disdegnoso dell’ empirismo’. It is a surprising interpretation, seeing that more than three-fifths of his Scienza Nuova is concerned with empirical investigation. Croce opposes him to the reformative materialistic school of Ugo Grozio, and absolves him from the utilitarian preoccupations of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle and Machiavelli. All this cannot be swallowed without protest. Vico defines Providence as: ‘una mente spesso diversa ed alle volte tutta contraria e sempre superiore ad essi fini particolari che essi uomini si avevano proposti; dei quali fini ristretti fatti mezzi per servire a fini più ampi, gli ba sempre adoperati per conservare l’umana generazione in questa terra.’ What could be more definitely utilitarianism? His treatment of the origin and functions of poetry, language and myth, as will appear later, is as far removed from the mystical as it is possible to imagine. For our immediate purpose, however, it matters little whether we consider him as a mystic or as a scientific investigator; but there are no two ways about considering him as an innovator. His division of the development of human society into three ages: Theocratic, Heroic, Human (civilized), with a corresponding classification of language: Hieroglyphic (sacred), Metaphorical (poetic), Philosophical (capable of abstraction and generalization), was by no means new, although it must have appeared so to his contemporaries. He derived this convenient classification from the Egyptians, via Herodotus. At the same time it is impossible to deny the originality with which he applied and developed its implications. His exposition of the ineluctable circular progression of Society was completely new, although the germ of it was contained in Giordano Bruno’s treatment of ident
ified contraries. But it is in Book 2, described by himself as ‘tutto il corpo … la chiave maestra … dell’ opera’, that appears the unqualified originality of his mind; here he evolved a theory of the origins of poetry and language, the significance of myth, and the nature of barbaric civilization that must have appeared nothing less than an impertinent outrage against tradition. These two aspects of Vico have their reverberations, their reapplications — without, however, receiving the faintest explicit illustration — in Work in Progress.
It is first necessary to condense the thesis of Vico, the scientific historian. In the beginning was the thunder: the thunder set free Religion, in its most objective and unphilosophical form — idolatrous animism: Religion produced Society, and the first social men were the cave-dwellers, taking refuge from a passionate Nature: this primitive family life receives its first impulse towards development from the arrival of terrified vagabonds: admitted, they are the first slaves: growing stronger, they exact agrarian concessions, and a despotism has evolved into a primitive feudalism: the cave becomes a city, and the feudal system a democracy: then an anarchy: this is corrected by a return to monarchy: the last stage is a tendency towards interdestruction: the nations are dispersed, and the Phoenix of Society arises out of their ashes. To this six-termed social progression corresponds a six-termed progression of human motives: necessity, utility, convenience, pleasure, luxury, abuse of luxury: and their incarnate manifestations: Polyphemus, Achilles, Caesar and Alexander, Tiberius, Caligula and Nero. At this point Vico applies Bruno — though he takes very good care not to say so — and proceeds from rather arbitrary data to philosophical abstraction. There is no difference, says Bruno, between the smallest possible chord and the smallest possible arc, no difference between the infinite circle and the straight line. The maxima and minima of particular contraries are one and indifferent. Minimal heat equals minimal cold. Consequently transmutations are circular. The principle (minimum) of one contrary takes its movement from the principle (maximum) of one another. Therefore not only do the minima coincide with the minima, the maxima with the maxima, but the minima with the maxima in the succession of transmutations. Maximal speed is a state of rest. The maximum of corruption and the minimum of generation are identical: in principle, corruption is generation. And all things are ultimately identified with God, the universal monad, Monad of monads. From these considerations Vico evolved a Science and Philosophy of History. It may be an amusing exercise to take an historical figure, such as Scipio, and label him No. 3; it is of no ultimate importance. What is of ultimate importance is the recognition that the passage from Scipio to Caesar is as inevitable as the passage from Caesar to Tiberius, since the flowers of corruption in Scipio and Caesar are the seeds of vitality in Caesar and Tiberius. Thus we have the spectacle of a human progression that depends for its movement on individuals, and which at the same time is independent of individuals in virtue of what appears to be a preordained cyclicism. It follows that History is neither to be considered as a formless structure, due exclusively to the achievements of individual agents, nor as possessing reality apart from and independent of them, accomplished behind their backs in spite of them, the work of some superior force, variously known as Fate, Chance, Fortune, God. Both these views, the materialistic and the transcendental, Vico rejects in favour of the rational. Individuality is the concretion of universality, and every individual action is at the same time superindividual. The individual and the universal cannot be considered as distinct from each other. History, then, is not the result of Fate or Chance—in both cases the individual would be separated from his product — but the result of a Necessity that is not Fate, of a Liberty that is not Chance (compare Dante’s ‘yoke of liberty’). This force he called Divine Providence, with his tongue, one feels, very much in his cheek. And it is to this Providence that we must trace the three institutions common to every society: Church, Marriage, Burial. This is not Bossuet’s Providence, transcendental and miraculous, but immanent and the stuff itself of human life, working by natural means. Humanity is its work in itself. God acts on her, but by means of her. Humanity is divine, but no man is divine. This social and historical classification is clearly adapted by Mr Joyce as a structural convenience — or inconvenience. His position is in no way a philosophical one. It is the detached attitude of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist … who describes Epictetus to the Master of Studies as ‘an old gentleman who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water.’ The lamp is more important than the lamp-lighter. By structural I do not only mean a bold outward division, a bare skeleton for the housing of material. I mean the endless substantial variations on these three beats, and interior intertwining of these three themes into a decoration of arabesques — decoration and more than decoration. Part 1 is a mass of past shadow, corresponding therefore to Vico’s first human institution, Religion, or to his Theocratic age, or simply to an abstraction — Birth. Part 2 is the lovegame of the children, corresponding to the second institution, Marriage, or to the Heroic age, or to an abstraction — Maturity. Part 3 is passed in sleep, corresponding to the third institution, Burial, or to the Human age, or to an abstraction — Corruption. Part 4 is the day beginning again, and corresponds to Vico’s Providence, or to an abstraction — Generation. Mr Joyce does not take birth for granted, as Vico seems to have done. So much for the dry bones. The consciousness that there is a great deal of the unborn infant in the lifeless octogenarian, and a great deal of both in the man at the apogee of his life’s curve, removes all the stiff interexclusiveness that is often the danger in neat construction. Corruption is not excluded from Part 1 nor maturity from Part 3. The four ‘lovedroyd curdinals’ are presented on the same plane — ‘his element curdinal numen and his enement curdinal marrying and his epulent curdinal weisswasch and his eminent curdinal Kay o’ Kay!’ There are numerous references to Vico’s four human institutions — Providence counting as one! ‘A good clap, a fore wedding, a bad wake, tell hell’s well’: ‘their weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their natural selections’: ‘the lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, ever-flowing on our times’: ‘by four hands of forethought the first babe of reconcilement is laid in its last cradle of hume sweet hume.’
Apart from this emphasis on the tangible conveniences common to Humanity, we find frequent expressions of Vico’s insistence on the inevitable character of every progression — or retrogression: ‘The Vico road goes round to meet where terms begin. Still onappealed to by the cycles and onappalled by the recoursers, we feel all serene, never you fret, as regards our dutyful cask … before there was a man at all in Ireland there was a lord at Lucan. We only wish everyone was as sure of anything in this watery world as we are of everything in the newlywet fellow that’s bound to follow. …’ ‘The efferfreshpainted livy in beautific repose upon the silence of the dead from Pharoph the next first down to ramescheckles the last bust thing.’ ‘In fact, under the close eyes of the inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody similarly as by the providential warring of heartshaker with housebreaker and of dramdrinker against freethinker our social something bowls along bumpily, experiencing a jolting series of prearranged disappointments, down the long lane of (it’s as semper as oxhousehumper) generations, more generations and still more generations’ — this last a case of Mr Joyce’s rare subjectivism. In a word, here is all humanity circling with fatal monotony about the Providential fulcrum — the ‘convoy wheeling encirculing abound the gigantig’s lifetree’. Enough has been said, or at least enough has been suggested, to show how Vico is substantially present in the Work in Progress. Passing to the Vico of the Poetics we hope to establish an even more striking, if less direct, relationship.
Vico rejected the three popular interpretations of the poetic spirit, which considered poetry as either an ingenious popular expression of philosophical conceptions, or an amusing social diversion, or an exact science wit
hin the research of everyone in possession of the recipe. Poetry, he says, was born of curiosity, daughter of ignorance. The first men had to create matter by the force of their imagination, and ‘poet’ means ‘creator’. Poetry was the first operation of the human mind, and without it thought could not exist. Barbarians, incapable of analysis and abstraction, must use their fantasy to explain what their reasons cannot comprehend. Before articulation comes song; before abstract terms, metaphors. The figurative character of the oldest poetry must be regarded, not as sophisticated confectionery, but as evidence of a poverty-stricken vocabulary and of a disability to achieve abstraction. Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passion and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when most concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars. Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity. Considering the Scholastics’ axiom: ‘niente è nell’intelletto che prima non sia nel senso’, it follows that poetry is a prime condition of philosophy and civilization. The primitive animistic movement was a manifestation of the ‘forma poetica dello spirito’.
His treatment of the origin of language proceeds along similar lines. Here again he rejected the materialistic and transcendental views; the one declaring that language was nothing but a polite and conventional symbolism; the other, in desperation, describing it as a gift from the Gods. As before, Vico is the rationalist, aware of the natural and inevitable growth of language. In its first dumb form, language was gesture. If a man wanted to say ‘sea’, he pointed to the sea. With the spread of animism this gesture was replaced by the word: ‘Neptune’. He directs our attention to the fact that every need of life, natural, moral and economic, has its verbal expression in one or other of the 30,000 Greek divinities. This is Homer’s ‘language of the Gods’. Its evolution through poetry to a highly civilized vehicle, rich in abstract and technical terms, was as little fortuitous as the evolution of society itself. Words have their progressions as well as social phases. ‘Forest-cabin-village-city-academy’ is one rough progression. Another: ‘mountain-plain-riverbank’. And every word expands with psychological inevitability. Take the Latin word: ‘Lex’.