“NICHTSNICHTSUNDNICHTS”: BECKETT’S AND JOYCE’S TRANSTEXTUAL UNDOINGS DIRK VAN HULLE

During the first decade of Beckett’s literary career, Fritz Mauthner and Arthur Schopenhauer connected the twin peaks of literary modernism. James Joyce and Marcel Proust represented the world in all its phenomenal abundance (with a respectively zoological and botanical emphasis). By weaving their textual veils they may have created the impression that something “deeper” lurked behind. Beckett suggested to his friend Axel Kaun that whatever “lurked behind” might simply be nothing at all. This insight, however, did not prevent him from writing. The assumption that there is nothing beyond phenomena except their negation is already present in Beckett’s first story, appropriately called “Assumption.”1 Its very first sentence implicitly contains what Beckett stated explicitly in an interview with Israel Shenker: that he was working with impotence as an alternative to Joyce’s omnipotence. But just as the Schopenhauerian denial of the will is impossible without will and Mauthnerian linguistic skepticism is unthinkable without language, a wide intertextual exploration is necessary in order to illustrate how Beckett rid his work of its initial erudition. He needed words in order to take them back, negating the kinetic energy of artistic achievement to arrive at the potential energy of ineffability. The issue at stake is not nihil, but the enormous surplus value Beckett gave to the infinitesimal, ‘the next next to nothing.’2

In 1937, Samuel Beckett wrote to Axel Kaun that his language appeared to him like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things behind it.3 This view seems to reflect the kind of essentialism which Richard Rorty rejects as “the way in which scientists, scholars, critics and philosophers think of themselves as cracking codes, peeling away accidents to reveal

1 Samuel Beckett, “Assumption,” in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 3-7. 2 Samuel Beckett, letter to A. J. Leventhal, February 3, 1959, quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 461. 3 Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), 52. 50 Van Hulle essence, stripping away veils of appearance to reveal reality.”4 But to those “things behind it” Beckett subtly added the parenthesis “(oder das dahinterliegende Nichts)”. The paradox of his enterprise was that in order to tear apart the veil of language and reach this absence of things behind it, he had to weave it first. He did so with the help of masters in the art of creating the illusion of diversity such as James Joyce, but also Marcel Proust, Arthur Schopenhauer, Fritz Mauthner, and many others. With the advantage of hindsight, it is possible to investigate the first decade of Beckett’s literary career in retrograde direction, taking back his words in five steps, in order to arrive at the textual doings undone in the very first sentence of his first story, “Assumption”.

5. Mauthner’s “Nichtwort”

“In the word was no beginning” is the first note on page 269 of Joyce’s notebook VI.B.41, containing several notes on the German philosopher Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache.5 Mauthner’s linguistic scepticism is based on the idea that thought and language are inseparable.6 Language is a set of metaphors, according to Mauthner, and since words are based on memory,7 they are unsuited for communication, for everybody has different memories.8 While Joyce was reading Mauthner in 1938 (more than a decade after Wyndham Lewis’s criticism in The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man) he found an answer to the Gracehoper’s famous question to the Ondt: “why can’t you beat time?”(FW, 419.7-8).9 The same question was formulated somewhat differently in Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache: “Why is our world, the way it represents itself in our language, so extremely spatial? Why do we find our bearings faster in three-dimensional space than in unidimensional time?” Mauthner’s answer is simple: “Because our visual faculty also serves as a space organ. Because our sense of hearing

4 Richard Rorty, “The Pragmatist’s Progress,” in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 89. 5 Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1923). 6 Ibid., vol. 1, 176: “Es gibt kein Denken ohne Sprechen.” 7 Ibid., vol. 1, 212. 8 Ibid., vol. 3, 641. 9 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 1992 [1939]).