Beckett in (T)Transition: "Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit," Aesthetic Evolution, and the Assault on Modernism David A

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

BECKETT IN (t)TRANSITION: “THREE DIALOGUES WITH GEORGES DUTHUIT,” AESTHETIC EVOLUTION, AND THE ASSAULT ON MODERNISM.

By DAVID A. HATCH

A Dissertation submitted to the Program in Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2004

The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of David A. Hatch defended on December 11 2003.

S.E. Gontarski Professor Directing Dissertation

Sally McRorie Outside Committee Member

William Cloonan Committee Member

Karen Laughlin Committee Member

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

THIS WORK IS DEDICATED TO MY WIFE, MELISSA HATCH, AND TO OUR DAUGHTERS: MALARY, JENNA, and RILEY. Ad astra per aspera...

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many hands have helped me grapple with Proteus. My wife Melissa has been supportive beyond belief. I'm grateful to Karen Laughlin, Bill Cloonan, and Sally McRorie for serving on my committee despite their busy academic schedules. Numerous friends have made the mistake of inquiring about the project and have shown their love by listening and making suggestions: Graley Herren, Roxane Fletcher, Lavon Gappa- Levi, Jim Bell, Charlie Madsen, and Gary Hatch. Thank you Leon Golden for your honor, and Gene Crook for your commitment. I will always be grateful to David Simmons for reminding me about priorities. Thanks to Shawn Tucker for listening well beyond the dumpster. Thanks to the cat for her patience and to the hanged man for keeping me humble. Most of all I am grateful to Stan Gontarski for his insight, time, effort, and patience. And his scalpel. As Socrates for the boy in Plato's Meno, he forced me to grow and has been an inspiration for a young scholar. Finally, I'm grateful to Samuel Beckett for being such a scoundrel.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT vi INTRODUCTION An Unspeakable Trajectory 1 CHAPTER ONE A Procrustean Bed: Critical Use of “Three Dialogues" 6 CHAPTER TWO In the Widening Gyre 56 CHAPTER THREE Perilous Zones: Beckett in (t)Transition 77 CHAPTER FOUR The Dialogue Format: An Untidy Analyst 124 CHAPTER FIVE Exhibitions . . . Dialogues. Du Bouchet . . Beckett 152 CONCLUSION Effluence from the void 205 NOTES 215 REFERENCES 221 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 235

ABSTRACT

Nearly every piece of Beckett criticism uses "Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit," yet many early assumptions about the work remain unexplored and unchallenged. "Beckett in (t)Transition" suggests new interpretive possibilities of Beckett’s work at the same time that it interrogates a number of critical trends that have formed within Beckettian criticism. With this essay Beckett challenges the modernist aesthetic agenda developed by Eugene Jolas in transition magazine. In addition, the work reflects the dialogical approach to criticism developed by Georges Duthuit in the resurrected Transition 49, and makes a pointed response to Andre du Bouchet’s art-critical essay “Three Exhibitions” which precedes the dialogues immediately in that magazine. At the same time, Beckett’s use of the dialogue format undermines traditional discursive criticism, makes direct reference to Bishop Berkeley’s writings on phenomenalism, and provides a subversive tool by which Beckett can escape the aporia of expressing the impossibility of expression. He accomplishes this through highly oblique references to a number of artists, critics, and philosophers who claim to have negotiated the "void" between the subject and object. Ultimately, this late-modernist work uses modernist techniques to uncouple fundamental epistemological assumptions of modernism at the same time that it heralds Beckett's transition to postmodern practice.

INTRODUCTION “. . . an unspeakable trajectory . . .”

"The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile...” - Samuel Beckett, Proust

"Dread of black. Of white. Of void. - Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said

In the exhaustive Critique of Beckett Criticism P. J. Murphy argues that patterns and critical biases have developed in Beckettian scholarship: It is quite amazing to see the degree to which the huge mass of Beckett scholarship in the Anglo-American tradition is founded upon a series of essentially unexamined and unchallenged assumptions established in the first handful of critical analyses. In the period 1961-65 a number of highly problematical judgments about the nature of Beckett’s art assume to a surprising extent an almost axiomatic status that has largely predetermined the various strata of subsequent criticism. (17) The list of biases that Murphy hints at is extensive; to examine the particulars of their formation and impact on subsequent criticism is beyond the scope of this project. The critical work “Three Dialogues” by Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, however, has been integral to the formation of a number of important critical trends; it is an axiomatic work around which “unexamined and 1 unchallenged assumptions” abound. Murphy notes, for example, that Beckett criticism tends “to exaggerate the role of Beckett’s critical writings, especially 'Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,' as a privileged entree to the oeuvre” (88). This results from the fact that critics have ignored the context of "Three Dialogues" for the most part, with the result that they have misinterpreted the content and overemphasized the importance of this work. The publication history provides insight into how this situation developed. “Three

Dialogues” was largely ignored for nearly a decade following its original publication in issue five of Transition (1949). Beginning in 1957, however, diverse extracts appeared in exhibition catalogues and livres d’artistes. The initial extract, entitled “Dialogue Samuel Beckett-Georges Duthuit,” is Beckett’s own translation of the third dialogue into French, and was published in a brochure by Galerie Michel Warren for a Bram van Velde exhibition held in Paris, 7 May -1 June 1957. The same year, an extract entitled “Samuel Beckett et la peinture” appeared in the “notes” section of Nouvelle Revue Francaise IX (1 June 1957). This passage, once again in French (although not by Beckett’s hand), quotes a short paragraph from the middle of the third 2 dialogue, as well as the long final response by B. This same passage, and another short selection from Beckett's article “Peintres de l’empechement (1948),” are quoted in a catalogue entitled Bram van Velde, with texts by Samuel Beckett, Georges Duthuit, and Jacques Putman (Paris: Georges Fall, 1958), and in the two variant American editions of this text: A Grove Press edition, in which the shorter passage is eliminated (NY: Grove Press, 1960), and an edition produced by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., which includes the short quote from "Peintres," and adds an extract from “Three Dialogues” on the dust jacket as well (NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1962). The complete text of “Three Dialogues” was not reprinted until 1965, when Martin Esslin included the essay in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, and John Calder produced a collection entitled Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. Later extracts include an “Excerpt from a Dialogue Between Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit,” which appeared in the exhibition catalogue for Bram van Velde: Paintings 1957-1967 held in New York, 2-7 April, 1968 (NY; M, Knoedler, 1968), and two extracts that were used in the exhibition catalogue Bram 3 van Velde (Paris: Centre National d’Arte Contemporain, 1970). This publication history is significant for several reasons. First, it demonstrates that “Three Dialogues” was initially reprinted in fragments, out of context, and in publications intended to support the work of Bram van Velde. The nature and consistency of the extracted quotes indicate that for the first decade of its existence the text was apparently thought of primarily as a piece of art criticism, and as a work that was specifically connected with van Velde. In addition, bibliographical evidence suggests that early scholars may have encountered the text in its fragmentary form initially, as the exhibition catalogues and art books were more readily available than original journal issues.4

This historical situation aside, this piece has been, as Murphy suggests, overused and under-examined; nearly every study of Samuel Beckett uses it, but to date these studies effectively disregard the historical, formal, and contextual intricacies of the work. In response to these oversights, this study challenges existing interpretations and critical trends through examination of the form and context of the dialogues. Although this study is revisionist, my purpose is not to devalue the works of early Beckett criticism; a number of these early studies are brilliant interpretations, despite evidence that suggests their conclusions may have been drawn somewhat intuitively. The process of contextualization I propose, however, presents certain theoretical, critical, and historical problems. I will not use “Three Dialogues” to discuss the misreading of Beckett’s texts in general, for example, although Murphy’s claim of critical bias presupposes that some interpretations are stronger than others. We must question, however, how seriously we can take Beckett’s critical comments in the dialogues, and to what artistic or critical occasions they might be applied legitimately. Thus, this study will be primarily formal and historical in nature. With this general scope in mind, Murphy’s assessment suggests three necessary tasks: first, this study maps and critiques the development of trends within the critical heritage; second, it reexamines the primary sources from which these assumptions are drawn within the appropriate cultural milieu; and third, it suggests new critical possibilities based on this reexamination. To accomplish these tasks I have divided this study into five primary sections, each of which examines an important aspect of "Three Dialogues": critical, theoretical, contextual, formal, and rhetorical. The first chapter of this study reveals how early interpretations of “Three Dialogues” influenced later critical traditions. Three major trends of interpretation have developed: the first maintains that "Three Dialogues" is a special key to Beckett's work; the second that subsequent works are informed by metaphysical anguish (or "absurdity"); and the last that the dialogues contain a coherent aesthetic theory. These trends have developed from a small number of assertions in the initial studies of Beckett's work, and have been allowed to proliferate and grow. A number of subsequent critics have made efforts to reconsider these biases, yet ultimately all of these reconsiderations are unsatisfactory because they do not investigate the original context of the dialogues fully. The epigram for this introduction has been removed from context, but it alludes to another important assumption present in early Beckett criticism--namely that the radical

assertions of “Three Dialogues” reflect a period of artistic “transition” for Beckett. Despite the dramatic form, “Three Dialogues” clearly has elements of a critical work, and should be considered as a component of Beckett’s overall critical dialogue, that is, as an article in dialogue with Beckett’s earlier and subsequent critical pieces. The second chapter addresses this notion of theoretical transition: it illustrates how the terms and ideas discussed in "Three Dialogues" have evolved from terms and arguments developed in earlier essays of both Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit; and it addresses Beckett's position in the modernism/postmodernism argument and how the dialogues provide concrete ammunition for a late-modernist position. Together with the examination of this evolution, the critical trends outlined in chapter one reveal a need to reinterpret the dialogues--and to qualify existing interpretations--through a reexamination of the original context of publication. The original transition was published in Paris between 1927-1938 by Eugene Jolas, the poet, critic, and newspaper columnist. “Three Dialogues” was published in the second Transition, which was edited by the art critic Georges 5 Duthuit between 1948-1950. Although the journals are significantly different in style and purpose, both addressed issues fundamental to Modernism in general and to perception/expression specifically. Chapter three explains how Beckett's affiliation with these personalities and publications informs the evolution of his aesthetics, and more importantly, it reveals that the dialogues reject specific assertions about the modernist aesthetic theories articulated in these publications. “Three Dialogues” is based somewhat loosely on the conversations and correspondence of Beckett and Duthuit, and thus the importance of the dialogue form has been neglected. Chapter four explores the significance of dialogue, illustrates how this form allows for numerous levels of reference and sophistication in the work, and shows how Beckett uses dialogue to create an engaging and fluid discussion that provides critical flexibility, plays with philosophical tradition, and capitalizes on the process of rhetorical elenchus. Beckett uses the form to create a "dialogue" with the philosophy of George Berkeley, for example, and thus questions Berkeley's assertions about expression and perception. The final section outlines and interprets the many and complex references to art, philosophy, religion, and aesthetics which appear in the text. With this wealth of references, “Three Dialogues” not only refers to the ideas and discussions occurring in other selections from issue five of Transition, but also to more global debates about epistemology, ontology, and

aesthetics. More importantly, with these references the author creates a multi-level argument, with a conceptual surface and performative subtext, that avoids the aporia of expressing the impossibility of expression, denounces specific modernist aesthetic experiments, and presents a method for expressing, despite the impossibility of expression. These five sections do more than illustrate the formal and contextual subtleties of "Three Dialogues," however, they also demonstrate how form, context, and content function simultaneously to create and maintain an argument the remains vibrant and subversive today. The evolution of terms and ideas displays Beckett and Duthuit's increasing skepticism about modernist aesthetic theories, the context reveals the specific assertions and theories against which they react, the form allows Beckett to counter these assertions without making questionable counter assertions of his own, and the references, together with the surface and subtext structure, allow Beckett to create a complex, cryptic, and self-authorizing criticism for those of his peers with ears to hear. When creating this type of study one faces the danger of generating new and not necessarily more useful trends, that is, of over-prioritizing this critical text by suggesting a new, more authorative context-based reading. I hope instead, that this study will generate new interest in “Three Dialogues” and suggest new interpretive possibilities for the work without limiting the fluidity and expansiveness of Beckett's ideas. My intent throughout has been to add new ideas to the critical discussion, to revitalize this area of Beckett studies by revisiting some of the primary texts, pointing out neglected critical and historical subtleties, and ultimately, celebrating the complexity of Beckett’s critical dexterity and vision.

CHAPTER ONE A PROCRUSTEAN BED: CRITICAL USE OF “THREE DIALOGUES.”

"Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not." - Carl Jung, Collected Works

“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 bookkeeping.” - Samuel Beckett, Proust

In Critique of Beckett Criticism, P. J. Murphy labels Martin Esslin’s introduction to Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays (1965), “the most influential fifteen pages in the history of Beckett criticism in English,” and credits Esslin with engineering the framework for what will become a series of critical trends in Beckett criticism (17). The stature of Esslin’s essay is due, Murphy contends, largely to the fact that Esslin’s assertions are informed by “Three Dialogues,” which appears immediately after the introduction in the volume, thus “lending Beckett’s own authority to Esslin’s speculations.” The critical tendency thus established suggests that these dialogues offer special access to Beckett’s work. By making “Three Dialogues” for the first time widely available, Esslin has, of course, done a great service for Beckett studies. But the emphasis upon this document as a type of ‘key’ to Beckett’s mature thinking on art is made at the expense and exclusion of other aspects of Beckett’s complex critical practice. For all of its youthful sophistication, Beckett studies at this point falls prey to a naive literary error from which it is still struggling to escape: the “intentional fallacy.” (17) Murphy’s evaluation is important, but limited in scope and detail, for the primary trend that he discusses not only has roots in earlier criticism, but has also spawned other critical tendencies that have become almost as restrictive as their sire. The first suggests that Beckett’s works

subsequent to “Three Dialogues” are informed and permeated by the theme of metaphysical anguish expressed in the dialogues. The second maintains that the dialogues contain a coherent aesthetic theory, and that they represent theoretical transition for Beckett. As a unit, these trends have had a progressively significant influence on criticism: they are interrelated ideas, have developed from assumptions created in the earliest studies, and as Murphy observes, have limited and directed the course of Beckett studies from its infancy to the most recent critical works. Most importantly, these trends have resulted in a general misinterpretation of "Three Dialogues." The following discussion surveys the development of these trends and demonstrates how they evolve both horizontally through successive studies, and vertically within each individual examination.

Foundation The notion that “Three Dialogues” provides a “key” to Beckett’s work does not appear on the Beckett landscape until ten years after the work’s publication. Ruby Cohn concludes her introduction to the 1959 “Samuel Beckett" issue of Perspective with a list of Beckett’s works since Textes Pour Rien. Beckett’s works, Cohn remarks, may sound like variations upon the theme at which he arrived after long and bitter exploration, but it is a prodigious poetic exploit to improvise upon "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 as Beckett himself phrases it in a dialogue of homage to the painter Bram van Velde. (131)6 To contemporary critics Cohn’s comment may seem general and not particularly profound, yet she is the first critic to suggest that the dialogues may have application beyond art criticism (although to her credit, she is careful to mention the art-critical context of the passage). In addition, by constructing the above list of Beckett publications Cohn suggests that this passage is a key to his subsequent work, that the “theme” has been little-revised and oft-revisited since the publication of “Three Dialogues.” Cohn thus assumes that the character “B” in “Three Dialogues” represents Beckett’s own views and that the character “D” represents Georges Duthuit, which assumption, although less explicit than her other suggestions above, has had a profound impact on Beckett scholarship. Granted, Beckett himself seems to suggest this connection at several points in the dialogues, such as when B states,

B. - There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said. I have experimented, as you know, both in public and in private, under duress, through faintness of heart, through weakness of mind, with two or three hundred . . . (103) One could interpret this passage as a description of the writing process, especially of the often intensely draining and painful experience writing was for Beckett. Yet to assume that B equals Beckett not only removes some of the fictional aspect from a work that is as much theatrical dialogue as discursive criticism, but this assumption also assigns a theoretical position to the author which may not be applicable beyond the fictional milieu of the dialogues themselves. In the same issue of Perspective, for example, Jacqueline Hoefer labels the passage quoted by Cohn above as the “ultimate aesthetic negation” and suggests that these dialogues have a larger application, that Beckett “explicitly states a nihilistic theory of art” (166). Hoefer uses this aesthetic theory as the basis for her discussion of Watt, which she argues is one step in Beckett’s “exploration of possible modes of meaning” that terminates with the above negation. This contention that “Three Dialogues” is the maturation of an artistic process begun in Watt places all of the works between the two texts on a continuum of experimentation that both informs and is ultimately defined by the passages of “Three Dialogues.” Although neither Cohn nor Hoefer assert explicitly that “Three Dialogues” is a key to Beckett’s oeuvre, nor that the work is a complete, coherent aesthetic that can be applied to art in general, the suggestions they make grow onto doctrine in later criticism. When considered as a unit these discussions intimate that “Three Dialogues” is both the terminus of Beckett’s aesthetic development and a blueprint for his subsequent work. Hugh Kenner suggests the same significance for “Three Dialogues” in his 1961 study Samuel Beckett--but more urgently. Like Cohn, he lists Beckett’s work to date, and then asserts that Beckett “has made just one public appearance to discuss the theory of these operations” (28). In this manner Kenner assigns to “Three Dialogues” the role of a manifesto or credo, despite the fact that he cautions that critics should not be, “like dogs excited by the scent of invisible meat, to snap after some item of information which the author grasps very well and is holding just behind the curtain” (10). Kenner excuses himself from such misaligned zeal when he stresses (perhaps as a wary response to the fundamental assumption that informs Cohn’s comments) that B does not make any assertion in particular about Beckett’s art, but instead that Beckett’s work “incorporates such an assertion” (33). He is careful to maintain the distinction between B and

Beckett, but he also argues that the formal qualities and themes of Beckett’s writing justify the argument that “Three Dialogues” applies to Beckett’s own work. Interestingly, Kenner makes no mention of “Three Dialogues” in either his 1958 article “The Beckett Landscape” or in the regularly anthologized “The Cartesian Centaur,” which appeared in Cohn's Perspective issue. But the dialogues come to dominate the discussion in Samuel Beckett, which suggests that the work has become an important element in the Beckettian critical dialogue by 1961, and that Kenner may have reconsidered the importance of the text because of the arguments presented in these other articles. As a continuation of this critical dialogue, Cohn alters her approach to “Three Dialogues” in her 1962 work Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut. She continues to use passages from the dialogues to illustrate Beckett’s “theme,” but she backs away from her earlier suggestion that “Three Dialogues” encapsulates his aesthetics, and she is quick to stress the self-critical nature of the theme itself. With increasing insistence through the years, Beckett’s ideal of commitment to art is undercut by his awareness of the absurdity of that ideal (as of others, earlier abandoned) and of the inevitability of its failure. Not only does he mock his artist-heroes but he turns his incisive wit against his own art: There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said. I have experimented [. . .] both in public and in private, under duress, through faintness of heart, through weakness of mind, with two or three hundred. By means of his comic thrust, Beckett shoves the artist off a pedestal, down into our lowly human midst. (6) In the notes to this work, however, Cohn reaffirms her earlier suggestion about the connection between “Three Dialogues” and Beckett’s own work. “Of the three painters, Tal Coat, André Masson, and Bram van Velde,” she states, “Beckett finds only the last succeeds in Beckett’s own aims for art” (322). The above critical comments form the foundation for an interpretation of “Three Dialogues” as a key to Beckett’s work. In subsequent works this interpretation becomes more universal and definitive. Richard N. Coe, for example, is one of the first to make these earlier suggestions concrete in the introduction to his 1964 study Samuel Beckett. He labels B’s statements in the dialogues “almost telegraphic,” which suggests that the dialogues not only communicate tersely

and directly, but that they contain a code--an unintentional hint of Beckett’s artistic intent (2). With this in mind perhaps, Coe notes Beckett’s reluctance to comment about his own work; “The Beckettian legend,” he observes, “is one of silence.” Yet despite the fact that Beckett was hesitant to discuss interpretation of his work (or perhaps due to this reluctance), Coe contends that Beckett revealed his aesthetic intent in the coded passages of “Three Dialogues.” In 1949, however, for the first and last time he broke this silence, and published in Eugene Jolas’s perennially avant-garde review, Transition, a series of three dialogues with the French art-critic Georges Duthuit. In these “Dialogues,” although the subject is the abstract art of the nineteen-forties, Beckett reveals his own inner and formal preoccupations more clearly than anywhere else (2). 7 Later in his study, Coe identifies a passage from “Three Dialogues” as the expression of these preoccupations: "'To be an artist is to fail,’ concludes ‘B’ in the ‘Three Dialogues,’ ‘as no other dare fail. Failure is his world.’ And the same theme is echoed and developed by most of Beckett’s people" (5). Coe makes few original contributions to this discussion, although like Cohn, he recognizes that the context of “Three Dialogues” is art-critical, and he notes that the issues discussed in “Three Dialogues” often surface in Beckett's later works. Coe's work is important to this study, however, because he expresses greater confidence that the dialogues contain the key to Beckettian aesthetics, and suggests that the stated subject is a disguise for Beckett’s real discussion. John Fletcher’s use of “Three Dialogues” in his 1964 study The Novels of Samuel Beckett continues the solidification of these ideas. Fletcher claims that Beckett develops a “general theory” of expression “unambiguously in the Duthuit dialogues,” and that Beckett then applies this theory “specifically to Bram van Velde” (137). Like Coe, Fletcher suggests that the dialogues contain a sort of coded Beckett confession. As a cumulative argument both of these studies weaken the art critical context of the dialogues and reinforce the earlier notion that “Three Dialogues” is a key to Beckett’s work. These trends continue in Raymond Federman’s 1965 study Journey into Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction. Federman interprets Beckett’s comments in the dialogues as universally applicable to artists of all types when he states: “though dealing with painters rather than writers, Beckett discusses the dilemma of the modern artist” (203). Like Coe, Federman quotes the passage about the artist’s “fidelity to failure” and then makes the following assertion:

It is evident from the above passage, and in the light of Beckett’s own creations, that his conviction about failure being the only possible ‘expressive act’ of the modern artist goes beyond his admiration for the work of his painter friend, Bram van Velde. Beckett is undoubtedly thinking of his own creative endeavor--that of the artist who (in 1949 when the Three Dialogues were published) has alienated himself from society and deliberately chosen failure as an artistic goal. (204) While Federman is less explicit in suggesting that the art-critical discussion in the dialogues is merely a vehicle for Beckett’s true discussion, he is more earnest in his claims about the connection between the dialogues and Beckett’s artistic goals. Coe discusses the dialogues in terms of a theme that often arises in Beckett’s work and Fletcher suggests that the dialogues reveal a general theory of art, but Federman contends that this work is a turning point in Beckett’s development--that within these passages Beckett rejects artistic convention and reveals a theory that is specific to his own artistic future. As P. J. Murphy suggests, the most significant entry in the development of the assumption that “Three Dialogues” houses a key to Beckett’s work is Martin Esslin’s 1965 Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays. Like Coe, Esslin begins his introduction by discussing Beckett’s reticence about his own work. He then states: Among Beckett’s rare public utterances about general considerations underlying the work of creative artists of our time, the most important probably are the three dialogues on modern painters (reprinted in this volume) which may or may not be a true record of conversations that took place between Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, but in any case owe their present published form to Beckett. (2) Esslin is the first to elevate the importance of the dialogues in direct comparison to Beckett’s other critical works, and to claim that all artists share B’s dilemma. He offers a quote from the dialogues in support of his assertion, but truncates it in a way that alters the meaning considerably: Beckett suggests, as an alternative, . . . an art [. . .] weary of it 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 […] and preferring the expression that there is nothing to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express . . .

Such, in fact, is the dilemma, the inevitable paradox of the artist . . . (2) The underlined sections of the passage below (as it appears in the original 1949 publication) indicate those sections that Esslin eliminates: B - ...I speak of an art turning away 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. (“Three Dialogues” 98) Esslin’s alterations have two major effects: first, they eliminate a certain degree of negativity from the passage and remove the dialogue form, so that the text reads more like a manifesto; second, two segments are removed from the final phrase in which B rejects the efficacy of any expressive vehicle (“nothing with which to express”) and of representation itself (“nothing from which to express”). Without doubt the mere inclusion of the reprinted “Three Dialogues” in a collection of criticism emphasizes the importance of the work as criticism. The significance of Esslin’s study to my argument rests not so much on the fact that he uses “Three Dialogues” as a key to support his thesis, but that subsequent scholars encounter and often adopt Esslin’s arguments as they use the reprint found in his collection. A secondary trend has developed, for example, that is both an outgrowth of this rhetorical positioning, and evidence for the critical influence outlined above. The foundation of this lesser trend is in Martin Esslin’s The Theater of the Absurd (1961), which does not mention “Three Dialogues.” In this well known work Esslin examines “absurdist” themes and formal qualities in the drama of Beckett, Ionesco, and several of their contemporaries. These artists, he argues, are united by a sense of “metaphysical anguish” at the state of the human condition; their works express “a similar sense of the senselessness of life, of the inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity, and purpose,” along with “the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought” (xix-xx). Esslin may not have been aware of “Three Dialogues” when he wrote The Theater of the Absurd, for the work’s lack of discursive argument and abundance of quotable passages about artistic failure and the helpless artist would seem to make the work the perfect vehicle to support

the above argument. Esslin even uses visual art as a metaphor to further his argument; in the last paragraph of his section on Beckett, he argues that in Beckett’s theater, “it is possible to bypass the stage of conceptual thinking altogether, as an abstract painting bypasses the stage of the recognition of natural objects” (46). To discuss Beckett’s work in these terms and not use material from Beckett’s own provocative art criticism raises questions about the prominence of “Three Dialogues” during the period when Esslin wrote this work. Notably, the bibliography at the end of The Theatre of the Absurd does not list “Three Dialogues” among Beckett’s works, despite the fact that Esslin includes the 1960 Grove Press edition of Bram van Velde, which contains extracts of the dialogues. Although Esslin could have elected not to use “Three Dialogues” in his study for some reason, clearly he seemed unaware of the dialogues, or the work was still thought of as art criticism. Almost certainly, this evidence suggests that the assumptions described thus far in this chapter had yet to harden into critical trends. When Esslin’s Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays appears in 1965, however, he not only uses “Three Dialogues” to support his notion of the “theater of the absurd,” but also as the key to his discussion of Beckett’s work in general.8 In language that sounds similar to that used in The Theatre of the Absurd Esslin argues that in “Three Dialogues” Beckett expresses, the dilemma, the inevitable paradox of the artist in a world that lacks a generally accepted-- and to the artist acceptable--metaphysical explanation that could give his efforts purpose and supply him with immutable standards of truth, goodness, and beauty. (2) The situation is, in short, “as absurd as it is tragic.” The introduction to this collection continues much of Esslin’s argument from his earlier study, but he has now placed “Three Dialogues” as the cornerstone of his theory of the absurd as this applies to Samuel Beckett. And although he labels Beckett’s efforts “heroic” in the face of the absurd human situation, Esslin’s interpretation of “Three Dialogues” is decidedly negative, as the following passage indicates. The so-called nihilism of Beckett, the cliché tag that the popular consciousness has attached to him, can thus be seen as no more than the necessary outcome of Beckett’s refusal to deal in generalizations and abstract truths. That, indeed, has always been the position of the artist whose mode of expression is the concrete rather than the abstract. Only that Beckett, in addition, like many writers and visual artists of his generation, has reached a position of doubt, of agnosticism about the external world itself, which, reflected as it must be within the existential experience of the individual, has lost its reassuringly positive and generally

accepted outlines. That is why in the last resort there is nothing to express together with the obligation to express; the only certain evidence of being is the individual’s experience of his own consciousness, which in turn is constantly in flux and ever changing and therefore negative rather than positive, the empty space through which the fleeting images pass. (8-9). In addition to this pessimistic reading, Esslin chooses to ignore the humor of “Three Dialogues.” His interpretation is thus negative in two senses of the word: he accentuates the dark and cynical aspects of Beckett’s work, and he suggests that, like the negative of a photographic image, “Three Dialogues” presents a world view in which nothing can be properly defined, or fully enjoyed. He overlooks the play between serious criticism and gentle mocking--or as Ruby Cohn puts it, the “tension between the ridiculous and sublime, between the sacred task and the profane” (Comic Gamut 6). Esslin concentrates instead on the absurd as he defines it in his earlier study: “Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose [. . .]. Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost, all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless” (Absurd xix). Esslin’s study accentuates the despair of the artist in Beckett’s work, a despair that results, he argues, from “the expression that there is nothing to express [. . .] together with the obligation to express.” Beckett’s works, Esslin argues, “would be destroyed by the slightest suggestion of glibness or facility”; the suffering and loneliness in these works are, he argues, the record of “a painful struggle with the medium of the expression” (Absurd 9). Ruby Cohn’s Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (1962), which appeared between Esslin’s two studies, seems to respond to Esslin’s interpretation of the absurdity in Beckett’s work. Cohn’s interpretation of “Three Dialogues” concentrates on the ridiculous aspect of absurdity, “the comic or laughable,” instead of the corrective, mocking aspect of absurdity, or comedy as “esthetic commentary” (7-8). Other aspects of her study--other subtleties of the gamut of comedy present in Beckett’s work--are, she reasons, laced with the second, darker type of humor. “Beckett’s heroes,” Cohn asserts, “laugh at suffering [. . .]. But Beckett’s laughter--the laughter he expresses and the laughter he evokes--is a mask for, not a release from, despair. It defies no one and transcends nothing” (286). Cohn’s study presents a different approach from Esslin’s overwhelmingly negative interpretation by illustrating the mixture of the above types of humor. She pursues the chuckling humanist behind the “unique suffering artist-human” of Beckett’s work, the Beckett hero for whom “commitment is comic, but it is also compulsive” (7).

Richard Coe also responds to Esslin’s argument in his 1964 study Samuel Beckett. Coe’s introduction uses Esslin’s terms and is a specific rejoinder to Esslin’s examples: To class Beckett himself as the simple incarnation of “despair” is a drastic over- simplification. To begin with, the concept of “despair” implies the existence of a related concept “hope,” and “hope” implies a certain predictable continuity in time--which continuity Beckett would certainly question. “Despair,” with all its inherent moral overtones, is a term which is wholly inadequate to describe Beckett’s attitude towards the human condition; nor is this condition, in the most current definition of the word, “absurd.” It is literally and logically impossible. (1) Coe argues that Beckett’s work expresses an occasion that he labels “The Art of Failure.” He contends that Beckett attempts to represent the inevitability of the artist’s failure, that he transforms this negative event into a positive inspirational resource: Around us on every side, in space, lies the Void; behind us, before us, in time lies the Void; and when the universal ultimate is “das Nichts,” then all normal concepts of significance become absurd. In such a context, “art” is irrelevant, impossible [. . .] unless there were to be discovered an art which could (literally) “express nothing.” (3) For Coe, Beckett captures this human condition; he positions his characters in this void but within sight of a paradise that can never be reached. The “Art of Failure” is, he contends, a record of the experience of reaching from the pit of despair toward the summit of hope despite the knowledge that one can never arrive. Man has a vision of Paradise--the ultimate realization of Self in a Neant beyond space and time, void united with void; yet to desire such a Paradise is to be aware of the Self desiring, and a Self desiring is not a void, and therefore cannot enter. The existence of man then, is not Paradise; but neither is it Hell, for a sort of hope remains, the hope, not of achieving the impossible, but perhaps of discovering, in the very act of grappling with impossibilities, some new synthesis of the Self, detached from time and space and above all from language, for whom the act of annihilation is the promise of a rebirth in some new dimension. Sometimes the Beckett hero seems strangely close to this inconceivable transmutation, sometimes Hell seems scarcely an instant away: but without exception, Purgatory is the residence of every different manifestation of Beckett’s moi: it is the home of Man. (5)

Like that of Martin Esslin, Coe’s argument is built upon an interpretation of “Three Dialogues” that accentuates the negative and ignores the ridiculous. Yet, despite Ruby Cohn’s excellent examination of the humor in Beckett’s texts, and moreover, the quality of the humor itself, Esslin’s and Coe’s discussions of absurdity and failure seem to resonate more powerfully with critics and are further developed in subsequent studies. Raymond Federman, for example, concludes his 1965 study Journey To Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction with the assertion that Beckett “has deliberately chosen failure as an artistic goal” (204). More importantly, however, the swift proliferation of the notion that “Three Dialogues” is somehow tied to the notion of “absurdity” seems to indicate that, even at this early stage, Esslin’s rhetorical positioning of the text has had an impact on the interpretations of other critics. In addition to the general assumption that “Three Dialogues” is a key to Beckett’s oeuvre and the secondary notion that Beckett’s work subsequent to this text is pervaded by absurdity and metaphysical angst, a tertiary trend has evolved within Beckettian scholarship that also has roots in Martin Esslin’s highly significant “Introduction.” In this essay Esslin constructs a chain of reasoning based on “Three Dialogues,” consisting of the above two assertions, followed by the notion that the dialogues contain clues to Beckett’s own aesthetic theory. Having come to this conclusion, Esslin proposes three approaches to Beckett’s work: to “elucidate the numerous allusions” found in these works; to reveal the “structural principles, the outline of the main design” in his oeuvre; and finally--“and above all”--to “determine the quality and depth of the experience by [the critics'] account of the impact the works in question have made upon themselves” (10-12). The first two methods of explication, as P. J. Murphy observes, “summarize and make programmatic the basic assumptions underlying the first full length studies in English” (17). The final approach is, however, Esslin’s primary departure from earlier critical opinion, wherein he adds the ultimate, metaphysical/theoretical component to the chain of assumptions discussed in this chapter. For, states Esslin, it is the existential experience in a literary work, as distinct from its purely descriptive, ideological, and polemical content, that, in evoking a direct, existential human response in the readers, will ensure its continued impact on succeeding generations. (13) Esslin’s study has had just this type of continuing impact on his critical descendants. Like dominant genes, Esslin’s three approaches--the “Beckett triplex” in Murphy’s words--and the above fundamental assumptions that Esslin nurtures in his study, have been linked to “Three

Dialogues” and appear throughout subsequent criticism in only marginally altered or developed forms. Although these theories are diverse, this very diversity is in itself misleading because the theories often culminate in the string of assumptions outlined in this discussion. In addition, the critical theories that develop as a part of this third critical trend are often vague and general; they are inconsistent suppositions that present little coherent discussion of how "Three Dialogues” illuminates specific Beckett works, and almost never discuss details of how Beckettian aesthetics translates into practice. Lois Oppenheim argues, for example, that critics have distorted Beckett’s critical statements through efforts to tease out a theoretical program. But any serious effort to explicate the creative by the critical oeuvre necessarily distorts the writer’s critical objective. While recent efforts (and there have been many) to wrench from the writings on literature and painting a cohesive Beckettian credo--despite the author’s antipathy to such a notion--have shed light on the questions of influence and obsession, in other words, they have clouded Beckett’s primary motivations and misrepresented his intentions in writing criticism. (Painted Word 66) The critical obsession and influence Oppenheim identifies in this passage aptly describe the critical tendencies outlined thus far by this study, but this distortion is far more obvious and egregious in the variety of Beckettian aesthetic theories that have been extrapolated from the passages of “Three Dialogues.” After this initial period, these various theories evolve along two general lines: a number of critics reinforce and elaborate on earlier assumptions, while others question and undermine this development.

Evolution: Solidification The impact of Cohn, Coe, and Esslin is apparent on a string of studies that appears between 1967 and 1973. John Fletcher’s use of “Three Dialogues” as a key to Beckett’s work, for example, is even more assertive than in earlier studies. In the introduction to Samuel Beckett’s Art (1967), Fletcher, like Coe before him, asserts that the dialogues concern Beckett’s own work more than the subject at hand. Little is said, however, that is very enlightening about the painters in question, as D does not hesitate to point out to B, but quite a lot is said about Beckett’s own attitude to creation. In particular, one notices that he has moved from the relative assurance of the Proust and Devlin

essays, where he implied that art can, at the expense of being necessarily difficult, express something of value and importance. Now he has reached the stage compellingly described in Molloy and The Unnamable, that creation always and inevitably spells failure, and that the artist must make the best he can of an impossible situation. (21-2) One also detects in this argument the impact of Esslin’s elevation of the dialogues to a position of importance in comparison to other works. Fletcher asserts, for example, that from “the general themes” developed in Beckett’s critical writings “a new and truer picture emerges, then, as a corrective to the earlier one, of an obscure and perverse denigrator of all that is ‘tolerable and radiant in the world’” (23). “Three Dialogues” is the crucible in which this picture--this theme of denigration--develops, Fletcher argues, and from which the refined theory pours forth to supplant Beckett’s earlier, less-developed theoretical utterances. In addition, Fletcher is supremely confident in the role of the dialogues as a blueprint--or key--to Beckett’s subsequent creations. He asserts that, “in his poetry, as well as his other writings, Beckett has never shirked the fact of the impossibility of the necessity of expression to which he referred in those dialogues” (26). Finally, Fletcher separates the dialogues from their art-critical context more aggressively than Esslin, almost to the point of accusing Beckett of critical duplicity or ineptitude, when he argues that “the dilemma” Beckett engages “is not an unreal one, however dubious his attempt to make Bram van Velde share it” (22). Fletcher also seems to have been strongly influenced by Esslin’s notion of despair and failure. He asserts that in “Three Dialogues” Beckett has moved beyond the “relative assurance” of his earlier criticism, wherein he maintains that art can “express something of value and importance” (21). His interpretation of “Three Dialogues” is particularly dark, although he tries to portray Beckett’s overall aesthetics in a heroic light. Fletcher recognizes the importance of humor in the dialogues, but he disagrees with Cohn as to the function of this humor. He adopts the tone of Esslin and Coe, who leave no room for the play of the ridiculous in “Three Dialogues” and choose to interpret the work very seriously when he argues that the humor mocks the general themes of Beckett’s own early criticism: the sacredness of the writer’s calling, a respect for tradition, and the importance of genuine humanism. Fletcher argues that Beckett’s humor is an illiberal jest that undermines Beckett’s previous criticism and thus requires a serious interpretation.

Michael Robinson reinforces earlier assumptions when uses the passage Hoefer had labeled previously the “ultimate aesthetic negation” as the epigram for his Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett (1969). Robinson argues that Beckett’s comments in the dialogues are, “with the exception of the monograph on Proust, the only ex cathedra indication of his own creative intentions” (33). He reasserts the importance of the passage quoted in the epigram, which he labels Beckett’s “credo,” and notes that, What Beckett sees as van Velde’s intentions, therefore, are pretty much his own, and if ‘write’ is substituted for ‘paint’ the following passage is a clear indication, by Beckett, of his own situation: B: The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint. (36) Robinson does not present any justification for his substitution of writing for painting, or any indication that this passage applies more fully to Beckett’s own work than to that of van Velde. His comments, furthermore, indicate the degree to which the assumptions and suggestions present in early scholarship have matured and hardened by the time of his study, for Robinson clearly has based the above separation of the dialogues from their art-critical context and interpretation of the text as a Beckett credo on earlier critical analyses. Beyond this general notion that the dialogues are a key, Robinson borrows heavily from Richard Coe's discussion of “The Art of Failure”: “The word failure,” Robinson argues, “lies at the core of Beckett’s poetics” (33). Like Fletcher, Robinson asserts that Beckett reconsiders his “earlier purposes” in “Three Dialogues” and that he does so “in order to mock them and to emphasize the impotence of an art that seeks to discover some ultimate deep” (33). Robinson’s “Poetics of Failure” argument centers on “Three Dialogues,” and in particular on B’s assertion that, “to be an artist is to fail.” To write, for Beckett, is necessarily to fail, and literature in the traditional sense, with its promise to enlarge Man’s experience and to explore or resolve his relationship with the world around him, is rejected as illusion. (33) Attempts to create art based on these traditional modes and assumptions are, Robinson asserts, “acts of bad faith.” For the artist there is no positive, constructive option; one is either a deceiver, a practitioner of failure, or is self-deceived, for as Robinson argues, “The man who still

wants to succeed has not yet admitted his own essential impotence” (36). Yet the severity of interpretation here is akin to the difference between the lie and the practical joke, between deception for profit and deception for the pleasure of all. In this study “Three Dialogues” is used as the source that underpins a solemn, negative interpretation of Beckett’s work. Like Fletcher, Robinson recognizes the humor in “Three Dialogues,” but he suggests that Beckett “prefers the role of academic clown in which he can use his erudition [. . .] to laugh at it and reveal its inherent impotence” (53). In addition, and contrary to Esslin, Robinson argues that although a theory seems to be present within “Three Dialogues,” definition of this theory is not Beckett’s purpose in the work. Van Velde is seen as the first painter to abandon the plane of the feasible and to ‘admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail [. . .] but as neither Beckett nor van Velde are trying to express anything definable (for to define Nothing is to make it be), the exposition ends in failure. Enough has been said, however, to see that it is not separate from Beckett’s other attempts, cast in the guise of fiction or drama, to articulate from the surroundings of the Void. (37) Here Robinson intimates that Beckett avoids articulating a theory. He suggests that Beckett’s criticism is no more illuminating than his prose, and, moreover, that any theory Beckett has created is found throughout the breadth of his creative projects rather than expressed explicitly in his critical works. In comparison to the above studies, Hugh Kenner’s comments in A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (1973) are more subtle, but they continue many of the same critical trends and allow the same assumptions to proliferate. His discussion of “Three Dialogues” is central to the conclusion of his study (entitled “Retrospect”), in which he argues: “The ostensible subject of these dialogues is painting, a manageable metaphor for any art” (186). With this comment Kenner retreats from some of the more strident assertions made by his colleagues; he recognizes that the art criticism in the text is important, and merely suggests that there are parallels between Beckett’s comments on painting and other media. Yet Kenner extrapolates a theme from Beckett’s comments and affirms that, “if we reflect on Beckett’s assertions in the Dialogues, still more if we reflect on Beckett’s works, we may discern a principle which will not disregard the inevitable component of failure but will embrace it” (187). Kenner’s comments reflect the scholarly trends present during this period, but like the sophomore study of Ruby Cohn,

Kenner’s second examination seems more hesitant about “Three Dialogues” as a key to Beckett’s work, and he is less sure about his own initial assertions. While Cohn demurely suggests that Esslin and later critics have over-emphasized the dismal and hopeless aspects of Beckett’s texts, Kenner attacks Esslin’s categories openly. He declares that too much criticism dwells on the “novelties” of Beckett’s work, and that such criticism, “has brought forth no traditions with which to align him, and has placed him instead with two or three other playwrights in an ad hoc category, the Threatre of the Absurd” (190). This connection, Kenner argues, “is not a useful bracketing.” Kenner does not elaborate, but his comments suggest that he feels that Beckett’s accomplishment as a writer has been limited by Esslin’s argument; that Esslin forces his theory of the absurd on Beckett’s work, and by extension, that “Three Dialogues” has been mishandled in this circumstance as well. He argues, moreover, that the discussion of art in “Three Dialogues” concerns formal necessity more than metaphysical issues. Kenner constructs a lengthy analogy wherein he illustrates that physical laws have both absolute ideals and real world applications, and that this same differentiation should be applied to the art criticism of Samuel Beckett. When Newton tells us that a moving body persists in its movement unless interfered with, we deduce that a wheel once set spinning will spin forever. But no, it turns out that we must correct for countless drags, including the impingement of the very light by which the wheel is discerned [. . .]. And similarly Art posits unachievable feats, which we learn to appraise as though they had been achieved, thus accrediting facile triumphs. (188) Kenner contends that in “Three Dialogues” Beckett proposes a new situation for the artist that incorporates the ideal as well as the real. The artist creates in order to fail, “in order to accept the inexpressible, which will seep through any membrane art’s alchemy can contrive” (188). Kenner castigates those who concentrate over much on the membrane and proposes an interpretation that accounts for success and failure, for the serious as well as the silly. So like some Henry Moore sculpture, shaping the empty spaces which perforate it, a Beckett play or novel locates and shapes unreason, some unsubduable stuff which permeates the universe and is not to be abolished by refusal to think about it. (189) He does not speak specifically of the role of humor in Beckett’s criticism, but suggests that all of Beckett’s artistic tools are present in each work by necessity. “Beckett’s writing conveys no

sense of choice,” Kenner states, “we are apt to feel that each book, each play, is as it is because it must be” (192). An utterly humorless and most severe set of assertions (and an indication of how deeply rooted critical assumptions have become in just over fifteen years) appears in the 1973 study Samuel Beckett by A. Alvarez. This author uses “Three Dialogues” several times in his study, and each reference is a new permutation of how the work is a key to understanding Beckett’s work. In the introduction, for example, he asserts that the dialogues are a summary of Beckett’s artistic evolution. It is as if the whole of Beckett’s writing career were a search for an adequate artistic expression for his depression and his distaste for art, a slow but inevitable process from manic high style through obsessionality to the latest minimal works, which are as close to silence as a man can decently get while remaining a practicing author. He himself summed it up in a 1949 dialogue with Georges Duthuit, when he described the fate of the artist as being resigned to “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.” (10) In his conclusion Alvarez marks this “ultimate aesthetic negation” passage as “Beckett’s own bleak formulation to Duthuit of his vocation as a writer”(137), and argues elsewhere that in “Three Dialogues” Beckett’s predicament is “clear at last because he has decided not only to face it directly but also to use it as a source of inspiration” (43). In these comments we detect the influence of earlier studies, and the tenacious and tempting natures of the assumptions contained therein. More important than mere influence, however, is the effect of the growth of these assumptions into tendencies. Clearly, for example, we have departed almost completely from the art history connection by this point; B’s comments are not only directly associated with Beckett’s own artistic theories and endeavors, but Alvarez uses “Three Dialogues” as proof for a number of different interpretations of Beckett’s themes, style, and even temperament. Alvarez’s study, for example, is the very hardening of the idea of metaphysical despair in Beckett’s work. Beckett’s absurdity, Alvarez argues, is not the “raging, hilarious farce” of Ionesco, but absurdity “in the strict, appalled sense” of Camus (6). “Three Dialogues” is central to Alvarez’s argument. He contends that “the problem” faced by Beckett the artist is the problem faced by humanity: “How do you get through life?” The answer, Alvarez continues, “is

simple and not encouraging: by force of habit, by going on despite boredom and pain, by talking, by not listening to the silence, absurdly and without hope” (87). To get through life “absurdly” in this context means to exist simply in this traumatic, humorless, meaningless, and depressing world. As the passage quoted above indicates, Alvarez believes that dealing with his depression is one of Beckett’s primary purposes for writing. Yet, to categorize Beckett’s early work as “manic” high modernism suggests that Beckett has only recently awakened to the horrors of the human condition and that since doing so he has abandoned his early practice for a more somber style. While this argument is plausible, especially when one considers Beckett’s work contemporary to Alvarez’s study, the critic’s position fails to account for the wealth and style of the humor in the later texts. In addition, Alvarez indirectly divides Beckett’s work into what he views as the early, light-minded pieces, and the sober, dreary post-dialogues works. Other critics are more cognizant of the subtleties contained within Beckett’s work. Hanna Case Copeland, for instance, borrows heavily from the quotations of other Beckett critics, yet she continues to develop many of the more cautious assertions made by Hugh Kenner in her study Art and the Artist in the Works of Samuel Beckett (1975). “For the author-hero,” she states, “the situation involves the inability to write and the act of writing in spite of that inability. In both cases, the result is an intensely self-conscious art deeply scarred by the painful conflict which the creator suffered in its production” (117). Like Kenner, Copeland argues that B’s statements must be considered the ideal, and the author’s efforts a series of asymptotic attempts that forever approach but never reach this ideal: Given the impossible demands which the obligation to create makes upon the impotent artist, the creative effort, when made, can never be successful; it must always fall short of the ideal demanded by the artistic imperative [. . .]. The wonder is that the artist, consumed by anguish in his work and haunted by the failure which will inevitably result from his tortured efforts, creates at all. (117) Copeland stresses that the anguish experienced by the artist is formal, that the limits of medium and human communication in general make any artistic expression arduous. Yet she claims that the artist has no choice--that the pain comes by necessity--and she rejects criticism that suggests otherwise. Thus, the lucid artist’s fidelity to failure does not stem from the choice of failure as an artistic goal, as some critics would lead us to believe. To be an artist is to fail because to be an artist

is to require of oneself the impossible expression of incommunicable perception. Beckett has not ‘chosen failure as an artistic goal’; he has rather shown over and over again how, for the self-conscious artist compelled to define himself through creation, there can be no other fate. (213) Copeland contends that Beckett does not create a situation wherein his characters face the despair of failing to attempt, but like Oedipus they flail against a horrid fate--they continue to wriggle--even though their actions drag them nearer to destruction. In contrast to Copeland the next group of studies returns more fully to earlier assumptions about “Three Dialogues” as a key to Beckett’s work, and indeed makes these assertions more prominent and explicit. Linda Ben-Zvi, for example, seems to offer at first glance an innovative approach to “Three Dialogues” in her 1986 study Samuel Beckett. She quotes the “ultimate aesthetic negation” passage and argues that this indicates Beckett, “is a writer who cannot be approached in traditional ways by readers and critics” (3). She expands this notion into the following assertion: The first thing the reader of Beckett must do is put aside predetermined expectations about literature. Since stories are never finished and never can be as long as the teller lives, the readers confronted with such chronicles must adjust themselves and their expectations to the conditions [. . .]. Beckett wishes to keep the impossibility of completion continually in the foreground. Should the storyteller be lulled by the power of his own story and believe in its veracity, then he would be lying, denying his own “fidelity to failure.” (4-5) Yet despite this cautious overture, Ben-Zvi provides a fairly traditional reading of “Three Dialogues.” At the beginning of her chapter “Beckett as Critic,” for example, she argues for the importance of context. “It is important to understand the milieu from which Beckett’s writing sprung,” she states, “particularly the influence of transition and its most famous contributor, Joyce” (21). She fails, however, to apply this contextual approach in her own discussion of Beckett’s criticism. She ends the chapter with the assertion that “Three Dialogues” is “the critical study that most directly relates to Beckett’s own writing” (31), and she offers the following, familiar assessment: The stance that van Velde manifests is one that Beckett takes for his own; therefore, what he says about the painter in this essay is significant for those who would understand Beckett’s

works. “Three Dialogues” provides the most direct description of the art of failure that Beckett has given us. (33) Like others who have made similar claims, Ben-Zvi does not justify her assertion that B’s statements in the dialogues represent the views of the author or that statements made about van Velde should apply more completely to Beckett himself. Ben-Zvi casts a new, positive spin on the notion that absurdity and despair inform “Three Dialogues,” however, when she insists that Beckett writes about failure as human limitation rather than failure as hamartia. Beckett argues for a position in keeping within the limited purview of man, a “fidelity to failure,” he calls it [. . .]. Failure becomes the inevitable end for those who recognize the impossibility of ever controlling the materials of life or of ever piercing through the void that lies beyond the constructs of reality, Beckett holds. Yet, as his comments also indicate, he is fully aware of the human need to avoid such conclusions; the “shrink from it” becomes a necessary requisite of self-preservation. It is precisely this terrain between recognition and avoidance that Beckett explores. (2) Ben-Zvi is not concerned with the failure of medium or anything beyond the artist’s being. For her the failure of the artist is partly due to fear and partly due to lack of perception. Like Copeland, however, Ben-Zvi suggests that Beckett’s use of failure is not by choice, but that Beckett vacillates between failure due to “recognition” of the artist’s inability to communicate fully and failure due to “avoidance” of the attempt to do so. Like earlier interpretations, this reading concentrates on failure, and fails to account for the humor in the dialogues, but it is more positive because there is room for play between the two notions above, whereas earlier interpretations largely ignore such subtleties. Ben-Zvi also departs from critics who search for Beckett's aesthetics in “Three Dialogues.” She considers Beckett’s criticism collectively and concludes that there is no unified trajectory developed in these works, but that his several theories continually evolve. The body of Beckett’s criticism, since it covers such a large stretch of time--from 1928 through 1966--cannot be taken as a whole; it continually evolves, as the selections indicate. In his comments in “Dante” Beckett writes that it is possible to find a way to overcome the limits of the verbal by doing what Joyce does, making “the words dance.” In Proust he states that no vehicles of communication are possible and that the void does not allow for

articulation. Finally, in “McGreevy on Yeats” he acknowledges that the “issueless predicament of existence” may be indicated not by direction but by indirection, the unsaid indicated by the said. (33) From this chronicle of Beckett’s theoretical development Ben-Zvi distills the following “unsaid” theory: “What has remained unchanged in all these works is Beckett’s adherence to an art of imagination and to the compulsion of creation despite the terrible limits such art must acknowledge and embody” (33). Despite her assertion that “Three Dialogues” provides “the most direct description of the art of failure that Beckett has given us” (33), she maintains that Beckett’s “theory” evolved beyond the dialogues, and can only be detected by extracting the essence from both early and later critical works. In a similar argument, Andrew Kennedy states in his study Samuel Beckett (1989) that “in the post-war years Beckett moved towards a far more radical position--gradually transferring to the art of writing certain creed-like statements on the very different art of non-figurative painting” (14). Kennedy offers no explanation of how this transfer is accomplished or in what works specifically, yet following the critical trend he applies Beckett’s comments on painting to Beckett’s own writing. Kennedy also speaks of Beckett’s desire to attain an “expression beyond expression.” This desire, he contends, was first expressed in “Three Dialogues,” and “springs from that old avant- gardist urge which, beginning with the symbolists, has wanted literature to be an approximation of music and, more recently, of non-figurative painting” (161). Although Kennedy begins with a discussion of form and cross-disciplinary approximation, however, he extends the yearning for the above expression into metaphysical territory: That movement towards life-lessness, ‘that speck lost in whiteness’ (in the close of Imagination like the shades of darkness in Company) may be compared to the countless modernist paintings (starting with Malevitch) of a white square upon a white background. These invite the onlooker to meditation, to a quasi-mystical experience of ‘as if’ figures perceived where there are no figures. It is one of the forms religion may take in an age without faith. (161-2) Here Kennedy alludes to several philosophical, religious, and aesthetic systems, but he does not associate Beckett’s work directly with any of these exterior “forms” of religion. Beyond the above comments about Beckett’s desire to discover “expression beyond expression,” however,

Kennedy seems unwilling or unable to articulate the details of an interior system--of a theory derived from Beckett’s criticism and practiced in his prose.

Evolution: Subterfuge Leo Bersani’s discussion of “Three Dialogues” in Balzac to Beckett (1970) is an example of the trajectory taken by more cautious critics during this period. Bersani begins with a familiar refrain: The nearest thing we have to an explicit statement of esthetic tastes or program is the cryptic, self-mocking Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit [. . .]. The essay on Proust is a longer critical discussion, but it is much less useful than the ten pages or so of the Duthuit dialogues for an understanding of what Beckett has been trying to do (or trying not to do) in his most interesting work. (301) Yet despite the orthodox nature of this beginning, Bersani resists the simple plug-and-play approach employed by other studies thus far and acknowledges the complexity of the discussion. When D. asks if Bram van Velde’s painting is inexpressive, B. waits a fortnight before answering yes. Having in this way either established the importance (or perhaps the silliness) of the question, or raised doubts about using Bram van Velde to illustrate his idea, or suggested that to formulate the idea is an agony, perhaps an impossibility, B. finally suggests an alternative to ‘the common anxiety to express as much as possible, as truly as possible, or as finely as possible.’ (302) In this passage Bersani attacks the fundamental assumption that the character B and the author Beckett are connected. Further, he postulates that the inconsistencies in the dialogues are intentional, used not as feints by Beckett to throw the unwary off the trail of his own confessional theory-making as others have suggested, but rather as attempts by Beckett to undermine any credo that might be extrapolated from the text. In doing so, Bersani maintains that “Three Dialogues” is an important work, but not in the manner suggested by other critics. And at last, at the end of this intriguing blend of humor, pathos, and eloquent verbal obscurity, B. gives us something like a key--or at least the right lock to work on--for his dream of art when he praises Bram van Velde as ‘the first to submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation, in the absence of terms, or, if you like, in the presence

of unavoidable terms, the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail. (302) Bersani suggests that the importance of the dialogues lies in the doubts and inconsistencies raised by the text instead of the ideas expressed in the highly quotable assertions. He later explains, for example, how Beckett has revealed the presence of the right “lock”: If, Beckett seems to be saying, we could realize “the absence of terms,” admit the impossibility of relating art to something else, we might have an art expressive of nothing but the resources it discovers in its own poverty-stricken, autonomous existence. (303) Yet Bersani’s discussion is more than just a new theory wrung from the dialogues or an assault on existing critical opinion. He admits that he finds Beckett’s arguments “troubling” because of Beckett’s dependence on “the opposition between expressive and inexpressive art” (304). Yet he praises the underlying humanity behind what is, for him, an impossible, ridiculous theoretical position. Rather than assigning the passages from the dialogues a place in Beckett’s theory or practice, Bersani sees Beckett’s stance--this obligation to express despite the impossibility of doing so--as “a kind of bizarre heroism given his fantastic talent for stylistic and dramatic diversity” (305). Bersani also challenges the prevailing notion that “Three Dialogues” telegraphs a theme of despair and absurdity that will come to permeate Beckett’s work, by striking at the logic of earlier connections. He begins from a position similar to that of Martin Esslin, in which he seeks the underlying questions Beckett asks rather than seeking specific answers: Bersani suggests that “Three Dialogues” provides “a key--or at least the right lock to work on” (302); Esslin’s goal in The Threatre of the Absurd is to “follow the author’s intention and to see, if not the answers to his questions, at least what the questions are that he is asking” (13). For Bersani, however, “Three Dialogues” is an “intriguing blend of humor, pathos, and eloquent verbal obscurity” (302). With this blend of elements in mind perhaps, Bersani questions the arguments others have constructed around this notion of the failure of the artist. For, states Bersani, “the elusive complexities of Beckett’s position become evident as soon as we examine how he connects the refusal of expressiveness in art to the praise of failure in art” (303). Recognizing that this connection is the fundamental element in many of the above arguments, Bersani argues that it has been too often used and that the logic behind it may be faulty.

The dependence of Beckett’s advocacy of failure on the opposition between expressive and inexpressive art is what I find most troubling in the Dialogues. The opposition itself suggests a hidden agreement with that view of art’s derivative nature [art derived from life], which, as I said a moment ago, Beckett seems to be rejecting as firmly as Robbe-Grillet. The assertion that expression is impossible is not the basis of a new definition of art; rather, it merely restates an old definition pessimistically. Since nothing is opposed to expression but the absence of expression, we may suspect that Beckett, instead of imagining some sort of authentic independence for art, has merely experienced the anguishing impossibility of deriving art from life and, as a result, has concluded that art can only be failure. (304) Bersani suggests that those who have constructed a Beckettian art theory upon the idea of failure make too much of what is, for him, Beckett’s lament about expression, rather than a theory about the practice of art. Bersani argues that failure is Beckett’s subject rather than a methodology: “The logic of failure is the subject of Beckett’s work, but the 'argument' would be uninteresting-- for his readers, at any rate--if the will to fail, to say nothing, did not meet so many resistances” (305). The primary resistance is medium--words express. Other resistances identified by Bersani are the humor, variety, and intensity that mark Beckett’s writing. Bersani suggests, for example, that the humor in “Three Dialogues” is vital to our understanding of the above connection, that it blends with the more serious elements to undermine a serious interpretation. Bersani imagines that despair is a vestment Beckett dons as he writes his way through his “argument” about expression, that he purposefully portrays the role of the ‘gloomy messenger,’ and thus plays with his own notion of a connection between failure and expression, at the same time that he expresses majestically. In short, Bersani decries the notion that “Three Dialogues” contains a theory as such, wherein one might expect to find a program that redefines art or the artist. He contends that Beckett is merely lamenting the situation faced by the artist rather than presenting a constructive program, and thus, that critics overextend themselves when they attempt to discover a coherent theory in this text. Unlike other critics who undermine the logic of earlier arguments, Lawrence Harvey challenges the emerging critical tendency in Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (1970), by highlighting the importance of the art criticism in the dialogues. At first, Harvey suggests that "Three Dialogues” refers to Beckett’s work: “For Beckett (or Bram van Velde), ‘to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail’” (434). In this argument van Velde is placed subtly in the margin

despite the fact that in the original text the above statement is applied directly to him alone. Yet Harvey does not remove van Velde completely as others have done, and he reminds us later of the nature of this criticism: “The use of art to express the inability to express is the third stage in Beckett’s history of painting” (435, my emphasis). In addition, Harvey stresses that “Three Dialogues” is about art criticism, and that it fits into a series of essays about artists contemporary to Beckett. In his essays on the Van Velde brothers, Beckett has a good deal to say about art criticism. He is after all indulging in it, but, as he knows full well, this in itself needs justification, given his own views and the nature of the painting he is discussing. He does indeed hit hard against traditional scholarship and criticism. Most of the work that considers art primarily as a product and seeks to explain it in terms of origins he rejects. (436) With the above context in mind, Harvey notes that much of Beckett’s criticism is aimed less at the construction of an aesthetic theory than at the demolition of “traditional” art criticism, that the passages in the dialogues argue for a separation of art from biographical detail, psychological analysis, and social context. Perhaps most importantly, Harvey carefully avoids more than the bare suggestion cited earlier that “Three Dialogues” is a key to understanding Beckett’s own writing. Harvey also presents a lighter interpretation of the humor/despair question in “Three Dialogues,” but like Fletcher, he cannot escape the developing trend of critical negativity. He quotes the “ultimate aesthetic negation” passage from the dialogues and then provides this comparatively optimistic interpretation: Art, traditionally “possessive,” triumphant, is in irreconcilable conflict with being, which is weakness, chaos. Failure to see has led to inability to express. Rejection of intellect has led to rejection of the instrument of intellect, words. Yet the need to make remains--and with it the obscure sense that somehow, somewhere is being. (435) Harvey adds that this creative need--this compulsion to express--“testifies both to the sterility and the persistence of the human effort.” Like Esslin, Harvey stresses that Beckett’s efforts are heroic but also tragic. Yet ultimately, he ignores the humor in the dialogues, and following Esslin and Coe, he opts for a negative interpretation, or more accurately, he argues that Beckett is optimistic that the artist will ultimately express, but that this victory is Pyrrhic, and the value of that which is expressed is negligible at best. Harvey’s unpublished notes about “Three

Dialogues” help to illustrate this point. “Crux,” he notes, “seems to be in attitude of author, his motive for writing. For S. B. it is neither expression nor communication . . . It is evidence, not 9 representation” (2). He argues that writing is evidence of failure and suffering--a record of artistic death throes: The best image is that of Jacques Putnam: “When a man is drowning, he performs a number of movements that seem to express to a critic passing by, even highly artistic and appropriate. Is the drowning man aware that he is exteriorizing to perfection a delightful personality? He is not realizing himself, he is thrashing about . . . Bram van Velde drowning in his painting, not expressing a cherished personality: reacts negatively to his destruction; with each effort at an image he is trying to drag himself out of the slime, the turbid water, with his hands, with his body, senseless in the dark.” (2) Harvey suggests that some metaphysical aspect of the artist ultimately perishes in the act of creation, and that this end is a sort of beautiful death toward which the artist struggles. His interpretation of the despair/humor issue suggests that there is glory in this defeat, in this success crafted by failure. His argument, like those of his critical progenitors, hinges on the fact that the humor in “Three Dialogues” is critical instead of ridiculous or a mixture of comedy types, as Ruby Cohn argues. In The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett (1971), David H. Hesla contends that the dialogues cannot function as a key because “what Beckett pronounced in 1949 does not harmonize with what he has practiced since” (6). He argues that the impossibility of expression discussed in the dialogues was simply a stage for Beckett, a problem for which Beckett eventually discovered a solution, and that Beckett’s comments in an interview with Tom Driver in 1961 reveal his new aesthetic program: Beckett insists that art must admit to itself what he calls “the mess” or “the confusion,” when he writes: The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of . . . One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess. (6)

Hesla contends that the relationship between this confusion--or ‘chaos’ to use his word-- and the formal art of writing is the “technical problem” that preoccupies Beckett in the years following “Three Dialogues” (7). As the other examinations discussed in this chapter indicate, Hesla’s argument that Beckett subsequently circumvents the impasse outlined in the dialogues is fairly common, yet his suggestion that Beckett’s comments in the interview supersede the passages from “Three Dialogues” is revolutionary. With this argument, however, Hesla makes some assumptions that ultimately undermine his assertions. He credits the Driver interview with the same significance, for example, as Beckett’s own published work, despite the fact that, as he himself recognizes, Driver ‘reconstructed’ Beckett’s comments from notes he made immediately following the interview (233). In addition, like earlier critics, Hesla ignores the disciplinary differences between the subjects of these two selections: B and D discuss visual art in the dialogues while Samuel Beckett apparently refers to his own writing when he comments to Driver about his struggle to “to find a form that accommodates the mess.” The significance of Hesla’s argument to this discussion, however, is that he subtly seeks to dislodge “Three Dialogues” from its prominence as a key to Beckett’s work, and to enthrone instead the Tom Driver interview. Ruby Cohn is less subtle in Back to Beckett (1973). In her introduction she delivers the following caution: Beckett has become a domain for scholarly research, which learns more and more about less and less. I have produced such scholarship, and I am dependent upon such scholarship, but I want this book to get back to Beckett, to the words of the works, which penetrate the width and depth of human experience. (3-4) Here Cohn seems to be chasing her monster across the ice in an effort to destroy or contain it, and with good reason. By the time of Cohn’s study more arguments have surfaced that make repetitious and inflammatory use of the passages in “Three Dialogues” than that give attention to context and nuance. Perhaps in response to this trend, Cohn follows the above statement with a tongue-in-cheek warning to critics and readers about the application of Beckett’s criticism in general, and “Three Dialogues” specifically. Several Beckett critics have used Beckett’s criticism to describe his own works. I think that in “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce” Beckett elucidates Finnegans Wake. I find that Beckett’s Proust penetrates A la recherche du temps perdu. Three Dialogues illuminates the

painting of Bram van Velde. It may be that Beckett chose to write about these artists (even though the essays were commissioned) because he felt their affinities with his own vision, particularly in the well-known sentence from Dialogues: “The expression that there is nothing to express . . .” But I would insist that Beckett’s interior obligation to express has expressed intense emotions, with words stemming from or reacting against our cultural tradition. Above all, Beckett has felt obligated to express his deepest experience, which is wide in resonance. (4-5) Cohn rejects the critical tide with this statement and invites the reader to consider the humanistic nature of Beckett’s expression. She returns to her original notion from Perspective that “Three Dialogues” presents the core of Beckett’s “variations on a theme,” but she challenges critics to consider variation as much as theme in Beckett’s works. She argues in the conclusion against the “reduction” of an oeuvre to a few major themes: “What of Beckett when we reduce him to life-death, self-other, silence-words, being-nothing, though these tensions are present in his work?” (270). While her arguments are potent, Cohn’s most profound refutation of the existing critical trend is perhaps that she rejects critical trends when she makes no rhetorical use of the dialogues in her study. Cohn explains that the title Back to Beckett refers in one sense to her turning her back “on what may be Beckett’s own view of his writing,” and in another sense to her return to Beckett’s works after much exposure to “Beckett criticism, Beckett sources, and several Beckett epigones” (6). One senses when reading this text that Cohn has turned her back on much existing Beckett criticism as well, which, she asserts, “learns more and more about less and less” (3). Yet she agrees with those who have suggested that Beckett’s characters exist in an absurd universe: “the human being is adrift in a world that he did not make, that is indifferent to his suffering, and that leaves him vulnerable to the calm of unbeing” (266). Her interpretation of Beckett’s approach to this absurd human condition, however, is more positive than the prevailing critical position. She argues that Beckett’s accomplishment is the spark of success that he wrenches from the failure inherent to artistic expression. Cohn contends that Beckett’s work “reflects Beckett’s most generalized view of reality--the infinite void in which, against all probability, life briefly stirs” (268). Like Leo Bersani, she suggests that the pessimistic tone of Beckett’s works is but a guise for the author.

Beckett’s lyrics of fiction are hard to read, and they seem to reflect too little of the world into which we were born, as well as too little of the personality of their author. I have tried to suggest that this is only a surface appearance: an author reflects personality through his words, and these pieces show Beckett’s unparalleled control over words--their tone, rhythm, and subtleties. Not the least of his achievements is to render in words the wordless void. (267) Beckett’s humor is arguably an important element in this personality, but Cohn does not deal specifically with the Beckett’s humor in this examination, likely because this was the focus of her earlier study. She concentrates, however, on the sliver of existence expressed by Beckett instead of on the vast void of despair that nearly smothers it. In addition, although she contends that critics err when they reduce Beckett’s work to a series of themes--including being/nothingness--Cohn’s study suggests the presence of a theory behind Beckett’s art and argues for the importance of metaphysical meaning in his works. She writes, for example, of Beckett’s struggle to define existence using philosophical models. In Imagination the impersonalized narrator, tempted by white stillness, tries to confine his words to a world reduced to the observable, the measurable, the describable. He fails, of course. The living being cannot retreat into a frozen world of nonbeing, however it may tempt him with its lack of suffering. (256) At another point Cohn writes of Beckett’s attempts to eliminate personal concerns and deal with existence coldly, scientifically. After a certain point in his career, states Cohn, Beckett abandons the anguish of personal narration: enough. Instead of a voice straining against or toward Nothing, Beckett tries to efface his narrator in a precise impersonal account of an inanimate world, but inevitably life stirs in that world, and Beckett’s phrases stir with it. (268) Both of these passages discuss the author’s attempts to erase traces of his narratorial presence through formal innovation, and in each passage, Cohn assumes a connection between formal and ontological issues which later critics will expand.

New Interpretations H. Porter Abbott’s The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Forms and Effect (1973) is the first in a series of examinations that are more concerned with the intricacies of the argument found in

“Three Dialogues” and less concerned with arguing whether or not this applies directly to Beckett. While such an approach contains an inherent challenge to existing scholarship, this development suggests that either these critics have chosen to ignore a troublesome argument, or that the issue has been completely subsumed within the earlier scholarship. Without doubt, by this time the trends discussed above are firmly entrenched. During this period in the critical history, for example, the references to art (i.e. to van-Velde, Duthuit, Masson, et. al.) and references to “Three Dialogues” begin to appear as separate listings in indices and bibliographies, which circumstance reinforces the notion that the text is no longer considered art criticism. Raymond Federman’s 1965 study, for example, lists the original source of “Three Dialogues,” the Bram van Velde extract, and the Nouvelle Revue Francaise extract in the bibliography; and the index entries in Robinson’s 1969 study for the above artists and the dialogues refer the reader to the same pages. For comparison, Abbott’s 1973 study refers the reader to different pages for artists and dialogues; and there is no recognition in Copeland’s 1975 work of the fact that Grove Press’s Bram van Velde is an extract of the dialogues. Abbot avoids the debate about applicability, and hints that Beckett “nourishes almost coquettishly” the uncertainty that inspires this debate. He notes Beckett’s declaration “that there is no relation whatsoever between a work of art and its occasion,” and argues that Beckett “scrupulously protects his assertion by claiming that the absence itself--which means, in effect, the impossibility of expression--is likewise inexpressible” (5). At first glance this approach seems similar to that of Bersani discussed above, but Abbott takes this argument further and contends that Beckett’s criticism in “Three Dialogues” is not discursive, but performative in nature: Beckett, in other words, is not so much talking about his art here as he is performing it. Insofar as it is commentary, it is an estimate “from within.” But, as critics, we do not share Beckett’s self-imposed limitations. Unless we are to throw out our vocation, we must necessarily talk from a vantage point outside art. Thus, to begin with this dialogue, it is possible for us to affirm that through the author’s straining and convoluted rhetoric we experience something of the expressive disaster that is his occasion. (6) This notion that one shares some of the Beckett’s experience is based in part on the third element of Esslin’s system. But Abbott’s interpretation of the dialogues as disastrous performance also reaffirms and extends Bersani’s contention that one should concentrate on the inconsistencies

and doubts within the text. This approach reveals both the questions asked by the author-- “the lock” in Bersani’s words--and the debilitating obstacles Beckett encounters in the process of creating the text and elucidating his argument. Vivian Mercier’s Beckett/Beckett (1977) also suggests a new manner in which “Three Dialogues” is a key to Beckett, but unlike Abbott, Mercier disputes some of the assertions made by earlier critics and unfortunately falls victim to some of the assumptions he is trying to refute. Mercier begins with a caution against the use of “Three Dialogues” as a key to Beckett’s aesthetics. Literary critics have suggested that Three Dialogues [. . .] offers a better guide to Beckett’s own aesthetics than to the painter’s. I am not prepared to accept this view without modification. Those who draw conclusions about Beckett’s aesthetics from his book on Proust have been seriously misled, I fear: only in the last section does he state his own views at all freely; the rest gives such a patient summary of the plot and method of A la recherche du temps perdu that students taking honors French at Trinity used to use it in preparing for degree examinations. Perhaps future art historians will applaud a similar patient fidelity in Three Dialogues. (90) Mercier argues that the major contribution of “Three Dialogues” and Beckett’s other art criticism is the information these works reveal about Beckett’s own artistic preferences. Mercier asserts that this revelation “may be a better guide to his aesthetic than all his enunciations of principle” (97). Despite this observation, however, Mercier continues the trend that overemphasizes the dialogues, with a small modification at best. B.’s preference is for the art of Bram van Velde, as we discover in the third dialogue, but inevitably the critics apply this description to Beckett’s own art as well. In doing so, they encourage us to ignore the earlier passages of the dialogue, where Beckett strives to do justice to the art of René-Pierre Tal-Coat. [...] Beckett’s previous remarks have set the revolutionary claims of Matisse and Tal-Coat--not to mention the entire history of Italian painting--in a new light. They are a contribution to the history of art, or at any rate of art criticism, as well as to the history of the growth of a poet’s mind. (106) The modifications to the prevailing view of “Three Dialogues” for which Mercier argues are astute, but under-developed and eventually abandoned. His claim that the dialogues contribute to Beckett’s development undermines his earlier dismissal of the notion that they present a

description of “Beckett’s own art.” Further, Mercier suggests that “critics have refused, perhaps rightly” to heed D’s admonition to B that he, “try and bear in mind that the subject under discussion is not yourself” (168). Thus, Mercier slides into the trap of suggesting that he has reconsidered existing interpretive assumptions, at the same time that he allows them to proliferate. Mercier ends his discussion, for example, with a statement in which he interprets “Three Dialogues” as the terminus of Beckett’s aesthetic development: "Having developed his aesthetic theory to its natural limit in Three Dialogues, Beckett retired from controversy. His two other articles on painting are brief, elegant tributes to individual artists" (109). To argue that Beckett retired from controversy at this early stage in his career is to reduce Beckett to less than the list of themes Ruby Cohn warns against; it reduces him to the role of a printer who, having set the type, cranks out slightly lighter versions of the same page until the ink inevitably fades. John Pilling presents another intriguing approach in his study Samuel Beckett (1976). He begins with a now familiar refrain: As an introduction to the three painters dealt with they are perhaps only marginally enlightening, but as brief, brilliantly constructed vignettes (with inevitable Beckettian humour) clearly outlining Beckett’s aesthetic, they are of extreme interest and importance to Beckett criticism. (20) But Pilling ventures beyond the notion that “Three Dialogues” is an important implement for explication of Beckett’s work in general; he labels the dialogues Beckett’s “most severe formulation” of theory and suggests that the dialogues are key to the post-trilogy work specifically (23). Most important of all perhaps is Beckett’s emphasis, no doubt due to the experience of the trilogy, on the fact that the artist is no longer in control: he is, by an ambiguous force of whose origin he is ignorant, somehow compelled to express despite the total obstacles to expression. (21) With this comment Pilling suggests that the three novels are the proving ground for the theory that appears in the dialogues. Yet he also intimates that Beckett seems to glorify his own successful creation of the Trilogy in the dialogues: “The dialogue on Bram van Velde is designed to show precisely how his friend has gone one step further than anyone else” (21). If, as Pilling suggests, the discussion in the dialogues has more to do with Beckett’s own work than with that

of the subject artists, then by extension it would seem that Beckett, by continuing to express after the impasse reached at the end of The Unnamable, has also “gone one step further.” Pilling reformulates these ideas just three years later for Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, with James Knowlson. He quotes the final passage from Texts for Nothing and then comments: [These lines] are perhaps as close as Beckett has ever come to writing which is 'expressive of the impossibility to express', an idea which from Beckett disassociates himself. But they are best described in Beckett's own words at the end of the third dialogue with Duthuit . . . I know that all that is required now [...] is to make of this [...] fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation. Between 1949, when Beckett despised this course of action, and 1952, when he composed the thirteenth Text for Nothing, he had been forced to change his mind and find a new fidelity to failure. (59) Pilling argues that the works following “Three Dialogues” illustrate the one further step envisioned by Beckett in the dialogues--the “fidelity to failure”--and that in the final Text Beckett is somehow “on the way to conquering the ‘attitude of disintegration’” evident in his work at this time. For in his “severely logical” stance, Pilling contends, Beckett reveals himself here as someone who, without deriding those artists who have 'enlarged the statement of a compromise' (as almost all, in Beckett's view have done), nevertheless prefers an art that makes no pretension to expression and relishes its own ability to conquer its 'insuperable indigence.' (251-2) An evaluation of these two studies as a unit reveals that Pilling struggles to use “Three Dialogues” according to the prevailing view, and to reorient this view at the same time. He discusses, for example, the practice of art as outlined in the dialogues--the ‘poetics’--instead of the theoretical aesthetic issues alone, and he extracts a different theme from the dialogues than that commonly selected by other critics. But Pilling cannot seem to escape the notion that “Three Dialogues” offers special access to Beckett’s works, and like Abbott and Mercier, he ultimately argues for a new angle within the same sphere of critical bias.

In addition, in 1976 Pilling contends that “Three Dialogues” contains a theory, and that this commentary is more important to questions of existence than to art. Beckett’s theory of failure, Pilling asserts, accounts for the ‘impasse’ he encountered in the writing of the trilogy, the subject and object united by Baudelaire are now always threatening to cease to exist. He has moved from the position of language being problematic to that of the whole of existence being problematic. Everything becomes a paradox. (22) Within his essays, Pilling posits, are indications that Beckett seeks the foundations of being and knowledge that inform the “genesis of a work of art” more than formal possibilities or limits-- that existence supplants the importance of form in Beckett’s “gradual erosion of language in the ever-contracting excavation inwards.” In fact, he views “Three Dialogues” as the culmination of a theoretical exploration begun by Beckett as early as 1934. Since there has been a ‘rupture in the lines of communication between subject and object’ (“Recent Irish Poetry, 1934), both the artist and the occasion have become unstable terms of relation. ‘All that should concern us’, therefore, ‘is the acute and increasing anxiety of the relation itself.’ By 1945 Beckett was convinced that this was what would constitute the new relation, but in 1949, talking to Duthuit, he was unable to prove it to his own satisfaction. In the Three Dialogues, his most severe formulation, he reasserts the absence of occasion, and yet postulates a kind of imprisoned freedom for the painter Bram van Velde [. . .] beyond the plane of the feasible. (23) Unfortunately, as Pilling asserts, Beckett’s theory of how this freedom is attained is imprisoned as well--it remains unarticulated in the mind of Samuel Beckett. He argues that Beckett promotes van Velde as an artist “with his eye on the object but who nevertheless achieves, by some magic Beckett does not discuss, a form that can be generally appreciated” (23). Pilling suggests that this undisclosed “magic”--the process which B praises in van Velde but which he never elucidates in the dialogues--is the climax of the above development. The theory exists, Pilling postulates, but Beckett either does not himself understand it fully, or he chooses to withhold his knowledge, revealing instead only what the theory is not. As before, Pilling develops this notion further in his 1979 study Frescoes of the Skull. He suggests that Beckett’s “haphazard formulations” in his earlier articles about the van Velde’s form the basis for his position in “Three Dialogues.” Pilling contends that Beckett “reveals

himself here as someone who [. . .] prefers an art that makes no pretension to expression and relishes its own ability to conquer its ‘insuperable indigence’” (251-2). Pilling’s description outlines a constructive, practical theory of art as concept rather than product, but these ideas do not appear as constituted in the dialogues; Pilling extrapolates this description from B’s comments, and thus in one sense completes the unfinished portion of the third dialogue. In other words, Pilling tries to articulate what van Velde (and in keeping with the critical tradition--what Beckett himself) “more than likely does” instead of merely expressing his “fancy” of what the artist does, as B does in the dialogue. Pilling labels this half-finished theory with which we are left at the end of the dialogues, "a kind of terminus for Beckett’s poetics, beyond which there seems nowhere he can go. It is his most radical and intransigent statement of what is, as Duthuit says, a ‘fantastic theory’, ‘a violently extreme and personal point of view’" (252). Yet Beckett obviously goes somewhere after this terminus, and Pilling has tried to reconcile this dichotomy with the above supposition. Perhaps in the period following his earlier study Pilling is confident he has divined the details of Beckett’s withheld “magic”--the process by which he and van Velde express despite the impossibility of expression--enough to postulate what might have been left unsaid at the end of the third dialogue. In Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nobokov, and Schoenberg (1981), Daniel Albright further develops a trend with roots in Pilling's criticism. Albright contends that in the dialogues Beckett, “stated explicitly the aesthetic governing his depiction of images,” and that the author had found “a plastic Beckett” in the artist van Velde (160). He maintains, in addition, that the dialogues are “a secret glorification of the artist”; that Beckett is praising van Velde for having overcome the expressive difficulties outlined in the dialogues. This praise is also self-directed, Albright argues, for it indicates an aesthetic epiphany for Beckett and celebrates the writer’s expressive victories in The Unnamable: The narrator of The Unnamable seems not quite so convinced of the excellent uselessness of language as is the Beckett of the “Three Dialogues”--indeed, seems driven, compelled, to rummage around in his imagination until a true expression of his predicament can be found. (170) Yet Albright claims that this aesthetic epiphany is not unearthed easily, that this key to Beckett represents something difficult to articulate, “something beyond mind’s edge, beyond even the advanced categories of Beckett’s thought,” so that Beckett must resort to myth to express it.

“The ‘Three Dialogues’ and The Unnamable, taken together,” he contends, “are the fullest statement of that myth” (192). Thus Albright asserts that “Three Dialogues” cannot stand alone as a work of art or criticism, but that the combination of these two works expresses Beckett’s aesthetics. Like Albright, Lance St. John Butler creates a more intricate reading of “Three Dialogues” in his 1984 study Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable. Butler uses a passage from "Three Dialogues" as an epigram for his study: “The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint." This type of paradox is at the foundation of Beckett’s art, Butler argues, for Beckett's concern is not the "surface mess of everyday life," but the "basic structure of the world, beyond or behind the mere names or the suffering of individuals" (160). "Three Dialogues" provides the evidence for this argument. That this is the case, that these are Beckett's 'real' concerns and that we are not forcing an interpretation arbitrarily upon him can, I think, be established from those pregnant snippets of criticism, the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit which appeared in transition no. 5 in 1949. (160) The heart of the discussion, Butler maintains, is in the dialogue on Masson. He argues that Beckett's comments about Masson's attempts to paint the "void" are evidence that Beckett "is in quest of an art that will express an ultimate depth--an absolute" (160). "The overall impression gained," he continues, "is that Beckett is asking here for an art that will confront ultimate reality, an art that will correspond not to the sociological or 'natural' structure of the world, but to its ultimate structure, its ontology" (161). Butler stresses that Beckett’s search is, in his opinion, more than a “colourless and unbiased” critical exercise; that in the final exchange of the second dialogue D presents a “positive, optimistic version” of ultimate reality. In D’s rejection of the notion that we must “deplore the painting that admits the things and creatures of spring, resplendent with desire and affirmation,” Butler states, “we have an encapsulation of a misty, sub-religious attitude that affects a confrontation with the nature of the world of a sort that ‘B’ finds even more appalling than failure to come to terms with the void” (162). This view of existence, he argues, drives B out “weeping” because he cannot agree with this position “on principle.” At this point the dialogues become, for Butler, a discussion of metaphysical

principles, of an “absolute” beyond the “mere predicaments” experienced by the artist, of “the ‘Problem’ beyond mere problems” (162). This argument not only relegates the art history of the text to a secondary position behind the larger issues of ontology and self-expression in general, but Butler’s approach largely ignores the notion that “Three Dialogues” is a key to Beckett’s writing, at least in the literal, specific sense of the “surface mess” of individual works or themes. He addresses the philosophical underpinnings of Beckett’s overall aesthetics rather than identifying and using this theory to extrapolate meaning from the texts. S. E. Gontarski takes a practical approach to "Three Dialogues" in his 1985 study The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts. Like many of his predecessors, Gontarski seems to accept the notion that “Three Dialogues” is a key to Beckett’s work. He labels the “ultimate aesthetic negation” passage “the Beckettian aesthetic axiom on the impossibility of communication,” and later comments in reference to the dialogues: "Like so many of Beckett’s critical statements (the essay on Proust most conspicuously), the aesthetics Beckett articulates is more revealing about his own sensibility than about his subject’s" (11). As did Lawrence Harvey, however, Gontarski is careful to remind the reader of the art-critical aspect of the dialogues. “What Beckett rejects in his analysis of the history of painting,” he contends, “is a ‘relation’ between the art work and the material world” (11). Yet Gontarski is also quick to point out the disciplinary differences between Beckett’s subject in the dialogues and his own writing: “In his own work that ‘absence of relation’ may be endemic to his medium.” Perhaps in response to the conflation of media difference that has occurred in the criticism up to this point, Gontarski suggests that interpretations of the “ultimate aesthetic negation” concentrate far too little on formal matters. Beckett’s oft-quoted statement deserves a gloss. “Nothing to express” is also an active phrase: what remains to be expressed is nothingness, primary absences, even though that needs to be done with the faulty system of language, a system whose referential quality is in serious question. There is “nothing from which to express” because self is not a unity, not a coherent entity, but in itself an interplay of presence and absence, a dialectic of the one and the other. There is “no power to express” because author, narrator, characters and language itself are impotent. (10) Gontarski’s study concentrates on how formal limitations like those discussed in “Three Dialogues” suggest new stylistic possibilities for Beckett. “When less is more,” he contends,

“diminuendo becomes crescendo” (10). Like Butler, Gontarski presents a more intricate reading of the dialogues which, although it utilizes many earlier, fundamental assumptions about the function of the text, also introduces to the critical dialogue neglected subtleties regarding the application of the text to Beckett’s work. In contrast, Daniel Katz borrows heavily from John Fletcher’s 1967 study when he argues in the introduction of Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (1999) that “Beckett never betrays his belief in ‘the impossibility to express.’” Like Albright, Katz uses “Three Dialogues” to explain the questions of identity that Beckett creates in The Unnamable, and suggests that the ideas presented in “Three Dialogues” are developed more fully in the novel. Beckett’s comments in “Three Dialogues” on failure and the traditional conceptualization of the ‘occasion’ should put us on our guard against any discourse of mimesis or adequation. But it is sufficient to read The Unnamable to avoid this discourse. (105) Here Katz suggests that the dialogues are a sort of thematic summary of the issues raised in the Trilogy. Later Katz contends that Worstward Ho is also informed by the arguments of “Three Dialogues.” In this work, Katz argues, Beckett seems to be sketching a movement toward loss, the arrival at which could resist being articulated as gain. The paradox seems identical to the one ‘B’ fails to solve in the “Three Dialogues,” when after asserting that “to be an artist is to fail,” he refuses to make of ‘fidelity to failure’ a condition of success [. . .]. In these respects, Worstward Ho is not only an extension of “Three Dialogues,” but also a subtle revision of some of its treatment of this question. (175) The notion that “Three Dialogues” is a key to Beckett’s oeuvre surfaces once again in Katz’s discussion. Yet his argument also challenges the nature of “Three Dialogues” as discursive criticism; Katz seems to suggest that the dialogues are somewhat performative in a manner similar to Abbot's theory. In this case, however, Katz claims that in comparison to the more effulgent performances of the same ideas in the prose works, the criticism is a stilted theoretical skeleton at which Beckett arrives after his trilogy. Other recent scholars have developed highly innovative approaches to “Three Dialogues,” as well. Jean Toyama, for example, imitates “Three Dialogues” in the introduction to her 1991 study Beckett’s Game: Self and Language in the Trilogy. The introductory dialogue, which

Toyama entitles “For a Theoretical Perspective,” imitates the style of “Three Dialogues” at the same time that it introduces content pertinent to Toyama’s study. T. - Overthrow of the feasible in search of the unfeasible in order to turn feasible completing, as it were, the circle of the game. Interplay of failure. Principle of successful play.

B. - Astounding! Such simplicity at play! Certainly this will be most helpful to your colleagues. By the way, are you related to D? No? . . . Pity . . . Play on, if you will.

T. - Game or play, play or game has the most far-reaching metaphysical implications. But, of course, it never succeeds in superseding the purely epistemological. However, amusing, it always means something. (1) This imitation suggests that “Three Dialogues” is a key to Beckett, both in the format and the content, for the original work, in her words, “provides the intertext” for her own study (1). More importantly, this rhetorical approach emphasizes both the performative and discursive aspects of the dialogues. With these two aspects in mind, perhaps, Toyama illustrates the difficulty of trying to divine Beckett’s aesthetics from such a form, and recognizes the humor and dualities of meaning that are important elements of “Three Dialogues.” When one deals with Beckett, one always runs the risk of imposing a philosophical sense on his work, even while that work defies such dogmatism. Being aware of this pitfall and unable to avoid it, I will continue in the hope that whatever I write will not tranquilize or stop the game already begun. (11) As the above examinations illustrate, numerous critics have imposed a system derived from “Three Dialogues” upon Beckett. Toyama recognizes this temptation, and by doing so maintains an open-ended interpretation of the dialogues as she had hoped. Her reading offers little insight into “Three Dialogues,” however, beyond illustrating the complexity of the work and the problems inherent in constructing an aesthetic system based upon this text. Although her imitation is innovative, and she makes some valuable points, she does not account for how the work could or should function within Beckett studies. This approach is only marginally successful, yet the numerous self-critical barbs and puns mark it as Beckettian in tone. This play, Toyama claims, extend into Beckett’s discussion of artistic failure: “In order to avoid the failure of expression which is imminent on the old plane of

art, Beckett proposes to fail to express. In other words, his espousal of failure is a gesture toward success” (15). As the theories discussed above demonstrate, this is not a new approach to the issue of “Three Dialogues” and the failure of the artist. Toyama adds the element of humor, however, and suggests that Beckett has calculated the reaction of his audience to his nihilistic statements. Despite the author’s attempts to express, Toyama postulates, he will fail to fail to express, because as in the case of van Velde even one tolerant ‘of this fantastic theory [will see in it the expression] of the impossibility to express.’ His strategy to thwart expression will be undermined by the critic’s desire to find expression. (15) Since lay reader and critic alike often approach a text expecting to discover “meaning,” Toyama suggests that Beckett counts upon the zealous critic to make too much of his fantastic theory, that a part of his game is to lay down a false critical trail. Yet Toyama argues that “Three Dialogues” encapsulates Beckett’s theory--a theory of failure--and that previous studies are unsatisfactory because, “while these critics discuss failure in Beckett’s work, they have not fully considered it as an esthetic theory” (12). Like Pilling, she argues that Beckett’s theory is more concerned with art as concept than art as product. “According to the dialogues with Georges Duthuit,” she states, “this is what Beckett is searching for: signs that do not represent” (37). Thus the interaction of failure and play, she asserts, deals with the characteristics of medium: The writer even more than the painter is doomed to failure. An art that does not express appears more feasible in the plastic arts, since the medium supposedly can be taken for itself. Literature, however, is made of words, and words, no matter how one might try to deny it, express. Words are always pointing to something(s) other than themselves. The word is that which fills up the space between perceiver and perceived, representer and representee. How then can a writer even conceive of a nonexpressive literature? If the realist always falls short of what he wished to represent, Beckett’s writer will certainly fail to represent nothing. The only way is to use words against themselves, to use expression to negate itself. In his search for negation he might subvert expression through deception by opposing, contradicting, refuting whatever is represented. (15) Negation is not despair. In this passage, however, Toyama suggests that Beckett uses humor to undermine his own argument in “Three Dialogues.” She claims it is the primary tool that he uses to oppose, contradict, and refute an otherwise bleak and untenable position, his method for constructing a critical deception.

Lawrence Miller suggests that a critical deception of another sort is taking place in his study Samuel Beckett: The Expressive Dilemma (1992). He argues that the dialogues are Beckett’s “last critical writings that retain any ties with conventional discursive criticism” and that the format of “Three Dialogues” is a step in the evolution from discursive to performative criticism in Beckett’s work (64). If Beckett writes little traditional criticism after “Three Dialogues,” Miller contends, this is not because his theory is completely formed, but because traditional critical forms are no longer satisfactory. Miller argues that, “the themes and issues of Beckett’s criticism, however, continue to be investigated and developed throughout his trilogy of novels” (64). He contends that Beckett’s works of fiction subsequent to “Three Dialogues” are attempts “to preserve the integrity of the artist’s ‘predicament,’ and to deny its conversion into a problem that may be solved” (9). Miller asserts, moreover, that the form of “Three Dialogues” does not force Beckett to explicate a theoretical position fully, but “makes few demands in the way of conclusions” (61). Thus the dialogues, Miller insists, “allow Beckett to carry out his reactive, deflationary programme, without having to propose a ‘correct’ alternative to the views he undercuts” (61). Miller envisions Beckett’s theory--this “reactive, deflationary programme”-- in much the same fashion as Toyama, as a calculated, asymptotic approach to the limits of expression, or “gesture towards success.” Miller notes that, as this theory as it applies to Beckett’s drama, to insist that Beckett’s plays are ‘puny exploits’ would be a pointless exaggeration; still, it helps to reverse the critical commonplaces urged by the history of Beckett’s reception to think of them as a kind of minor success, a success that testifies to the avoidance of a more noble failure [. . .]. Beckett’s drama, then, may be seen as a compromised expression-- compromised just because it is an expression, because in a number of ways it makes a ‘new occasion’ of the compulsion to express and the inability to express. (10) Like Pilling, Miller accentuates the importance of the ‘unsaid’ in Beckett’s criticism. That is, he suggests that what Beckett “in fact is and does” can be discovered by considering the aesthetic alternatives that remain after Beckett’s assault on expression, that the ‘correct alternative’ to those theories attacked by Beckett in the dialogues is found by comparing the elements Beckett derides to elements in his own creative experiments. James Acheson’s Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice (1997) makes much less use of “Three Dialogues” than one might expect given the title and the prominence of the dialogues

in the critical history. Acheson limits his discussion of the work to a single chapter entitled, “The Art of Failure: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable,” an essay which, incidentally, has been revised for inclusion in this study from a 1983 article, “The Art of Failure: Samuel Beckett’s Molloy.” Acheson begins the earlier article with the assertion that “Three Dialogues” is a key to Beckett’s work: “The term ‘the art of failure’ has provided a constructive critical approach to the seemingly self-destructive esthetic of Samuel Beckett’s fiction” (1). In his revised essay Acheson retreats from this assertion; he removes the above quote and reconsiders the validity of Richard Coe’s discussion of the “art of failure” and the work of later critics who have constructed variations of this theme (96). He argues, for example, that in these theories critics have tried to highlight what they see as existentialist themes in “Three Dialogues,” which he feels are less important than Beckett’s use of psychological terms. The use of terms like, “the absurdity of human existence’, ‘Neant’, and ‘the Void of the Self’, suggests that Beckett’s comments about the modern artist are derivatively Existentialist. Yet Beckett does not employ Existentialist terminology in the dialogues: in fact, his most significant departure from critical language is his use, in the first dialogue, of a term from experimental psychology. (97) Acheson refers to the term “coenaesthesia,” or total consciousness of the human body, including senses, emotions, and reflex responses. He argues that the failure of the artist is not due to the meaningless of human existence--of the world outside the body--or to the failure of expression, but to the inability of the human senses to perceive: “Despite the vigilance of the coenaesthesia, the artist is, Beckett implies, limited in what he can hope to learn about the world around him” (97). Acheson's comments suggest that such a situation could be interpreted as metaphysically significant, but that to assign an existential interpretation to “Three Dialogues” is unwarranted. Acheson alters other passages in his revised essay that suggest similar connections between the dialogues and Beckett’s work. In the 1983 version, for example, Acheson argues that the intricacies of perception are an important issue in “Three Dialogues”: Moreover, it is a subjective simplification, since the coenaesthesia comprises not only our five senses, but the whole range of our emotions, which inevitably colour perception. Beckett develops the implications of this both in the dialogues and in his novel Molloy, which, written two years in advance of the dialogues, anticipates in practice the theory of art he expounds in them. (2)

The corresponding passage in the revised essay begins with the same sentence, but Acheson continues with the following statement: Beckett develops the implication of this both in the dialogues and in his trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, which, written at about the same time as the dialogues, parallels in practice the theory of art he expounds to Duthuit. (97) These alterations in the argument are small but significant. The passage from the more recent article extends the influence of the theory developed in “Three Dialogues” to all three novels in the trilogy, yet at the same time Acheson seems less certain about a cause and effect relationship between criticism and artwork. He relies heavily, however, on this parallel between practice and theory; numerous times throughout the chapter Acheson argues that the artist’s only option is failure, “for the reasons Beckett outlines in his dialogues with Duthuit” (120). Ultimately Acheson suggests that Beckett blurs the lines between theory and practice, that he has created a strange amalgamation of the narrator of The Unnamable, “B” from “Three Dialogues” and Beckett himself. Worm and Mahood are brought into existence by a narrator all too aware of the futility of the task before him. His narrative is expressive ‘of its impossibility, of its obligation,’ and Beckett ensures that his situation is that of the ideal artist in the Duthuit dialogues. Thought the narrator feels ‘obliged to speak,’ he would dearly love to be silent, and toys initially with the idea that his obligation to write is a pensum, which once discharged will free him from ever having to speak again. (137) In the above passage Acheson follows the example of his subject author, that is, he blurs the lines between Beckett and his narrators. Acheson’s comments about the “narrator” seem to refer both to Beckett and the author’s fictional voice, and Acheson seems to suggest that Beckett ensures that his own situation as a writer resembles that experienced in fiction and outlined in criticism.

Once More Into the Breach In contrast to these inventive approaches that remain largely under the umbrella of the critical trends discussed above, there are several recent critics who challenge the assumptions surrounding “Three Dialogues” directly and with vigor. Ruby Cohn, for example, repeats and condenses her previous warning about the temptation to abuse "Three Dialogues" in her

introduction to Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (1983). "Three Dialogues," she cautions, "is so well worn a springboard for Beckett criticism that one may recall D's injunction to B, '. . . the subject under discussion is not yourself'" (15). At the same time Cohn admits that the issues raised in “Three Dialogues” are still important for Beckett studies, that “Beckett’s hyperawareness of an unsteady eye on an evanescent occasion is the fulcrum of his recent (1982) fiction Mal vu mal dit” (15). Cohn’s admonition is virtually ignored, however, due to a tradition that has become too ingrained by this time, or perhaps to the nature of Beckett’s later work itself, which as Cohn admits, reinforces many of these early assumptions. Evidence for the potency of these trends appears in seemingly insignificant details. In his essay “Beckett as Essayist” in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (1994), for example, Rupert Wood argues that the dialogues deal with subjects beyond those stated in the work: “they also explore language’s impotence in the face of visual images, and the instability of the philosophical foundations upon which art-criticism is built [. . .] painting gives way to the word in essays that are ostensibly about painting” (9). Despite the suggestion that other issues are involved, however, Wood is obviously buying into well-established assumptions, even, for example, in his use of the word “essays” to describe the dialogues, whereby he suggests that there is a discursive theory being developed in the text. Yet, in a comment aimed at critics Wood states, There is, of course, an almost overwhelming temptation, especially since Beckett once stated ‘I’m working with impotence, ignorance’, to read what B says about van Velde as a literary credo on Beckett’s part. It is not; brushstrokes are not words, and words, even Beckett’s words, are not inexpressive in that sort of way, nor could they be. Beckett’s work bears tribute to the fact that words can never undo themselves and turn into a ‘literature of the unword’, however desirable this may seem. Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit is not simply a metatext. (13-14) This passage rejects the fundamental assumptions about “Three Dialogues” more directly and fully than any other in Beckettian criticism. Wood also discounts the notion that the dialogues are to be regarded as a critical entity: “Thus we come to the unhappy conclusion that the Three Dialogues are not about van Velde (or Tal-Coat, or Masson) at all, but merely a statement of B’s fancy.” And, he continues:

we are shown the impossibility of foundation; there is nowhere to start, for as B’s admission that he cannot properly say anything about van Velde shows, the real discussion never got started anyway. What van Velde in fact is and does was never really on the agenda, and so the whole text has been circling around an absent centre. (14) While Wood’s outline of how “Three Dialogues” has been mishandled is potent and well- founded, and although he illustrates the complexity of the work and the larger issues addressed within it, he unfortunately fails to articulate how the dialogues could be handled properly. Wood seems, for example, to accept Pilling’s notion of a trajectory in the development of Beckett’s theory at the same time that he rejects the concept of a unified theory in “Three Dialogues.” He outlines common themes in Beckett’s art critical pieces up to and including “Three Dialogues,” and identifies the dialogues as a culmination of these arguments, as “the description of total capitulation and its conditions” (12). The Three Dialogues represent something of a terminus in Beckett’s discursive writing. They are a recapitulation on the failings of modern art, but unlike his earlier essays, they no longer point a way forward, however limited, for Western art; instead they appear to recommend total capitulation. (12) At the same time, however, Wood is cautious about the dialogue format, which, he argues, “leaves no space for ‘serious’ authorial intervention, either to come to the aid of or to ironize B’s theorizing” (12). He contends that the dialogues are an extreme example of the playfulness and self-mockery present in Beckett’s texts, and although they contain no concrete theory as such, they might in this way function as a key example of Beckett’s work. With this in mind, perhaps, Wood suggests that Beckett’s theory is not only unsaid, but may be unknown as well. B’s view of Bram van Velde’s work has gone beyond the views expressed in Beckett’s earlier essays, where both van Veldes were pushing the subject-object relation to its limits. Bram van Velde has, according to B, accepted, apparently unknowingly, the impossibility of any degree of adequacy of expression in art [. . .]. Van Velde is, according to B, the only artist brave enough to admit, albeit apparently unknowingly, that ‘to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail.’ Thus his whole way of being is as much in his failing as in his painting. (13, my emphasis) Wood contends that this discussion never really got underway because Beckett has no constructive theory--he can only scrutinize the programs of other artists and reject that which is

unusable. Thus, like that of Miller, Wood’s argument suggests that the dialogues are as much performative criticism as they are discursive criticism: If Beckett knows what makes van Velde’s art successful and purposefully withholds this theory then he cannot create successful art unknowingly; if Beckett does not know and purposefully avoids speculative articulation of what “it is more than likely that [van Velde] is and does” in order to maintain his ignorance, then perhaps he can stumble along the same path to success as the painter. Wood suggests that such an act of chicanery is not beyond Beckett. He observes, for example, that the form of the dialogues prevents the type of “serious” argument normally present in discursive criticism; that “Three Dialogues” occupies a position “between philosophical aesthetics and dramatized repartee” (12). Thus, one can never be sure how much Beckett's characters represent his ideals. Like earlier critics, Wood suggests that Beckett uses this tactic to separate himself from the criticism he writes. The deconstructive logic that undermines the marginal space within Beckett’s theory (the space of the aesthetic experience) has been turned inside out to undermine the marginal space that Beckett himself occupies outside his own theory. Its clarity and seriousness are undermined, but not destroyed. So the drama we are presented with in the Three dialogues is a kind of endgame of aesthetic theorizing; it is a drama which is neither entirely serious nor entirely playful, but one where playfulness and seriousness continually infect one another. (12) Wood later defines this dividing effect as the “separation of the artist’s and critic’s zones.” He argues that only the artist can know his own work, and the critic cannot access this understanding, for he cannot “step outside his own prison of words” (14). Wood’s argument intimates that in “Three Dialogues,” B and D are the critics, Beckett the artist, and Masson, Tal Coat, and van Velde are merely subject matter. As Acheson intimates in his study, contemporary critics cannot separate the humor from serious commentary any more that one can isolate the comments of the artist Beckett from those of the fictional critics. Wood’s elucidation of these subtleties undermines the arguments of those corporeal critics who emphasize the despair of the artist in the work and subsequently assign this quality to Beckett himself. Lois Oppenheim also attacks the traditional interpretation of “Three Dialogues” in her study The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (2000). This work contains an examination of the Beckett/Duthuit correspondence from the period and reveals that Duthuit

10 contributed much more to the dialogues than has been previously imagined. Perhaps with this information in mind, Oppenheim asserts that in his criticism “Beckett remains true to art as rhetorical interrogation [. . .] as opposed to illusionist representation.” “It is in this regard,” she continues, “and only in this regard, I believe, that we can speak of a Beckettian aesthetic. Otherwise, the search for a however implicit artistic credo in Beckett’s critical miscellany is futile” (66-7). Unlike those who have failed to offer a justification for the assumption that the passages within the dialogues refer to Beckett’s own work, Oppenheim argues that the very nature of Beckett’s criticism offers textual evidence why such a connection is unsupportable. Justification for avoiding the temptation to tease an aesthetic credo from his criticism and letters is to be found, then, in Beckett’s ultimate refusal to participate in the objectifying of art, the thetic act of critical writing which disregards art’s ontologically eruptive force. (92) In addition to this textual evidence, Oppenheim consults period Beckett/Duthuit correspondence to refute the notion that “Three Dialogues” presents a Beckett credo. She notes, for example, that Duthuit wrote the following message to Beckett in reference to the text: Here’s where we’re at, or rather where I feign to solidly hold ground, which is not at all the case, in order to push the dialectic as far as possible, a simple matter of an article to be done. You will see in the end that I am in no means bound by my position. (92) This passage suggests not only that Duthuit rejects the position ascribed to “his” character (“D” in the dialogues), but that the fictional element of the work is more significant than has been assumed. Oppenheim also quotes the following letter from Beckett to Duthuit in which he discusses the composition of the dialogues: This miserable composition, that was arse-licked out of me, at a time when I already couldn’t have cared less about Geer than about my last jock-strap is neither within reach nor in my head. I just seem to remember that I let myself go, the faster to be done with it, to some antithesis of which I am the first to have sensed the absurdity, while recognizing in it a certain explicative value, which is far from comforting. (92-3) Oppenheim’s study of the correspondence relevant to “Three Dialogues” reveals much about the construction of the dialogues and the verity of the positions presented within the work. The above comments from Beckett, for example, suggest that expedience dictated their content more than theory construction, and that he is very aware of how untenable the argument is. Yet at the same time he also acknowledges a certain value to the text even to the point that he admits that

he is discomforted by how much the work may reveal (although his words, as always, should be approached with some caution). Above all, Oppenheim’s valuable study gives credit to Duthuit for his contribution to the dialogues, and at the same time contests the notion that “Three Dialogues” is a privileged key to Beckett’s oeuvre. Oppenheim also argues that there is no evidence for the critical preoccupation with "the despair of the artist" in Beckett’s work. “There is nothing,” she begins, “to support the notion of failure--either as it appears in the 'Three Dialogues' and the other writings on art or as it appears in the creative texts--as anything other than what he so openly claimed it to be: the interference of words in their own saying” (47). Thus, she argues, Beckett’s ever-present despair is a lament about the imperfection of medium, rather than a statement about the absurdity of the human condition. In her view, “failure” for Beckett is a formal issue. She suggests that critics make an enormous error when they fail to recognize “the distinction between aesthetics as thinking on art and aesthetics as creative praxis” (67). She contends that many critics have confused these distinctions in regards to the “failure of the artist.” The phrase “aesthetics of failure” she argues, which shows up again and again in studies of Beckett, is so loosely used an expression as to provide the case in point. Given, on the one hand, the self-conscious and reductive direction taken by his critical writings and, on the other, their focus on the dilemma of representation, where it should be used to define not a conceptual thinking on art but a creative manipulation of deception before its expressive limitations, the preoccupation with failure has all too often been made to stand for a philosophy of art. (70) As I have argued above, many critics have suggested that “Three Dialogues” is itself such a deception--but the larger number interpret the work literally and seriously. More importantly, as Oppenheim suggests, critics have teased out various types of artistic and metaphysical theories from this text. Oppenheim seems to find the latter, metaphysical interpretation the least supportable; she dismisses a host of arguments that has been linked to this notion of failure and despair, but which might be labeled collectively as attempts to extrapolate a metaphysical missive from the pages of “Three Dialogues.” One must not see in these or any other of his statements on art or, for that matter, in any of his myriad characters haunted by failure, proof of an ethical imperative (the obligation to speak against moral indifference), proof of an existential imperative (the necessity of facing

with courage an essentially meaningless world), or proof of the writer’s succumbing to the absolutism of nihilism. (46) Yet Oppenheim also derides the attempt to seek a coherent theory of art in Beckett’s criticism. Instead, she writes, I would substitute for the notion of a Beckettian aesthetic a more properly anaesthetic perspective, a nonconceptual approach to art wherein the need for its definition is undone not only by the very inadequacy of expression Beckett continually addresses (as in what he terms “compromises” of Tal-Coat and Masson) but in the futility of attempting to give form to what already is meant to exist as such. Duchamp’s remark that “there is no solution because there is no problem” could have been Beckett’s own. (91) Critics are, unfortunately, reluctant to conceive of criticism that exists without a practical application; such texts appear to us, in the words of Martin Esslin, as that “intricate texture the critic has to unravel” (11). Ultimately much of the overall development of the chain of assumptions I have discussed, or more specifically the design of the principles by which subsequent criticism has been informed, must be credited to Martin Esslin. P. J. Murphy identifies Esslin’s “Introduction” to Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays (1965) as the “locus classicus of these ‘principles’” (17). This influence is partly due to Esslin’s prominence at the time, to the intriguing system he constructs to explicate Beckett’s work, and to the fact that Esslin’s essay precedes his reprint of “Three Dialogues” immediately in a collection of critical essays, which marks the work as an essay rather than a performative artistic exercise or dramatic work. These features of the Esslin collection combine to create a powerful critical complex that both effectively incorporates earlier theories and heavily influences the use of “Three Dialogues” in later scholarship. Ruby Cohn may have suggested the initial connection between a Beckett agenda and the dialogues, and others have strengthened this suggestion, but Esslin constructed a system based upon early, and somewhat unstable assumptions, and reified this construction by making the essay widely available in his collection. My intent in this chapter, however, has not been assign blame or praise to particular critics, or to disparage the early works of Beckett criticism in general. These works are at times brilliant, and the authors are worthy of much credit for their pioneering efforts. I have made the attempt, albeit perhaps futile, to present the development of these scholarly trends with as little

of my own critical fingerprint as possible--to let the critics speak for themselves. Obviously, as the above discussion reveals, some of these studies are stronger than others, and even those that are insightful and far-reaching may rest on assumptions that are themselves unsupported by a contextual reading of “Three Dialogues.” The discussions of context and form that follow this chapter will provide this contextual material by which one may judge the value of individual studies, and by extension, the strength of the critical trajectories that have developed in Beckettian scholarship.

CHAPTER TWO “IN THE WIDENING GYRE”

"The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind..." - James Joyce, Ulysses

“It is the thing alone, isolated by the need to see it, by the need to see. The thing, motionless in the void, here finally, is the visible object, the pure object. I see no other." - Samuel Beckett, "La Peinture des van Velde"

In his study of Beckett’s criticism, Rupert Wood observes that “in the discursive pieces, Beckett toys with, and eventually tries to abandon, those very things which, as critic or as writer, that it turns out he cannot do, say, or know” (2). In Beckett’s critical works we observe an exploration of epistemology and ontology, a preoccupation with the process of perception and expression, and an evolution of the tropes and critical terms he uses to discuss the subject/object relation. These terms or their derivatives ultimately appear in “Three Dialogues” and include: void, occasion, possession, expression, flux, predicament, need and relation. Without doubt, Beckett's use of these terms should be approached with caution in order to avoid what Wood identifies as the "obvious pitfall in seeking affinities between an artist and his subject" (4). The evolution and varied applications of these terms, however, not only provide context and suggest alternative interpretations for the discussion that occurs in the dialogues, but they also display how this text represents for the author a departure from the conventions of High Modernism. In Proust (1931), for example, Beckett asserts that the possibility of perception and expression exists, but that such actions are problematical. He observes that the natures of the subject (the artist) and the object (whether external or internal) create a discontinuity that inhibits these actions:

So far we have considered a mobile subject before an ideal object, immutable and incorruptible. But our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena. Exemption from intrinsive flux in a given object does not change the fact that it is the correlative of a subject that does not enjoy such immunity. The observer infects the observed with his own mobility. (17) Beckett’s observation here of the fallibility of a “subjective correlative” refers to and rejects T. S. Eliot’s contention in “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919) that an “objective correlative”--the external equivalent of subjective experience--can be discovered. Beckett contends that flux-- movement in time or space that is intrinsic to a person’s perception of the world--makes such communication impossible. Later in the essay, for example, he rejects Symbolism, the theoretical ancestor of Eliot’s correlative, as an attempt to artificially fix that which is inherently mobile, and thus to create an artificial unity. “The Baudelarian unity is a unity ‘post rem,’ a unity abstracted from plurality," he argues, "his ‘correspondence’ is determined by a concept, therefore strictly limited and exhausted by its own definition” (79). The correspondence Beckett rejects is the Symbolist notion of direct, universal communication through an ideal vehicle, which he describes later as "a genuine act of transfer" ("La peinture” 125), and which notion he dismisses here as “expansive.” He suggests that a more plausible artistic tendency is “contraction”--a movement toward the expression of self instead of communication to another: Art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication. Even on the rare occasions when word and gesture happen to be valid expression of personality, they lose their significance on their passage through the cataract of the personality that is opposed to them. Either we speak and act for ourselves--in which case speech and action are distorted and emptied of their meaning by an intelligence that is not ours, or else we speak and act for others--in which case we speak and act a lie. (64) In this passage, Beckett observes that a barrier exists between individuals which prevents communication absolutely. “When it comes to human intercourse,” Beckett explains, “we are faced by the problem of an object whose mobility in not merely a function of the subject’s, but independent and personal: two separate and immanent dynamisms related by no system of synchronization” (17). At this point in Beckett's criticism, expression--that "genuine act of transfer" of sensations from artist to audience--seems possible, although it is distorted by the

mobility of the terms of the relation between subject and object, by this “cataract” which makes a lie of communication. Beckett posits that Proust’s notion of “involuntary memory” provides a method to combat this discontinuity and gives the artist access to the "ideal-real." This mnemonic experience, "the identification of immediate with past experience, the recurrence of past action or reaction in the present," he claims, "amounts to a participation between the ideal and real, imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and substance" (74). As this passage suggests, Beckett believes perception and expression to be two different orientations of the same act, that reality, "whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic" through which one must pass to perceive (whether one looks to the exterior object with the senses or the interior object with the imagination), and through which one returns to express the experience (74). Since this barrier hinders both perception and expression, Beckett insists that involuntary memory alone facilitates their success, for it “is at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extratemporal” (75). He stresses that both perception and expression use the same function or vehicle, but that one can exercise no control over this uncontrollable, unwieldy implement. Voluntary memory (Proust repeats it ad nauseam) is of no value as an instrument of evocation, and provides an image as far removed from the real as the myth of our imagination or the caricature furnished by direct perception. There is only one real impression and one adequate mode of evocation. Over neither have we the least control. (14) Despite the possibility of impression/evocation outlined in this passage, Beckett stresses the passive limitation of involuntary memory several times during the essay: “Involuntary memory,” he states, “is an unruly magician and will not be importuned. It chooses its own time and place for the performance of its miracle” (34). In Proust Beckett denies the possibility of communication--the "direct and purely experimental contact between subject and object" (74)-- but at this point perception and expression, although exclusively by accident, are still possible. For at the conclusion of this essay he salutes Proust for creating “art that is perfectly intelligible and perfectly inexplicable” (92).

Beckett returns to this discussion of expressive possibilities in “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), wherein the discontinuity Beckett observed in the previous article evolves into a “breakdown” of subject and object. He observes that various artists assign the breakdown to one of the above two terms, but he dismisses this distinction: “It comes to the same thing--rupture in the lines of communication” (Disjecta 70). With what Ruby Cohn identifies as "a modernist and European bias" in this work (Canon 68), Beckett divides the poets he examines into two groups: “antiquarians,” or “those who are not aware of the rupture” (who Beckett accuses of being “in flight from self-awareness”), and those who are aware of the rupture (who, he claims, are labeled “the fish that lie gasping on the shore” by W. B. Yeats) (70-71). As before, Beckett views communication as impossible, but suggests that expression is feasible under the right conditions. The artist who is aware of the rupture, he writes, “may state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects; he may state it as no-mans-land, Hellespont or vacuum, according as he happens to be feeling resentful, nostalgic or merely depressed” (70). In this description the artist’s statement is a trope that delineates the rupture, instead of an attempt to express the navigation of the rupture, but Beckett also suggests that this negotiation of the rupture and expression of the experience are possible, that the artist, having confronted this rupture, “may even record his findings, if he is a man of great personal courage” (70). In contrast to Proust, however, in this discussion Beckett does not outline how this process of perception/expression occurs, beyond the contention that courage is required, which idea he reasserts in subsequent criticism. He ackowledges the experiment of George Russell, for instance, who “when thoroughly galvanized by the protracted apathies, rigidities and abstractions, enters his heart’s desire with such precipitation as to positively protrude into the void” (71). Yet Beckett does not suggest that Russell has any more control of his vehicle than Proust. As his review of Thomas MacGreevey’s work reveals later in the article, he still believes that the vehicle is uncontrollable- -that successful expression requires patience and luck. Above all, he stresses the significance of the fact that the artist, fully aware of the rupture, makes the attempt to express. Having dismissed the antiquarian poets, for example, Beckett writes: Mr. Thomas MacGreevey is best described as an independent, occupying a position intermediate between the above and the poor fish, in the sense that he neither excludes self-perception from his work nor postulates the object as inaccessible. But he knows how to wait for the thing to happen, how not to beg the fact of this ‘bitch of the world’ [.

. .]. And when it does happen and he sees, ‘far as sensitive eyesight could see’, whatever happens to be dispensed, gile na gile or empty hearths, it is the act and not the object of perception that matters. (74) Beckett blurs the distinctions in this text between perception and expression, which suggests that on some level, he views them as opposite orientations of the same action. More importantly, the vehicle here remains as difficult to use as when Beckett discussed this issue in Proust, yet MacGreevey receives similar praise for his manipulation of it. Beckett is less complimentary in his review of the works of Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey, whom he accuses of submitting themselves “to the influences of those poets least concerned with evading the bankrupt relationship referred to at the opening of this essay--Corbiere, Rimbaud, Laforgue, the surrealistes and Mr. Eliot, perhaps also to those of Mr. Pound” (75). Ruby Cohn proposes that Beckett lists these poets without explaining their significance, "as though resentful that he was asked to review so many books" (Canon 68). The evolution of the terms Beckett uses to discuss the discontinuity above, however, suggests that with this list he underscores the impossibility of direct and universal communication by denouncing those who claim to navigate the rupture using symbol, objective correlative, or image complex. In “The Essential and the Incidental”--Beckett’s review of Sean O’Casey’s Windfalls, which was published six months after the above review--the breakdown of subject and object becomes an opportunity instead of an obstacle. Although Beckett again neglects to explain the details, he claims that perception/expression takes place through a process Ruby Cohn has labeled “creation through decreation” (Disjecta 12). Beckett argues, for instance, that O’Casey “discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities, and activates it to their explosion” (Disjecta 82). This process is not limited to the exterior object, for O’Casey is credited with expressing the “dissolution” of his character’s personality as well. If this work, Beckett postulates, “is his best work so far, it is because it communicates most fully this dramatic dehiscence, mind and world come asunder in irreparable dissociation” (82). Beckett’s praise in the previous article of those poets with enough courage to express in spite of discontinuity has evolved into praise of O’Casey’s exploitation of rupture, of his successful expression of the “essential” aspect of the title, which refers to this artist’s “having dramatized the slump in the human solid” (82). This alteration from breakdown-as-rupture to dissolution-as-

dehiscence demonstrates how Beckett experiments with different approaches to expression in order to combat the discontinuity between subject and object during this period. The breakdown of subject and object remains an opportunity two years later when Beckett writes “An Imaginative Work!” an review about the painter Jack B. Yeats. As an artist, Beckett writes, Yeats “takes it to pieces and makes a new thing, new things. He must.” (Disjecta 89). Although Beckett does not specify what Yeats dismantles and refigures, comparison with the previous article suggests that Beckett revisits the concept of the explosion or dehiscence of the object in this discussion. Yeats counters this rupture, Beckett asserts, by means of “analytical imagination,” a simultaneous function (“not first the old slum coming down, then the new slum going up, but in a single act slum seen as it is and other”) which resembles the successful perception/expression facilitated by Proust's involuntary memory. Beckett associates these two processes when he argues that "the discontinuity" proceeds "from the same respect for the mobility and autonomy of the imagined (a world of the same order if not so intense as the ‘ideal real’ of Prowst [sic], so obnoxious to the continuity girls)" (89). This comment suggests that Beckett observes in Yeats an expressive ability only marginally inferior to that of Proust. In this short discussion and the previous review, however, Beckett retreats somewhat from his assertion in Proust that perception and expression are erratic processes. The above statement, for example, reveals his continued “respect” for the flux and discontinuity of the subject/object relationship, and in the essay he salutes Yeats for the lack of traditional conventions of communication in his work (allegory, symbol, satire), but the addition of the word "analytical" to his discussion of imagination suggests that Beckett believes this artist to have more control of the vehicle. More importantly, Beckett’s previous cautions about the involuntary aspect of the process are conspicuously absent in this work. Despite this apparent confidence, however, Beckett abandons this concept after these brief explorations, and denies the possibility of expression through decreation in his later criticism. The formerly disavowed Devlin receives a second examination in “Intercessions by Denis Devlin” (1937), which appeared in the final issue of transition. In this essay Beckett experiments with a new direction when he theorizes that expression must be interrogative instead of declarative. He persists in the inexplicability of art, which “has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear” (94). Yet he adds that “art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have

been obliged by the ‘social reality’ to appear, but never more freely than now, when social reality has severed the connexion” (91). Examination of the ruptured "connexion" between subject and object thus becomes the artist's goal, for in this passage, as Lois Oppenheim contends, Beckett questions the "ontological foundation" of art (79). Beckett has argued previously that the artist expresses without making the effort to communicate--without expectation of understanding--but now expression has become an inquiry, a search, an expression less sure of the feasibility of expression itself. In this essay Beckett’s doubts about the accessibility of subject and object have resurfaced and intensified. The rupture appears to have widened and the artist’s compulsion to have increased, for Beckett now speaks of two needs which are separated by the above severed connection: “between these two, the need that in its haste to be abolished cannot pause to be stated and the need that is the absolute predicament of particular human identity, one does not of course presume to suggest a relation of worth” (91). James Acheson suggests that this rupture interdicts even the formerly viable but unruly vehicles of "involuntary memory" and "analytical imagination" when he connects this discussion of needs to “Schopenhauer’s comment that the three forms of perception--space, time and causality-- create a 'deep gulf between the ideal and the real,' an 'irreducible boundary between object and subject'” (Artistic Theory 42). Beckett suggests that the first need is the desire to apprehend the object, and that the inaccessibility of the object has resulted in “the common rejection as ‘obscure’ of most that is significant” in modern art. The second need is a quality of the human identity that Beckett now finds particularly troubling, the plurality of the subject self, for Devlin, he argues, makes intercession “with himself on behalf of himself, with his selves on behalf of himselves” (91). In Proust the subject was mobile but unified, "a mobile subject before an ideal object, immutable and incorruptible" (17). Beckett suggests in this passage that the self is fragmented to a greater degree, which makes the act of perception more difficult than ever before--the artist faces a “predicament” where one must express without trustworthy input, for perception in doubt. Yet Beckett also stresses that these needs are mutually dependent: “The Dives-Lazarus symbiosis, as intimate as that of fungoid and algoid in lichen [. . .] here scabs, lucre, etc., there torment, bosom, etc., but both here and there gulf. The absurdity, here or there, of either without the other, the inaccessible other” (92). With this allusion Beckett suggests that for the artist who must by definition perceive using the imagination or the senses, the subject and object are linked and defined by one another like the wealthy man and leprous beggar in this

biblical parable. Due to this situation, expression has devolved from expressive declaration to interrogation of expression itself, for as Beckett stresses in this passage, both subject and object are separated from the artist by a discontinuity which, the author hints, may be perpetual and unassailable. Beckett returns to the subject of need again in “Les deux besoins” (1938), although with some hesitation. In this text Beckett seems unwilling to eliminate the possibility of expression completely, but he contends once again that expression can only interrogate the process of expression. There are, he observes, “les deux besoins, les deux essences, l’être qui est besoin et la nécessité où il est de l’être, enfer d’irraison d’où s’élève le cri à blanc, la série de questions pures, l’oeuvre” (56). Here again the pure question is presented as the expressive action “less the rhetoric”-- as a blank cry from an irrational hell. This appellation suggests that Beckett now conceives the artist’s situation to be this conceptual torment, a predicament where the artist is not only trapped, ensconced in the gulf between subject/object, but also tortured by the above needs. Ruby Cohn observes that critics struggle to interpret this peculiar text, with the result that they often "impose coherence within their respective lenses for reading Beckett" (Canon 98). This result is not surprising, for Beckett himself struggles to articulate the particulars of the discussion, suggesting that the problem cannot be written about: “pas plus que d’autres entités substantielles, sans en falsifier l’idée. Cest ce que chacun fera à sa façon. L’appeler le besoin, c’est une façon comme une autre” (Disjecta 55). Beckett’s growing doubts about expression infect the form of the criticism in this passage; his hesitation to try to communicate discursively underscores his distrust of expression and suggests that this essay represents the type of interrogation it advocates. In an attempt, as Cohn has observed, to "avoid aporia by geometric representation" (Canon 98), Beckett uses a geometrical figure--two triangles, one inverted and superimposed upon the other in the shape of a six-pointed star--to illustrate the fact that the artist is trapped within the central conceptual space formed by the confluence of these needs (which Beckett represents with lines designated by letters): Besoin d'avoir besoin (DEF) et besoin dont on a besoin (ABC), conscience du besoin d'avoir besoin (ab) et conscience du besoin dont on a besoin-dont on avait besoin (de), issue du chaos de vouloir voir (Aab) et entrée dans le néant d'avoir vu (Dde), déclenchement et fin de l'autologie créatrice (abcdef). (Disjecta 56)

The entry and exit Beckett outlines in this passage indicate that perception is again the problem, for they suggest methods of recovery that are denied the artist when perception of the object is denied and expression is requisite. Ruby Cohn argues, for example, that Beckett “exalts art as the only path to knowledge about the self,” but that “the drive to such knowledge, a need, is countered by a need denying such knowledge” and, as Beckett asserts in the article, “out of their conflict/synthesis arises the work of art”(Disjecta 12). Beckett moves from a discussion of the impossibility of access to the subject/object and the causes of this gulf, to an examination of why one is driven to express and how one deals with the inability to perceive. Clearly, as John Pilling observes, Beckett “is much less concerned after this with describing the finished product, the precipitate, and concentrates instead on the process of making, the experiment” ("Poetics" 250). Yet Beckett asserts here that the artist must ask the question, that one must express the cry, though blank, “car aux enthymemes de l’art ce sont les conclusions qui manquent et non pas les premisses” (57). In “MacGreevey on Yeats” (1945) exposure and exploration of the predicament itself becomes the artist's subject. Beckett once again praises Jack B. Yeats, this time because he, along with a list of other artists including Kandinsky and Bram van Velde, “brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence, reduces the dark where there might have been, mathematically at least, a door” (Disjecta 97). Once again courage is required for expression associated with the gulf, more so than in earlier criticism in fact, since perception is now unreliable. But why is the predicament now issueless? Rupert Wood postulates that the situation bears this label because the artist is “without exit, solution or outcome” (9), which suggests that Beckett has abandoned the struggle to apprehend the subject/object relation. The passage above indicates that for Beckett the door in the darkness can no longer be discerned, and suggests that it was merely theoretical at best, which, when compared to Beckett’s association in the "Les deux besoins" of the possibility of perception with an entrance and exit, suggests that any possibility of perception has now been eliminated. Perhaps because of this conclusion, subsequent critical texts reflect a change in focus for Beckett, a change which critics recognize but which they struggle to interpret. Rupert Wood suggests, for example, that "MacGreevey on Yeats" is the last critical work wherein Beckett's "critical voice stands aloof from the aesthetic problematic, before being caught up in its own inexorable logic" (9). Though insightful, however, Wood's observation seems belated, for the

evolution of these terms related to perception and expression suggests that Beckett has been resisting a collapse into aporia since "Les deux besoins" at least. Lois Oppenheim, in comparison, labels Beckett's later critical works "anti-texts," and argues that they demonstrate the author's "anaesthetic point of view" (Painted 67). Unfortunately, although her discussion is more insightful than most, Oppenheim's assertions coincide for the most part with the critical trend outlined in chapter one that "Three Dialogues" contains a credo or aesthetic system. Though valuable, these arguments ignore Beckett's responsibility as a critic to find a way to articulate both the impossibility of expression and yet to escape the aporia above in his own critical work. In the criticism from "MacGreevey on Yeats" to "Three Dialogues" Beckett attempts several times to accomplish this goal. With the exception of "Three Dialogues," however, these later critical articles are only marginally successful, and following the dialogues Beckett abandons the critical discussion, producing what Ruby Cohn calls "brief tributes to artist friends" (Disjecta 15). Beckett's several attempts to escape aporia are marked not only by what Oppenheim calls a "ludic tone and often contradictory insights" (Painted 74), but also by the author's awareness of his dependence upon the impossible act of expression in these works, which undermines his attempt to offer plausible options for the artist and reifies further the hypocrisy and impossibility of expression. Beckett makes his first attempt with “La peintre des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon” (1945). In this essay he contends that Bram and Geer van Velde each express the impossibility of expression by recording the effects of the discontinuity (which he labels the “change”): Deux oeuvres en somme qui semblent se réfuter, mais qui en fait se rejoignent au coeur du dilemme, celui même des arts plastiques: Comment représenter le changement? Ils se sont refusés, chacun à sa façon, aux biais [. . .]. C’est d’ailleurs de la représentation de cette impossibilité que la peinture moderne a tire une bonne partie de ses meilleurs effets. Mais ils n’ont ni l’un ni l’autre ce qu’il faut pour tirer parti plastiquememt d’une situation plastique sans issue. (Disjecta 129) As this passage suggests, since navigation of the rupture is impossible, the artist records the impossibility itself: Bram paints “l’entendue”; Geer “la succession.” John Pilling explains that “in Geer’s case, Beckett suggests that he resolves his predicament by ‘engulfing’ the external world with its own externality; in Bram’s case, Beckett suggests that he resolves his predicament

by retiring into the confinement of his inner world” ("Poetics" 251). Beckett claims, in other words, that the artists articulate successfully the tools by which objects are perceived--the observable effects of time and space. Both methods are designed not to navigate the rupture, but to make its existence irrelevant, “forcer l‘invisibilité foncière des choses extérieures jusqu’à ce que cette invisibilité elle-même devienne chose” (130). The art object is ostensibly an expression of the qualities of perception, for as Oppenheim contends, the van Veldes do not attempt representation, “a duplication of the object perceived a priori,” but a “suspension, a spatiotemporal fixing” (75). Thus the details of the object itself are irrelevant, because the van Veldes paint the context instead of the subject; they express the disconnections inherent to all expression. Beckett praises Bram van Velde in particular because of his ability to paint the isolation of the object and the extent of the separation: La peinture d'A. van Velde serait done premièrement une peinture de la chose en suspens, je dirais volontiers de la chose morte, idéalement morte, si ce terme n'avait pas de si fâcheuses associations. C'est-à-dire que la chose qu'on y voit n'est plus seulement représentée comme suspendue, mais strictement telle qu'elle est, figée réellement. C'est la chose seule, isolée par le besoin de la voir, par le besoin de voir. La chose immobile dans le vide, voilà enfin la chose visible, l'objet pur. Je n'en vois pas d'autre. (126) This passage suggests that the object is pure because it is suspended in the void, untouchable. The passage also reveals, however, that Beckett expects the reader to think of this object, like the theoretical door of "MaGgreevey on Yeats," as an unperceived object and therefore unmodified by any attempt to apprehend it. Since perception and expression are impossible, he requires the reader to accept that the van Veldes have isolated the object by their need to perceive it, by the desperation to have something to express, and that since it cannot be perceived it is presupposed to exist only by the effects it produces in time and space--by the flux of the void. Ultimately this argument is unconvincing and collapses into aporia, however, not only because it demands this collusion from the reader, but also because the act of writing an essay relies upon expression. Beckett still faces the same blind alley he confronted when he attempted to use an abstract diagram in "Les deux besoins" to articulate the above dilemma without falling victim to it. He has failed to convince himself, as subsequent articles demonstrate, that these methods overcome the discontinuity, and more importantly, he has failed to discover a way to articulate his criticism without expression.

Beckett makes another attempt at this impossible critical exercise three years later in “Peintres de l’empechement,” which Cohn notes was originally titled "Le nouvel objet" (Canon 154). He warns, however, that this article will add little to the former investigation: “J'ai dit tout ce que j'avais à dire sur la peinture des frères van Velde dans le dernier numéro des Cahiers d'Art (à moins qu'il n'y en ait eu un autre depuis). Je n'ai rien à ajouter à ce que j'ai dit à cet endroit. C'était peu, c'était trop, et je n'ai rien à y ajouter” (Disjecta 133). In spite of this disclaimer, Beckett suggests that the art of the van Velde brothers presents a new expressive possibility: instead of seeking to perceive/express the object itself, or the effects of the discontinuity that reveal the existence of a theoretical object, the painters represent the discontinuity/rupture/void itself--the "prevention"--as a new object. The departure that occurs in this new expression, Beckett explains, is a renunciation of the traditional desire to apprehend the object: L'histoire de la peinture est l'histoire de ses rapports avec son objet, ceux-ci évoluant, nécessairement, d'abord dans le sens de la largeur, ensuite dans celui de la pénétration. Ce qui renouvelle la peinture, c'est d'abord qu'il y a de plus en plus de choses à peindre, ensuite une façon de les peindre de plus en plus possessionnelle. (Disjecta 135) He suggests that the drive to possess the object has led artists to ignore the reality of the situation, to compromise. Beckett rejects this negotiation, which he labels an “evasion,” and he argues that qualities inherent to both the object and the artist deny the expression that he once believed possible: “L’un dire: je ne peux voir l'objet, pour le représenter, parce qu'il est ce qu'il est. L'autre: Je ne peux voir l'objet, pour le représenter, parce que je suis ce que je suis” (136). He contends that all that remains is the representation of the two types of prevention: Greer van Velde represents the first type--“l’empechement-object”--and Bram the second- - “l’empechement-oeil” (136). Beckett argues that the van Veldes reject the traditional relationship between subject and object, that their painting is “libre de tout souci critique, d'une peinture de critique et de refus, refus d'accepter comme donné le vieux rapport sujet-objet” (137). Yet he admits that although their painting “est l'analyse d'un état de privation,” they must borrow “les termes du dehors, la lumiére et le vide, chez l'autre ceux du dedans, l'obscurité, le plein, la phosphorescence,” (136). Here once again Beckett cheats a bit when he argues that the van Veldes reject the subject/object relation, and yet they represent a new object; that they express that which creates the crisis in this relation:

Un dévoilement sans fin, voile derrière voile, plan sur plan de transparences imparfaites, un dévoilement vers l'indévoilable, le rien, la chose à nouveau. Et l'ensevelissement dans l'unique, dans un lieu d'impénétrables proximités, cellule peinte sur la pierre de la cellule, art d'incarcération. (136) Here Beckett’s argument collapses into aporia once again because apprehension of this object requires the process of perception/expression that the new object is said to disrupt. And Beckett once again depends upon some accommodation from the reader, for as Rupert Wood contends, he “seems to be asking whether a conscious forgetting of the necessarily self-undermining element in any adopted system of aesthetics might be possible in order to get on with the business of describing modern paintings” (10). Beckett's self-critical remarks in this essay illustrate that he is aware of the absurdity of this compromise, and suggest that he is once again unconvinced by his own logic. Wood observes, for example, that Beckett “struggles to remain upright” philosophically, while at the same time undermining “the last possibility of seriousness of philosophical intent” (11). Yet in these articles Beckett moves toward a theoretical absolute-- an imageless art or unworded word--which Lois Oppenheim records, was recognized by Georges Duthuit in their discussions: "Reread everything you wrote about Bram, my dear friend, and tell me if, in ten places, it is not this search for this absolute, by way of procession and not by conversion, which haunts you" (Painted 84). Beckett comes closest to this absolute when at the end of the article he suggests that three alternatives exist for the artist (and outlines at the same time the critical dilemma he himself faces): Le chemin du retour à vieille naiveté, à travers l'hiver de son abandon, le chemin des repentis. Puis le chemin qui n'en est plus un, mais une dernière tentative de vivre sur le pays conquis. Et enfin le chemin en avant d'une peinture qui se soucie aussi peu d'une convention périmée que des hiératismes et préciosités des enquêtes superflues, peinture d'acceptation, entrevoyant dans l'absence de rapport et dans l'absence d'objet le nouveau rapport et le nouvel objet, chemin qui bifurque déjà, dans les travaux de Bram et de Geer van Velde. (137) Each of these alternatives, however, rely ultimately upon the outmoded subject/object relation, and thus require the artist to ignore the inconsistencies of this relation, to pretend to find a new relation, or to use the traditional relation to try to represent expressive impossibilities. A year

later Beckett rejects all three of the above options in “Three Dialogues,” when he apparently capitulates and denies the possibility of expression utterly. The terms and ideas that Beckett used in his previous criticism continue to evolve in “Three Dialogues.” Ruby Cohn acknowledges that both the theme--"dehiscence of the subject/object relation"--and the language--"the superior, quasi-hermetic phrasing"--of this work recall Beckett's criticism from the previous decade (Canon 182). The artist is still caught within a predicament associated with perception, for B observes that “there is more than a difference in degree between being short, short of the world, short of self, and being without these esteemed commodities. The one is predicament, the other not” (102). And, as before, one aspect of this predicament is the torment brought on by the need to perceive and express, which Beckett now describes as an obligation: “The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint” (101). Yet this torment has intensified somewhat, to the point that the awareness of the discontinuity that inhibits apprehension of the object has become a “malady.” B argues, for instance, that Masson is plagued by two problems: “the malady of wanting to know what to do and the malady of wanting to be able to do it” (99). This comment suggests that lack of perception accounts for the first, and lack of expressive vehicle results in the second. As in earlier criticism, encountering these problems requires courage, for in language similar to that used in "MacGreevey on Yeats" Beckett praises Bram van Velde because he is "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" (103). Finally, in “Three Dialogues” Beckett’s reaction to the artist’s historical obsession with apprehension of the object has intensified. Instead of merely rejecting this history of painting, B speaks 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” (98). For as he outlines in a statement that makes reference to a "Peintres de l'Empechement": 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, in a kind of tropism towards a light as to the nature of which the best opinions continue to vary (103).

Beckett’s oft quoted rejection of expressive possibility is a denunciation of this obsession, and reads like a summary of the evolution of terms outlined above. He declares a preference for “the expression that there is nothing to express [because one cannot perceive the object], nothing with which to express [no vehicle], nothing from which to express [no access to the subject], no power to express [because of the discontinuity between subject and object], no desire to express [as a result of an awareness of the extent of the gulf], together with the obligation to express [brought on by various needs]” (98). And as the text makes clear, the void itself cannot be represented. D inquires how Masson is expected to paint the void and B replies: “He is not [. . .]. The void he speaks of is perhaps simply the obliteration of an unbearable presence, unbearable because neither to be wooed or to be stormed” (99). Nor is the expression of the dimensions of the void possible as it was in the first van Velde essay, for, B continues, If this anguish of helplessness is never stated as such, on its own merits and for its own sake, though perhaps very occasionally admitted as spice to the ‘exploit’ it jeopardized, the reason is doubtless, among others, that it seems to contain in itself the impossibility of statement. Again an exquisitely logical attitude. In any case, it is hardly to be confused with the void. (99) Here Beckett, tongue in cheek, rejects his own position from “Peintres de l’Empechement” and recognizes the aporia inherent in this argument; he argues that the only method for overcoming the discontinuity is to pretend it does not exist--to cheat a little--because the existence of the void prevents articulation of the void. While I am wary of beginnings and endings--of assuming teleology artificially where it may not exist--the evolution of these terms highlights corresponding alterations in Beckett's aesthetics, and, moreover, suggests that during this evolution Beckett makes a transition from modernism to postmodernism. Andrew Kennedy observes correctly that Beckett critics tend to avoid this "postmodern debate" ("Modern/Postmodern" 255),11 which situation is due in part to the fact that Beckett himself seems to have resisted such labels. But the discussion seems unavoidable, for the larger theoretical debate tends to include Beckett, as his work has been a popular battleground in what H. Porter Abbott calls the "modernist/postmodernist turf war" (Beckett Writing 23). The modernism/postmodernism debate as it relates to Beckett has been addressed with varied success: Theodor Adorno and Marjorie Perloff have each argued that Beckett exemplifies

their definition of modernism, while Hugh Kenner, Irving Howe, Alan Wilde, and Anthony Cronin have identified Beckett as the "last modernist."12 The postmodern position gained popularity in the early nineties, due largely, as Abbott observes, to an apparent "fit between Beckett's writing and postructuralist theory" (24). This position has been argued convincingly by many critics, including Michel Foucault, Stephen Barker, Anjela Moorjani, Steven Connor, Carla Locatelli, Thomas Tresize, Richard Begam, and Leslie Hill.13 In recent years a resurgence of modernism has occurred, however, as critics have explored the transition between modernism and postmodernism--a "late-modern" interim--that Fredric Jameson envisions as characterized by "the last survivals of a properly modernist view of art," and peopled by artists like Beckett, "who had the misfortune to span two eras and the luck to find a time capsule of isolation or exile in which to spin out unseasonable forms" (Cultural 305). The watchword for this late-modernism seems to be hybridity, a quality that Brian McHale associates with texts (which he labels "limit-modernist") that oscillate between the dominant characteristics of modernism and postmodernism (12). John Fletcher, for example, suggests the hybridity of this liminal late-modernist position when at the conclusion of "Modernism and Samuel Beckett" (1985) he argues that, "Beckett stands dominant today as one of Modernism's great survivors, postmodernly modern to the last" (216). H. Porter Abbott picks up this line of argument when he asserts that Beckett "remains a categorical rift," that as a "postmodern modernist" (here Abbott borrows consciously from Fletcher), Beckett represents each position concurrently (Beckett Writing 25). Drawing on Irving Howe's notion of a "spirit of opposition" as a hallmark of modernism, Abbott contends that Beckett imports this "principle of resistance" into his work using a process of self-resistance Abbott calls "recollection by invention" (28).14 Abbott identifies this "remembering by misremembering" of elements in successive works as "a concentrated refinement of modernist practice," but he also recognizes that the technique has "the look of the postmodern" and "a textbook availability to poststructural analysis" (28-29). He associates these postmodern qualities with Beckett's use of the trope of "onwardness" in particular, which device he contends, has such "infinite variability" that Beckett "approaches what the more discursive postmodern theorist falls short of" (39). Andrew Kennedy presents Beckett in a similar hybrid position of modernism and postmodernism in "Beckett and the Modern/Postmodern Debate" (1996), when he asserts that Beckett's "vision is both traditional and hyper-modern" because of the author's humanistic

"images of fallen, diminishing and linguistically suffering" beings who are also "displaced, extra-terrestrial" in a valueless culture (257). Like Abbott, he stresses that Beckett's work "is marked by qualities admired by most postmodern critics," but that it is "rooted in both traditional modernist aesthetic urgencies" as well (262). In similar fashion, Tyrus Miller argues that Beckett felt the need to "defend the modernist tendency within which he wished to situate his own work" at the same time that he turned to "parody and self-ridicule to call into question a number of modernist authorship's basic assumptions" (177). The outcome of this stance, Miller contends, is that Beckett can reject epistemological assumptions of modernism and explore the conditions that "inform and infirm" the subject. Beckett's process, this "unburdening of epistemology, this uncoupling of rhetoric from questions of truth" requires hybridity, for as Miller contends, it functions "by means of parodic reference to a modernist stance from which he is taking leave" (179). David Weisberg takes a different tack when he argues that Beckett's dissatisfaction with modernism's social agenda, or "contradictory cultural-political divides," led Beckett to reject "the aspirations of both modernism and the avant garde" (5). He contends that Beckett developed ambivalence to the "modernist ideal of aesthetic autonomy" during the war, from which he recovers in the post-war years. Weisberg argues that "Three Dialogues," reveals Beckett's "interest in reimagining aesthetic autonomy in a manner that does not uncritically reiterate the ideological oppositions of the 1920s and '30s" (142). His method, Weisberg contends, is to fashion "a narrative form that consciously exploited contradictions inherent in the notion of an autotelic art" (9). Interestingly, Weisberg's discussion is something of an anomaly, as "Three Dialogues" does not often play a central role in this debate. Although critics occasionally mention the work, they seem to prefer later "critical" comments that seem more definite and polemic: Beckett's 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, in which the author characterizes language as a "veil that must be torn apart to get at the thing (or the Nothingness) behind it" and introduces the notion of a "literature of the unword" (Disjecta 171, 173); a 1956 interview with Isreal Shenker, in which Beckett remarked: "The more Joyce knew the more he could. He's tending toward omniscience and omnipotence. I'm working with impotence, ignorance"; and a 1979 interview with Tom Driver, in which Beckett speaks of the necessity of a new art form to "accommodate the mess," and states that "this form will be of such type that admits chaos and does not try to say chaos is really

something else" (218-219). This lack of attention paid to the dialogues in this debate is strange, not only because, as the critical history discussed in chapter one reveals, the work is highly quotable and is used almost universally in Beckett criticism, but also because the text has many characteristics that speak directly to common modernism/postmodernism categories. The modernist characteristics of "Three Dialogues" are more compelling than a simple avant garde rejection of convention, more than the "rage against prevalent traditions" that Astradur Eyesteinsson identifies as the primary characteristic of modernism (8). The dialogues also display a prominent pessimism, for example, a sense of "being unhappy" that Richard Poirier associates with modernism (125). Critics have noted this characteristic often, as the critical history reveals, particularly B's lament that the artist has "no power to express" and his acknowledgement of the "absurdity" of his position. Yet the work is also marked by a sardonic tone. B proposes an end to the discussion, for example, and quips, "Would not that be an excellent issue out of all our afflictions? He happy, you happy, I happy, all three bubbling over with happiness"(102). In addition, he claims to be "trying in vain to say what may be tried in vain to be said" and he speaks of himself as beleaguered, "in the dock" (103). At the same time, however, these same qualities reflect the type of postmodern "ironic rethinking" Umberto Eco speaks of in his "Postscript to In the Name of the Rose," in which the past, "the already said" must not be negated, but revisited "not innocently" (68-9). The correspondences discussed earlier in this chapter between the dialogues and Beckett's earlier works combine with the above pessimism to communicate this sense of irony, this sense, as B states in the dialogues, of "here we go again." In addition to these qualities, the dialogues are built upon a highly subjective premise; the artists discussed exemplify the eternally solitary individual identified by Georg Lukács as the quintessential modernist type: isolated from human and social relations and merely "thrown into existence" (20). B and D discuss the isolation of the artist, who although driven to create is "short of the world, short of self," trapped between two "unstable" terms of relation: artist and occasion (102). This situation, however, also addresses the demise of what Jean-François Lyotard labels "true modernism," specifically, the withdrawal of "the real" and "the sublime relation between the presentable and the conceivable" (79). In comparison, Lyotard contends, postmodernism emphasizes "the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation" and a corresponding "nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject" (79). B's statement that there is

"nothing from which to express" suggests that he recognizes this disconnection from self and reality, and demonstrates this sense of nostalgia for the now defunct relation between artist and occasion, a relation heretofore "always regarded as indispensable." Instead of historical or formal connections between the artists in question, the dialogues address these abstract correspondences between the artists' aesthetics; they question the mythical "spatialized" structures (or "patterned energies" to use Hugh Kenner's phrase) that Michael Bell identifies as the formal index of modernism (15).15 In addition to the relation between artist and occasion, for example, B and D isolate two other abstract aesthetic issues that confront the artist: two maladies, the "malady of wanting to know what to do" and the "malady of wanting to be able to do it" (99); and two issues vital to the creative process, the artist's "aliment" and its "manner of dispatch" (103). These ideas, not the three artists examined, are the subject of the dialogues, and they are outlined through comparisons between these artists, their contemporaries (Matisse, Bonnard, Kandinsky, Mondrian), and their predecessors (Leonardo, Giotto, "italian painters"). At the same time that "Three Dialogues" uses these references to isolate the above patterns, however, the text also suggests that a deconstructive crisis of reference exists. The work does not, to use the words of Craig Owens, presuppose that "mimesis, the adequation of an image to a referent, can be bracketed or suspended," but in postmodern fashion, the text "neither brackets nor suspends the referent but works instead to problematize the activity of reference" (79). Beyond B's assertion that there is "nothing with which to express," the text suggests that language/medium is insufficient for the artist's needs. The referents in the text itself are questioned, for instance: the almost-mythical masters of the Renaissance, the "italian painters" in the above example are dismissed as "building contractors" who apprehend with "the same utilitarian servility as in a traffic-jam" (97-8). Elsewhere in the text, B, suspicious of mimesis, seeks art that is "impoverished," and "incapable of any image whatsoever" (100). He resists the notion that art is "inexpressive" (101), yet at the same time he struggles with the "acute and increasing anxiety of the relation" between artist and occasion (103). One could interpret this suspicion about language in a number of ways. On one hand, the dialogues function as the type of aesthetic crucible described by Clement Greenberg in "Modernist Painting," where "the essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence" (101). Using this model one could

suppose that the dialogues are self-critical of art, aesthetics, criticism, and even the text itself in order to purify the theory and practice of art. On the other hand, the dialogues contain elements of parody or pastiche, which undermines the serious interpretation above. For Frederic Jameson, these devices represent a line of demarcation between modernism and postmodernism. The difference between the two, he explains, lies in the stance of the author, for pastiche is value- neutral parody, "without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satirical impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that, along side the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy normality exists" ("Consumer" 17). The wealth of references to artists in the text and the presence of quoted or borrowed material (from Masson, from Beckett's earlier criticism, and ostensibly from B's theories about Bonnard) suggests that parody or pastiche occurs in "Three Dialogues." But as the critical history reveals, the question of the value neutrality of B's stance, and whether or not that stance reflects Beckett's opinion, resists definitive interpretation. As this examination reveals, this type of cataloguing should be approached with caution, for as Eyesteinsson warns, critics who attempt such categories tend to find what they seek, "either because they have adopted that approach to reading and interpretation or because they have come to assume that it is the proper way to approach works associated with modernism" (125). 16 Although I want to avoid making what Abbot calls "another contribution to the war of labels" (27), this examination illustrates Beckett's evolution in both his aesthetics and his commitment to modernism, and moreover, that on the surface at least, "Three Dialogues" qualifies as a hybrid, late-modernist text. As the above discussion of the modern/postmodern qualities of the dialogues illustrates, however, this qualification must be handled carefully. For as Tyrus Miller argues in his discussion of the late-modern, two problems plague attempts to qualify modernism/ postmodernism: the first is defining chronological boundaries; the second is the problem of selection, that is--what to include and what to leave out (21). The late-modern category is particularly complicated, he asserts, for it resists these conceptual barriers to address concurrently the modern age and the postmodern condition. Thankfully, as the discussions in the following chapters illustrates, "Three Dialogues" provides contextual references and concrete targets that enable us to avoid many of the oversimplifications that result in what Jean-Michele Rabaté dismisses as "forceful integrations"

into "pre- or post-" categories (ix). While the qualities discussed above leave the argument somewhat open, the discussions in the following chapters not only provide compelling support for a late-modernist positioning of "Three Dialogues," but they also provide a new arsenal of evidence for the larger discussion of Beckett's overall position within this debate.

CHAPTER THREE “PERILOUS ZONES”: BECKETT IN (t)TRANSITION

“Of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his word--the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.” - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“There are hidden forces in the subconscious which are not only the residua of our own personal lives, but are the remnants of those dark ages before history began.” - Eugene Jolas, “transition: An Epilogue.”

In the “Beckett as Critic” section of her 1986 study, Linda Ben-Zvi argues that Samuel Beckett’s association with the journal transition informs much of his work. It is important to understand the milieu from which Beckett’s writing sprung, particularly the influence of transition and its most famous contributor, Joyce. The echoes of both reverberate through Beckett’s early works. Their emphasis on new forms of language, rejection of traditional modes of literature and art, advocacy of imagination over intellect, and absolute belief in the possibilities of creation played an enormous part in molding Beckett’s attitudes. (21) Ben-Zvi fails to elucidate the details of this milieu, however, or to illustrate how this context influences particular Beckett works. The above list of characteristics, for example, applies equally well to Modernism in general as to Joyce and transition specifically. Ben-Zvi is not alone in these types of assertions, and when such connections are drawn, critics often tend to highlight the influence of Joyce and minimize the influence of Eugene Jolas (or worse, to assume that the theories of these two men are congruent), and to elide the subtle theoretical and rhetorical differences between the two journals that bear the name transition.17 Yet even if such assertions were defended properly they would be insufficient in scope, because the milieu of

(t)Transition is more than just a historical background that enhances our understanding of the “attitudes” of Samuel Beckett and his contemporaries. The context of these journals provides comprehensive interpretation of the language and references of “Three Dialogues,” displays how the language of the dialogues disputes specific assertions made in transition’s “Poetry is Vertical” manifesto, and ultimately, illustrates how with this rejection Beckett and Duthuit challenge ideas about perception and expression that are central to Modernism.

A Laboratory for Modernism The evolution of transition as a critical entity is both gradual and complex. The first twelve issues appeared monthly from Paris in 1927, during a developmental phase Eugene Jolas labels the “eclectic/subversive period” ("Transition Bibliography"; t 22: 146).18 The journal passed through several subsequent stages: Jolas added the subtitle “A Quarterly for Artistic Experiment” to issues 13-19 (Summer 1928-June 1930); the journal was on hiatus for the next two years, after which it appeared with the labels “An International Workshop for Orphic Creation” (issues 21-22) and “An Intercontinental Workshop for Vertigralist Transmutation” (23); the magazine was identified as simply “A Quarterly Review” during the publication of the “New York numbers” (24-26); and the final “Tenth Anniversary” issue (27) was again edited in Paris and appeared in February 1939. These subtitles outline the important theoretical stages of transition, but they also underscore the fact the Eugene Jolas designed the journal as a vehicle for modernist experimention. The “transition” title, for example, defines for Jolas the need to explore the modern aesthetic situation; the word expresses the “notion of transition from one plane of human evolution to another” (t 21:394), as well as the idea of art as “a tangible link between the centuries,” that “joins distant continents into a mysterious unit, long before the inhabitants are aware of their impulses” ("Introduction"; t 1:135). Jolas envisioned his project as a laboratory in which artists would have “an opportunity to express themselves freely, to experiment, if they are so minded, and to avail themselves of a ready, alert and critical audience” (t 1:137). In his initial explanation Jolas pledged: “No rigid artistic formulae will be applied in selecting the contents of transition.” Instead, he proposed that the contributors and readers direct the development of the journal.

We believe, that although art and literature are, in many quarters, growing more definitely racial and national in coloring and texture, their appeal is becoming distinctly international. The reader is coming into his own. Whatever tendencies appear, we want them reflected in transition if they have real artistic value. (t 1:137) In response to these trends, the selections published in the journal reflect Jolas’s effort to represent the experiments of a diverse and international artistic population. The journal published surrealist works, for instance, by André Breton, Paul Eluard, Phillipe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, and Robert Desnos. Surrealism had such prominence in the journal in fact, that Dougald MacMillan asserts: “there was probably more surrealist material published in transition than in any other magazine” (82). Jolas also published Dada selections by Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Hugo Ball, together with a comprehensive apology entitled “Dada: 1916- 1936” (t 26). Expressionist works by Franz Kafka, Georg Trakl, and Gottfried Benn were presented together with the works of such prominent American expatriates as Ernest Hemingway; developing artists such as Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, and Samuel Beckett were published along with less recognized artists--particularly women--including Kay Boyle, Djuna Barnes, and Laura Riding. The most imposing and established figures to appear regularly were Gertrude Stein, whose experimental prose was featured often in the early issues, and James Joyce, whose Work in Progress was serialized throughout the run of the journal. This diversity is a part of the lasting legacy of this "little magazine," but it also presented editorial challenges. Geoffrey Wolff observes, for example, that Jolas “opened the pages of Transition to such an eclectic bunch--Futurists and Dadaists, Surrealists and Expressionists--that his own convictions might have been lost in the roil were it not for their urgency” (244). The experiment is also, as Jolas’s introduction suggests, highly multidisciplinary. In addition to literature and criticism, the magazine regularly featured artistic or critical works by many important painters, photographers, musicians and filmmakers, as well as selections on more esoteric subjects, including primitive art and embroidery. As the journal matures, the prominence Jolas gives to the “Revolution of the Word” seems to dominate these other disciplines, yet in keeping with his collaborative approach, Jolas insists that his revolution is not discipline specific, and that he uses the term “poetry” in its “generic semantics as indicating the primal impulse to create” ("Literature and the New Man"; t 19/20:13). Craig Monk argues, however, that such statements are merely an accommodation made necessary by Jolas’s

“particular friendships and collaborations, not to mention the undeniable status attained by modern painting during the first half of the twentieth century” (“Photography” 364). Monk is suspicious of Jolas’s motives and what appears to be his token attention to multidisciplinarity: While the various aesthetic manifestos that appeared in transition express sentiments that can be applied across the arts, Jolas’s preoccupation with a revolution in language to accommodate the demands of automatism in poetry calls into question the commitment of the editor of one of the most important modern little magazines to furthering the development of a wide range of modern art forms. (364-5) Without doubt Jolas’s transition is predominantly word-centered. Dougald McMillan credits the journal with having “re-established the importance of ‘the word,’ which had suffered so much in the exaltation of the image in the first quarter of the century” (5). The preoccupation Monk observes is displayed by editorial comments wherein Jolas’s belief in the supremacy of the word is undeniable. Jolas, for instance, undermines his own declaration about the universal nature of the term “poetry” when he writes: Poetry is at a cross-roads today [. . .]. A confusion faces the modern poet at the threshold of his development. He either will have to abandon completely the attempt to express his universe with the decadent instrument of unpliable and exhausted language matter, or else will have to try to resuscitate the comatose word. ("Logos"; t 16-17:25) This passage suggests not only that Jolas prefers the word to other media, but also that he disavows the efficacy of their expression. Granted, his comments about exhausted language matter could be applicable to visual art or music, but he makes clear that the type of expression he advocates depends upon the word. Such comments intimate that while other media are useful or interesting, they may be insufficient to communicate the intellectual and metaphysical complex he envisions: “The word,” he writes on another occasion, “presents the metaphysical problem today” ("The Revolution of Language and James Joyce"; t 11:109). Yet this prominence of the word does not negate the importance of the other media presented in the journal, and Jolas can be forgiven perhaps if his personal preference for language overshadows at times other aspects of the experiment. Despite his preference, however, Jolas presents the appearance of a collaborative theoretical evolution. Edward E. Cheilens suggests that this is the case in his study American Literary Magazines when he notes:

Transition had quickly become a breeding ground for theoretical statements. These statements appeared in the magazine in three basic forms: the conventional essay, the manifesto, and the questionnaire. Viewed separately from the poetry and other prose published in the magazine, these pieces can be seen as key ingredients in the formation of transition’s experimental character. Of special interest are Jolas’s numerous essays on poetic theory. (366-7) These vehicles for the explication of transition’s “research” are nearly always collaborative, one might even say conspicuously so. They reflect Jolas’s goal of a creative laboratory: numerous signatures appear on each manifesto, and numerous and diverse responses are printed to each questionnaire. Also, although Jolas is credited as the sole author of many of the editorials, a large number are signed by more than one person, attributed to “the editors,” or presented simply as unsigned pronouncements. By the third month and issue of the workshop, however, Jolas is feeling both daunted and exhilarated by the pressures of facilitating this eclectic/subversive experiment, and begins to assert himself as editor and mentor, that is, to summarize and explain what he regards as the most important attributes of Modernism. In “Suggestions for a New Magic,” for instance, an editorial which Jolas would later identify as his “guide-post throughout the transition decade” (Babel 93), the editor felt moved to “re-define some of the concepts” that symbolize “the quintessence of the modern spirit” in transition (t 3:178). We believe that there is no hope for poetry unless there be a disintegration first. We need new words, new abstractions, new hieroglyphics, new symbols, new myths. These values to be organically evolved and hostile to a mere metaphorical conception must seek freer association. Thus there may be produced that sublimation of the spirit which grows imminently out of the modern consciousness. By re-establishing the simplicity of the word, we may find again its old magnificence. (t 3:179) In this essay Jolas also expressed for the first time his hope that “a vertical urge” would emerge from this disintegration of language. At this stage “the vertical” is simply a trope by which Jolas describes the experimental artist’s renunciation of the realism and dilettantism that he believes permeates much period art. Yet the theoretical departure that would later define Verticalism--a mantic connection between the spiritual and mundane worlds that Jolas would label “New Romanticism”--is hinted at in the above passage. This short essay, as Dougald MacMillan notes,

is Jolas’s first attempt to formulate a universal theory of Modernism based on the diverse experiments presented in the journal. Like many of Jolas’s editorial statements ‘Suggestions for a New Magic’ is romantically extravagant. This should not obscure the fact that it is an important attempt to define theoretically what others were demonstrating with the creative works that appeared in the magazine. For these writers it was no longer adequate to describe existing reality or even to evoke the effects of inner visions or emotions; the visions and mental processes themselves must be depicted with all the contradictions and unconventional means necessary to express them. They had found it necessary to dispense with ‘normal’ metaphors and associations, and to use combinations arrived at less consciously. Their emphasis on the portrayal of an inner vision and the renewal of language formed the basis of most of the critical theory developed in transition. (38) Jolas is not, at least in the early stages of the journal, an innovator as much as a collector, critic, and organizer. The list of universal themes and practices that Jolas identifies as central to Modernism is based upon observation instead of his imagination; even the infamous "Poetry is Vertical" manifesto is a largely derivative pronouncement that incorporates many ideals from other modernists. MacMillan observes that Jolas possessed the ability to recognize important new attitudes and trends, and to mobilize artists and critics in the exploration of these ideas (230). Yet the astuteness of Jolas’s observations and the success of his attempts to delineate a Modernist aesthetics even as these experiments progressed is evident by the similarity of his assertions to those of recent critics, such as Christopher Butler, who with a perspective enhanced by the passage of time, identifies two universal characteristics of Modernist innovators: “They developed Symbolist notions of stylistic autonomy, so that their work could seem to depend upon aesthetic conventions which were independent of public norms,” and “they relied upon the idea that creativity (and art) had to be subjective, intuitive, and expressionist in character” (3). Following his initial attempt to define the “modern spirit” of art in “Suggestions for a New Magic,” Jolas continues to develop his discussion of what he believes to be the fundamental aspects of Modernism. In issue thirteen, for example, he augments and clarifies his previous assertion that language must be manipulated to have artistic significance: It is the future poet’s task to present us the dual reality of life. The word also has two meanings: the literary or traditional one and the transmuted one. If words are given

violent associations, we arrive at a lyrical vibration that does away with the purely descriptive, and that increases our joy in hearing and reading. We must seek new words that gradually metamorphose the world of experience, and proceed thus into the timeless and spaceless. ("Transatlantic Letter; t 13: 276-7) In this passage he argues that the “freer association” he had outlined in the previous essay should alter the reader’s world through violent juxtaposition. As before, the ideas presented in this passage are not original to Jolas, but are derived largely from the theory and practice of various artists and movements. André Breton, for example, discusses the importance of violent associations in poetic language in the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), wherein he writes: It is, as it were, from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms that a particular light has sprung the light of the image, to which we are infinitely sensitive. The value of the image depends upon the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference of potential between the two conductors. (37) Jolas never claims these innovations as his own, but strives to facilitate such experimentation and synthesize common issues thus unearthed. Since the earliest issues of the journal, for example, Jolas had included a glossary of created words--or “neologisms”--used by various artists whose work appears in the journal. This practice became more pronounced as the experiment progressed, and the glossary evolved eventually into transition’s “Revolution of the Word Dictionary” which was published in issue twenty-one. In addition to new words, Jolas advocated the creation of new literary forms, including those of his own invention: the anamyth, "a fantastic narrative that reflects preconscious relationships," and the psychograph, "a prose text that expresses hallucinations and phantoms" (324). Such inventions were not popular with contemporary critics of transition, who questioned the necessity and function of the “new” forms. Dougald Macmillan dismisses these attacks, however, and suggests that Jolas sought to break with the assumptions attached to literary form at every level: “The old terms like fairy tale, vision, prose poem, or surrealist text under which such writings had been lumped in the past had inaccurate connotations, and Jolas’s new terminology was a serious attempt to replace them” (67). As the journal matures, however, Jolas feels driven to guide the development of the experiment--to lead instead of facilitate--and the “formulae” by which he determines which pieces will appear in transition reflect this desire. The rhetorical approach that results is not the

laboratory, the experimental “duologue” to which Jolas aspires, but a monologue, a series of assertions, an organized defense of what he believes the Modernist agenda to be. At first, Jolas's more aggressive editorial stance is subtle. At the end of the second year he admits that his own theories and the selections appearing in the magazine regularly diverge on important artistic issues: Doubtless it does seem disconcerting to find so many “different kinds” of stories in transition, particularly when the editors show a definite tendency in their editorials, a tendency leading away from a considerable portion of their contributors’ offerings. ("A Review"; t 12:143) Not surprisingly, however, Jolas argues that such a discrepancy is healthy for a community of artists, and that the laboratory environment and an editorial tendency are not mutually exclusive. Some of our friends chide us for having a too definite programmatic idea, while others insist that the lack of a purposive orientation is our chief fault. Let me, therefore, emphasize here that we never believed in a rigid application of a priori ideas, but have always conceived of our effort as primarily research into the modern spirit. We attempted to find the creators active in every nation who had a new vision of their universe and who expressed it in the directest way possible. We never conceived transition to be the review of a narrow group, clique, chapelle, “movement”. We allowed it to develop organically, and since we discovered certain parallel tendencies among the fresh elements of various nations, we thought it important to present them as documents. We felt, however, that our half-sleep or our sleep, had as much beauty as the objective world which American writing had been exclusively trying to portray. Thus we felt personally that if we should have a “tendency” or direction at all, it ought to be toward the search for the magical. We felt the importance of the problem of reality--the new reality of our twentieth century in relation to our own inner world. ("Notes"; t 14: 180- 181) Despite Jolas's subtle involvement at this early stage, the role that Jolas took upon himself of organizer and champion of the diverse manifestations of Modernism suffered heavy criticism throughout the publication of the journal. This is due partly to Jolas’s zeal and rhetorical style, to what Hugh Ford labels “his ponderous dicta” that were “easier to ignore--even by signatories of the ‘Revolution of the Word’--than to observe” (Silet x). This criticism takes diverse forms,

from friendly jest to verbal assault, and created a critical dialogue that over time resembles a perpetual running battle between transition and rival publications, movements, and personalities. Some participants, such as Joyce and Stein, merely refused to sign manifestos or respond to questionnaires. For others, as Kay Boyle observes, “it was not difficult to be humourous about Jolas’s graphing of the night mind and his concept of it as a marvelously unexplored territory” (265). Jolas’s passion for his discovery and confidence is its originality, Boyle remarks, was a target as well: It was even easier to ridicule transition’s wild celebration of not only liberated words but poems, and essays, and non-stories, that had been dredged up from the unconscious and heralded as if they were long awaited travelers from a distant and mysterious land” (265) She notes that regular contributors to the journal, including she and Robert McAlmon, “were particularly adept at this kind of ridicule,” and that, “the surrealists, Jolas, and transition were all to be dismissed in sardonic jest” (265-6). Other less friendly exchanges include the “Testimony Against Gertrude Stein” that Jolas instigated in reaction to what he felt were misrepresenttions about the experiment and personalities affiliated with it in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and a debate in response to the “Direction” manifesto leveled at transition by Samuel Putnam of This Quarter. The laboratory inspired several vocal opponents, for as Putnam records: “There were a good many who felt that the much-advertised revolution was getting nowhere rapidly and that it would be a salutary thing to call some kind of halt, at least long enough for a calm and sane consideration of the question of language and modernism” (226-7). In the face of what they saw as a preoccupation with form, signers of the “Direction” document, for example, called for “a return to content.” The most feverish attack, however, came from Wyndham Lewis in “The Enemy” (1927), wherein the author denounces Jolas’s experiment and what he viewed as affiliated entities: Communism, Surrealism, Joyce, Stein, Sherwood Anderson, D. H. Lawrence, Negroes, and Indians. Jolas responded with “First Aid to the Enemy” in which he defends the developing program. “It is the artist’s search for magic in this strange world about us that transition desires to encourage,” he writes, “we do not ‘propose to dictate to the world of Western art and letters.’ That is ridiculous. We have no set of rules for the use of our contributors. We simply want fresh flowers instead of dead weeds” (t 9:176). Jolas attends to this debate with some concern and a

sense of urgency, and clarifies his editorial position on several points. Later in the same issue, for instance, he stresses again that, The misconception with which the experiments of transition are being received in many quarters necessitates once more a clarification of the general ideas of our venture. We have no intention of indulging in dogmatic pronunciamentos, for we are interested primarily in research. We should like to feel that each being re-invent the world for himself. (t 9:191) In addition, due to the fact that transition published material by Surrealists, Jolas offers the following explanation of how the editors’ tendency differs from Surrealist practice: Our conception of literature [. . .] is not the formalized one of the Surrealists. We believe with them that the artist’s imagination should be placed above everything else in importance, but we do not hold with them that writing should be exclusively of the interior [. . .] We believe in a new romanticism, more volatile than that of the past, which achieves a magic by combining the interior and exterior, the subjective and the objective, the imaginary and the apparently real. (t 9: 175) Finally, later in the article, since a fascination with machines and motion is evident within journal selections, Jolas also clarifies his theories in relation to Futurism: The movements of life in its physical sense added to the hermeticism of the instinctive can conceivably create a beauty never dreamed-of before. The dynamism of the newer manifestations such as electricity, cinema, auto, telephone, aeroplane, radio, may give a new artistic basis leading to fantastic functions of the mind [. . .]. We are not hostile to the whirling symptoms of the modern world of machines. But they must be subordinated to the expression of the imaginative aims which are the very essence of poetry. (t 9: 194- 5) In addition to these pointed clarifications, critical response deteriorates at times into ridicule. Jolas, for example, relates the tale of a man who dismisses his young lover with a kick as she leaves him for a career on the stage. He then writes: In reading Mr. Lewis’ The Enemy we were reminded of old Colonel Mouffetard and his ambitious sweetheart, for it seems to us that instead of his leaving supposed revolutionary camps, as he would have it appear, modern literature has found a chance for something better and has left poor Wyndham dolefully behind. Consequently he takes a farewell

boot at the rump he had fondled so coyly a few years before. We think literature will recover. (t 9:162) The above passages indicate the nature and particulars of the debate, but this last riposte in particular underscores the idea that Jolas envisions himself at the center of Modernist artistic experimentation, that he believes he has discovered the “something better” in modern literature, or even perhaps, that he is responsible for having engineered its existence. Jolas kept busy drafting responses to the above assaults and to similar criticism by V. F. Calverton of Modern Quarterly, F. R. Leavis of Scrutiny, and Harold Salemson, one of the 19 signers of the “Revolution of the Word” manifesto. As the above exchange illustrates, such critical disagreement seems to have been healthy for transition, as this active resistance forced Jolas to constantly evaluate and explicate the progress of the experiment. Yet the constant assaults may also have inspired in him a certain defensive posture, with the result that he feels more compelled to develop and forward his personal theories. Consequently, as the editorial tendency becomes more prominent in the journal, Jolas expends less energy maintaining this separation between the experiment and his tendencies. In fact, as the above comments suggest, after the second year of publication he associates the mainstream of the experiment with his own ideas, and defends this experiment by means of separation of these ideas from various movements as opposed to the rhetoric of incorporation espoused previously. In the journal during this period the word-centeredness of the journal becomes more pronounced than the notion of an “organically” developing experiment as Jolas asserts his own program. Craig Monk argues, for example, that Jolas makes “less-than-complimentary comments” about photography in his writings, despite the fact that this art form was a regular feature (“Photography” 362). The questionable approach to which Monk refers is exemplified in one of Jolas’s regular commentaries on poetry, in which he states, “The photographic conception of the word can no longer interest us. We desire a nomenclature that evokes an immediacy and the essence of abstraction [. . .]. We desire the etymology of approximation and apperception” ("Logos"; t 16-17:29-30). In this passage Jolas limits the importance of photography by suggesting that the poet should avoid the mimetic function of that medium. Film receives similar treatment. In Transition Workshop (1949) Jolas stresses that, “the literature of the future will have no interest in competing with the possibilities for photographic and acoustic realism offered by the cinema, the radio, television, and similar mechanical means”

(29). Instead, he feels that cinema can inform poetry, that the medium suggests “new technical possibilities” for the poet (t 2:184). “The cinema,” he continues later, “in spite of the imbecility surrounding its present evolution, can give us possibilities for hallucinations that check successfully the pedantry of the puritan” ("On the Quest"; t 9:195). He even suggests at one point that poetry must aspire to the expressive immediacy attained by film. The pure expression of a poetic concept outside all documentary adhesions may be seen in the experiments made by one or two modern film creators. Through mechanical means they flash before our eyes a series of rhythmitized images which produce illuminations without slavish reference points in our sensual lives. The poet is interested primarily in giving us his world stripped of all superfluous elements. Poetry, using the word as mechanics, may, like the film, produce a metaphoric universe which is a sublimation of the physical world. ("Logos"; t 16-17:26) Jolas’s poem Cinema (1926) illustrates this function. The work communicates a sense of spectatorship to the reader, as if the narrator is watching a film. Each of the clipped, five-line stanzas creates a separate visual scene, and the work as a whole reads like a shooting script: eyes blinded motors turning in tired brains mechanical wheels of my nerves refrain of irony cry silence [. . .] chaos yawped mergenthalers wand of steel we plunged into midnights of fear abrupt chronicles grew abstract a dawn leered In these initial stanzas Jolas seems to describe the darkening of the theater, the motion of the projector, and the subsequent illumination as the story is told. By comparing the projector to Mergenthaler’s typesetting machine he credits film with the immediacy of communication to which he alluded in the above statement on photography, with a potency that he hopes to transfer to the written word. Jolas draws from cinema in this manner numerous times for his own creative enterprise: “O cinema of chaos” he exclaims in “Carrousel” (t 9:60); “O blinding light

of your vision/ You saw the curtain drawing apart/ Fearful vistas shivered before you” he writes in “Transcendental Feature Film” (t 5:98); and like Gertrude Stein, he taps into the dynamism of the cinema through the use of rapid repetition of slightly altered phrases in one of his larger poems, “Logocinema of the Frontierman” (t 23:187). Yet despite this apparent serviceability of cinema in his own work, Jolas is careful in the pages of transition to rein in any suggestion that the moving image offers expressive possibilities comparable to those of the word. Sergei Eisenstein’s important essay “The Cinematographic Principle and Japanese Culture,” for instance, appears in issue nineteen/twenty of the journal. Jolas apparently felt compelled to clarify Eisenstein’s ideas, for the essay is followed immediately by a brief commentary entitled “Towards New Forms”: We have today enough technological media for the transmission of the factual side of life [. . .]. Composition, because of our new psychological insight, and because of the dynamic tempo of our background, today, assumes a changed aspect. The writer has new forms at his disposal, a fusion of forms in which all the senses come into their own [. . .]. The development of the talking film and radio will doubtless have a revolutionary influence on the drama, among other things. And since sound seems to be the basis of the hear-play and the cinema-drama, it is safe to say that the problem of the new form will be the word. (104) Jolas’s logic here is flawed. In his rush to sublimate the cinema to the word he overemphasizes the dialogue of cinema and ignores the impact of images and motion. Yet although this piece is a small addition to the mass of editorial remarks Jolas published in transition, it is significant. The document not only reiterates formal issues significant to Jolas’s vision of the Modernist experiment, but it demonstrates Jolas’s efforts to guide the transition experiment in the noontide issues of the journal. Another example that underscores Jolas’s attention to even apparently insignificant challenges is the similar correction of an experimental poem by Bob Brown that appeared in transition eighteen. Brown is a less-recognized writer, and his poem seems completely innocuous, if not salutary: I accept transition’s verdict that words should be bro ken up I only hope the slippery slimy

GLASS-SNAKE ONES DON’T CRAWL AWL TOGETHER AGAIN (t.18:208) Like the calligrammes of Guilliame Apollinaire, however, Brown forms the words at the end of the poem into images of snakes and mountain peaks, and through this use of image presents a subtext that challenges the importance of the word. Brown's technique acts as an “awl,” as a tool with which Brown threatens to divide or punch holes in Jolas’s “Revolution of the Word” and conflate written and visual media. Jolas does not react to this poem immediately, but he does include it in Transition Workshop (1949), a collection in which he attempts to record the event that was transition, in order to “give a fair idea of what transition tried to accomplish and-- however short of the mark--what it did accomplish” (17-18). He admits that the selection of items for inclusion was “a particularly delicate one,” and that “there were many others to be found in the twenty-seven numbers” of the journal that he would “have liked to see included in such a miscellany” (17). His selection of Brown's poem seems peculiar, then, until one observes that the poem was originally titled “Experiment,” and that Jolas has renamed the work “Text” for the Workshop. With this subtle manipulation Jolas clarifies the fact that the word is the dominant medium in Brown’s conflation, and he deflects the formal inquiry raised by the poem. A unique and important symptom of Jolas’s defensive posture is his creation of an alter ego: Theo Rutra. This “newspaperman of Czecho-Slovakian parentage living in Brooklyn” first appears in issue eight where he published “Poems” (144-145), and he continues to publish selections in transition until the termination of publication ten years later. Jolas offers little explanation for this ruse. In his autobiography he dismisses Rutra as a playful affectation: “I myself invented a poet I called Theo Rutra, in order to project certain of my own neologistic work, and soon this fellow Rutra became my alter ego. I enjoyed playing him up to friends” (109). Yet this impish deception seems to have grown in the telling, and Rutra to have evolved into a much more significant persona over the years. There is no recognition, for example, in Charles P. Silet’s transition: An Author Index that Jolas and Rutra are one and the same. Dougald Macmillan recognizes that Rutra is a pseudonym but does not attach any significance to this fact. In contrast, Craig Monk asserts that the nom-de-plume provided Jolas “some freedom from his editorial responsibilities” (“Translation” 31). But Diedre Bair is perhaps closest to the mark when she contends that Jolas used Rutra “when he wanted to write something to beef up

transition’s pages or to state an opinion he thought someone in his editorial position should not have held” (140). There is little textual evidence that Rutra ever expressed such an opinion or that Jolas was ever shy about addressing issues personally. Clearly, however, Rutra is more than an artistic escape for Jolas. He not only produces textbook examples of Verticalist poetry, but (along with Jolas) he responded to the fourth and final questionnaire circulated by the journal, “Inquiry About the Malady of Language” (t 23:165-66), and his signature appears on the “Poetry is Vertical” manifesto (again along with that of Jolas). In other words, the editor uses Rutra as another voice to support his experiments and to respond to critics. "Look what the New York Herald-Tribune’s Walter Lippman tells his readers in Today and Tomorrow of June 10,” writes Rutra, “didn’t you say this very thing in transition 21 and your Language of Night? Although I believe you had in mind primarily a revolution of creative language, the need for a semantic revolution in the political-economic vocabulary is apparently equally urgent" (t 23:166). For comparison, James Joyce created an alter ego two years after Jolas--the critic “Vladamir Dixon”- -who contributed one of two letters of protest to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, the book of essays about the text that would come to be titled Finnegans Wake. But Joyce’s man functions differently. He is, Richard Ellman notes, “both hostile and humorously illiterate” (626). If Dixon furthers Joyce’s agenda it is through his ignorance and misguided zeal, whereas Rutra is the superlative example of the Verticalist poet and an avid supported of Jolas. As the journal matures Jolas tries to maintain the illusion of the Modernist experiment, but his own statements begin to resemble the “dogmatic pronunciamentos” that he had opposed so adamantly. In issue twenty-one, for example, he places his own metaphysically oriented theory at the heart of the transition research project: Metaphysics is an attempt to find the unity of man and nature. The ultimate reality back of the phenomenal world, the transcendental universe, is the aim of this research. The process eventuates by means of a mediumistic act, the release of reason ‘from the pressure of the objective world.’ ("Night-Mind and Day-Mind"; t 21:222) As his own theoretical ideas solidify, Jolas seems compelled to see them explored in the journal and to impose them on contributors. Period critics Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich observe, for example, that “the early issues present a much greater variety of contributors; in the last issues the contributions seem selected in the light of a theory” (The Little Magazine 287).

During this period Jolas begins to formalize and promote his personal vision of a “pan- romantic” art that would result in “the resurrection of the golden age that existed before Babel” (t 22:405). Such art, he believed, would engage a set of issues confronting humans in the modern era: Seeking the central, the all-human point in the play of those contrapuntal elements--spirit and nature, mechanical life and instinctive life--seems still the aim of every philosophic speculation today. The essential problem is man. We are waiting for a new type of man- -not a collective being, but a universal being, an harmonious being, synthesizing in himself the impulsions of the spirit and the social sense of the twentieth century. ("Super- Occident"; t 15:12) This new human--an individual who synthesizes in the self the dualities to which Jolas repeatedly refers--he labels the “orphic” poet. But digesting and understanding are not enough. Nor is mere expression. Like the mystic who experiences a vision of forthcoming annihilation, the poet’s knowledge carries with it the obligation to cry repentance--communication of discovered truths must follow synthesis. Not only does the orphic poet try to find the territories of the known, to penetrate still deeper into the most abstract limits of his conscious and sub-conscious personalities, he is also eager to explore new ways of transmitting his discoveries. The problem of language and of the process of intellection have as great an importance to him as life itself. ("Logos"; t 16-17:26) For, Jolas argues, the mystic cannot remain in the intellectual equivalent of a mountain retreat like the “untouchable Surrealist”; Verticalism must function as a bridge between vision and form if art is to have a significant aesthetic or social impact. In fact the interpretation of reality which I developed in transition does not agree with that of the surrealists. While they are determined to completely deny the physical world, basing themselves on a Hegelian interpretation, I continued to believe in the possibility of metamorphosing the real. I envisioned a dualism, I believed that the external world should be made the basis from which to proceed into the supernatural and magical [. . .]. The relationship of the external world to the inner world has not been sufficiently clarified by psychology, and unless we are able [. . .] to actually penetrate into another

world, we must accept reality as the foundation of our conception. ("The Innocuous Enemy"; t. 16-17:209) The orphic poet thus becomes the crucible in which the transcendental event envisioned by Jolas is formed. For him, the artist taps into psychological and metaphysical forces, organizes them around a framework of myth and everyday experience, and communicates this complex with innovative words that release primordial grunt, mystic spell, and erudite sermon concurrently. The new composition must thus become mythological action. The primitive mythos and the modern mythos are fused, and the union of the collective and individual at the point of the immediate conscience produces the universal condition. The timeless and spaceless forces lay hidden in the instinctive. ("Notes on Reality"; t 18:19) Jolas seeks not only access to this union, but also a means to communicate it; he desires the immediate and total communication that Hugh Fox labels “total word-reality” and which he compares to St. Teresa of Avila’s “description of the voice of God speaking to her in words that are both ‘word and work’” (5). “The new man,” Jolas summarizes, “will recapture the cosmological world-view and search for the primal logos” ("The Primal Personality"; t 22:83). In 1939 Charles Allen labeled the “latest literary method” thus spawned “Transitionism” (118), but Jolas himself preferred the label “Verticalism” or “Vertigralism.” In his autobiography Man from Babel he explains the term as indicative of his search for “a constructive, a white, a sidereal romanticism” that would enable the artist to express the “principle of ascent and descent in the psychic sphere” (156). He expresses this principle more fully in the “Verticalist Pamphlet” of 1938: I am convinced, however, that the creative instinct should be identical to the instinct of ascension. The arts are analogous to existential mysticism and, as such, should once more become conjuration, a mantic means of liberation or exorcism. Their role should be to emancipate the human being from the obsession of fear in the world of matter. They should mirror the expansion of consciousness in a migration to higher space, to the supernatural, to the ‘divine dark.’ (10) Like the title of the journal, the term “vertigral” is charged with meaning; it contains elements of words that call to mind the spirit of Jolas’s search. “The grail was the symbol of the quest,” notes Macmillan, “by taking the German word Graal and dropping an ‘a’ he could include this concept in his key term. The new word also had overtones of ‘integral’ and thus suggested the

universality which Jolas was seeking” (67-8). In addition, the term suggests the existence of vertices--the intersection of dualistic tensions such as those that exist between romanticism/realism, matter/spirit, light/darkness, and stupor/inspiration--which form what Jolas labels the “vertical dualogue” (Babel 157). Thus Verticalism, as Macmillan explains, although clearly in opposition to the horizontal plane of normal life, encompasses both the direction of descent and ascent. Jolas believed a combination of negative and positive forces was necessary for an adequate view of life but [. . .] he also thought that the final resolution of forces should be in upward movement toward religious experience. Only through eternal quest could the positive movement be assured. (67) Jolas felt that this yearning for ascension was one of many universal human experiences to which the modern artist must respond. His search for universality led him to psychology, and to the work of C. G. Jung in particular; he became fascinated by the unconsciousness and universal psychic experience. As these experiments progressed, I became increasingly absorbed by the nocturnal mind. I studied my dreams and tried to perfect an instrument for expressing them. In those days of psychic tension in Europe [. . .] I found that my unconscious life somehow mirrored these phenomena of the sick world-soul. My dreams and daydreams in Paris and in frequent roaming around Europe were marked by this preoccupation with primordial things. (Babel 113) Yet as the above narrative reveals, he is unwilling to surrender artistic control to the unconscious mind--as in Surrealist automatism--but instead he assigns responsibility for organization and explication of the “night mind” to the artist. In Vertical: A Yearbook for Romantic-Mystic Ascensions (1941), for example, Jolas stresses the necessity of recording and expressing collective metaphysical experience: Poetry must emphasize the creative urge towards a communal feeling of living, towards a collective spirituality, towards a liturgical-ritual renascence. Poetry must become a medium for the emancipation of the human personality by accentuating its voyage to the invisible, its hunger for the transcendental, its nostalgia for God. The new poetry, in all its daemonic-celestial tension, reconstructs the myth of voyage, flight, ascent in all its romantic-mystic dimensions. (17)

Because this process demands an orphic poet--one who is both sensitive to mystical/psychological experience and adept with media of communication--Jolas begins to outline how the above theories should be put into practice. In his autobiography he recounts the progression from the call for “new words, new abstractions, new hieroglyphics” outlined in “Suggestions for a New Magic” to a more definite program: The vertical principle of ascent and descent in the psychic sphere became a new source of spiritual activity. I began to write poems based on this principle. In the third issue of transition, in 1927, I had already mentioned this “vertical urge” and in my poem Secession in Metropolis the astronomic imagination had proved fertile [. . .]. I revived ideologically the archaic concept of the third eye [. . .] the cosmological eye, positing the imperative of a new form of expression for such phenomena as “the dream,” the daydream and hypnologic hallucinations.” I sought an identity between the mystic-romantic conception of life and this tendency. But I also tried to go beyond my predecessors by demanding an “expansion of the frontiers of language” to keep pace with the expansion of consciousness. I was in favor of the metaphysical word, the word as sacrament, exorcism, conjuration. (Babel 157) This summation outlines the two-fold thrust of Verticalist practice, the simultaneous Janus-view of inside and outside, of consciousness and tangible existence, combined with the search for an ideal medium. Most significantly, however, this passage demonstrates Jolas’s certainty that the word could be reconstituted through a “mystic renovation” of both form and function to become a link between the mystical and the mundane that would evoke the nether mind and perform ritual acts of communication in one stroke (Pamphlet 6). In simple terms, Jolas’s interest in metaphysical, orphic experience--which he eventually formulates into New Romanticism or Verticalism--is illustrated by a comparison of early and late critical writings. In “Suggests for a New Magic,” for example, Jolas writes: "Perhaps we are seeking God. Perhaps not. It matters little one way or the other. What really matters is that we are on the quest. Piety or savagery both have the same basis" (t 3:179). By the appearance of issue twenty-six, however, the quest has developed a particularly metaphysical--and say detractors, a particularly Christian--theme. “We dream a new race,” writes Jolas, “visionary with the logos of God” (158). This statement suggests that the orphic poet possesses perfect perception and communication, that by means of this process, perceptions could be harvested

directly with the aid of spiritual sources and then transmitted to an audience without loss of meaning. In more complex terms, the nature of Jolas’s theoretical evolution is revealed by a comparison of the two major manifestos produced by transition: “Revolution of the Word” in 20 issue sixteen/seventeen (1929), and “Poetry is Vertical” in issue twenty-one (1932). In his unsurpassed study of transition, Dougald Macmillan traces the general theoretical differences evident in the second document: Points 1, 2, and 8 are reiterations of principles announced in the ‘Revolution of the Word’. Number 3 also had been latent in the earlier manifesto, but now for the first time classicism is singled out as an evil. The new emphasis in the programme is the suggestion in points 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9 that the poet’s function is genuinely orphic, depending upon the use of a primal faculty which the poet exercises like a medium through dreams, trances, and even psychopathic derangement. Points 9 and 10 in seeing the function of poetry as relating the personal consciousness to the metaphysical totality of the universe and establishing a sense of community are also new. (67) As MacMillan’s summary illustrates, Jolas’s various alterations articulate two primary points: orphic experience brings about ideal perception--access to the “transcendental ‘I’ with its multiple stratifications reaching back millions of years” (#7)--; and the use of revolutionary language--“a mantic instrument” (#8)--results in a flawless transmission of ideas between artist and audience. These components combine to create transcendent communication instead of the disinterested expression that is a hallmark of Modernism: “The plain reader be damned!” Jolas declares in “The Revolution of the Word,” for “the writer expresses, he does not communicate.” Verticalism, however, allows the poet to communicate universally and flawlessly, for as Jolas asserts in his second manifesto, “Poetry builds a nexus between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ by leading the emotions of the sunken, telluric depths upward toward the illumination of a collective reality and a totalistic universe” (#9). Without doubt, the second document enriches and supplants the original. More importantly, however, the “Vertical” manifesto represents a solidification of Jolas’s theory after the hiatus of the journal, and outlines a synthesis between the primarily formal “Revolution of the Word” and Jolas’s growing metaphysical, even mystical, sensibilities. In 1939, for example, Charles Allen noted that the “new review” (e.g. the issues that appeared since the March 1932

“revival” of the journal), is “far more radical” than previous ventures. “The editor,” he observes, “has formulated and systematized Transitionism. An increasing stress has been placed on critical articles and propaganda, explaining the new Romanticism” (127). Hugh Fox argues that Jolas’s earlier theoretical statements were, “for the most part tentative and provisional,” but that after the hiatus, the editor’s “whole tone changes in the direction of authoritarian certainty and Vertigralism is born” (4). Jolas himself suggests that such an alteration has occurred in the introduction of his “Vertical Yearbook” (1941), wherein he traces the development of Verticalism from his initial experiments, through “Poetry is Vertical” to a culmination in the Vertigralist Pamphlet (1937), in which, he recalls, “an aesthetic theory of ascent was finally formulated” (1). Notably, the “Revolution of the Word” manifesto is unacknowledged in this history of theory. Jolas's progressively metaphysical preoccupation attracted additional critical hostility and drove away potential supporters. Hugh Fox notes, for example, that “by reverting--however remotely--to a traditional Christian base, he alienated many of his contemporaries who for all their nihilism and/or superficiality were at least realistic enough to recognize that the post- Christian era began with the end of World War I” (5). In addition, Jolas’s preliminary comments about this “New Romanticism” drew further criticism from Wyndham Lewis. In his 1931 essay “The Diabolical Principle,” Lewis contests the notion that Jolas’s theories are either revolutionary or innovative: “The doctrinaires that I am thinking of are then for me, on the side of the ‘romantic’--sensual average--majority, and must sooner or later, as the night follows the day, betray the artist whom they use to the majority, for they are as philistine as it” (218). In this passage Lewis exposes Jolas’s theoretical departure from the bulk of Modernist experimentation; the majority to which Lewis refers is not that of the participants in the transition laboratory as Jolas maintains, but that of the bourgeois art world the editor claims to reject. In addition, Lewis contends that “New Romanticism” is both ill defined and antiquarian. In the first place it is not new; it is a return to the feverish ‘diabolism’ that flourished in the middle of the last century in France, and which reached England in the ‘nineties,’ with Oscar Wilde and Beardsley as its principle exponents [. . .]. If you add to this the ‘illumination’ of German mystics, of the order of Weishaupt, throwing in the theory of Einstein as a congenial late-comer, you obtain what is ‘super-reality.’ It is merely a flowery cocktail, but it has a grand name. What is most remarkable about it so far is that,

swallowed whole, it leaves things just as they were before; it does not enable anyone to write anything except criticism of a not very original order. (221) Lewis’s second denunciation of transition is far more perceptive and effective than his initial essay: more perceptive because even regular transition contributors such as Kay Boyle also confess a certain disillusionment with and confusion about Jolas’s theoretical writings;21 more effective because his thorough and insightful outline of the tenets of Verticalism obliges Jolas to define his program further in the “Poetry is Vertical” manifesto.

A New Permutation Despite the vitality of transition and Jolas’s passion for this experiment, he ends production of the journal in 1939 for a number of reasons. Detractors may intimate that when Finnegans Wake was published after ten years of serial publication in transition, Jolas lost the substance of the journal and was forced to cease production, or that he may have fulfilled his creative design--that what had evolved into the Verticalist experiment was complete and further publication would be merely repetition--but Jolas suggests otherwise. The final issue, he writes, “represented a last attempt on my part to gather together such intellectual and artistic forces of Europe and America as were not already enslaved by the shallow realism that had been introduced by the totalitarians” (Babel 152). Jolas recognized that war was inevitable, and that the creative environment in which his aesthetic laboratory thrived was soon to be dispelled. In addition, as he explains in his autobiography, he “gradually came to feel that a poet had not the right to remain entirely aloof” from the coming war. McMillan contends that “by allowing transition to come to an end, Jolas was in a way upholding one of the basic principles of the magazine,” specifically a “dissociation from politics” (72). Jolas could have continued the periodical from New York and either ignored the European struggle completely, or as a former newspaper journalist, could have altered the magazine to be a political force, yet he broke off production, and “remained true to the belief that poetry is demeaned when the poet is called upon to produce propaganda” (MacMillan 73). But the experiment was far from over. In New York during 1940, before he joined the United States Office of War Information and traveled to Germany to re-establish free journalism in the wake of Nazi defeats, Jolas began

production of Vertical: A Yearbook for Romantic-Mystic Ascensions, which appeared in 1941. McMillan argues that the book is both “a worthy successor to transition” and “an outgrowth of the magazine” (73). Jolas displays this connection to the final issue of the journal in the introduction to the yearbook: The present book was planned at that time as a metaphysical successor to transition which, until the final number, published in Paris shortly before the present war, had opened its pages, without prejudice, to every manifestation of the modern spirit in the arts. (1) Always interested in breaking new ground, Jolas comments that this volume was “probably one of the first literary manifestations of the so-called religious revival in American poetry” (Babel 191). Yet within the pages of the yearbook he continued to pursue his agenda as before, although with the added motivation that “the mystical will is needed to ruin the fraudulent romanticism of totalitarian imperialism” (14). In his autobiography, Jolas reveals that during this period he envisioned a new journal to be edited by himself, André Breton, and the art critic Georges Duthuit. The three of us discussed the founding of a magazine, to be half in English, half in French, in which each of us would project his own ideas. The formula was a tempting one, and we began to discuss practical plans for its realization. I made it plain to Breton that I did not share all of his Surrealist convictions, despite my admiration for his own creative gifts, but that I was especially interested in continuing along the lines of my former interest in reviving the pan-romantic spirit. (Babel 188) The review never materialized, due primarily, Jolas asserts, to personality conflicts with Breton following the appearance of a Jolas article in which he “bid definitive adieu” to Surrealism, which resulted in Breton “working himself into bitter resentment.” Craig Monk suggests in addition that the interests of the collaborators may have been too severely divergent, for as the journal began to take shape, Jolas “did not include in his list of creative interests plastic arts in a catalogue of a dozen disciplines that included philosophy, poetry, psychology, religion and sociology,” while “Breton still professed his interest in visual art, as did Georges Duthuit” (“Photography” 364). In addition to these attempts, Jolas may have considered reviving transition after the collapse of this venture and following the war, but as McMillan notes, former associations had

been destroyed: “The basic conflict between a mechanistic, positivistic society and the claims of the unconscious and the imagination which had been the uniting concern of transition’s contributors remained, but the war had made irreconcilable differences among those who had formerly felt themselves a part of the same cause” (74). Despite these setbacks, however, Jolas and Duthuit establish a journal together. The new Transition, with Georges Duthuit as editor and Eugene Jolas listed as one of several advisory editors, appeared in January 1948. The initial issue was followed by three other issues that year, and by a single issue in each of the two subsequent years, after which the journal ceased 22 production. Critics disagree about the circumstances surrounding the launch of this journal, and thus opinions vary as to what connections, if any, might exist between Transition and its progenitor. To complicate matters, Jolas is uncharacteristically silent on the subject of the beginning of the new journal. In their exhaustive study of Beckett’s bibliography, for example, Federman and Fletcher assert: “Postwar Transition, edited by Georges Duthuit, did not attempt to continue the work of prewar Transition” (98). Deidre Bair also dismisses the notion of any type of connection. She suggests that the name and heritage of the journal came into the possession of Duthuit because of convenience, that the rights became available when Duthuit was looking for a publication vehicle. Specifically, Bair asserts that after the death of her husband Maria Jolas “sold transition to Georges Duthuit and it was now called transition 48” (373). This claim is unfounded, however, as Eugene Jolas not only contributed to the first issue of Duthuit’s Transition, but he remained alive until May of 1952. Dougald McMillan suggests that the transfer of the rights to the transition name was for convenience as well, but for convenience of another sort. He contends that Duthuit--who was a close friend of Jolas and shared his interest in Verticalism--wanted to begin a periodical, and that Jolas allowed him to use the name to overcome certain difficulties confronting publishers in post-war France. Paper, like almost every other commodity, was scarce and rationed. Publications already established before the war had priority and there was hardly enough to meet those needs. Publishing supplies to start a new magazine were unobtainable. When Jolas heard of Duthuit’s plight, he generously allowed him to use the name transition and accepted the

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title of advisory editor to satisfy the authorities that the new magazine, Transition Forty- eight, had continuity with the pre-war version. (73-4) Yet even McMillan contends that this continuity with the formal journal is a fabrication at worst and “hardly more than nominal” at best. James Knowlson uses McMillan’s account of the instigation of the journal, although he claims, “Duthuit took over the pre-war transition, buying the title from Eugene Jolas and retaining him as an editorial advisor” (Damned 334). Knowlson overlooks the issue of Transition’s continuity, although he asserts that Duthuit “succeeded in making it intellectually more rigorous than the earlier magazine had ever been.” Without doubt the new publication is very different from the original; the magazine has a less international scope, a less diverse selection of media, and a different overall focus. In the inaugural issue Duthuit explains: “the object of Transition Forty-eight is to assemble for the English-speaking world the best of French art and thought, whatever the style and whatever the application” (T 1:5). Anthony Cronin observes that Duthuit ultimately makes “the best new French writing available in translation for readers of English, combining this function with art criticism which would bring the same readers up to date with the latest developments in French painting” (394). In addition to the above differences, the new journal is less enduring and prominent than the premier journal, as well as less artistically engaged (i.e. there are no external debates with other movements). Finally, the journal is not word-centered, but is instead a site for cross- and interdisciplinary experimentation, and the theory that underpins these experiments is not defended in the same manner as in transition. As Knowlson’s observation suggests, Duthuit creates a more painstaking laboratory environment in Transition. His rhetorical approach renders in practice the dialogue Jolas espouses in theory; he uses juxtaposition instead of assertion, and presents a program that is more involved with the investigation of indefinite theoretical subtleties than with the definition of a particular theory. His introduction to issue one outlines this approach: Our first number presents an atheist philosopher like Sartre, wrestling with Breton and the surrealists; a learned Catholic like Gengoux; Jean Wahl, the lucid, hesitant believer; Artaud, pain-haunted rebel and solitary. Their divergences are strident, and it would be odd if men exploring the same Stygian cave did not sometimes come into collision. (T 1:5)

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Clearly juxtaposition is a means here, and conflict an anticipated outcome. In order to create the interaction he desires, Duthuit arranges journal selections in thematic clusters that approximate a theoretical dialogue. These dialogue groups generally appear in one of two forms: as either an art work or critical article paired with a specific critical response; or as a group of entries that do 23 not respond to one another directly, but which are nevertheless united by subject. In issue one, for example, we see evidence that Sartre and Breton are “wrestling’ rhetorically: Georges Duthuit’s essay, “Sartre’s Last Class,” is paired with Sartre’s “What is Literature.” The former not only responds directly to the latter, but they are united by a shared criticism of Surrealism. Immediately following these essays, Duthuit places René Char’s “The Pulverized Poem,” a short critical piece combined with a series of poems, and a parable by Antonin Artaud: “About a Journey to the Land of the Tarahumaras.” This practice differs considerably from the manipulative rhetoric of Eugene Jolas; although Duthuit argues against Surrealist practice in his article, for example, the Surrealists are represented in the critical dialogue--in their own voice and without editorial clarification. Duthuit’s approach also differs from Jolas’s in the way he forms arguments in his own critical works; he uses fictional elements and dialogue between characters, as opposed to Jolas’s use of manifesto and editorial. A fictional encounter, for example, forms the framework for Duthuit’s five-part critical series, “Sartre’s Last Class.” In the first installment he claims to have received a letter with an illegible signature, “a kind of report, on the whole reliable, written by an unknown correspondent, and covering the events which led to the inevitable encounter between our two best literary swordsmen of the advance guard, Jean-Paul Sartre, a savage attacker, and André Breton, fully on the defensive” (8). Interestingly, the fictional encounter he describes mirrors the rhetorical encounter he has created between Sartre and the Surrealists through his arrangement of journal entries in dialogue clusters, with the net result that he reinforces the dialectic environment to which he aspires. At the same time, however, these tactics keep the reader destabilized; one has difficulty separating fact from fiction and identifying Duthuit’s theoretical position. This situation is due, in part, to the fact that this essay takes the form of a lecture, allegedly delivered by Sartre, which is interspersed with editorial notes by the editor. Duthuit exacerbates this destabilization further by hinting that the correspondent (if he exists) may be Sartre himself: he remarks at one point that the document is “apparently well informed” (19), and in a later installment that the correspondent “criticized Sartre in a style suspiciously

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24 like that of Sartre himself” (T 2:98). In some ways, Duthuit’s use of this “fictional” correspondent mirrors Eugene Jolas’s creation of Theo Rutra as a vehicle for reinforcing his critical position, with one significant difference: here the reader is a party to the deception. Duthuit, for example, labels the letter “light hearted satire,” and reminds the reader that whether “fact or fancy, this document nevertheless casts some light on one of the most disturbed and passionately interesting moments in our history” (T 1:8). Despite these rhetorical differences, however, evidence suggests that more continuity exists between these two journals than has been thought, that although obvious differences abound, the new journal is a permutation of transition. When critics disavow continuity they concentrate too much on the cosmetic differences and ignore the thematic parallels that remain. Specifically, they ignore the fact that Duthuit’s interest in Verticalism informs the theories presented in the second journal. Although the numerous allusions to a continuation of transition that are present in the first issues of Transition have been included ostensibly to endure official scrutiny, they are also the first indicators of a thematic continuity that manifests itself throughout the run of the magazine. In the introduction, for instance, Duthuit explains that the contributors are united by a need to “be true to truth” and that they seek a “common awareness of a new age.” This age, he asserts, will utter a simplification, an astonishing simplification: whereby science and divination, metaphysics and the arts, all the lusty incompatibles, will no longer seem apart or out of joint, but fused and re-minted into a wise wholeness . . . the ambition of this paper: to recover somehow the virtue that has gone out of life: to unseal the spirit of festivity; to find again the adjustment, togetherness, at-one-ment of the tavern; to return to the sense of rapture. (T 1:5-6) One detects in these comments nostalgia for a pre-war social innocence or something similar, but Duthuit’s search for a method to fuse the arts and metaphysics, and his use of loaded terms such as “divination” and “atonement” suggest that Verticalist theory is present here as well. Yet within this introduction an interesting play on words suggests at once both continuity and departure: transition, which appeared between the wars, and now Transition Forty-eight belong to the close of something--in fact, of our civilization. To predict and measure disaster is the

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function of the journalist: the poet, the man who reflects and creates, moves instinctively from ends to beginnings. And beginnings are the matter here. (T 1:5) In anticipation perhaps of official scrutiny, Duthuit connects his journal to the former version very conspicuously. The similarity of the language Duthuit uses in this introduction to the language Jolas uses to describe the Verticalist situation in Vertical suggests that they are connected theoretically as well. “We are living under the sign of a great dying” writes Jolas, “and a world aeon is crumbling [. . .]. We are in an epoch of convulsions and blasphemies, for the reason that modern man has rejected the universal solidarity of original guilt and lost the sense of liturgy, myth and dream” (11). Yet at the same time, Duthuit seems to jab at Jolas--the “journalist”--and to underscore the fact that this publication begins a new experiment for him-- the forward-thinking "poet." Other conspicuous indications of continuity include the fact that Jolas is listed as an advisory editor, and that he contributes an essay to the first issue: “From Jabberwocky to Lettrism.” Yet once again, there are some indications of theoretical tension, of some birth pains as Duthuit develops his journal in the shadow of its predecessor. In Jolas’s essay, for example, he reiterates important elements of his Verticalist program, such as the function of phenomenal language: It is not wholly irrelevant to recall here that the primitive peoples of Africa, Asia and Polynesia are known to use simple sonorities even today as ritual incantations. Certain tribes have a secret, jealously guarded holy language that consists entirely of meaningless sounds. (T 1:115) Jolas argues that a reconstruction of language is necessary in order to acquire the power of the word as invocation. He had articulated a similar argument during the initial, exploratory year of his own journal. Lyric poetry must be a primitive explosion of the enchained impulses of man. It must be against nature, and in itself a force of subversion. I will even go so far as to say that, in order to create the true state of the subconscious, from which all possibility of destruction really comes, a poem might, under certain conditions, become merely an a-logical complexity of sounds, if the inspiration be a sincere one. ("Transatlantic Letter"; t 13:276)

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This earlier statement, however, lacks the metaphysical component central to New Romanticism, which component, as discussed above, Jolas develops following the hiatus of the journal, and subsequently emphasizes in this essay. In addition to restating a number of theoretical points, Jolas outlines what he believes to be the trajectory of the continuing Modernist experiment. The article he contributes to Transition traces the language innovations in English literature developed by various artists and movements from Lewis Carroll to Isidore Isou. He ends his discussion of Isou's theory of "Lettrism"--and the article--with the following evaluation: It is of course inconceivable that the poetry of the future will be based exclusively on Isou’s ‘Lettrism,’ and his fate will in all probability resemble that of his precursors, for it only represents one facet of the complex linguistic situation we face today. Yet, with this reservation, the writer does not hesitate to say that ‘Lettrism’ is a valuable movement. Isou’s own poems are often filled with mysterious, fluid and dynamic “amplic” force. They remind us of cries and exclamations which are the vital elements in carrying the emotional flux of collective fraternity. My own research, while including a quest for sonorist rhythms, follows a more oecumenical direction. ("From Jabberwocky to Lettrism"; T 1:120) As Jolas salutes the revolutionary aspects of Lettrism (which are in reality correspondences between this movement and his own theories), he also suggests that his own ideas are superior to Isou’s. His prediction that Lettrism will suffer the same fate is its “precursors” is a strange comment, since, as he makes plain elsewhere, he views Verticalism as the direct antecedent of Lettrism: “We gave free rein to what I called ‘mantic writing’ in sonorous incantations,” he writes, “a trend that was to be imitated in Paris after World War II by the literary school known as Lettrism” (Babel 107). In the above passage he intimates that Isou has evolved from the same experiment as Verticalism but with inferior results, that the derivative theory ignores important aspects of the “complex linguistic situation.” This rhetorical tactic may or may not be a jab at attempts by derivative movements or publications in general to re-engage issues pioneered by their forebears. Yet certainly it is no coincidence that Jolas prepares the manuscript of Transition Workshop during this same period in which Duthuit releases his first issue of Transition. Although circumstance may have led him to transfer the reins of his journal—and

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arguably, the accompanying movement--into the hands of Duthuit, Jolas seems driven to codify his experiment in print and assert its superior accomplishment. An examination of Duthuit's writings indicates that he becomes committed to Verticalism at some point, yet at the same time, the subdued tension discussed above is a symptom of Duthuit’s eventual departure from Verticalist orthodoxy. Dougald McMillan’s observation that Georges Duthuit was “interested in Verticalism” seems understated (73). In fact, although Duthuit’s only contribution to transition was to the Vertical yearbook, his earlier criticism illustrates his fascination with orphic experience and a growing enthusiasm for Jolas’s program. In “Cezanne and Truth” (1936), for example, Duthuit suggests that the artist should pursue a combination of technical innovation and orphic inspiration: If the painter can discover a force equivalent to that which gives to each body an individual form, a particular character, and yet unites them all within the varied covering of the coloured expanse, then he has got back to the primitive source, he has become equal to the creator. (105) Duthuit addresses this issue more fully in his study Chinese Mysticism and Modern Painting (1936), wherein he argues that before creating a work the artist must “discover a twofold principle of elevation and conduct which will enable him to carry the undertaking to a successful end” (12). This twofold principle to which the painter must adhere is both formal and metaphysical in scope, and is thus analogous to Jolas’s writings about the role of the orphic poet, as Duthuit’s further explanation illustrates: We simply admit that there exists, for the painter, a spiritual power which communicates life and meaning to material forms, and that he must attain this power before taking part himself in the elaboration of forms [. . .]. It is, for the adept, a kind of royal, or rather divine, presentation ceremony. (12) Up until this point Duthuit seems preoccupied with how external metaphysical experience informs the work of the painter, yet as he makes clear in a subsequent passage, he believes that the artist must reach inward as well as outward for inspiration. The work to be done will be for him, at whatever point his effort may stop, a means of communion with the universe as a whole. He seeks to control the mass of forces which rule the earth, the heavens and his own consciousness [. . .]. By his rhythms, his harmonies, his thoughts, he answers the voice of the hidden god, who through living

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columns murmurs confused words to him. Nature becomes for him a temple without limits, filled with loud or muffled echoes, where water in mingled with fire and clouds with stone. He must strive, then, to discern behind the walls the omnipresent reality of which human eyes, the reflections in canals, the smoke of factories, the dying sun, the radiance of female bodies form but the “dulled and plaintive mirrors.” (14) The reality to which Duthuit seeks to penetrate refers to the universality of experience outlined in the Verticalist manifesto, to that “transcendental ‘I’ with its multiple stratifications reaching back millions of years.” As in Jolas’s theory, Duthuit assigns the responsibility for developing this mediumistic perception to the artist: “We are to awaken our pure, divine, inner vision; to project ourselves outwards; to establish contact with the universal spirit; to become part of universal life” (111). Although it is difficult to discern at what point Duthuit adopts these Verticalist ideas, by the time Jolas prepares the Vertical Yearbook Duthuit is clearly a devotee; his article in the volume, entitled “For A Sacred Art,” is essentially an anthem of Verticalism, or a history of the artistic theories leading up to Verticalism: “from the hot, but relatively well-organized lands of romanticism to the now torrid and now glacial deserts of mysticism” (132). Jolas thought highly of the work; while living in New York he apparently delivered portions of the essay to an audience as an explication of Verticalism, which resulted in hurt feelings on the part of 25 Duthuit. Although the essay adds little to Verticalist theory, the work itself is insightful and very clever. While discussing the advent of the revolution, for example, Duthuit argues at one point that Dada, although an important antecedent to Verticalism, “was too flagrant,” that “the poles of the sacred were interchanged by one sharp blow; without transition, the beautiful, the good and the true yielded place to the horrible, the deadly and the unbelievable” (134). The play on the word “transition” may be unintentional, yet Duthuit returns to the notion that art should function as a “tangible link” between centuries, movements, and individuals throughout the essay. He argues, for example, that “the little surrealist troupe,” which he suggests is more reasonable and ultimately more effective than Dada, “after years of flying through the storm and over the marshes of hell, finally became aware of its solitude and sought bridges of communication with the rest of the social ant-heap” (134). Yet ultimately it is the Verticalists who succeed in this pursuit where other movements failed:

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Those who sought across ruins of vanished civilizations for secret tactics and practices that once, in epochs of religious fervor, rendered possible union through ecstasy at the heart of communal action . . . can do nothing more than persist in the preparation of virgin soil which some day may flame with new hearths of energy and waste [. . .]. We have seen that only the great sonorous and plastic synthesis in epochs of collective concentration and exaltation bequeathed us a few inspired texts, monuments, traces even of ceremonial which still can counsel us. (151-2) In this passage Duthuit salutes what he views as the accomplishment of Verticalism: the synthesis of the sonorous and the plastic that creates inspired works. Taken as a group, these numerous references to continuity between the (t)Transition journals suggest that their connection is more than nominal or circumstantial. Despite Duthuit’s apparent devotion to Verticalism, in his writing he expresses doubts about the same theoretical issues as Samuel Beckett, and expresses them using strikingly similar terms. Although intrigued by the notion of inspired perception, he struggles with issues of execution, with the feasibility of ultimate communication. In “Cezanne and Truth,” for example, he writes of “the distracted spirit appalled by the silence of the infinite spaces” (105). As a budding Verticalist who is also a critic of visual art, when he speaks of “space” he refers to stellar expanses, the empty dimensions of the canvas, and a conceptual gap between perception and expression that he labels the “void.” In the above article, for example, Duthuit writes about the void that exists between the artist and the object, in this case a bottle: The void envelopes the bottle, it half fills it; the light makes it gleam in diverse ways; the tomes and masses disposed around it influence its conformation and aspect: the infinite surrounds and possess the bottle. How can one give the equivalent of this terrifying object? (107) As a visual artist--one who ostensibly perceives and tries to record objects or events in some fashion--Duthuit may be more cognizant of the difficulties attached to expression. He contends that this void is related to both perception and expression, and ultimately to truth, for which reason the attempt to express even the most basic object truthfully can be terrifying. Cezanne is appalled at not being able to grasp its outline, ‘le contour me fuit.’ He cheats a little. He schemes admirably. He puts down a line, then half-conceals it, then takes it up again, with thick layers of paint, vaguely parallel lines. It is better after all not to

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express frankly a questionable truth, according to which bodies have, at the same time, an existence absolutely separate from the rest of space, and an ideal limit which can be defined by a black or grey-blue line. (107) This line of demarcation is fluid because of the void, Duthuit contends, and thus the attempt to express truth is unhinged by the deception described above, which masks the artist’s inability to discern and express details with accuracy. At first glance these concerns seem primarily formal, and linked exclusively to visual art, yet in Verticalism, formal, ontological, and expressive issues are linked so intimately that this dilemma becomes more universal. Duthuit begins to question, for example, the above notion that it is “better not to express frankly a questionable truth”; the consequences that would stem from such a direct expression gradually dominate his interest and the void comes ultimately to represent the gap between numerous poles: metaphysical and mundane, inner and outer experience, desire and ability, theory and practice. In many ways Duthuit's concerns exemplify a critical posture Anthony Vidler identifies as “spacial anxiety” (303). Vidler argues that the intersection of “space-time” became “a dominant leitmotif of modernism” (295), but that this fascination is eventually replaced by a fascination with the void. For Duthuit this fascination presents a problem; he seems drawn to the orphic experience, but fears that once the sibylline obligation is placed upon him he will not be able to express the “divine dark” of the night mind as Jolas believes possible, that he will be unable to express any truth because of the void, that he will be simply in the dark. These doubts emerge in various works. In “For a Sacred Art,” for example, a group of artists discusses an orphic dilemma: the fact that humans have lost contact with god. Whose fault is it? It does not matter. We cleave to what we have left. We still know perilous moments of discovery and ecstasy, those privileged instants that ‘make the sun grow pale,’ as our abandon and our fervor increase. After the embrace, cold and trembling. But we know that we shall always find the same flash and the same exquisite burning, the same sacred instant ‘characterized by the impossibility that it may last,’ which we evoke without will and without power to fix. How could we fix that which escapes and never comes again? (131). Although this passage seems to outline the finer points of the orphic experience--“to awaken our pure, divine, inner vision; to project ourselves outwards; to establish contact with the universal

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spirit,” as Duthuit articulated the experience earlier--it also highlights the difficulty of rendering such experiences as art, of fixing the ephemeral in a static, reproducible form. When these two passages are compared, Duthuit’s increasing hesitation about the feasibility of expression becomes obvious. Duthuit examines these expressive limitations elsewhere as well. Chinese mystical aesthetics, he writes, has here brought a new shade of meaning into our culture, expressive of an experience familiar to us, but one which for lack of fine enough instruments we find difficult to translate: the second of eternity, indefinitely drawn out by dreaming, when we follow, it may be, the smoke of a cigarette whose consistency and fragility give a human measure to the vastness of a Mediterranean sky; or when we see, as falling night presses down its gentle strangling fingers, the fringe of a woman’s scarf floating on a terrace, a quivering key to darkness and silence. (Chinese 67) In this passage Duthuit intimates that such ephemera are perceived through orphic phenomena, by means of the third eye, which, empowered by the night mind and the dream, penetrates though barriers of time and consciousness to the metaphysical significance behind everyday occurrence. Yet, as before, he laments the fact that expression is hindered by technical inconsistencies that inhibit the authenticity of the artist’s expression: The expression is no longer furnished by the features of the model posing, but it springs from the assemblage of painted surfaces, equally flatly laid down, the empty spaces having the same importance as the full ones. The figures are situated in a spiritual space to which we can set no limits, since the material world surrounds us on all sides at once, since our body is part of it, since its images are woven into the stuff of our consciousness. Here again there can be no question of measurements, or relationships, or scientific truth. (Chinese 90) Since expression relies upon a formal precision which cannot be rendered in the above spiritual space, Duthuit doubts the ability of the artist to create a “nexus between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’” as Jolas postulates. Shortchanged on perception, the artist, like Cezanne, is forced to compromise on expression, to “cheat a little.” The painter cannot fill up the holes that open up horribly before his eyes. It is in vain that he waits for the void to diminish every time he pastes a form on top of it [. . .]. Drawn

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from everyday space, or rather abstracted from an abstraction of measured space, or of the time that moves in successive leaps along an empty track--a pair of inseparables whose dwelling place is precisely the void--they are nothing but the pulverization of events. (Fauvist 7) Jolas, on the other hand, seeks to elide the distance between the unconscious, subjective consciousness, temporal existence, and metaphysical experience. Duthuit, like Beckett, argues that gaps in the fluid elements of time, space, and motion exist between these terms, that form and content cannot be joined in a superlative vehicle for communication of orphic experience. The result of attempts to fix mantic experience in a medium, he suggests, is not the expression of truth, but merely the expression of pulverized abstractions. These doubts come to fruition in Duthuit’s article “Matisse and Byzantine Space,” which appears in issue number five of his journal. He argues, for example, that in expression, instead of superlative form defining and fixing metaphysical ephemera, the form is itself diffused by the fluid characteristics of the void. “The soul of a thing is never perceptible,” he writes; “the cup does not exist; it is the void that is the cup” (25). He compares the object to an ancient sepulcher, which although non-living, represents the consciousness and accumulated gestures of the person entombed therein: Although strangers to these mortal remains, we feel conscious of their presence, conscious that everything here is attempting to reduce visible space and, without our even having to look at the images, to invade us to the very roots of our being. They produce a kind of semi-consciousness, where the details of the forms which have helped create it scarcely exist, or disappear altogether. (25) The artist must account for the void that exists between perceiver and object--between inspiration and expression--and for the fact that pursuit of orphic experience may exacerbate this discrepancy further. To the artist Duthuit relegates the task, of recreating the lost space in which the person and his material surroundings are recomposed through an effort which is both movement of creation and movement of total organization of the disordered, chaotic, paradoxical and lacerated space in which we usually move. (36) Yet the void threatens even the expression of itself, with the result that, Duthuit asserts, the artist “retreats upon himself and gives expression to his own state of subjectivity, limiting himself to

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this expression and not caring whether expression is also communication” (36-7). With this assertion Duthuit makes a last grasp at New Romanticism. Although this passage suggests that some form of expression is still possible, he uses Jolas’s own phrase from declaration eleven of the “Revolution of the Word” manifesto to challenge the ideal communication Jolas espouses in the subsequent manifesto. At this stage in Duthuit's thinking, a stage which Beckett is negotiating in similar ways and during the same period, he asserts that existence of the void not only makes Jolas's brand of communication impossible, but it damns both the plain reader and in many ways, the artist himself. For these problems of expression are not limited to visual art, Duthuit contends, nor can they, in what might be yet another subtle jab at Jolas, “be solved by resorting to the solutions propounded by the literary imagination” (37).

Beckett in (t)Transition Samuel Beckett’s fiction and criticism from the 30's and 40's suggest that he experiences a similar fascination with and rejection of Verticalism. Beckett is, without doubt, familiar enough with the theory and rhetorical approach of each version of the journal to have this experience. Although he arrived in Paris too late to participate in the “eclectic/subversive stage” of transition, he was accepted as a junior member of the informal circle surrounding transition, as Jolas’s description indicates: He was Anglo-Irish and in gesture and spirit resembled Joyce sometimes to such an extent that we were astonished. He was a young man of genuine talent, very original and creatively alive. Both as a poet and as a prose writer his personality imposed itself in all of us, and I enjoyed his brilliant albeit dour mind. (Babel 174) During this period of his association with transition, Beckett contributed several significant 26 pieces to the journal, and he signed the “Poetry is Vertical” manifesto. Beckett scholars disagree about the importance of this signature. Dougald McMillan argues that the names of the signers “were solicited individually,” which suggests that Beckett-- still a young and developing author at this time--may have signed merely because he was flattered to have been invited (65). Anthony Cronin proposes that this may be the case, and cautions that one should not “confuse the older, more established and of course more fastidious Beckett with the young man just about to turn twenty-six who had arrived back in Paris, still demoralized, just as Jolas was preparing to get out another issue of the magazine” (171). Yet

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Cronin overextends his argument when he postulates, “it is possible that the manifesto does betray some influence of Beckett’s, either during composition or otherwise” (172). Dougald McMillan, for comparison, claims that, “the manifesto is largely Jolas’s own, but that it is possible that Carl Einstein and Hans Arp also made suggestions and contributions” (65). Ruby Cohn asserts flatly that Beckett “had no part of its composition” (10). Deidre Bair argues that Beckett’s signature is important, if for no other reason than the supposition, borrowed from Federman and Fletcher, that Beckett “does not sign anything lightly” (140). She also claims, however, that Beckett more than likely signed for reasons similar to those outlined above, and in addition, that “in conversation forty years later, Beckett dismissed his signature “as not worth talking about’” (141). Her sources for these claims are, however, both anonymous and unsubstantiated by other sources, and thus her arguments should be approached with caution. These critical disagreements notwithstanding, clearly Beckett was pleased to be associated with the journal and its affiliated personalities, and he experimented with the theories developed therein. Dougald McMillan, for example, argues that “Beckett’s contributions to transition are basic critical and philosophical statements which define his attitudes and help clarify his relationship to the magazine” (148). He notes that Beckett’s prose from this period is very word-centered, and like Linda Ben-Zvi, he contends that critical issues raised in the journal arise in Beckett’s work. This influence on Beckett was clearly recognizable to period critics, for in a 1938 review, Dylan Thomas--a regular contributor to transition--quips that Beckett "has not yet thrown off the influence of those writers what have made transition their permanent resting place" (454). Lois Gordon extends this notion in her recent book; she argues that Beckett had mastered Jolas’s theories of language, and although she does not defend this claim sufficiently, she asserts that the “subject matter and struggle” of Beckett’s first published prose work “Assumption” (which appeared in transition 16/17) “typify the kind of work transition had been publishing” (41-2). “Assumption” deals with thematic issues related to Jolas’s notion of “vertical ascent in the psychic sphere,” as demonstrated by the protagonist’s need to express a spiritual aspect, a need that is coupled with the fear of surrender to this uncontrollable, irrational side. In his recent study of the sources particular to this story, J. D. O’Hara emphasizes this general “yearning for the spiritual” in the work, and argues that “each paragraph compresses beyond mere narrative a

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stage of the man’s struggles between his spiritual and material parts” (30). The artist protagonist, for instance, strives to dominate this spiritual aspect as if it were a hostile entity: In the silence of the room he was afraid, afraid of that wild rebellious surge that aspired violently towards realization in sound. He felt its implacable caged resentment, its longing to be released in one splendid drunken scream and fused with the cosmic discord. Its struggle for divinity was as real as his own, and as futile. (Complete Short Prose 4) Beckett’s character is compelled to draw on this entity for inspiration, but he fears the lack of control that might accompany this orphic perception: “he dreaded lest his prisoner should escape, he longed that it might escape” (5). Beckett cautions that this artist is not driven by “apostolic fervour,” but that he seeks, at worst, “the purely utilitarian contrivance of a man who wished to gain himself a hearing,” and at best, “an amused experiment in applied psychology”(4). He suggests that the character’s fear of this vertical ascent is due to a pain that accompanies this experience: Before no supreme manifestation of Beauty do we proceed comfortably up a staircase of sensation, and sit down mildly on the topmost stair to digest our gratification: such is the pleasure of Prettiness. We are taken up bodily and pitched breathlessly on the peak of a shear crag: which is the pain of Beauty. (4) This character’s control over his spiritual self is threatened by an encounter with a woman, a vampiric character to whose beauty he is drawn, but to whom he loses “a part of his essential animality”--at each encounter (which suggests a loss of both primal animal and spiritual anima natures)(6). Eventually contact with this woman facilitates an experience of vertical ascension: “at last, for the first time, he was unconditioned by the Satanic dimensional Trinity, he was released, achieved, the blue flower, Vega, God . . .” (6). Beckett makes plain a connection to Verticalism by means of this reference to Novalis’s The Blue Flower--a text which was not only a symbol for Romanticism in general, but to which Jolas makes regular reference in his essays-- and also by this description of the path of vertical ascension from the blue flower (Romanticism), to stellar bodies (“Vega”), and eventually to artistic exaltation (“God”). Yet in this process the artist unearths the pain that he feared, a pain that comes from the inability to communicate this ephemeral experience: After a timeless parenthesis he found himself alone in his room, spent with ecstasy, torn by the bitter loathing of that which he had condemned to the humanity of silence. Thus

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each night he died and was God, each night revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness, so that he hungered to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfillment. (6-7) Ultimately, the artist loses control completely and is overwhelmed by this orphic experience to the point that he dies and joins with nature as his spirit becomes “a great storm of sound, shaking the very house with its prolonged, triumphant vehemence, climbing in a dizzy, bubbling scale, until, dispersed, it fused into the breath of the forest and the throbbing cry of the sea” (7). Eugene Jolas apparently recognized and appreciated the Verticalist references in “Assumption,” for he included the text in Transition Workshop and identified the story as a paramyth (29). Dougald McMillan, however, suggests that the text may be a mocking imitation of Jolas’s “New Romanticism.” The struggle of the story’s main character to give utterance to a cry long pent up in him is clearly labeled as a ‘struggle for divinity.’ While it is a genuine and unavoidable impulse, Beckett calls it futile and mocks it by portraying it as a meaningless, inchoate scream. (150) Like Duthuit, who writes about the same “privileged instants that ‘make the sun grow pale’ as our abandon and fervour increase” which the artist evokes “without power to fix” (“For a Sacred Art” 131), Beckett’s character experiences “increasing grievousness” due to a loathing of this experience “which he had condemned to silence” because of his fear. This text displays both Beckett’s apprehension of Verticalist theory and technique, and his disillusionment with the same. P. J. Murphy suggests that similar contradictions exist in the title of the text, which he asserts, “has much more to do with the common usage of presumed “arrogance” (literally or otherwise) than with the feast in honor of the raising of the Virgin Mary to the heavens” (“Portraits” 35). McMillan contends that Beckett may initially have perceived a degree of value in Verticalist ideals, but that having made the attempt to put theory into practice, the apprentice orphic poet finds both lacking. In so far as Verticalism designates a downward movement into the psyche in search of a way upward, Beckett participates . . . But having made the descent beneath the surface, he did not find there the great power that had been promised. Though suffering the same longings for an upward movement suggested by the metaphor of a vertical line, he did not find the metaphysical consummation, the union of the ‘I and Thou’ spoken of in the

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Verticalist manifesto. So the urge which the other signers celebrate as positive has become only a source of woe in Beckett’s works. (152)27 Ultimately, observes McMillan, “Beckett is the ruined mystic, one who feels the need for transcendental experience, suffers from it, but cannot fulfill it” (152). Assuming that McMillan’s assessment is accurate, Beckett must have had some difficulty reconciling his disillusionment with the Verticalist program and his respect for Joyce, who was blessed with such confidence in his craft, and who was venerated by Jolas as the superlative exemplar of “New Romanticism”--as the author of the “protean book of the night” (t: 27:169). More importantly, however, MacMillan associates Beckett’s disillusionment with the ninth assertion from the “Poetry is Vertical” manifesto, which concerns ideal communication, and which Duthuit finds troubling as well. Beckett’s association with Duthuit’s Transition differs significantly from that outlined above. He is, notably, one of few personalities affiliated with the previous journal to continue his association with the new publication, and he has a more extensive history with transition than Duthuit himself. In short, Beckett is now the veteran. In addition, although he contributes occasional works to Transition, Beckett translates an extensive amount of the journal’s output, and thus is essentially a member of the editorial staff. Although, he notes that the scholarship is not yet complete, James Knowlson gives a partial list of these translations in Damned to Fame, which includes seven of the nineteen pieces featured in issue five alone (689). He also notes that Beckett assisted Ralph Mannheim with the translation of Duthuit’s The Fauvist Painters, in which the author first discusses "the void" (334).28 The translation of this large quantity of material drew Beckett into the loose circle of artists and critics with whom the editor interacted, and resulted in a close interaction with Duthuit. Knowlson observes that during this period the two developed a close friendship based on shared “personal sympathy” and intellectual affinity: “Duthuit’s own learned, subtle essays,” he remarks, “show that he was keenly intellectual and quite capable of following Beckett on some of his boldest, most challenging flights of fancy” (335). Although the details of their accounts vary, Beckett’s biographers agree that Duthuit and his associates would meet for food and conversation almost daily in the editorial office or at a nearby cafe. Bair stresses that the conversation during these gatherings, though often light, would at times lead to “abstract, theoretical” discussions of professional topics, and that Duthuit

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“had the knack of instigating conversations that developed into articles for his magazine” (392). She claims that “Three Dialogues” was spawned during such a discussion, and that Duthuit urged Beckett to dramatize their contest for publication in the journal. This claim is substantiated by James Knowlson’s account, although he makes clear that the dialogues “represent only part of a debate that went on between them in private and by letter over many months” (336). In her recent article about the authorship of the dialogues, Lois Oppenheim argues that although Beckett is the definitive author of the work, Duthuit’s contributions had far greater impact on the argument than has previously been imagined (“One Author” 69). James Knowlson argues that writing the dialogues was an experiment that “allowed Beckett not only to develop his views on the split between the artist and the outside world but also to explore the consequences of a split that he saw in the self” (336). In light of Oppenheim’s recent study, however, such an interpretation seems inadequate; it neglects both Duthuit’s input and the context of Transition. A far more accurate assessment of the dialogues would be that the work represents a confluence of the collective disillusionment that Beckett and Duthuit experience with Modernist ideas of perception and expression.

Assault on “Poetry is Vertical” The context of (t)Transition is vital for interpretation of the dialogues because it helps to delineate the departure Beckett and Duthuit make from Modernism in general and Verticalism specifically. In general terms the document denounces Modernist notions of revolutionary form, and of art as subjective expression, yet the language of the dialogues also suggests that the work is reconsideration of the “Poetry is Vertical” manifesto in particular. Although this document is a part of the aesthetic history of both authors, and the avant garde aspect of Modernism engenders this type of rejection of one’s forebears in an effort to, in Ezra Pound’s words, “make it new,” at first glance the authors’ assault on Verticalism seems belated and misdirected. This misconception is due to the fact that Beckett and Duthuit select the manifesto not as a target, but as a vehicle. Because Jolas claims to incorporate, represent, and enhance modernist aesthetics, they use his theoretical extremes to expose the ideas upon which his theories are constructed. A comparison of "Three Dialogues" and the "Poetry is Vertical" manifesto reveals the details of this assault on Jolas's modernist notions. In assertions 8 and 10 of the manifesto, Jolas asserts:

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[8] The final disintegration of the ‘I’ in the creative act is made possible by the use of language which is a mantic instrument, and which does not hesitate to adopt a revolutionary attitude toward word and syntax, going even so far as to invent a hermetic language, if necessary. [10] The synthesis of a true collectivism is made possible by a community of spirits who aim at the construction of a new mythological reality. Aspects of these assertions derived from Modernism in general include the use of myth to create a new reality, the adoption of revolutionary language, and indifference to reception of this “hermetic” expression. Jolas adds the notions of surrender to orphic inspiration, the mantic use of language, and the search for collective spiritual synthesis. In “Three Dialogues” Beckett and Duthuit challenge the feasibility of this combined formal and orphic thrust; D and B question how these apparently contradictory actions of construction and disintegration can coexist. They suggest, for example, that André Masson has made use of the above methodologies: D. - That is perhaps why he speaks so often nowadays of painting the void, “in fear and trembling”. His concern was at one time with the creation of a mythology; then with man, not simply in the universe, but in society; and now . . . “inner emptiness, the prime condition, according to Chinese esthetics, of the act of painting.” (98) Having moved through these stages of development, the artist is credited with having accomplished the “final disintegration of the ‘I’ in the creative act”--of achieving “inner emptiness.” Yet his search brings nothing but an awareness of the void, before which the artist quails. With this reference Beckett and Duthuit argue that the void frustrates any attempt to perceive and express the self or the object, and nullifies the expressive complex Jolas promotes. This discussion of Masson ties this criticism to Verticalism more firmly, for the artist is a former Surrealist who contributed regularly to transition and to Vertical, and who was a friend and confidant of Eugene Jolas (Babel 187-8). Beckett and Duthuit recognize and respond to the fact that Masson’s goals, his methods, and the tropes he uses to describe this process are derived in part from Verticalism. D notes, for example, that Masson “aspires to be rid of the servitude of space, that his eye may ‘frolic among the focusless fields, tumultuous with incessant creation’” (99), and later that, “Masson speaks much of transparency--‘openings, circulations, communications, unknown penetrations’--where he may frolic at his ease, in freedom.” They are unconvinced of the efficacy of this approach, however, for B remarks,

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What you say certainly throws light on the dramatic predicament of the artist. Allow me to note his concern with the amenities of ease and freedom. The stars are undoubtedly superb, as Freud remarked on reading Kant’s cosmological proof of the existence of God. With such preoccupations it seems to be impossible that he should ever do anything different from that which the best, including himself, have done already. (99-100) By means of this reference to the stars, B suggests that the connection Jolas makes between astrophysical phenomena and spiritual ascension is ineffectual, that his theories offer no new expressive alternatives and merely reformulate untenable ideas from earlier movements. Evidence for the fact that Duthuit and Beckett are challenging Modernism in general instead of merely Jolas’s theory exists in another series of references. In the manifesto, Jolas asserts that the artist creates a link between contemporary humanity and a universal consciousness: [7] The transcendental ‘I’ with its multiple stratifications reaching back millions of years is related to the whole history of mankind, past and present, and is brought to the surface with the hallucinatory irruption of images in the dream, the daydream, the mystic-gnostic trance, and even the psychiatric condition. This belief in patterns of universal human experience, the search for a superlative vehicle to expose them, and the certainty that the artist is uniquely qualified to organize these patterns are prominent ideas in Modernism. Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis emphasize this notion in their outline of Vorticism, in which theory the artist functions as a vortex by means of which these patterns are focused. In “Vortex: Pound,” for example, the artist writes, Every conception, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It is the picture that means a hundred poems, the music that means a hundred pictures, the most highly energized statement, the statement that has not yet spent itself in expression, but which is the most capable of expressing. The turbine. All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. (Blast 1:153) Pound and Lewis credit the artist with an almost divine ability to perceive and express these patterns. Jolas apprehends this notion of the artist’s “vivid consciousness” and adds to it; he contends that the connection that unifies humanity past and present is spiritual--the

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“transcendental I"--and that although the artist is responsible for discerning this pattern, this feat is accomplished through orphic inspiration. In the dialogues Beckett and Duthuit suggest that Masson, like Jolas and other Modernists, seeks to apprehend and articulate these patterns of human existence--the “multiple stratifications reaching back millions of years.” D observes, for example, that “without renouncing the objects, loathsome or delicious, that are our daily bread and wine and poison, he seeks to break through their partitions to that continuity of being which is absent from the ordinary experience of living” (99). The authors contend, however, that regardless of the method employed the artist cannot overcome the existence of the void and perceive these patterns. Having compared the techniques of several artists, for example, B argues that, “the only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat is a certain order on the plane of the feasible.” To which D replies, “What other plane can there be for the maker?” (98). This use of the words “plane” and “maker” calls to mind spiritual realms, and alludes to the otherworldly genius of the artist, to a god-like command of perception and expression. Yet as B makes clear later in the dialogues, he rejects all such claims: Among those whom we call great artists, I can think of none whose concern was not predominantly with his expressive possibilities, those of his vehicle, those of humanity. The assumption underlying all painting is that the domain of the maker is the domain of the feasible. The much to express, the little to express, the ability to express much, the ability to express little, merge in the common anxiety to express as much as possible, or as truly as possible, or as finely as possible, to the best of one’s ability” (101) In this passage the plane of the feasible/maker has been altered to the domain of the feasible/ maker, by which change the authors contend not only that the pursuit of expression has progressed little, but also that the role of the artist as creator is not facilitated by the spiritual, but is instead defined by the limits of the vehicle and the human. The issue that receives the most attention, and which the authors seem to view as the greatest inconsistency, however, is the discrepancy between superlative control of media and ultimate surrender of inspiration to orphic forces. Jolas outlines how the vertigral artist makes use of orphic forces in the following two declarations from the manifesto:

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[5] Esthetic will is not the first law. It is in the immediacy of the ecstatic revelation, in the a-logical movement of the psyche, in the organic rhythm of the vision that the creative act occurs. [6] The reality of depth can be conquered by a voluntary mediumistic conjuration, by a stupor which proceeds from the irrational to a world beyond a world. In response to these assertions, Duthuit and Beckett question the possibility of ultimate communication. Due to flux--the inconsistencies of time and space that separate the subject and object--B contends, the attempt at expression is merely, “a thrusting towards a more adequate expression of natural experience,” although he adds the grudging acknowledgement that should such a method work, “whether achieved through submission or mastery, the result is a gain in nature” (97). Verticalism seeks to communicate this experience, to discover ultimate expression through a composite exercise of submission (to orphic experience) and mastery (of medium and form). B recognizes and responds to this search when he states: “By nature I mean here, like the naivest realist, a composite of perceiver and perceived, not a datum, an experience.” As the above discussion indicates, the experience Jolas seeks is a communion of artist and audience, an ideal communication without loss of meaning. Yet B dismisses the search for this expression as futile: “the tendency and accomplishment of this painting are fundamentally those of previous painting, straining to enlarge the statement of a compromise” (97). He dismisses the construction of such a composite as impossible in practice, no matter what method one might employ. B. - There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said. I have experimented, as you know, both in public and in private, under duress, through faintness of heart, through weakness of mind, with two or three hundred . . . (102) Critics commonly interpret this passage as a reference to Beckett’s criticism; they suggest that the critic has struggled to articulate his views despite the above difficulties. The passage can also be interpreted, however, as indicative of the authors’ struggle to use Modernist and Verticalist techniques to express in their own art works--to experiment by means of an aesthetic “faintness of heart” or a surrealistic “weakness of mind.” Having decided that such techniques offer no additional insight, however, B asserts, “that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express,

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together with the obligation to express” (98). He concludes that neither formal mastery nor submission to orphic forces can overcome the void, and that rejection of all such efforts is the only alternative. Van Velde is praised for making this step, for being, the first to desist from this estheticised automatism, the first to submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation, in the absence of terms, or if you like, in the presence of unavailable terms, the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and to shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living. (103) With this statement B refers to and rejects the Modernist “esthetic will” from assertion five of the "Poetry is Vertical" manifesto, and he suggests that Jolas offers instead a less palatable and equally impractical surrealistic “estheticised automatism.” Beckett thus contends that Jolas is blind to the discrepancies within his theory, that the Modernist ideas upon which he builds are unstable, and that none of these theories offers a method by which to overcome the perceptive and expressive discontinuity that makes up the void. Beckett and Duthuit make this rejection explicit through a direct refutation of pronouncement nine of the manifesto, wherein Jolas asserts, [9] Poetry builds a nexus between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ by leading the emotions of the sunken, telluric depths upward toward the illumination of a collective reality and a totalistic universe. In an assertion that refers to and rejects this declaration almost point for point, B argues that, 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, in a kind of tropism towards a light as to the nature of which the best opinions continue to vary. (103) With these comments B dismisses Modernist efforts to communicate by means of formal renovation or orphic experience as fruitless. He asserts that creative mastery deteriorates into tropism, and that the light toward which the artist ascends is of indefinite value. Even with such direct correspondences, however, this assault on “Poetry is Vertical” and the modernist ideals that inform the manifesto seems insignificant and uncompelling. This is due in part to the fact that although “Three Dialogues” is a criticism of the Verticalist program and a lament about the inconsistencies that interfere with expression, Beckett and Duthuit, like those

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they denounce, do not define the void in concrete terms, or explain sufficiently how this force interferes with perception and expression. Nor do the dialogues offer a more efficacious program--or so we are led to believe. Clearly the milieu "from which Beckett's writing sprung" indicates that "Three Dialogues" is more complex than it seems, but it also suggests that critics should be wary of disguised meaning and misleading argument.

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CHAPTER FOUR THE DIALOGUE FORMAT: “…an untidy analyst.”

"Painting is man face to face with his debacle. I paint my wretchedness" - Bram van Velde, "Some Sayings"

Clov: What is there to keep me here? Hamm: The dialogue. - Samuel Beckett, Endgame

Philosophical dialogue is a peculiar vehicle for art criticism; it presents engaging arguments, but it is also deceptive and indistinct almost to the point of incoherence. In a discussion of Plato’s use of the form, Michael Stokes argues that perspective philosophical dialogue is, rhetorically, a “very inefficient method of communication” because the verbal exchange by which it presents information becomes a “vehicle of ambivalence” (27). Yet he also suggests that this ambivalence is a benefit and that it allows for a certain rhetorical flexibility. When Plato makes assertions in his dialogues, he explains, it is possible to suppose that Plato intended his readers to just pause and think. Possibly at every question of Socrates we were meant to step back and wonder whether the embodied proposition is being implicitly communicated or denied [...]. It is at times difficult, on this hypothesis, to know what Plato intends us to think, and how. The protreptic and educational value of the dialogues may be high, but their communicative value low. (27) This ambiguity, Stokes admits, often seems unsatisfactory as criticism; he asserts that, “the treatise is, on the face of it, a better vehicle for the communication of views than the dialogue” (25). Yet he argues that the choice to use dialogue is important and intentional, that the form does not result from some kind of “historical accident” (27). He then stresses the need for a

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model of interpretation that displays the consistent value of the author’s argument without undermining the “communicative clarity and force of the dialogues,” or, in other words, for a model of interpretation that accounts for the concurrent function of form and content. Unfortunately, the common explanation for Beckett’s choice of the dialogue form is based on historical accident instead of formal capability. Beckett’s biographers, for instance, are quick to point out that the ideas discussed in the text were generated during informal discussions between Beckett and Duthuit. Deirdre Bair contends that Duthuit urged Beckett to document their lunch-hour debates about art criticism for the Transition journal (392). James Knowlson argues that Duthuit and Beckett shared “remarkable exchanges of ideas concerning art” and that the dialogues “represent only part of a debate that went on between them in private and by letter over many months” (Damned 336). Anthony Cronin, for comparison, argues that Beckett wished to “give a lift” to van Velde, and thus “suggested that he might write a piece about him,” but Cronin notes that “after some discussion this idea was abandoned in favor of an exchange of views about painting between Duthuit and Beckett in which van Velde would figure largely” (396). Beckett’s only recorded comment about the generation of the dialogues is enigmatic. Martin Esslin, who cautions that the text “may or may not be a true record of conversations that took place” between the two men, records that he asked Beckett specifically about the conception of the text: “Would it be true to say you wrote down what had been said?” Beckett responded, “I suppose you might say down, I’d rather say up” (“Introduction” 2). No comprehensive formal analysis of "Three Dialogues" exists, and when form is considered critics usually dismiss the dialogue as incidental to the existence of what Mark Moes labels a “proto-essay.” Those who subscribe to this notion believe that the dialogue form is not essential to the purpose of the author, but that it disguises a more conventional argumentative structure. Moes argues that such an approach is based upon the assumption that the author’s purpose is, to construct valid arguments yielding true conclusions about matters of philosophic import, and to articulate rigorous methods, either for defining necessary and sufficient conditions for the possession of properties and the truth of theses, or for acquiring a technical grasp of any subject matter. (1-2) John Fletcher approaches the dialogues in this manner, for instance, when, despite evidence that the dialogue form often creates more ambiguity than it clarifies, he argues that Beckett outlines a

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“general theory” of art “unambiguously” in the text (Novels 136). In similar manner, John Pilling suggests that a proto-essay lies hidden within the dialogues when he contends that Beckett’s "haphazard formulations" in the two previous essays on the van Velde’s "form the basis for his severely logical stance in the Three Dialogues” ("Poetics" 251). Moes admits that critical dialogue inspires distrust in critics--that it initiates the search for a mask to be stripped away--for it seems improbable that, as Plato writes, a “serious man will ever think of writing about serious matters for the general public so as to make them prey to envy and perplexity” (1).29 Because the text is based on historical discussion and correspondence, Beckett critics (particularly early critics such as Cohn, Coe, and Esslin) have neglected to use a model like Stokes recommends; they often fail to consider how the form and content of “Three Dialogues” function concurrently to communicate the author’s argument. Moes also observes that an inherent component of the search for a proto-essay is the assumption that the positions developed in the dialogue represent the author’s own views. Beckett critics have subscribed almost universally to these two assumptions in their treatment of “Three Dialogues,” with the result that the fictional and critical elements of the dialogue form are often conflated, and subtleties of argument revealed by the reasoning of two or more characters are neglected. Connections between the language and subject matter of "Three Dialogues" and Beckett's earlier discursive criticism reinforce the suggestion that a proto-essay exists. In the dialogues, for example, B states, “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, in a kind of tropism towards a light as to the nature of which the best opinions continue to vary” (103). Beckett makes similar statements about art history in “Peintres de l’empêchement,” his second article on the van Veldes: “L'histoire de la peinture est l'histoire de ses rapports avec son objet, ceux-ci évoluant, nécessairement, d'abord dans le sens de la largeur, ensuite dans celui de la pénétration. Ce qui renouvelle la peinture, c'est d'abord qu'il y a de plus en plus de choses à peindre, ensuite une façon de les peindre de plus en plus possessionnelle” (Disjecta 135). Yet these connections, considered along side Beckett's earlier critical works, also suggest that Beckett's preoccupation with the void remains unresolved, that he is unsatisfied with his argument in the previous two discursive treatments of the van Veldes, and that the choice to use dialogue in this final critical discussion enables a new critical process.

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My objective in this chapter is to provide the type of interpretative model of “Three Dialogues” that Stokes advocates, that is, to account for Beckett's use of dialogue as a critical vehicle by means of which arguments are shaped by content and form concurrently. Evidence suggests that Beckett selected the dialogue form for several mutually-constitutive reasons: dialogue allows him to participate in Georges Duthuit’s dialogic rhetoric that occurs in both Transition and the editor’s own criticism, and thereby to enter the discussion of aesthetics taking place in this publication; the form allows him to utilize the critical flexibility--and subversive possibilities--of Platonic dialogue, and in this manner to articulate more effectively his radical and often contradictory ideas about “the void”; and dialogue allows Beckett to subvert traditional critical logic, to "write up" to the cognoscienti, and ultimately, to escape the aporia of trying to express the impossibility of expression.

Milieu and Dialogue The style and dialectic of “Three Dialogues” is informed by the overall rhetorical approach of Duthuit’s Transition, which is set up as a series of dialogue clusters, each of which is made up of articles and art works that are linked thematically. Issue five, in which the dialogues appear, is the best example of this rhetorical approach. Paul Eluard’s "The Work of the Painter-To Picasso," for example, is linked with "Poems," by Picasso, with "Notes about the Exhibition of Recent Works of Picasso," by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and with "Picasso Goes for a Walk," by Jacques Prévert. Georges Duthuit discusses the effect of modern art on the viewer in “Matisse and Byzantine Space,” which subject Francis Ponge also addresses in his essay “Braque, or Modern Art as Event and Pleasure.” In similar fashion, André du Bouchet's article "Felix Feneon or The Mute Critic" corresponds with series of short critical entries by Feneon that are named after Seraut's "La Grande Jatte," one entry of which is about Edgar Degas, whose "Sonnet" is the next selection in the journal. Pierre-Jean Jouve’s article “Eugène Delacroix” is followed by an essay Delacroix wrote in 1846: “A Walk in the Woods.” Most importantly, “Three Dialogues” is juxtaposed with André du Bouchet’s article “Three Exhibitions” and “Some Sayings of Bram van Velde,” which precede and follow the dialogues respectively in the journal. The first two of these last three texts discuss a similar list of artists: Du Bouchet examines Masson, Tal Coat, and Miró; Beckett and Duthuit examine Tal Coat, Masson, and Bram van Velde. The substance of these comparisons will be addressed more fully

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in the next chapter, but even on the surface, this juxtaposition suggests that the texts were not meant to be read alone, that they are placed in sequence--in dialogue with one another--with the intent that the reader would compare the assertions contained in the three texts. The dialogues not only fit into the larger dialogical rhetoric of the journal, but the specific form of "Three Dialogues" also follows the dialectic conventions Georges Duthuit employs for his substantial use of dialogue in three of the installments from his series of articles entitled “Sartre’s Last Class.” Dialogues in the series include an exchange in issue three between Sartre and Antoine Saint-Exupery, the novelist, essayist, and aviator who was killed in 1944; a fictional “show-down” in issue six between Duthuit and "Pamela," a young woman who has become entranced with Surrealism; and, in the second issue, a debate between Sartre and a Surrealist in attendance at his lecture. The latter dialogue, writes Duthuit, “runs something like this”: Teacher - The utter degradation of man . . .

Surrealist - Don’t blame us.

T. - The deliberate destruction of everything . . .

S. - A mere warning. Child’s play to what was to come.

T. - And painless into the bargain. Bombs made of rosewood and tin--mere symbols of physical annihilation.

S. - What makes you think we wanted to hurt people?

T. - Operatic terrorists, twiners of apocalyptic lace, tinkers of ancient dubitations, decoy ducks in the hands of extremists--no sooner is the brute-age upon us, and the reign of the mastiff and the club, than they pray to be excused . . . (T 2:99) Here Duthuit uses a convention that is rare in philosophical dialogue. After the first exchange, and presumably because identities have been established, the characters are identified simply by the first letter of their title. Notably, this pattern of demarcation appears in “Three Dialogues” as

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well. In contrast to Duthuit’s practice, however, Beckett does not establish the identities of the characters firmly by name at the beginning of the debate. The initials “D” and “B” are commonly interpreted as a reference to Duthuit and Beckett, but the lack of concrete definition in comparison to Duthuit’s dialogue leaves this identification in some doubt. This interpretation is based on tradition, and the common but erroneous identification of the dialogues as "Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit," when the correct title is "Three Dialogues: Tal Coat--Masson- -Bram van Velde" by Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit. Although this distinction seems small, it adds a fictional distance to the dialogues which is similar to the fictional nature of Duthuit's "Sartre's Last Class," which Duthuit describes in the first issue as "a kind of report, on the whole reliable, written by an unknown correspondent" whose signature, the notes inform the reader, "was illegible." This fictional veneer allows Duthuit to create a more dramatic discussion, but more importantly, he can distance himself from the opinions expressed and interpretive mistakes made by his characters. For, he asserts, whether "fact or fancy, this document nevertheless casts some light on one of the most disturbed and most passionately interesting moments of our history" (8). In addition to this system of character identification, "Three Dialogues" follows Duthuit's pattern of rhetorical development. Duthuit asserts in his introduction to “Sartre” that dialogue functions as an “agent provocateur” for his critical agenda, which he articulates more fully in a more traditional discursive essay--the “lecture” of his fictional Jean-Paul Sartre--that follows the dialogue cited above. The text thus progresses from dialogue to a monologue that resembles discursive criticism. “Three Dialogues” follows a similar pattern: it begins with a dialogue and ends with a lengthy monologue in which the character B attempts to explain and justify the assertions he has made thus far in the text. These connections suggest that the dialogue form was not selected arbitrarily, but purposefully, because the dialogue functions as a component of a larger discussion occurring both within each author's individual criticism and in the current journal issue as well. As editor, Duthuit instigated this larger discussion, but he also contributed to the specific content of the dialogues as well. In her recent article “Three Dialogues: One Author or Two,” Lois Oppenheim contends that “a careful reading of both Duthuit’s files and the Beckett-Duthuit correspondence” reveals that “entire passages in the 'Three Dialogues' were, in fact, reviewed by Duthuit and that many were excerpted directly from the letters” (63). In addition, Oppenheim

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reports that in a letter to Duthuit in June 1949 Beckett states that he “is unable to revive their discussion alone” and anticipates “meeting later that week so that they might do so together” (68). As a part of her justification for additional acknowledgement of Duthuit’s contribution to “Three Dialogues,” Oppenheim asks: “Indeed, would the reinstatement and perpetuation of Duthuit’s name in the title not, at the very least, revitalize the dialogic nature of the text fundamental--as shown by the correspondence--to our authentic appreciation of it?” (69). Having surveyed the available evidence, Oppenheim concludes that although Duthuit’s contribution to “Three Dialogues” was substantial and has been unrecognized for too long, Beckett is undoubtedly the principle author of the text. This label of "author," is key, however, and needs some clarification. Clearly Duthuit and Beckett share an interest in aesthetics, have a similar previous affiliation with Jolas's transition journal, and face a similar preoccupation with the subject/object discontinuity. Their correspondence indicates that Duthuit and Beckett discussed the ideas for the dialogues, that Duthuit commented on the work in progress, and as Oppenheim observes, specific passages from this correspondence appear in the final product. In addition, as the above discussion indicates, Duthuit inspired both the global rhetorical form and specific dialectic conventions within the work. Finally, as editor, Duthuit undoubtedly approved the final submission before publication. The references to Beckett's earlier work, however, together with the appearance of tropes, allusions and language that appear elsewhere in the Beckettian oeuvre indicate that the creative decisions were Beckett's, that he organized the dramatic elements of the work, and thus, in this sense of the word, is the principle author of the dialogues. This label, however, is hardly clear-cut. Although Oppenheim makes the assertion above, for example, she is troubled by the uncertain connotation of Beckett’s comment to Martin Esslin that he “wrote up” the dialogues, particularly since critics make reference to this statement and ignore its inherent ambiguity. “Fournier’s claim that Beckett alone ‘wrote’ the dialogues might indicate a mere linguistic ambiguity at the crux of the problem,” Oppenheim explains. “Does she mean that, from the conversations and correspondence with Duthuit, Beckett composed a text? Does she mean, rather, that he ‘wrote up’ this material, that he made it publishable?” (62). Oppenheim is unable to come to a satisfactory conclusion about this issue, beyond the assertion that the problem introduced by this statement “may not really be reducible” to such simple interpretations. Although Beckett’s comments about his own work should be

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approached with caution, his alterations of traditional philosophical dialogue form suggest that he wrote the dialogues "up" in both a compositional and subversive manner--that he recreated the café discussion and correspondence at the same time that he engineered a complex argument that communicates to different readers based on their level of knowledge and sophistication.30

Dialectic Departures Although each philosopher who uses dialogue does so in a unique manner, most use Socratic methods: they use inductive reasoning to isolate terms and arguments, construct syllogisms based on these arguments, and derive universal definitions and applications there from. Scholars disagree about the importance of particular functions or attributes of philosophical dialogue, but most studies concentrate on the importance of three primary aspects: the function of dramatic elements, the structure of the argument, and the purpose of the dialectic process. Plato, for example, utilizes the dramatic components of his dialogues to communicate important subtleties to his audience. Joanne Waugh explains that, much of the dramatic power of Plato’s dialogues comes from the masterful way he exploits his audience’s awareness of the full implications of the words and actions of Socrates and his interlocutors. The audience would recognize how these characters, excepting Socrates, think to display their sophia as they demonstrate their expertise in public discourse. (47) To highlight the dramatic aspects of his dialogues and thus enhance this audience participation, Plato often draws upon historical figures or characters from theater.31 These dramatic elements of dialogue distinguish the form from traditional discursive criticism in several important ways, yet these elements are often neglected in critical examinations. Plato, for example, reminds the reader that his work is fictional, that the situation is contrived as a vehicle for argument instead of a record of actual events. Mary Margaret McCabe argues that Plato accomplishes this design through temporal inconsistency: he records Socrates’s death in detail, for example, despite the fact that, “while Socrates was preparing himself for death and explaining how the health of the soul is far more important than the health of the body, Plato was off sick” (8). These dramatic elements are subtle, and in some cases even silly, yet they create specific meaning for a historical audience, which meaning may be lost on a contemporary audience if dramatic aspects of dialogue are ignored or thought to be secondary to content. Unfortunately, readers tend to

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suppose that philosophy is timeless; that, as McCabe observes, philosophy "looks to the universal and hopes to transcend the here and now" (3). Waugh laments that it is difficult to find critics "who seriously consider whether and how philosophical importance attaches to the dramatic situations, characters, and events of the dialogues" (41-2). In the minds of critics, McCabe notes regrettably, "philosophy and drama do not mix." In “Three Dialogues” Beckett and Duthuit use these general formulas, yet they also depart from traditional Socratic form in a number of significant ways. Unlike Plato, for example, the dialogues are almost completely independent of occasion: Beckett and Duthuit assign no concrete identity to their characters, and there are no descriptions of the environment or historical context. For this reason perhaps, the text has been misinterpreted when anthologized and separated from the context of Transition. In order stay within traditional conventions the authors should have constructed a fictional dialogue using, for instance, Jolas, Joyce, or other historical figures. Duthuit's use of Saint-Exupery and Sartre as historical models for his fictional interlocutors is a more orthodox example of this technique. Beckett and Duthuit choose, however, to suggest merely that these characters represent themselves, and thus they present a dialogue that seems concerned with timeless issues instead of with historical application. The practice of Transition sets precedence for this fictional distance, and the authors use of ridiculous temporal inconsistency in the second dialogue, when they indicate that the discussion is delayed for a fortnight pending a response from B, not only reminds the reader that the dialogues contain fictional elements, but reinforces this timelessness and lack of occasion. Beckett and Duthuit also depart from the conventions of philosophical dialogue by undermining and self-effacing language. Victorino Tejera argues that two essential dramatic dimensions of philosophical dialogue are often overlooked: “pervasive wit and overflowing allusiveness” (144). The allusions present in the dialogues will be discussed in the next chapter. The style of language used in the dialogues, however, suggests that the first of these qualities is essential in the text, and that the assertions developed within should be approached with caution. We observe this undermining of language, for example, when B prefaces his final monologue on van Velde by informing the reader that what follows will be droll supposition: B. - How would it be if I first said what I am pleased to fancy he is, fancy he does, and then that it is more than likely that he is and does quite otherwise? Would that not be an

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excellent issue out of all our afflictions? He happy, you happy, I happy, all three bubbling over with happiness? (102) The sardonic tone B uses in this passage suggests that he is merely playing at criticism, that he is stating his fancy with no intention of supporting, defending, or even articulating this notion fully. This maneuver displays two aspects of witty dialogue, which Kennedy designates as “‘out- witting’ (at the expense of other characters) and ‘in-witting’ (the flux of knowing and capping remarks)” (106). This technique destabilizes any attempt at serious interpretation because the author directs this humor both outward and inward; the dialogues are, as Leo Bersani notes, both “cryptic” and “self-mocking” (301). Beckett and Duthuit assault the high and serious nature of art history, for example, by means of B’s suggestion that the Italian masters are nothing more than “building contractors.” They question philosophical complacency when B ridicules the incongruity of Pythagoras’s pursuit of mathematical truth and his belief in metempsychosis by suggesting that critics react “with a kind of Pythagorean terror” to the “irrationality of pi” (103). Yet this comment is directed inward at “Three Dialogues” as well, for the comment questions the function of criticism itself. "You realise," D puns, "the absurdity of what you advance?" To which B replies with an unsteady, "I hope I do" (101). Other examples of this self-conscious humor include the fact that Beckett and Duthuit portray B, who is driven forth “weeping” from the end of dialogue two, as a bit emotionally unstable, or the fact that B displays his critical ignorance and impotence. When asked why van Velde is obliged to paint, for instance, B. replies: “I don’t know.” And when D challenges his intimation that “the painting of van Velde is inexpressive,” the text records that B’s response is returned “a fortnight later.” Bersani argues that this exchange underscores both the ambiguity present in the text and the self- deprecating nature of the humor. The author has, he writes, “in this way either established the importance (or perhaps the silliness) of the question, or raised doubts about using Bram van Velde to illustrate this idea, or suggested that to formulate the idea is an agony, perhaps an impossibility” (302). This ambiguity of language, labeled by David Fortunoff the “liquidity” of dialogue, allows the author’s to create these mutually exclusive interpretations (65). In his article “An Endgame of Aesthetics: Beckett as Essayist,” Rupert Wood explains this advantage: The Three Dialogues enjoy a status somewhere between philosophical aesthetics and dramatized repartee. The dialogue form leaves no space for ‘serious’ authorial intervention, either to come to the aid of or to ironize B’s theorizing. In the less confined

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space of the dialogue form, the contradictions and lacunae of B’s theorizing can be highlighted. (12) Although Wood notes the existence of the rhetorical flexibility outlined by Stokes, he hints that the ambivalence found in the dialogues is self-consciously intentional and more significant to interpretation than merely an invitation by the author to pause and think. He contends that when the character “B” attempts “to outline the philosophical framework that he uses, it collapses into a jokey non-seriousness,” and that Beckett “fails to draw up stable ground-rules” for discussing the subject at hand (14). Yet Wood also suggests that the contradictions revealed by the dialogue form are linked to the subject of this work, that the author is less interested in arguing a thesis than in highlighting the importance of what is left unsaid. Beckett and Duthuit's self-effacing language contributes to this suspicion that one is being misled, that the author is disguising his agenda behind clever verbal exchange and outlandish assertions. Andrew Kennedy argues that dialogue depends on this duplicity, that it often “releases the doubleness” in a character or work, “through the verbal aspect of disguise: costume language giving way, at appropriate moments, to the felt language of the ‘real’ person” (Dialogue 121). A similar doubleness exists in "Three Dialogues," which both hinders the clarity of the argument and enhances the mystery and appeal of the text. For, as Rupert Wood contends, clarity and seriousness are undermined, but not destroyed. So the drama we are presented with in the Three Dialogues is a kind of endgame of aesthetic theorizing; it is a drama which is neither entirely serious nor entirely playful, but one where playfulness and seriousness continuously infect one another. (12) As the critical history of this work reveals, however, the combined difficulty and allure for the Beckett critic lies in the futile attempt to detect the boundaries of the serious and playful, and to assign meaning accordingly. The dialogue form, as modified by Beckett and Duthuit, resists criticism. In addition to this unconventional use of humor and duplicity, Beckett and Duthuit depart from traditional philosophical dialogue form in the way that they draw the reader through these arguments. As outlined above, traditional philosophical dialogue constructs arguments by means of extractive questions. Richard Robinson observes that the philosophical dialogue customarily begins when a teaching character asks an initial question in an effort to solicit a definition or

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explanation from a learning character. Subsequent questions challenge this primary statement and are designed to elicit affirmations or denials. These disconnected answers are then “syllogized” to refute the original answer and suggest other alternatives (299). In Plato's dialogues, for example, Stokes observes that Socrates “often claims ignorance, and usually adopts an obviously questioning stance” (7). He claims that the philosopher can construct successful arguments in this fashion because he selects a certain type of victim and demands consistency from this person. This victim must, however, like “Protagoras and Gorgias both, in the dialogues named after them, accept the primacy of the intellect” (32). Because of this quality, Socrates can hold them accountable for their assertions: They are under obligation, in Socrates’s presence, to remain consistent, and if they do not they are defeated. Some accept defeat, others give up one or more of the offending group of propositions. Their inconsistency may be direct, in that they enunciate in the course of the discussion two propositions evidently contradictory, or it may be indirect, in that they utter two propositions of such a kind that Socrates can, by analyzing the consequences of one or both, arrive at an inconsistency. (32) Beckett and Duthuit invert and rupture the technique of using one character as the “straight man” in a teacher/learner binary. Hugh Kenner suggests that this binary exists in the dialogues when he identifies B as “an Irish pawn who quails before a Frenchman’s dialectic” (Beckett 28). Yet, in “Three Dialogues” no clear teaching character emerges: the subject is not introduced clearly at the beginning of the discussion, definitions are created by D and B in concert, and the bulk of the argument is formed by informative assertions instead of through extractive questions. D emerges as the inquisitor and B the respondent only in the third dialogue, and this practice is short-lived. D does not lead B through a process of Socratic discovery, nor is B overcome by D’s eloquence, acumen, or superior consistency. B collapses because of his own inability or refusal to argue or respond to questions. The inconsistency of his assertions seems obvious to both characters and reader, but unlike Plato’s victims B refuses to acknowledge defeat or retreat from his argument. Finally, Beckett and Duthuit depart from traditional dialogic inquiry by under-arguing their assertions. The most obvious manifestation of this is the fact that “Three Dialogues” does not examine specific works or techniques of Tal Coat, Masson, or van Velde. In addition, points are raised in the dialogues that are neglected at best and more often ignored completely. There is

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no critical reply, for example, to D’s challenge at the end of each of the first two dialogues, or any indication that D’s argument is so crippling that B should be driven from the scene weeping. Also, when pressed about the logic of his argument, B attempts to retract his earlier statements about van Velde, which causes D in frustration to demand, “Come, come, my dear fellow, make some kind of connected statement and then go away” (102). This lack of concrete argument suggests that the fictional B may know less about van Velde than he pretends, that the character demonstrates the topic under examination--the inability to express. As quoted above, B qualifies his own understanding of this absurd argument as a "hope" instead of a certainty. Rupert Wood illustrates this uncertainty and impotence when he observes, How van Velde sees the world is inaccessible to B; so, too, is how B sees the world to D who, like the psychiatric nurses at Murphy’s hospital, functions as a ‘sane eye.’ B’s views neither make sense to D, nor, ultimately to a reader looking for a stable argument. (14) In contrast, as Leo Bersani claims, the assertions articulated in the text are “disturbing without, in a sense, being radical” because of this lack of coherent argument. Yet Bersani agrees that the core questions and conclusions are unexamined: “Why this peculiar ‘obligation to express’ when there is nothing to express? Even more fundamentally, what makes expression impossible?” (305). Critics like Wood and Bersani are disturbed by these questions because they seek a proto- essay. Yet as Lawrence Miller observes, dialogue allows Beckett to avoid this type of argument: The form makes few demands in the way of conclusions: its prototype, the Socratic dialogue, does not require (and in its most basic form does not even provide for) positive or constructive results. A thesis submitted for elentic dispute is either proven false or shown to be supported by an invalid argument. The ‘Three Dialogues,’ accordingly, allow Beckett to carry out his reactive, deflationary programme, without having to propose a ‘correct’ alternative to the views he undercuts. At Duthuit’s insistence, Beckett does give an affirmative account of how artistic failure is to be preferred to any possible success, but, by virtue of the form of the dialogue, he need not prove its validity or truth. (61) Unfortunately, as Miller hints, the same process that provides the above flexibility also hinders the discovery of the above "programme." Overlooked by Miller, who operates on the assumption that this agenda exists, is the fact that B never gives any affirmative account at all--

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the dialogue is unfinished. B prepares to leave after the final monologue and is called back by D: D. - Are you not forgetting something?

B. - Surely that is enough?

D. - I understood your number was to have two parts. The first was to consist in your saying what you--er--thought. This I am prepared to believe you have done. The second…

B. - (Remembering, warmly) Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken. (103) The missing element is the promised, more critical explanation of van Velde’s work: “what it is more than likely that he is and does” (102). B delivers only his fanciful speculation, after which he intimates that he was mistaken to suggest he had any substantive ideas about Bram van Velde at all. Rupert Wood notes that by means of these passages, we are shown the impossibility of foundation; there is nowhere to start, for as B’s admission that he cannot properly say anything about van Velde shows, the real discussion never got started anyway. What van Velde in fact is and does was never really on the agenda, and so the whole text has been circling around an absent centre. (14) The reader is led to believe that the missing section--the unsaid theory--contains the more important of these two explications, and thus this intentional absence undermines the validity of the whole enterprise. Like Bersani, however, Wood overlooks the dramatic elements of dialogue in his interpretation and approaches this text as traditional discursive criticism. He ignores, for example, the fact that B may be able to articulate what he thinks van Velde is and does, but simply refuses to do so directly. Wood identifies a lack of center in the discussion perhaps because he expects the argument to be formed like that of an essay, and Beckett’s use of dialogue encourages this assumption--to a point.

Enthymeme and Elenchus On a deeper level, Beckett and Duthuit's departures force the reader to question the assumptions inherent in dialectical criticism because they compromise the logic of the

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enthymeme and enhance the reader's experience of elenchus. Gregory Clark's discussion of rhetoric and dialogue outlines the fundamental qualities that differentiate dialogic and discursive approaches to criticism, and provides insight into the authors' method: The purpose of discourse that is rhetorical is identical to the purpose of discourse in dialectic: to engage people in a process of collaborative exchange through which they can judge together what they will collectively consider good and true. Rhetoric, in this description, differs from dialectic not in purpose or function but in materials and participants: dialectic is an exchange sustained by a few specialists for the purpose of establishing specialized knowledge or general theoretical principles in contingent matters, whereas rhetoric is a similar exchange sustained publicly within larger and more complex communities for the purpose of establishing collective values and assumptions and deciding upon collective actions. (27) Since discursive criticism does not use the comprehensive “step-by-step negotiation” of dialectic argument, Clark argues, the rhetor "must simulate that negotiative exchange in the process of composition itself and propose its outcome in speech or text to the audience for their assent” (28). He asserts that this simulation, which Aristotle labels an enthymeme, "functions in a rhetorical exchange as a syllogism functions in dialectic: as a proposition to be collaboratively tested. It does so by affirming the knowledge that rhetor and audience currently share and by asserting on that basis a potential extension or application of that knowledge.” The enthymeme is commonly defined as an incomplete or abridged syllogism, "one of the terms being omitted as understood" (Lanham 41). But Clark asserts that in practice enthymeme is more subtle. For Clark, the fundamental difference lies in the fact that, “rhetoric describes the process of testing various possibilities in a dialectical process of exchange until a rhetor can articulate a possibility that an audience can accept. As such, the enthymeme is more than an incomplete syllogism for which the audience must supply the missing term because the audience retains the power to accept or reject the assertion” (28). Dialogue thus not only empowers the audience, but it forces on them a critical obligation that Beckett and Duthuit exploit. In “Three Dialogues,” for example, Beckett and Duthuit do not follow through completely in this "step-by-step" collaborative process of syllogism. The characters discuss "specialized knowledge and theoretical principles" but fail to isolate terms and definitions. The terms occasion and possession, for example, are discussed and partly defined, but never placed

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in a context of art history or applied to specific critical arguments. Nor do Beckett and Duthuit supply the expected "syllogized" definitions and applications. B argues, for example, that van Velde "is the first to desist from this estheticized automatism, the first to submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation" (103), but he neither demonstrates how this has been observed (by looking at specific art works, for example), nor articulates how van Velde accomplishes this action (by discussing specific techniques unique to this artist). In addition, because the dialogue is constructed by means of informative assertions instead of extractive questions, Beckett and Duthuit appear to make use of discursive rhetoric instead of syllogism. Yet they disrupt this process when they argue using the tools of enthymeme but the structure of traditional Platonic syllogism. The authors offer, for example, only one of two promised possible explanations for van Velde's success--which explanation B dismisses as mere supposition--and leave the second, potentially more accurate and insightful explanation unexpressed. With this maneuver Beckett and Duthuit sabotage the "step-by-step" negotiation of enthymeme inherent in discursive criticism; they deny the reader the opportunity to accept or reject these assertions because they are made indirectly. B's comments suggest, for example, that the reader cannot accept his first explanation, and that the reader must supply the missing second explanation because B both maintains that it exists and neglects to articulate it. Thus the dialogues do not function as a syllogism nor enthymeme, but as a particularly incomplete syllogism where one of the terms has been intentionally and emphatically left out, which denies the audience the opportunity to accept or reject this argument. Because of the assumptions involved with this process, enthymeme provides a unique vehicle for critical sleight-of-hand. The missing term can only be understood when the audience shares a certain level of cultural literacy with the author; all parties must, as V. N. Vološinov asserts, share a "unity of the real conditions of life that generate a community of value judgments" (100). Logical connections intimated by the enthymeme are thus lost on those outside of this community, because these connections function as "something like a 'password' known only to those who share the same social purview (101). Thus, Vološinov concludes, the "individual and subjective are backgrounded here by the social and objective" (100). When "Three Dialogues" is examined out of context, or for those not familiar with the resurrected Transition and the post-war Parisian art world, this type of community is absent. D's response to B's list of expressive impossibilities at the end of the first dialogue, for example, that his ideas

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represent "a violently extreme and personal point of view, of no help to us in the matter of Tal Coat" suggests that D feels that B's arguments are not grounded in the social and objective, and thus D cannot follow his value judgments (98). In addition, B's lack of response to this comment not only suggests that he may not be able to provide acceptable social and objective value judgments because of the impossibility of expression, but also that he may not understand his own argument fully. Walter J. Ong argues that the enthymeme is thought of as concluding because of something unexpressed, unarticulated: enthymēma primarily signifies something within one's soul, mind, heart, feelings, hence something not uttered or 'outered' and to this extent not a fully conscious argument, legitimate though it may be. Aristotle's term here thus clearly acknowledges the operation of something at least very like what we today would call a subconscious element. (12) This subliminal, or "underminded" interpretation of enthymeme suggests that Beckett and Duthuit's incomplete syllogism is designed to remain individual and subjective, that B denies the reader the opportunity to accept or reject his assertion intentionally, as the second, more accurate (and ostensibly inexpressible) assertion is not supplied. This strategy suggests that, like Plato, Beckett and Duthuit envision a purpose for dialectic exchange that stresses the logical process itself instead of the successful outcome of the argument. Plato, for instance, uses dialogue for pedagogical reasons, for as Joanne Waugh argues, the dialogues "do not present philosophical truths, but, instead, teach others how to philosophize" (49). Kenneth Seeskin contends that this purpose is accomplished through the process of elenchus: Socrates does not just have conclusions to impart but a method for arriving at them. That method is elenchus, which means to examine, refute, or put to shame. As practiced by Socrates, it is a method which lends itself to the dialogue because it requires that at least two voices be heard. It requires, in addition, that the people whose voices we hear be intimately connected with the positions they take. The first rule of Socratic elenchus is that the respondent must say what he really thinks. (1) This type of exchange produces rigorous argument because the dialogue simulates conversation, and the reader thus identifies with participants who make errors and commit themselves to

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dubious critical positions. In Plato, Seeskin argues, the demonstration of these mistakes is vital to the philosopher's purpose. It follows that elenchus is more than an exercise in philosophical analysis. In asking people to state and defend the moral intuitions which underlie their way of life, Socrates inevitably reveals something about their characters. Elenchus, then, has as much to do with honesty, reasonableness, and courage as it does with logical acumen: the honesty to say what one really thinks, the reasonableness to admit that one does not know, and the courage to continue the investigation. Most of Socrates’s respondents are lacking in all three. (3) B, the character "in the dock," as he describes himself in the text, lacks none of these qualities. Nor do Beckett or Duthuit. B's oversights and retractions, together with his refusal to retreat from an apparently untenable position, however, exemplify the process of elenchus. His audience--the community of artists, critics, and aesthetes who one might expect to understand the enthymemic assumptions in the text--identifies with B's frustration and his need to commit to potentially untenable positions even when faced with the futility of attempting to express the impossibility of expression. Yet Beckett and Duthuit's sabotaged enthymeme creates this identification without suggesting a solution. The dramatization of this argument draws the audience into the discussion and demands that they supply the missing connections in this altered enthymeme--they must evaluate B's first, deceptive assertion about what van Velde accomplishes and speculate about the missing, more authentic second assertion. This technique suggests that Beckett and Duthuit are more interested in displaying the process of critical thinking than in presenting a theory about art directly; that like Socrates they want their audience to examine their beliefs honestly and vigorously. Notably, both B and Socrates are eager to admit their lack of knowledge. Having read “Three Dialogues” one can conceive that B might even associate himself with Socrates, who claims in the Apology that he is the wisest man in Athens based on his argument that, “I neither know nor think that I know” (7). Seeskin maintains that the purpose of elenchus is "to enable the respondent to say what he feels he was trying to say all along” (5). B functions as the respondent in the final section of "Three Dialogues," but having struggled to articulate his views about the void and van Velde's navigation of it, he ultimately states what he has been trying to say all along, the only statement, perhaps, that he can make with complete honesty: "I am mistaken."

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Subversive Dialogue Beckett and Duthuit's use of this sabotaged enthymeme, together with the above self- effacing renunciation, suggests that the authors' overall purpose in the dialogues is subversive; that they manipulate the assumptions inherent to dialectic tradition and conventions as they attempt to communicate ideas clandestinely to an elite aesthetic community. Tejera argues that historical context is vital for interpretation of this type of philosophical dialogue, that in Plato, for instance "the dialogical approach relates Plato’s works in a verifiable way to the concerns and crises of his time” (144). Waugh dismisses the notion that philosophy is timeless, "that 'any rational being' could understand its meaning, or that this meaning is independent somehow of the cultural and interpretive community in which it was written." She agrees that Plato's dialogues "provide us with a picture of the cultural and interpretive community for whom he is writing” (42). At times, however, this community reacted violently to philosophical criticism: Socrates was executed, Anaxagoras and Protagoras were exiled, and the writings of the latter burned publicly. Plato came into conflict with the established order as soon as his philosophy, to use the words of David Fortunoff, “entered into analysis of the human world” (61). Thus, following the execution of Socrates, Fortunoff asserts, Plato “wittingly and stunningly developed and exhibited the literary-philosophical genre of dialogical drama as a multipurpose ‘instrument’ to meet crucial political as well as intellectual requirements” (62). Fortunoff argues that, for Plato, dialogue circumvents official scrutiny both from the state, the “reactionary, repressive, and paranoid Athenian power-structure that has already politically repressed the intellectual activities of the historical Socrates by execution,” and also from proponents of other philosophical ideals, specifically, from the “amoral, radical, relativist morality and politics of the Sophists” (62). He contends that the dramatic aspects and allusiveness of dialogues had the salutary effect of rendering all philosophical, ethical, and political assertions contingent upon the doings of the dialogues’ dramatis personae. This was a subversive activity in that it enabled statements to be progressively ramified within the context of Plato’s Socrates, the philosopher-doer, and his interlocutors, as well as within the exhibitive judgments of Plato. This allowed for a broadening of the range of meanings for dialogical assertions because the significations resulting from the synthesis of assertions and actions are accretive, presenting themselves for repeated ramification. (65)

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Because Plato makes his reader aware both of the fictional and innocuous natures of the dialogue by means of temporal inconsistency, allusion, and humor, he could "flirt with potentially subversive, or even seditious connotations while figures in the dramas could continue to act with impunity with regard to the political context outside the drama” (Fortunoff 65). Readers who apprehend the allusions in the text would understand the criticism being tendered, but others would be distracted or mollified by the dramatic elements. Plato may have been added to the list of the proscribed, Fortunoff adds, "had he not already found a dialogical vehicle through which to alert the cognoscienti of Socrates’s dialectical inquiries, while remaining just ambiguous enough to leave his adversaries in doubt” (72). With “Three Dialogues,” Beckett and Duthuit question the form and function of both critical and creative works, and subvert the binary definitions that separate them. Yet the work is not Beckett’s first attempt to subvert questionable or dangerous ideas by means of an experiment with critical form. Although Beckett's early critical pieces, such as “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce” (1929) and Proust (1931), are fairly straightforward essays, subsequent works display his dissatisfaction with traditional discursive criticism. Ruby Cohn notes, for example, that Beckett’s first article on Greer and Bram van Velde, “La peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon” (1945), is “unique in examining, almost dramatizing the predicament of the non- professional art-lover, who is assaulted by the verbiage of art criticism” ("Forward" 13). In the article, for example, Beckett writes: Voilà une infime partie de ce qu'on dit à l'amateur. On ne lui dit jamais: 'Il n'y a pas de peinture. Il n'y a que des tableaux. Ceux-ci, n'étant pas des saucisses, ne sont ni bons ni mauvais. Tout ce qu'on peut en dire, c'est qu'ils traduisent, avec plus ou moins de pertes, d'absurdes et mystérieuses poussées vers l'image, qu'ils sont plus ou moins adéquats vis- à-vis d'obscures tensions internes. Quant à décider vous-même du degré d'adéquation, il n'en est pas question puisque vous n’êtes pas dans la peau du tendu. (Disjecta 123) Several of these dramatized criticisms appear in the article. With these passages Beckett assaults not only the elitist disposition of art criticism, but also the act of discursive criticism itself. The hybrid dramatic/critical form he selects allows him to comment on both the form and content of contemporary art criticism concurrently. Other evidence of Beckett’s experimentation with critical form, and with the possibilities of dialogue in particular, is found in the texts Lawrence Harvey labels the “three related pieces

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on sex in Ireland” (Poet and Critic 303). The short dialogue “Che Sciagura” (1929), the essay “Censorship in the Saorstat” (1935), and the “Bando passage” in Watt (1945) display three different formal approaches to similar political issues. “Censorship” is a traditional essay on what Beckett viewed as the outrageous practices of censorship boards in Ireland. The passage in Watt addresses the issue of the manufacture of a product used to cure impotence. In “Che Sciagura,” however, Beckett uses the subversive attributes of dialogue to point out inconsistencies in the conservative political position regarding birth control. An examination of "Che Sciagura" may seem digressive at this point, but this text reveals Beckett's early use of the subversive aspect of dialogue, and thus provides insight into the more sophisticated subversion he and Duthuit develop in "Three Dialogues." According to Federman and Fletcher, "Che Sciagura" was "inspired by the embargo on the import of contraceptives into the Republic of Ireland” (3). The text appeared in the 14 November 1929 issue of T.C.D.: A College Miscellany, the weekly undergraduate newspaper published at Trinity College. The title of the work refers to the exclamation of the eunuch upon encountering the naked and helpless young countess at the end of chapter eleven in Voltaire’s Candide: “O che sciagura d’essere senza coglioni!” (53).32 The work consists of an introduction, in which Beckett communicates the necessity for subterfuge and outlines the heavily coded subject, followed by a series of propositions that deal with specific birth control practices. The first interlocutor begins by asserting that birth control occurs in Ireland, and intimates that due to the embargo, the methods utilized are unorthodox. “Frequently.”

“In this country?”

“Strictly speaking--never in this country.”

“Permit to protest against the double-barreled qualification. Am I to reduce the coefficient of spatial, or that of qualitative elasticity?”

“You will excuse my disability to apprehend inaccurate scientific illustration.”

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“I understand you to have implied the danger of conceptual non-congruence.” Initially, both speakers are confused by the other’s coded comments: the second speaker rejects the “double-barreled qualification” that birth control can occur and not occur at the same time; and the first speaker protests against his counterpart’s attempt to differentiate the process into “the coefficient of spatial” birth control--lack of sexual contact--and “qualitative elasticity”-- which refers to interdiction via condoms. The latter reminds his associate that precautions such as his “inaccurate scientific illustrations” are necessary due to the danger of “conceptual non- congruence”--that is, of possessing opinions that conflict with the dominant ideology. Having established their code, they begin to communicate with one another (and Beckett with the reader) when the first speaker asserts that he anticipates the possibility of his partner’s response to “terminological stimuli”--coded phrases--that will implant “cerebral reactions” like a nucleolus inside a nucleus. They then proceed to discuss the “mode and sphere of activity,” or, in other words, the method of birth control and the sexual activities about which they intend to debate. The second speaker--who for convenience I will label the "inquisitor"--invites his fellow to outline the boundaries of the discussion when he states, “I propose at once the elemental limits.” His counterpart--the "respondent"--answers with the following illustration: “Abstract the Antrim Road, Carrickarede Island, and the B. & I. boat threading the eye of the Liffey on Saturday night.”

“And you will allow coincidence?”

“Absolute coincidence.”

“Mode, then.”

“Mode.” With this invitation to “abstract” the listed geographical features the respondent suggests a mental image of vaginal intercourse: the island is a small protrusion near Ballintoy on the extreme northeast coast of Ireland; the road follows the curved coast from this area to the Dublin inlet, through which the boat penetrates to enter the Liffey. The coincidence to which the speakers refer is the similarity between this description and female genitalia--clitoris, vulva, and

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vagina, respectively--through which the “boat” carries its germinal passengers. This notion that the “sphere of activity” to be discussed involves vaginal intercourse is reinforced by Beckett’s use of the phrase “elemental limits,” which refers to Steven Dedalus's pun on the words “elemental” and “genital” in the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In this passage Dedalus refers to the alleged sighting of “our very illustrious sister H. P. B.’s elemental” or the ghost of the Theosophist guru Madame Blavatsky, and mocks: “you naughtn’t to look, missus, so you naughtn’t when a lady’s showing off her elemental” (152). Following this exchange, the inquisitor presents a series of proposals in which he alludes to various “modes” of birth control and asks his associate to comment on the legitimacy of these practices. “I propose the uncompromising attitude as advocated by the Catholic Truth Society.”

“Though unfamiliar with the publications of that body, I understand that the bulk of their pronouncements is of a purely negative nature.”

“Maximal negation is minimal affirmation.”

“I have considered it expedient to reject their unexpressed clock-wisdom.” The Catholic Truth Society was founded in 1868 in order to evangelize and spread the Catholic faith. Their “uncompromising attitude” to which the speaker refers is a complete rejection of birth control in any form. The result of this stance, the other participant suggests, is the use by Catholics of the rhythm method--abstinence during ovulation--which here is labeled “unexpressed clock-wisdom.” This conventional proposal having been denounced, the inquisitor presents masturbation as an alternative. “I propose the sophisticated, amoral, and specifically bi-pedal mode, as depreciated by that organ.”

“We are not concerned with abstract concepts. I am afflicted with an extreme form of the disfaction complex. I extend my apprehensions to a variety of objects.”

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The “sophisticated, amoral” label refers to the Theosophical Society, some members of which were famous for their strict chastity, and specifically to the infamous “Leadbeater Affair” when a leader in the London branch of this organization wrote a letter to the thirteen year old son of a Chicago theosophist, in which he advised the boy to masterbate twice weekly “as a preventative against unchastity” (Mullin 88). The respondent in Beckett’s dialogue rejects this option as well, for he is preoccupied with “disfaction”--unmaking or the prevention of insemination--instead of with “abstract concepts” associated with autoeroticism (the "bi-pedal" or two-feet alone mode), which he views as separate from the issue of birth control. His comment that his concerns extend “to a variety of objects” reinforces the above reference to masturbation; it alludes to Madame Blavatsky’s use of such objects for self pleasure, specifically to her admission that “I could never have connection with any man because I am lacking something and the place is filled up with some crooked cucumber” (Neff 187-8). The inquisitor persists, however, and suggests that the spiritual aspects of theosophy would allow the individual to transcend the need for physical sexual gratification. “I propose the illusory compromise as practiced exclusively in the Gaeltacht.”

“Shall a crust-crumbling victim of tetanus express the eating of bread?”

“He shall express the desire.”

“Empirical investigation has nothing to do with the psychology of gesture.”

“You deny its modality?”

“It is an independent activity.” With this proposition the inquisitor connects Theosophy to the Irish conservative district--the Gaeltacht--and thus suggests that this is an issue particular to this region. The respondent argues that the “illusory compromise” is untenable because, like the hungry victim of tetanus, or "lock- jaw" he describes, one who is unable to participate in an activity cannot express the sensations connected with it. His opponent counters with the assertion that the expression of the desire for withheld sexual union provides more satisfaction than the act itself, and thus offers a suitable

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form of birth control. W. B. Yeats, a devotee of Theosophy and celebrant of Irish nationalism, celebrated the spiritual growth that the Theosophists believed resulted from this sexual denial in his 1903 poem “Baile and Aillinn.” Their love was never drowned in care Of this or that thing nor grew cold Because their bodies had grown old. Being forbid to marry on earth They blossomed to immortal birth. (359) In “Scylla and Charybdis” Joyce mocks the alleged spiritual benefits of this abstinence with Buck Mulligan’s parody of Yeats, in which he quips: “Being afraid to marry on earth / They masterbated for all they were worth” (176). Beckett does not mock these beliefs, but he dismisses this activity nonetheless when the respondent contends that this spiritual investigation has nothing to do with “the psychology of gesture,” or mode of birth control, but that it is an “independent activity.” The inquisitor, however, is unable to understand this adamant rejection of these various methods of dealing with the “mode and sphere” of “elemental limits.” The respondent contends that his friend is blind to the fact that any method of interdiction, whether by mode or sphere of activity, qualifies as birth control and should be viewed as equally acceptable or abominable. The inquisitor continues, “I hesitate to propose the quandru . . .”

“You should have done so before.”

“Do I touch you so?”

“I mean you are an untidy analyst.”

“Then I confess I cannot see the force of your reservation.”

“You admit its application in space?”

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“Yes.”

“But not in mode?”

“I cannot see it.”

“Can you not see that the most extreme and passionate form of any act whatsoever, more than actual participation, is an energetic, vehement, and self-conscious abstention?” Through these commentators, Beckett argues that the embargo on objects of contraception is hypocritical; that in comparison to the use of condoms, the regulation of one’s passions by means of “clock-wisdom,” the substitution of masturbation for copulation, or the search for spirituality through celibacy constitute “the most extreme and passionate” forms of birth control. In addition to the embargo itself, Beckett denounces duplicity and self-serving compromise. More importantly, however, this notion of abstention as vehement participation provides an important clue to the interpretation of "Three Dialogues," which ends with B’s abstention from supplying the promised explanation of what he believes van Velde really does. This work is one of Beckett’s earliest critical pieces, yet the dialogue form he uses provides him with a sophisticated amount of critical flexibility and anonymity; he is able to address issues that are sensitive politically and morally, and which would undoubtedly have been declared obscene by his audience.33 As drama “Che Sciagura” is amusing and suggestive, but from a critical perspective the work itself is, like "Three Dialogues," created by an “untidy analyst," that is, the text largely fails as criticism if one is not familiar with the issue at hand. Ruby Cohn observes, for example, that the text “is so opaquely learned that no one thought to censor it from a student newspaper” (Back to Beckett 11). Apparently the Editorial Subcommittee at Trinity appreciated the danger; they note that the dialogue “was extremely clever,” but observe with some relief that the text is “fortunately a trifle obscure for those who do not know their Joyce and their Voltaire” (T.C.D. 6 March 1930, my emphasis). Although the potential for state censure due to the issues discussed in "Three Dialogues" is extremely slight (particularly since the work is devoid of occasion), like Plato, Beckett and Duthuit must meet their own "crucial political and intellectual requirements" (Fortunoff 62). Specifically, the authors' face critical disapproval for, as Beckett puts it in "Che Sciagura,"

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conceptual "non-congruence" because of this dismissal of the modernist tradition in general, and of specific artists and movements. More importantly, in the work Beckett and Duthuit also struggle to avoid the duplicity and compromise Beckett denounces in "Che Sciagura"; they must confront the censure of their own consciences if they ignore the problems they observes in various theories of aesthetics. Beckett's comment that he "wrote up" the dialogues suggests that subversion is a primary goal. In her introduction to Disjecta, Ruby Cohn reflects on Beckett's remark to Martin Esslin "that he wrote the talks up rather than down," and asserts: "Like Brecht's Messingkauf Dialogues, those of Beckett are dramatic enough to perform" (14).34 The dialogues are performed occasionally, 35 but the wealth of reference used in the text makes “Three Dialogues” far too complex for aural consumption, and suggests that the work is to be studied carefully. In one of those serendipitous critical coincidences, Cohn's comparison of the dialogues of Beckett and Brecht in relation to Beckett's comment may intuitively suggest more than she intends, for in a short essay entitled "Writing the Truth, Five Difficulties,"36 Brecht writes: Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons. (133) In his discussion of the cunning necessary to spread truth effectively and without censure he suggests that one must write "up" or "down" to reach the selected audience. "It is indeed the case that the high literary level of a given statement can afford it protection," he writes. "Often, however, it also arouses suspicion. In such case it may be necessary to lower it deliberately" (143). The choice of the dialogue form for both "Che Sciagura" and "Three Dialogues" suggests that both dialogues are written "up" to reach the cognoscienti. Beckett's use of the dialogue form and coded phrases in "Che Sciagura" indicates that he understands both the necessity and use of such cunning to communicate to an audience. In her study of philosophical dialogue, Mary Margaret McCabe offers insight into this general phenomenon when she argues that Plato’s dialogic form inspires a measure of distrust in his audience because of the neatness of the arguments:

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Plato can write vivid and compelling accounts of the verbal engagements between Socrates (usually) and various interlocutors. And his brilliance may work, after all, to Plato’s disadvantage; for the success of the dialogue form threatens the success of his arguments. Sometimes Plato’s readers feel he must be cheating, just because he does it so well. (3) As a part of this aspect of her study, McCabe compares Plato’s formal brilliance to “the ‘clumping’ style of George Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous” (2). She intimates that Berkeley provokes less suspicion of deceit because his dialogues are less successful formally. One recalls Beckett's warning at the beginning of "Dante...Bruno. Vico..Joyce," that "the danger is in the neatness of identifications" (1). But assuming that McCabe’s ratio of formal brilliance to dialectic success is transferable, Beckett and Duthuit seem to capitalize on the clumpiness of these dialogues, and this work--a formally less successful permutation of the philosophical dialogue--merits therefore the highest degree of reader trust, which is essential to reader identification and the process of elenchus. Yet, although “Three Dialogues” is logically absurd and disconnected dialectically, the work is perhaps more enticing because of these inconsistencies. Members of the authors’ immediate circle may have understood the formal games being played in "Three Dialogues," but these subtle notions are lost to more recent critics. The critical history of the dialogues, for example, reveals both the surprising amount of attention the work has attracted, together with the narrowness of the trends that have developed surrounding this work, which facts testify to success of Beckett and Duthuit's subversive attempt. Without doubt, the high literary quality of "Three Dialogues" has attracted attention, but unfortunately, as the critical history suggests, it has not aroused enough suspicion.

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CHAPTER FIVE EXHIBITIONS . . . DIALOGUES. DU BOUCHET . . BECKETT

Estragon: I tell you we weren’t here yesterday. Another of your nightmares. Vladamir: And where were we yesterday evening according to you? Estragon: How would I know? In another compartment. There’s no lack of void. - Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“All is emptiness, alas--desire, dreams, action, Words! . . . Above, below, in the depths, on the shore, Silence and space, terrifying and enchanting. . . And my mind, ever haunted by vertigo, Is jealous of the blankness of the Void.” - Charles Baudelaire, The Abyss

The debate about expression in “Three Dialogues” occurs on several levels. In the surface discussion, B and D discuss the circumstances that prevent expression (i.e. the presence of “the void”), survey how the three painters in question (plus Matisse and Bonnard) endeavor to overcome the subject/object discontinuity, and outline Bram van Velde’s successful expression despite the impossibility of expression. As the title of this chapter suggests, the surface discussion takes place within the context of the journal issue itself, and correspondences between André du Bouchet’s “Three Exhibitions” and “Three Dialogues” underscore certain of these points. These connections notwithstanding, the dialogues lack detail about specific paintings or particular techniques, and thus, the discussion fails to articulate, as Leo Bersani observes, "what makes expression impossible” (305), or to explain how Bram van Velde overcomes this impossibility. Beckett and Duthuit address the former problem in a deeper level of discussion, where they catalogue (by means of allusion to texts outside the context of transition) and dismiss (through both juxtaposition of these allusions and ironic counterpoint with the surface discussion) the theories of various artists, philosophers, and mystics who claim to express the

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subject-object relation and navigate the void. The authors address the latter problem by means of a performative subtext in which B offers to explain van Velde's success, but then neglects to do so. This subtext undermines the surface examination because it suggests that the discussion of these artists is questionable and incomplete. But it also undermines the allusive level because it suggests that, in spite of the dismissal of numerous ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological arguments, a workable method of expression exists. Ultimately, this surface/subtext structure allows Beckett and Duthuit to escape the aporia inherent in expressing the impossibility of expression because B has expressed nothing--makes no claims to truth, sets up no arguments for refutation--and yet, with the performative subtext, the authors demonstrate a method by which one might overcome the impossibility of expression.

Three Exhibitions The surface argument begins with the correspondences between “Three Exhibitions” and “Three Dialogues,” which arrangement fits into the overall dialogic rhetorical system of Duthuit’s Transition. As is the case throughout the run of the journal, selections in this issue are arranged in thematic clusters, usually in pairs or groups of three. In this instance, André du Bouchet 's "Three Exhibitions: Masson - Tal Coat - Miró” precedes "Three Dialogues: Tal Coat - Masson - Bram van Velde," by Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, which is followed by "Some Sayings of Bram van Velde." Clearly, this arrangement is designed to encourage comparison, and a close reading reveals that Beckett and Duthuit’s essay is, in many ways, a pointed response to du Bouchet’s statements. André du Bouchet (1924-2001) is a burgeoning poet in 1949; the “Notes on Contributors” section in issue five of Transition states that Du Bouchet “has had poems and notes published in Les Temps modernes," and that he “has a book of poems in preparation” 37 (127). Du Bouchet is not a professional art critic, but an articulate connoisseur; his review of the collected works of the art critic Felix Feneon--entitled “Felix Feneon or The Mute Critic”-- appears along with his essay “Three Exhibitions,” and was translated by Beckett (Knowlson 38 639). Feneon, writes Du Bouchet, “pronounces no judgment, expresses no opinion, commits himself to no philosophy, no esthetic other than that relevant to the picture he describes,” yet he “makes his way in the void” with a “penetration of perception that enables Feneon to divulge the

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painter’s secret” (78-79). Du Bouchet's use of the "void" trope and his assertion that Feneon can navigate this discontinuity undoubtedly attracted Beckett's interest if not his indignation as he translated this document. For Du Bouchet contradicts himself when he states both that Feneon makes no claim to truth, and that the critic's superb perception allows him to navigate the "void" and divulge secrets. The allusions the Beckett and Duthuit make to “Three Exhibitions” help to define their discussion in relation both to artistic tradition and to the individual artists. In “Three Exhibitions,” for example, Du Bouchet credits Tal Coat with the ability to capture the object in time, and to transfer it to the viewer: In one moment hours are bestowed upon us [...]. Those long hours during which the painter watched the track of a fish in a pond, of a dog in a cornfield, dissolve into a vanishing point or disappear in an eddy. With a single leap he pounces on a movement, brings it back trembling with life and passes on its overflow to all those who desire it. (93) This passage suggests that Du Bouchet attributes to Tal Coat not only the capture, but the rejuvenation and universal communication of the object in a fixed moment. D echoes this assertion in the Tal Coat dialogue when he observes in the artist’s work: “the world a flux of movements partaking of living time, that of effort, creation, liberation, the painting, the painter. The fleeting instant of sensation given back, given forth, with context of the continuum it nourished” (97). Tal Coat’s perception, D notes, is both “global” and “disinterested”; although his capacity for perception is great, he merely represents without undue rhetoric. This statement corresponds with Du Bouchet’s claim that Tal Coat “invites us to a kind of vital communion”; that his painting, leads us, without making an effort to persuade, to a state of acute quietude, of lively restfulness, which tells of participation rather than of observation, by gradually strengthening us in our own material substance, in our opaqueness and transparence, in the way of flesh as well as memory, and the recrudescence of consciousness which gushes up in the presence of Tal Coat’s pictures fills us with a strange breath of freshness. (93) This notion of art that communicates universally and enlivens the viewer spiritually through communal experience is a vestige of Symbolism, which Duthuit discusses in detail in his article

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“Matisse and Byzantine Space” elsewhere in the journal issue. B rejects this idea of communal spiritual participation when he states that Tal Coat’s efforts are nothing more than a “thrusting towards a more adequate expression of natural experience” and a “gain in nature.” D reasserts the spiritual nature of the experience: “But that which this painter discovers, orders, transmits, is not in nature . . . are we not on quite a different plane?” To which B replies, “By nature I mean here, like the naivest realist, a composite of perceiver and perceived, not a datum, an experience.” He is willing to grant that the artist engages the viewer through realist representation, but he rejects the idea that Tal Coat communicates universally and communally, “to all those who desire it,” as well as the assertion that the experience results in an expansion of consciousness for the viewer. “All I wish to suggest,” B explains, “is that the tendency and the accomplishment of this painting are fundamentally those of previous painting, straining to enlarge the statement of a compromise” (97). This compromise involves an ignorance of or intentional blindness to the perceptive and expressive difficulties B observes in connection to artistic expression, a “pretending to be able” of which B is “weary” (98). B envisions these difficulties as a void that prevents perception or expression of both subject and object, with the result that the only honest expression, he asserts, is “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” (98). Beckett and Duthuit examine Masson more closely because this artist seems more aware of the above compromise and yet claims to have overcome the expressive difficulties created by the void. Masson is aware of this expressive disruption, D asserts, for “he speaks so often nowadays of painting the void, ‘in fear and trembling’” (98). Yet D argues that the artist has internalized the void--an "inner emptiness"--and that he uses expressive impossibility as an opportunity: His concern was at one time with the creation of a mythology; then with man, not simply in the universe, but in society; and now [...] ‘inner emptiness, the prime condition, according to Chinese esthetics, of the act of painting’ (98). Du Bouchet observes a similar evolution in Masson, whose art, “which seemed to be seeking its substance in mythology, must henceforward be counted among the signs which today point to the decline of mythologies” (89). He argues that Masson has passed through different periods of experimentation with expression, that he has abandoned the “dim and transparent canvases” of

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his youth, as well as a more recent period of “strenuous opacity,” and has arrived at the “exciting turn of a new metamorphosis.” No more barriers. Masson, with his customary velocity, catches reflexions like whip- lashes without allowing the prejudice of the imaginary to intervene and appropriate them. At the same time he draws nearer to the elemental so as to experience its flavour, he withdraws from it more and more in order to situate it, so that the field of discord is widened to infinity [. . .]. Massacres have been transformed into entertainments. The whole affair being merely about cicadas or the mistral, the artist, fully occupied in unraveling knots and determined to see things clearly, is no longer in any danger of getting lost. And here we have disorder recomposing itself. (89-90) Du Bouchet suggests that Masson can perceive without obstruction and disseminate his perceptions to infinity through manipulation of the “field of discord.” Du Bouchet associates this expression with a light in Masson’s painting “that is always an argument,” with “solar points, signs of incandescence,” which “mark the moments when fury and meditation knit” (90). He argues that Masson has exploited the interference of the void to the point that these arguments are communicated with the effulgent exactness of the symbolist, as articulated in Baudelaire’s poem Correspondences: “This solar splendor may be associated with the virulence of certain odours, flavours and sounds, even on a rainy day, or--why not?--with certain ideas that rise in the mind” (91). In “Three Dialogues,” D acknowledges Masson’s goal, that “without renouncing the objects, loathsome or delicious, that are our daily bread and wine and poison, he seeks to break through their partitions to that continuity of being which is absent from the experience of ordinary living,” but although he admits that Masson is capable of “great technical variety,” D seems less sure of the artist’s accomplishment (99). B dismisses Du Bouchet's claims about the value of Masson's "incandescent" expression when he argues that the history of painting is nothing more than "a kind of tropism towards a light as to the nature of which the best opinions continue to vary" (103). He rejects utterly Masson’s ability to express at this level, and denounces the accomplishments of Tal Coat and Masson as mere imitation: “With such preoccupations it seems impossible that he should ever do anything different from that which the best, including himself, have done already [. . .]. So forgive me if I relapse, as when we spoke of the so different Tal Coat, into my dream of an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence and too proud for the farce of giving and receiving” (100).

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Despite the dialectic format of the journal, which would, in practice, set up a one-to-one comparison between texts, Miró escapes censure when, for several important reasons, the authors examine Bram van Velde instead. First, Beckett and van Velde were friends, Beckett enjoyed the painter's work, and he wished to support van Velde's career. In addition, van Velde seems preoccupied with the same expressive problems Beckett and Duthuit address in the dialogues. Deidre Bair argues that Beckett found in Bram's painting "a visual counterpart for the futility of expression he encountered in his own writing" (394). In similar fashion, Lois Oppenheim contends that Beckett found an "endorsement of his own anaesthetic purpose" in van Velde's art, and she records that Beckett lamented to Duthuit that he tends "irresistibly to bring Bram's case back to my own." (Painted 86). Although "Three Dialogues” was crafted in response to “Three Exhibitions,” and the roster of painters had been selected in advance, many of the ideas about expression offered by Du Bouchet in "Three Exhibitions" had been examined and dismissed by Beckett and Duthuit in earlier criticism. Du Bouchet credits Tal Coat and Masson, for example, with having surpassed impediments to expression similar to those Beckett rejected in his earlier articles on the van Veldes. This history suggests that, in addition to the above reasons, Beckett and Duthuit replace Miró with van Velde because Beckett had used van Velde to address similar issues in previous criticism, and his inclusion allows Beckett to continue this discussion. In addition, Beckett and Duthuit include van Velde in order to follow the convention of the journal and connect rhetorically with the artist's "Sayings." On the surface, this one-page list of van Velde's comments reflects the general ideas discussed in "Three Dialogues." The artist laments, for example: "I have nothing in my pockets, nothing in my hands. Where shall I find what I need?"; "Painting is man face to face with his debacle"; and "I do not know what I do. What I put into a picture is not the result of any act of will. I do not know myself what it means" (104). As a whole, however, these statements are not only inconsistent internally, but they also seem contrary the issues addressed in the dialogues. Van Velde states, for instance: "Everyone lives on idealism, even the rich. Otherwise they would have been destroyed long ago (like rats)"; "My work is a leap towards life, towards the energy that makes life possible"; and most significantly, "The world is a mystery that my painting helps me to penetrate. What I feel is too strange, too violent, for me to capture it in word or thought. It demands to appear and I paint" (104). These statements suggest that van Velde experiences an idealism and inspiration that are denied in the dialogues, that he has both something to express and something with which to

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express. In contrast to the practice of juxtaposition evident in Transition, Beckett and Duthuit make no direct reference to these assertions, and more importantly, they do not account for van Velde's claims to "penetrate," be inspired by, and ultimately to represent the objects that surround him. This contextual comparison reveals these inconsistencies and omissions, which suggest that B's evaluation of van Velde's expression is ironic.39 When discussing Bram van Velde, for example, B proposes to outline “what I am pleased to fancy he is, fancy he does, and then that it is more than likely the he is and does quite otherwise” (102). His supposition consists of the admission that “van Velde is the first to desist from this estheticised automatism, the first to submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation, in the absence of terms, or if you like, in the presence of unavailable terms, the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and to shrink from it desertion” (103). Like the artists whose "great personal courage" Beckett praises in "Recent Irish Poetry," van Velde has the courage necessary to express in the face of severe opposition. But Beckett and Duthuit do not "fancy" that the artist is able to paint the void, or as Beckett claimed in previous criticism, that van Velde can paint either the functions of time and space that define the void, or details of how the void prevents expression. In the dialogues B states that, faced with the complete lack of perception--which he articulates as being “in the presence of unavailable terms”--the artist expresses the impossibility of expression, he makes “this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation” (103). As in Beckett's earlier essays this argument collapses into aporia, but unlike his earlier discussions this can, perhaps, be excused since the argument is, after all, only B’s fancy. At the end of the dialogue D presses B for the second, more authentic, opinion about what van Velde really does and receives nothing. D - Are you not forgetting something? I understood your number was to have two parts. The first was to consist in your giving what you --er--thought. This I am prepared to believe you have done. The second . . .

B - Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken. (103) With this final observation B undermines his earlier assertions; on the surface he suggests that he has been defeated or at least was pushed into a logical stalemate. But the author’s argument

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about expression has already occurred. Unlike Beckett's attempts to express the dimensions and effects of the void in his previous articles on the van Veldes, the authors choose to leave this observation unsaid in the surface text, to dismiss through allusion those who claim to navigate the void, and to express indirectly in the performative subtext. This strategy--the argument negatively defined--allows Beckett and Duthuit to articulate the conditions of the void and refute various arguments for expressive possibility, yet at the same time to escape the contradiction that occurs when one tries to express the impossibility of expression.

References/Refutations Although the surface argument is general and marked by aesthetic jargon, it has attracted most of the critical attention, while all but the most obvious allusions have been neglected. This may be due, in part, because in this second, allusive level of discussion, where Beckett and Duthuit outline the circumstances that prevent expression with a specificity lacking in the surface discussion, the text is as allusive as the works of Eliot or Joyce, but far more elusive, as no footnotes or schema are provided. These references exemplify the "course of contradiction and the abandonment of various possible ways of expressing” that Rupert Wood identifies in Beckett's discursive and prose works (2). The initial references, for instance, reject several historical approaches to perception and expression, or as the authors describe it in the dialogues, traditional preoccupation with the “possession” of the object. The dialogue on Tal Coat, for example, begins with B’s criticism of this artist, who attempts to represent the “total object, complete with missing parts, instead of partial object” (97). D counters that Tal Coat makes a departure from the historical obsession with the object; that Tal Coat paints, “More. The tyranny of the discreet overthrown.” This phrase suggests that D believes Tal Coat has overcome an oppressive, conservative sensibility; the artistic equivalent, perhaps, of Alexis de Toqueville's political "tyranny of the majority." John D. Marshall associates the phrase "tyranny of the discreet" with the devotion to a system that artificially harmonizes evidence from antiquity with one’s ideals, specifically with the “anti-human and escapist effects of antiquarianism, which is thereby seen as an educational blight, one that kills curiosity as it romanticizes the past” (2). In her introduction to Disjecta, Ruby Cohn argues that Beckett labels “Tal Coat (and incidentally, Matisse) despite prodigious painterly talent [. . .] an antiquarian in his subject-object relation” (15). Beckett and Duthuit's use of this phrase suggests that, like the “antiquarians” Beckett

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dismissed in “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), and "Les deux besoins" (1938), B believes Tal Coat to be an escapist who is “not aware of the rupture” between subject and object; that he cheats when he claims to express the relation between them. In another of these initial references, B argues that Tal Coat is “thrusting towards a more adequate expression of natural experience, as revealed to the vigilant coenaesthesia” (97). This term (alternately spelled cenesthesia) is a psychological term that refers to “total body consciousness,” or an “awareness of bodily existence through localized sensations whose aggregate expression is any degree of pleasure or pain” (Readers 262). James Acheson has connected Beckett's use of this phrase with Jung’s theory of human consciousness (Artistic 96). At the most basic level, however, the term refers to perception through accumulated sense-data, and in this manner the term suggests another psychological experience-- “synesthesia”--the simultaneous perception of senses referred to in Charles Baudelaire’s poem Correspondences, wherein “Nature is a temple whose living colonnades/ Breathe forth a mystic speech in fitful sighs” and “All scents and sounds and colors meet as one” (Norton 1361). Du Bouchet's reference to this poem in the above passage about Masson reinforces for Beckett and Duthuit what might otherwise be a tenuous connection between these two similar, yet distinct psychological ideas. Whether the above reference is to Jung, Du Bouchet, or Baudelaire (or as is likely, to all concurrently), Beckett and Duthuit's use of the term suggests that Tal Coat follows tradition and elides the rupture in perception they observe in the subject-object relation. D argues, for example, that B's interpretation of Tal Coat is unfounded, that the artist has isolated himself from the dogmatism of traditional perception and expression, that “the global perception of Tal Coat is disinterested, committed neither to truth nor to beauty, twin tyrannies of nature” (97). This passage is, of course, a reference to “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, wherein the poet writes: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need know” (Norton 632). D’s designation of these two objects as tyrannical in the dialogues suggests that he believes Tal Coat has escaped the antiquarian, Romantic tradition which compels the artist to seek and express them, and that the artist rejects the notion that objects such as Keat's urn can evoke truth and beauty. Yet B compares Tal Coat’s disinterested perception to an antiquarian classicism against which the Romantics react, to “Franciscan orgies” such as the clustered figures in Giotto’s frescoes of St. Francis at Assisi (which reveal some of the earliest experiments with atmospheric perspective, but which lack the Romantic emotionalism identified

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here with an "orgy"), as well as to the perception of other “Italian painters” who “surveyed the world with the eyes of building-contractors.” B compares Tal Coat with those artists who are obsessed with apprehending the world and “improving the result with a lick of Euclidian geometry” (97-98). Beckett elaborates this concept further in a letter to Duthuit dated 9 June 1949: From this perspective, the Italians, Matisse, Tal Coat and tutti quanti are in the same sack, of superior fiber, along side [sic] those who, having, want more, and being able to, still more. More what? Neither beauty nor truth, alright, if you wish, it isn't so clear, these are catchall concepts, but more of the self-the rest relation which, in other times, expressed itself in terms of beauty and truth, but which now seeks other respondents, and does not find them, despite deliberate airs of capharnaum, void and periclitation" (Oppenhiem, Painted, 88). These comments make clear that Beckett believes Tal Coat's methods to be far more conventional than they might appear at first. More importantly, however, although the above references are not particularly original or profound, they are fairly obvious clues, which like the figurative language used at the beginning of "Che Sciagura," initiate the reader into the heavily referential discussion that follows. This second allusion works on a deeper, more specific level, however, for as Chris Ackerley has observed, coenaesthesia is just one of several terms and ideas Beckett borrowed from Max Nordau's Degeneration (1895), which Beckett read in the 1930s. Ackerley notes that the term appears in Beckett's "Love and Lethe," "Draff," Dream of Fair to Middlin Women, and Molloy, and, in addition, that Beckett defined the term for himself in the Dream notebook: "General sensibility. Dimly perceived cellular experience. Ego not controlling cerebral consciousness" (96).40 This definition suggests that, for Beckett, coenaesthesia provides only limited understanding of a divided self, that the artist cannot control this process, and that the experience required to link subject and object is, for the artist, passively acquired, generally sensed, and dimly perceived. More importantly, as Ackerley argues, Beckett incorporates into his aesthetics Nordau's notion of "coenaesthesia" as a site for conflict between the subject and object, or in Nordau's terms: between the I and the Not-I. Nordau contends, for example, that when a mind experiences coenaesthesia it "acquires a just idea of his relations to other men and to Nature" (252). Beckett

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and Duthuit refer to this passage in "Three Dialogues" when B dismisses the ostensibly revolutionary work of Tal-Coat as mere "thrusting toward a more adequate expression of natural experience, as revealed to the vigilant coenaesthesia (97; emphasis added). They thus dismiss coenaesthesia, which functions for Nordau as the relation between subject and object--between mind and body--for with coenaethesis, he asserts, "the organic dimly-conscious 'I,' rises into the clear consciousness of the 'Ego,' by excitations of the second order, reaching the brain from the nerves and muscles" (249). In Nordau's system, if one cannot attain this clear consciousness, if one "scarcely appreciates or even perceives the external world and is only occupied with the organic processes of his own body," then one becomes mentally ill and degenerate (254). Ackerley's assertion that coenaesthesis is "a key term in defining Beckett's aesthetic of impotence and failure" (6) applies to the dialogues as well, for B and D demonstrate the ineffectiveness of coenaesthesia when, at the end of the text, B struggles to articulate a feasible subject/object relation, claims that his "inability to do so" places him in "what is called an unenviable situation, familiar to psychiatrists" (103), and exhibits the mental instability Nordau describes. While individual references like the one discussed above are vital to understanding the complex discussion Beckett and Duthuit develop in "Three Dialogues," these references are organized around two terms that various individuals have used to address the subject/object relation: occasion and possession. When Beckett and Duthuit write of the artist’s occasion in "Three Dialogues" they refer both to the artist's circumstance, including the context of the art work and the artist's aesthetic experience--"the relation between the artist and his occasion" (102)--and to the phenomenal facilitation of perception and expression by some outside force: the unconscious, the deity, etc. Possession has two meanings in the text as well: first, possession as acquisition, as the artist's ability to perceive and express both subject and object--the classical notion of possession as “a more adequate expression of natural experience”; second, the romantic notion of possession in a spiritual sense, as unity of subject and object brought on by inspiration, by surrender to a metaphysical entity or psychological force--possession as “a composite of perceiver and perceived, not a datum, but an experience” (97). As used in the text, the secondary meanings of each of these terms are nearly cognate, which suggests that Beckett and Duthuit see both terms as, at least in part, dependent upon "the same reaching towards succour from without" (99).

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Beckett and Berkeley: "Occasion" Beckett and Duthuit borrow the notion of occasion as facilitation of perception/expression from the Occasionalists in general, but historical, formal, and conceptual evidence suggests that their use of the term alludes to Bishop George Berkeley's idealism in particular. In addition to the similarity of title between “Three Dialogues,” and Berkeley's "Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous," for example, the authors limit themselves to two characters who engage in a private discussion. Berkeley’s dialogues take place in a garden; Philonous (“lover of mind”) argues the immaterialist view, and Hylas (“material”) plays the role of the skeptical learner. We are not informed about the site of Beckett and Duthuit's dialogues, although as Ruby Cohn observes, “the scene is readily imaginable--street, cafe, or gallery where two art critics, B and D, air their differences” ("Forward" 14). Yet although many Beckett scholars assume that B and D represent Beckett and Duthuit (as indeed we are lead to believe by the title), the comparison to Berkeley suggests that the initials B and D may signify opposing forces similar to the names Philonous and Hylas. One of the prominent issues in the dialogues, for instance, is the degree to which one is in bondage to orphic inspiration or to which one can dominate the medium of expression. B and D signify this bondage/domination opposition; the miniscule letters not only mirror one another visually (i.e. b:d), and the characters they identify are opposed in their views, but D dominates the dialogue. He daunts his opponent repeatedly with questions and assertions that celebrate the artistic tradition rejected by B, which brings the weight of this tradition to bear against B’s developing theory and prevents the latter from articulating his ideas. This specific knowledge of Berkeley undoubtedly comes from Beckett. Both Beckett and Berkeley studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and as Norma Kroll points out, Beckett’s tutor at Trinity was A. A. Luce, the premier scholar and editor of Berkeley’s works (532). In addition, Frederick N. Smith notes that Beckett was responsible for Berkeley’s “Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain” as a part of his entrance examinations for college, that copies of a number of Berkeley’s works were found in Beckett’s library upon his death (including Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous), and that in 1932 letter to Thomas MacGreevy Beckett admits to reading Berkeley’s Commonplace Book (332).

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Critics disagree, however, about the importance of the numerous references to Berkeley that appear in Beckett's work. John Fletcher argues, for example, that Beckett often uses Presocratic philosophy for a purpose foreign to the content of the theory: Beckett, of course, tends to parody the thoughts of these and other philosophers, or at least to twist them to suit his own artistic purposes. He would naturally not satisfy an examiner; more often than not he is content with a quite superficial acquaintance and is more interested in anecdote and legend than in fact. (“Philosophers” 45) P. J. Murphy offers a similar caution, and identifies Beckett’s use of Berkeley in particular as insubstantial and indirect, as "essentially for ironic counterpoint or structural convenience” (“Philosophers” 239). References to Berkeley in Murphy, for example, such as Neary’s comment, “immaterialise or bust,” which, as Fletcher observes, refers to Berkeley's idealism, and Murphy's desire to avoid becoming involved in "the idealist tar,” which alludes to Berkeley’s interest in the supposed medicinal properties of tar water (“Philosophers” 55), seem to make light of Berkeley's ideas and add little to the fundamental themes developed in the novel. In contrast, Smith contends that Beckett borrows Berkeley’s forms for other texts, and that “through the manipulation of form,” he addresses "many of Berkeley’s most pressing philosophical concerns” (331). Smith acknowledges allusions to Berkeley in Godot, Dream of Fair to Middlin Women, and Murphy, and adds that in the last Beckett “seems to burlesque passages from Berkeley’s Three Dialogues” (332). In addition, Smith argues that Beckett uses Berkeley’s Philosophical Commentaries (1707) and Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water (1744) as “formal models for the personal, tentative, philosophical fiction of his first trilogy and How It Is” (331). He contends that the form not only links passages in these works to Berkeley, but that this link provides the reader with additional insight into the struggle of these characters to understand themselves and their world. Ultimately, Smith proposes that Beckett has updated Berkeley’s philosophy for the contemporary era, and that by so doing, “Beckett demonstrates the desperation of an existence, tentative and fleeting, that is so dependent upon perception” (334). Norma Kroll argues that Beckett uses Berkeley’s immaterialism directly and genuinely in Waiting for Godot, and moreover, that his theory informs the thematic structure of the play: Beckett builds on Berkeley’s belief that reality consists wholly of images conceived by God and perceived by humans, but inverts the philosopher’s trust in God’s unwavering

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regard for his creation. Rather, Beckett treats Godot, whom the characters invoke interchangeably with God, and who appears to rule their destiny, as an unseen cosmic observer who has withdrawn his mind’s eye from the human predicament. (530) Kroll argues that this inversion is manifest by the inconsistencies of perception experienced by Vladamir and Estragon, including their account of the apparent irregularities of the tree that inexplicably bears leaves overnight and Estragon’s boots which suddenly seem foreign to their owner. By means of these episodes, she contends, Beckett emphasizes “that whatever does exist does so only while being perceived and that such perceiving is a creative human activity” (537). When the characters notice the difference in the tree, she writes, their mental images still differ, and for another moment, they see a different tree. Vladamir measures his memory of the tree against its current appearance and notes that ‘yesterday evening it was all black and bare. And now its covered with leaves.’ He perceives either a different tree in the same place or the same tree displaced in time. In either case, the gaps in his perception of the world foreground its intermittency. (537) Kroll argues that the characters “cannot bear such a disjunction,” which represents, in her reading of Beckett through Berkeley, not only a disconnection from God as the source of perception, but a malicious betrayal of trust by the deity. Thus the characters try to “paper over this discontinuity” by doubting their own observations, which is a difficult task in the theatre where observations are shared by an audience full of witnesses. Yet Kroll argues that Beckett is merely exploiting an inconsistency that Berkeley recognized in his own theory: “Berkeley knew that the internal logic of his system calls for the repeated alternation of existence and nonexistence and that we cannot simply assume ‘that the Author of Nature always operates uniformly’ because ‘we cannot evidently know’” (535). Beckett also uses Berkeley in a genuine and direct manner in Film, when he begins the notes for the screenplay with the Berkeleyian statement from Principles of Human Knowledge: “Esse est percipi.” Initially, this inclusion suggests a connection between film and text, yet Beckett seems to undermine the importance of this reference later in the outline: All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being. Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception. No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience. (Collected Shorter Plays 163)

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This self-effacing passage suggests that Beckett uses Berkeley’s dictum for formal convenience more than for the substance of the philosopher’s arguments. S. E. Gontarski suggests this possibility when he observes that, Beckett’s major creative problems here were to develop and to shape visual images not in order to embrace Berkeley’s idealism but rather to explore the essential human consequences that followed from such a philosophical proposition [. . .] Beckett’s art is often more concerned with formal relationships than with something we might call message or even meaning. (Intent 105-6) Other critics, however, are more suspicious of Beckett’s dismissal of his own reference to Principles of Human Knowledge. In her article “Film: A Dialogue Between Beckett and Berkeley,” Sylvie Debevec Henning argues that the project is “an attempt to work through the logic of Berkeley’s main thesis,” and moreover, that “Beckett is taking Berkeley seriously in Film in order to point up a weak spot in his generally fascinating work” (89). James Acheson rejects this position in his study, Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice. He agrees that Beckett’s interest in Berkeley is important to an interpretation of Film, but he finds Henning’s assertion that the project is a serious dialogue with Berkeley “less than convincing” (166). Acheson reiterates Beckett’s apparent dismissal of the phrase lifted from Berkeley, and stresses, “if Beckett truly wanted to dispute Berkeley’s views, it seems odd, too, that he chose to do so in a silent film instead of in an essay or a series of dialogues like his three dialogues with Georges Duthuit” (166). Acheson, along with most critics, assumes that Beckett’s assertion at the beginning of the film script that “no truth attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience” applies to Film alone (or at all). Yet is it Beckett himself, or Berkeley, who, Beckett argues, hesitates to attach truth to “esse est percipi” and considers the idea a convenience? Another possible reading suggests that Beckett believes Berkeley himself recognizes and yet downplays this inconsistency in the interest of articulating his philosophy. Notably, Beckett leaves off a portion of Berkeley’s motto, which reads in full: “esse est percipi aut percipere” (to be is to be perceived and to perceive). This truncation suggests that Beckett is engaging Berkeley's thesis directly, and that the above dismissal may, in fact, be aimed at the originator of the phrase instead of at Film.41 More importantly, Beckett's use of Berkeley in Godot and Film provides insight into how he and Duthuit use the philosopher in "Three Dialogues."

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Two Dialogues The connection between Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous and “Three Dialogues” is more than nominal, for, Acheson's dismissal notwithstanding, Beckett engages Berkeley in "Three Dialogues." In what is arguably the most significant allusion in the text, he and Duthuit borrow both form and phrase from Berkeley, use these connections to highlight inconsistencies in Berkeley's theories, and ultimately, use Berkeley's ideas to illustrate why they feel expression is impossible. Their second dialogue, for example, begins with B’s assertion that the interlocutors are “in search of the difficulty rather than in its clutch” (98). The difficulty he discusses--the struggle to express--is compounded by the complacency of the art community, which seems preoccupied with the occasion of artistic expression. “The analysis of the relation between the artist and his occasion, a relation always regarded as indispensable, does not seem to have been very productive either,” B laments, “the reason being perhaps that it lost its way in disquisitions on the nature of occasion” (102). B’s frustrated comment points directly to a passage from Berkeley’s Three Dialogues, where Philonous celebrates the efficacy of immaterialism: “What difficulties, I say, what endless disquisitions concerning these and innumerable other like points, do we escape by supposing only spirits and ideas?” (139). By using the word disquisition, Beckett and Duthuit link these texts and suggest that occasion is at the core of this comparison. When Berkeley uses the latter term he refers to the manifestation in the mind of the result of an expression of will, such as when God takes the event of a person willing to walk as the occasion to create the perception of movement in this person’s mind. These terms link the two works because the dialogues of both Berkeley and Beckett/Duthuit deal with the issue of occasion, and both texts are more refined forms of earlier disquisitions on this subject. Charles Dancy argues, for example, that A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, published three years previous to his dialogues, “did not have the desired effect,” and that Berkeley thus “tried recasting things in dialogue form” (5). Berkeley accomplished this task with the hope of making his arguments more accessible and more rhetorically powerful, but his argument also evolves between these works and is refined further by this recasting process. Rupert Wood asserts that a similar refinement takes place in Beckett's aesthetics between “Peintres de l’empêchement” and "Three Dialogues." At the conclusion of the former, he writes, Beckett

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suggests that there are now three routes open to art: to return to an old and discredited naivety and to ignore the subject-object problematic; to continue to struggle with the old subject-object relation; or the van Veldes's way, which admits defeat but finds a new object in the conditions of unrepresentability. In this respect, something is salvaged from the old subject-object crisis, and so the paintings of Geer and Bram van Velde might be described as successes. The description of total capitulation and its conditions is left until Three dialogues with Georges Duthuit. (11-12) By connecting "Three Dialogues" to Berkeley’s work, Beckett and Duthuit suggest that they and Berkeley have struggled with the same issues, and as discussed in chapter two, that Beckett's and Duthuit's earlier disquisitions did not have the desired effect, that Beckett in particular lost his way on the search for the relation between artist and occasion. In addition, each of the "Dialogues" explores perception and expression, and the role of inspiration in these processes. Yet Berkeley dwells on perception and maintains a theoretical distance from his subject, while Beckett and Duthuit are preoccupied with expression and confronted by the immediate problems of praxis. This difference in focus illustrates the problems Beckett and Duthuit observe in Berkeley. In Principles of Human Knowledge Berkeley explains the relationship between perception and expression: “A spirit is one simple, undivided, active being: as it perceives ideas it is called the understanding, and as it produces or otherwise operates about them, it is called the will” (112). He separates perception into two types: knowledge of self and knowledge of external objects. The first type of knowledge is gained through a process he calls reflexion: Philonous - [. . .] I do nevertheless know, that I who am a spirit or thinking substance, exist as certainly, as I know my ideas exist. Farther, I know what I mean by the terms I and myself; and I know this immediately, or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a colour, or a sound. The mind, spirit or soul, is that indivisible unextended thing, which thinks, acts, and perceives. I say indivisible, because unextended; and unextended, because extended, figured, moveable things, are ideas; and that which preserves ideas, which thinks and wills, is plainly of itself no idea, nor like an idea. Ideas are things inactive, and perceived: and spirits a sort of being altogether different from them. (Dialogues 114-115)

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In this system, the subject self--or spirit in Berkeley's terms--is separate from sense data because it possesses the ability to perceive; one can, Berkeley argues, understand one’s own identity without the use of external media. All knowledge of things external, however, which he labels “ideas,” comes from sensible qualities or “modes” of sense data. Berkeley illustrates this concept with a discussion of visual art: Philonous - Tell me, Hylas, when you behold the picture of Julius Caesar, do you see with your eyes any more than some colours and figures with a certain symmetry and composition of the whole?

Hylas - Nothing else.

Philonous - And would not a man, who had never known anything of Julius Caesar, see as much?

Hylas - He would . . .

Philonous - Whence comes it then that your thoughts are directed to the Roman Emperor, and his are not? This cannot proceed from the sensations or ideas of sense by you then perceived; since you acknowledge you have no advantage over him in that respect. It should seem therefore to proceed from reason and memory: should it not?

Hylas - It should.

Philonous - Consequently it will follow from that instance, that anything is perceived by sense which is not immediately perceived. Though I grant we may in one acceptation be said to perceive sensible things mediately by sense: that is, when from a frequently perceived connexion, the immediate perception of ideas by one sense suggests to the mind another perhaps belonging to another sense, which are wont to be connected with them. For instance, when I hear a coach drive along the streets, immediately I perceive only the sound; but from the experience I have had that such a sound is connected with a

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coach, I am said to hear the coach. It is nevertheless evident, that in truth and strictness, nothing can be heard but sound. (89-90) For Berkeley, perception of ideas is distinctly separate from interpretation of these ideas, for interpretation of sense data depends on reason and memory. Thus sense data and the knowledge derived from these data are not connected in an a priori fashion, as Hylas is forced to admit: I tell you once and for all, that by sensible things I mean those only which are perceived by sense, and that in truth the senses perceive nothing which they do not perceive immediately: for they make no inferences. The deducing therefore of causes or occasions from effects and appearances, which alone are perceived by sense, entirely relates to reason. (62) In this passage Berkeley exposes a flaw when he intimates that the terms cause and occasion are synonymous, for he suggests that using reason, humans construct causes to explain our observations instead of the cause (deity) creating the perception. But memory fails, and reason can function only using available information, which may be incomplete or deceptive. Berkeley acknowledges that the above disconnection leaves room for misinterpretation and relative perception, as he illustrates with the following example: Hylas - What say you to this? Since, according to you, men judge of the reality of things by their senses, how can a man be mistaken in thinking the moon a plain lucid surface, about a foot in diameter; or a square tower, seen at a distance, round; or an oar, with one end in the water, crooked?

Philonous - He is not mistaken with regard to the ideas he actually perceives; but in the inferences he makes from his present perceptions. Thus in the case of the oar, what he immediately perceives by sight is certainly crooked; and so far he is in the right. But if he thence conclude, that upon taking the oar out of the water he shall perceive the same crookedness; or that it would affect his touch, as crooked things are wont to do: in that he is mistaken. (102-121) Interpretation of sense-data thus relies upon the reason of the perceiver, which can result in different opinions based upon the same observations. Despite his recognition of the potential for misinterpretation of sense qualities, however, Berkeley holds strictly to his assertion that no such errors are possible in the process of reflexion.

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And, moreover, he argues that through this same process one can know God and other perceiving beings. For all the notion I have of God, is obtained by reflecting on my own soul heightening its powers, and removing its imperfections. I have therefore, though not an inactive idea, yet in my self some sort of an active thinking image of the Deity. And though I perceive Him not by sense, yet I have a notion of Him, or know him by reflexion and reasoning. My own mind and my own ideas I have an immediate knowledge of; and by the help of these, do mediately apprehend the possibility of the existence of other spirits and ideas. (Dialogues 115) This knowledge of deity is a necessary element in Berkeley’s system, because the act of perception and expression is only possible through a dialogue with God, that is, through the process of occasion. Berkeley speculates that this perceptive dialogue is constant, that there are certain ideas in the mind of God, “which are so many marks or notes that direct him how to produce sensations in our minds, in a constant and regular method: much after the same manner as a musician is directed by the notes of music to produce that harmonious train and composition of sound, which is called a tune” (Principles 128). Thus the continuity of the constant flow of images passively perceived and actions willed by humans must by necessity pass through the mind of God as a part of occasion. In “Three Dialogues” Beckett and Duthuit contend with Berkeley about the possibility of perception and expression. They begin with the problem of self-knowledge, which they address in one of the initial exchanges of the dialogue: D. - [. . .] The world a flux of movements partaking of living time, that of effort, creation, liberation, the painting, the painter. The fleeting instant of sensation given back, given forth, with context of the continuum it nourished.

B. - In any case a thrusting towards a more adequate expression of natural experience, as revealed to the vigilant coenesthesia. (98) The authors' appear to agree with Berkeley; these comments suggest that the above list of elements can be reduced to the “sensations” by which one is aware of their qualities, and also that an understanding of the natural world--of external objects--is related somehow to the internal awareness of bodily existence or coenesthesia. Yet in psychology, the awareness that

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comes from coenesthesia is specifically linked to bodily sensations, which is contrary to Berkeley’s notion of immediate self-knowledge through unmediated reflexion. This passage thus points out a contradiction Beckett and Duthuit observe in Berkeley--and which Henning identifies as the inconsistency Beckett exploits in Film--for they are suspicious of the process of reflexion. The focal point of this disagreement is Berkeley’s description of the process of occasion as it relates to reflexion. Beckett and Duthuit's comments in the text may be inspired once again by Du Bouchet, who contends that Masson "with his customary velocity, catches reflexions like whip-lashes without allowing the prejudice of the imaginary to intervene and appropriate them" (89). Here Du Bouchet suggests that Masson can perceive without interference from the imaginary, that his reflexion of the object is as immediate as the self-knowledge Berkeley espouses. The argument developed in “Three Dialogues” suggests that such apprehension is impossible, that all perception and expression require a medium, and that Berkeley’s assertion that one can know the self (as well as other perceiving beings and God) through reflexion is arbitrary and unstable. In the dialogues, Beckett and Duthuit suggest that the rules of perception must be universal, that one cannot perceive the self any more effectively than the object, that the artist is “short, short of the world, short of self” (102). The artist is short of both subject and object because occasion--perception of the object--requires outside assistance which may be unavailable, and is, even with such assistance, still fallible because of human misinterpretation, and reflexion--perception of self--relies upon an untenable a priori knowledge that Berkeley maintains is somehow unaffected by reason or memory. As a consequence, B argues, “It is obvious that for the artist obsessed with his expressive vocation, anything and everything is doomed to become occasion, including, as is apparently to some extent the case with Masson, the pursuit of occasion” (102). B's connection of this lack to the artist's obsession with occasion suggests that Berkeley’s system is inconsistent because Berkeley elides the notion that occasion is required for all perception and expression--including perception of self, objects, beings, and deity. In addition, Beckett and Duthuit suggest that Berkeley's occasion relies upon stability of identity, which the authors find presumptuous:

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B. - But if the occasion appears as an unstable term of relation, the artist, who is the other term, is hardly less so, thanks to his warren of modes and attitudes. The objections to this dualist view of the creative process are unconvincing. (102-3) In this passage B argues that the sources of instability are the modes (or qualities of sense data as Berkeley uses this term) by which the artist attempts to know the self, and the attitudes (or reason) that affect interpretation of this data. Since, in Berkeley’s philosophy, reason and sense data are not linked, two individuals will interpret data differently based upon relative conditions. Beckett's Film illustrates both this division of self and relativity of interpretation. The protagonist of the work, "O" (object) seeks to escape being perceived, but is pursued by "E" (eye) who is his mirror image--another portion of his fragmented self.42 O covers windows, expels pets, destroys photographs, and flees the camera. He eventually tries to eliminate his own perception as well by covering his face with his hands, but he is ultimately both perceived by and forced to perceive E as the two confront each other in the final scene. These mirror-image characters act out the process of reflexion, but the self-knowledge "O" experiences is bewilderment and terror. In similar performative fashion, B and D (another of Beckett's "psuedocouples") demonstrate both reflexion and the impossibility of expression; they reflect oppositions of bondage/domination, materialism/immaterialism, and subject/object, yet they also, on the surface at least, demonstrate the gap that remains open between these positions. D challenges B to "make some connected statement," for example, but disconnection and lack of communication result when B provides only the first, and less authentic, of his proposed two observations about van Velde (102). Beckett and Duthuit explain the compromise that results when one tries to navigate the void at the beginning of the final dialogue, when B asserts that Van Velde “is the first to accept a certain situation and to consent to a certain act” (100). He explains that, The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint. (101) The Berkeleyian context suggests that the authors believe that the artist is helpless due to inconsistencies of perception and expression, and that the artist is obliged to paint because of a need to interpret the profusion of sense data. At the end of the text, however, B asserts that van

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Velde is able to act--to express--because he can do so in some manner that is independent of occasion. B. - 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. (101) B's assertion that van Velde has overcome both "ideal" and "material" occasion suggests that the artist has avoided both the obsession with the object--the materialism against which Berkeley contends--and Berkeley’s ideal, spiritually facilitated, occasion as well. In what appears to be an untenable assertion, Beckett and Duthuit suggest that neither system offers van Velde an expressive option--yet van Velde paints. B’s assessment suggests that one must express, but that one cannot claim to attach truth to an expressive process that is marred but such inconsistency--artists "straining to enlarge the statement of a compromise" (97), and that discussion of access to the self or the world is thus only for structural and dramatic convenience--the "anguish of helplessness [...] occasionally admitted as spice to the 'exploit' it jeopardized" (99). Beckett and Duthuit thus assert that one must accept the above inconsistency--the "total object, complete with missing parts"--if one is to be an artist. They seem unable to discover any way that an artist can express truth under these circumstances, so at the end of the dialogue on van Velde, B abandons his intention to outline what he believes “that it is more than likely that he [van Velde] is and does,” and offers the reader instead merely his supposition or his “fancy” that van Velde has discovered a new occasion. B. - [. . .] I know that all that is required now, in order to bring even this horrible matter to an acceptable conclusion, is to make of this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation, and the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation. (103) With the word "fancy" Beckett and Duthuit allude once again to Berkeley--who uses to it identify an untrue idea--one of "the irregular visions of fancy" (Dialogues 139). This suggests that B's "new occasion" is the opposite of Berkeley's occasion: it exemplifies a lack of phenomenal facilitation of perception of object and reflexion of self--it demonstrates the void. With this new occasion B asserts that Berkeley's occasion is fallible and flawed, and ultimately,

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that truth cannot be perceived or expressed. In her discussion of Film, Sylvie Henning identifies this flaw--the gap between perception and expression--as the “unconquered and apparently unconquerable distance between E and O that once understood, causes anguish” (98). This gap is the void that troubles Georges Duthuit in “Cezanne and Truth,” and it is an issue to which Beckett returns in one form or another in much of his criticism. Beckett and Duthuit exploit Berkeley’s terms and ideas because they allow the authors to define the above problems of perception and expression, but to define this void indirectly.

Kant, Kierkegaard, and Kandinski: "Possession" This indirect definition continues on a less grand but more contemporary scale when Beckett and Duthuit discuss possession in the second dialogue. B identifies Masson as an artist “in search of difficulty rather than in its clutch,” an observation which D connects to Masson’s remarks about “painting the void, in ‘fear and trembling’” (98). With this exchange the authors' suggest that Masson sees the breakdown of the subject-object relation as an opportunity--that he searches out and makes use of the difficulty inherent to expression. Yet, in an example of ironic counterpoint, D is also quoting Masson’s essay “Divigations sur l’espace” which appeared in Les Temps Modernes in June 1949. D argues for example, that Masson’s “concern was at one time with the creation of a mythology; then with man, not simply in the universe, but in society; and now [...] ‘inner emptiness, the prime condition, according to Chinese aesthetics, of the act of painting'" (98). Masson’s progression through these phases is informed by Du Bouchet's review, but the passage that Beckett and Duthuit quote reads: Faire en soi le vide, condition première, selon l'esthétique chinoise, de l'acte de peindre. Si elle nous semble inaccessible elle peut au moins servir de départ à une divagation sur l'espace. Se soucier du style comme on le sait est un leurre (c'est Puvis ou Gauguin), mais le peintre qui a connu, ne serait-ce qu'une fois, la tentation d'un espace à réinventer- cette " crainte " et ce " tremblement "--saura que c'est là le lieu même où réside l'alternative : suivre les autres en toute tranquillité ou avancer face au risque et à l'impardonnable. (961) In this passage Masson makes explicit that he views the void as an opportunity--as a point of departure. D explains Masson’s program for overcoming the maladies of perception that might prevent expression:

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Masson’s declared purpose is now to reduce these maladies, as you call them, to nothing. He aspires to be rid of the servitude of space, that his eye may ‘frolic among the focusless fields, tumultuous with incessant creation.’ At the same time he demands the rehabilitation of the ‘vaporous’ (99). Once again a return to the Masson article underscores the fact that possession of the object is the issue here, for in the passage from "Divagnations" from which D quotes above Masson writes of his rejection of the traditional manipulation of space and the need to control the viewer’s perception: de ce point d'hypnose qui par le truchement de la perspective (même assouplie) nous oblige à fixer notre regard, là où l'artiste organisa la scène capitale. Mais sans parcours préétabli, sans guide et sans cornac, que l'œil s'ébroue librement parmi ces champs affranchis de centres immuables, enfin multipliés, dans une incessante création. (962) In the dialogues, D notes that “Masson himself, having remarked that western perspective is no more than a series of traps for the capture of objects, declares that their possession does not interest him. He congratulates Bonnard for having, in his last works, ‘gone beyond possessive space in every shape and form, far from surveys and bounds, to the point where all possession is 43 dissolved’” (100). D notes that Masson desires to follow Bonnard’s example, that “without renouncing the objects . . . he seeks to break through their partitions to that continuity of being which is absent from the ordinary experience of living.” He accomplishes this, D suggests, by means of the rejection outlined above, through an awareness of “transparency--‘openings, circulations, communications, unknown penetrations’--where he may frolic at his ease, in freedom” (99). Yet the quoted passage from the Masson article reads: Un espace bien compris comporte un grand jeu d'ouvertures, de circulations, de communications, de pénétrations inconnues au peintre qui considère l'objet comme un ornement de l'espace. Le maniériste organise sa surface de telle façon que des cloisons étanches se forment, se durcissent, emprisonnent les éléments dont il dispose. (966) This passage indicates that Masson rejects a mannerist approach to space, a traditional use of perspective that he characterizes as “la hantise de la fenêtre” (966). His method is far less revolutionary, however, than D’s summary suggests: Masson does not reject the possession of the object as such, but the traditional western approach to possession. He is captivated by “l'espace zéniste,” which as Dawn Ades explains, he “loved as an example of

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the lightness, detachment and transparency man could achieve with regard to his activities in the world, by contrast with the tendency of man in Western culture to put his mark heavily upon it, to seek to dominate, impress and change. It was a kind of mobility within a world of flux, which would be experienced as immobility” (24). Masson contends that a non-western method allows the artist to express an object through the accumulation of small details and the play between presence and absence: Il y a dans l'art poétique japonais une expression concrète qui signifie : " tout à fait parti", " entièrement disparu ". C'est quand le poète ou l'artiste, accumulant des détails, précise et définit lourdement l'objet. Parfaire va à l'encontre de la perfectión. L'abondance joue contre joue avec l'absence, ainsi s'exprime l'inépuisable. (966-967) Georges Duthuit had addressed this mystical approach to expression in his 1936 study Chinese Mysticism and Modern Painting and found it lacking. Although Beckett never considers a non- western approach to perception and expression directly in his previous criticism, as early as his reviews of Sean O’Casey (1934) and Jack B. Yeats (1936), he abandons the notion that the artist can make use of the void as a point of departure. Despite the fact that Beckett and Duthuit have disavowed similar ideas previously, however, B praises Masson for his tenacity; he recognizes him as “an artist who seems literally skewered on the ferocious dilemma of expression,” but who “continues to wriggle” (99). Yet he also suggests that Masson offers no feasible solution for representing or overcoming the void, that the ideas developed in “Divagations sur l’espace” are more dramatic than practical: The void he speaks of is perhaps simply the obliteration of an unbearable presence, unbearable because neither to be wooed nor to be stormed. If this anguish of helplessness is never stated as such, on its own merits and for its own sake, though perhaps very occasionally admitted as spice to the “exploit” it jeopardized, the reason is doubtless, among others, that it seems to contain in itself the impossibility of statement. (99) Beckett and Duthuit make use of Masson's attempt to spice up his exploits when they not only dismiss his assertions directly, but also use his comments about the void to refer to an outside text that challenges these assertions. D states, for example, that Masson “speaks so often nowadays of painting the void, ‘in fear and trembling’” (98). Although Masson uses these words in his article, Beckett and Duthuit alter the preposition so that instead of reporting that Masson

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experiences fear and trembling when painting, D suggests that Masson paints a void that exists in fear and trembling. D thus speaks of painting "the void [found] in [Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 treatise] Fear and Trembling." The void to which Beckett and Duthuit refer appears in the first paragraph of this text, in which Kierkegaard discusses human consciousness: If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void, never satiated lay hidden beneath all--what then would life be but despair? If such were the case, if there were no sacred bond which united mankind [. . .] if an eternal oblivion were always lurking hungrily for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrest it from its maw--how empty then and comfortless life would be! (30) In this text, attributed to the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard writes about the desperate struggle of humanity to reconcile faith and doubt; about the conflict between ethical behavior and divine duty as exemplified in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Alastair Hannay contends that the use of a pseudonym is due to both Kierkegaard’s hesitation to appear as an authority, and his desire to associate himself with the reader plagued by doubt, “to help people in the grip of that view to find their way back to an authentic religious understanding” (164). The pseudonym is also an example of indirect communication, however, as indicated by Kierkegaard's epigram: "What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger." Here Kierkegaard hints that his messenger, John of Silence, may not understand the importance or meaning of what he imparts, which in turn pressures the reader to look for meaning beyond the obvious message. In this work Kierkegaard argues that Abraham is the superlative example of a tragic hero who, when commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac, gambles on faith in spite of human inability to discover empirical evidence of deity--evidence of something beyond the void mentioned above. Due to this dilemma, one must rely upon faith alone, which, for Kierkegaard, requires inestimable courage: “For my part,” he writes, “I can in a way understand Abraham, but at the same time I apprehend that I have not the courage to speak, and still less to act as he did” (129). Kierkegaard views faith as part of a life dedicated to what he calls "immediacy," a term taken from Hegel, for whom it means "unreflective knowledge." The only solution, given the above

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conditions, is to ignore the existence of a void that interdicts human understanding of universal consciousness and to act, to rely wholly upon the unsubstantiated gamble that is faith. For, as the author writes in his conclusion, only by means of unreflective knowledge of God can one understand the universe and one's place in it: “either there is a paradox, that the individual as the individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute or Abraham is lost” (129). Beckett and Duthuit challenge this notion of an "absolute relation" in "Three Dialogues" when B states that van Velde faces the "incoercible absence of relation" at worst, and "the presence of unavailable terms" of relation at best (103).44 Kierkegaard seems to recognize the same dilemma, for The Sickness Unto Death (1849), which Walter Lowrie characterizes as “a ‘repetition’ in maturer years of Fear and Trembling” (much like the earlier treatises of Beckett and Berkeley), Kierkegaard begins his discussion of despair--“a sickness of the spirit”--by revisiting the paradox from the end of the previous text of existence as a relation between the individual and the absolute. Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is the relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation (which accounts for it) that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but (consists in the fact) that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between the two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self. (146) Kierkegaard contends that a third term of relation is now necessary, and that this term can come into existence in one of two ways: “it must either have constituted itself or have been constituted by another” (146). The only formula that offers escape from despair, Kierkegaard writes, “is the expression for the total dependence of the relation (the self namely), the expression for the fact that the self cannot of itself attain and remain in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only in relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relation” (147). Yet the lack of synthesis, Kierkegaard asserts--the missing relation or void--is insurmountable because of the individual’s inability or unwillingness to recognize this dependence upon deity, to recognize the fact that “the self is grounded in the power which constituted it” (147), which formula, “is the definition of faith” (262).

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Beckett and Duthuit reject this dependence upon faith, and assert that the paradox outlined at the end of Fear and Trembling is unassailable by juxtaposing this Kierkegaard reference with an allusion to Abraham in the Gospel of St. Luke. As the two interlocutors discuss van Velde and his occasion in "Three Dialogues," D challenges B's theory when he asks, "But might not it be suggested, even by one tolerant of this fantastic theory, that the occasion of his painting is his predicament, and that it is expressive of the impossibility to express?" Here D suggests that van Velde and his predicament are feasible terms of relation between subject and object. B replies: "No more ingenious method could be devised for restoring him, safe and sound, to the bosom of Saint Luke" (101). As is their practice in the dialogues, Beckett and Duthuit misdirect the reader when they make it sound like the bosom belongs to St. Luke himself, when it refers instead to the phrase "bosom of Abraham," which appears in the Gospel of Saint Luke. This phrase is generally accepted to refer to the blissful existence of the righteous after death. In the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus the Beggar from Luke 16:19-26, as Abraham embraces the righteous beggar to his bosom he tells the hell-entombed Rich Man, "between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence" (16:26). This allusion suggests that D's assertion would not only return van Velde to paradise--to the bosom of Abraham, where he would enjoy the "absolute relation to the absolute"--but also to the embrace of St. Luke. Historically, Luke was a physician, thus the "safe and sound" notion, but he is also the patron saint of painters and physicians, who, tradition maintains, painted a portrait of the Virgin Mary. Thus, with this phrase Beckett and Duthuit intimate that to be aesthetically "righteous," van Velde needs to have the equivalent of artistic "faith"--to go along with tradition and the dominant ideological position suggested by D. B asserts that this is impossible; he refuses to submit, to "turn tail before the ultimate penury" where one is "short, short of the world, short of self" (102). This position is not surprising, since Beckett had used the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man to discuss the indefatigable nature of the void in Proust, wherein he writes of, "the Dives-Lazarus symbiosis, as intimate as that of fungoid and algoid in lichen [. . .] here scabs, lucre, etc., there torment, bosom, etc., but both here and there gulf. The absurdity, here or there, of either without the other, the inaccessible other" (92). Beckett and Duthuit's reference to Abraham subverts Kiekegaard's reference to this prophet, for unlike the philosopher, who uses this reference to

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illustrate the importance of faith as a synthesizing relation, the authors' use Abraham to illustrate lack, separation, and inaccessibility. More importantly, with these references to Masson and Kierkegaard, Beckett and Duthuit juxtapose two approaches to the void in order to reveal that both function based on a similar basic assumption. Both Masson and Kierkegaard recognize the existence of a lack of relation between subject and object (whether their terms are the artist and the objects one seeks to represent or the human of faith and the deity one seeks to know), and both writers turn to external spiritual forces to counteract this discontinuity: Masson to Zen; Kierkegaard to Christianity. In “Three Dialogues” B suggests that Masson mistakes the void for “an unbearable presence, unbearable because neither to be wooed nor to be stormed,” but, “in any case, it is hardly to be confused with the void” (99). The word "presence" here suggests a metaphysical connection, an otherworldly visitation like the occasion Berkeley espouses. With this reference to Fear and Trembling Beckett and Duthuit assert that Masson, like Kierkegaard, relies not upon a practical, formal method of overcoming the void, but on an artistic process akin to faith. What B rejects is not the presence itself, but blind dependence on something so inexplicable; the presence is unbearable because the artist can only relate the subject and object by means of faith in an uncontrollable, unknowable force. Here we observe the first indication that possession of the relation between subject and object requires dependence upon another power, a spiritual or psychological possession of the artist, which D characterizes as “the same reaching towards succour from without” (99). Beckett and Duthuit interrogate this spiritual/psychological dependence further by means of a reference to Sigmund Freud and Immanuel Kant. In response to D’s assertion that Masson, like Kierkegaard, searches for a “sacred bond that unites all of mankind,” that the artist seeks to penetrate objects, “to break through their partitions to that continuity of being which is absent from the ordinary experience of living,” B states: What you say certainly throws light on the dramatic predicament of the artist. Allow me to note his concern with the amenities of ease and freedom. The stars are undoubtedly superb, as Freud remarked on reading Kant’s cosmological proof of the existence of God. With such preoccupations it seems to me impossible that he should ever do anything different from that which the best, including himself, have done already. (99-100)

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The passage to which B refers is found in Freud’s 1932 essay “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,” in which Freud writes about the fragmented personality, specifically “the formation of the super-ego--that is to say, about the origin of the conscience” (61). He refers to “a well- known pronouncement of Kant’s which couples the conscience within us with the starry Heavens” and suggests that “a pious man might well be tempted to honour these two things as the masterpieces of creation.” The pronouncement to which Freud refers is found in the conclusion of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788), wherein the author writes: There are two things which imbue the mind with a feeling of admiration and reverence, ever renewed, and ever on the increase, the more frequently and the more perseveringly our thoughts are occupied with them: the star-clad sky there above us, and the moral law within ourselves. (201) In his Critical Philosophy, Kant maintains that humans can make unmediated a priori judgments about mathematics, natural science, and morality. In the above passage Kant, for example, extends this cosmological argument further when he implies that moral conscience can be apprehended as easily and universally as one can view the constellations. In addition, he connects the stars not only with moral law, but with human consciousness, and thus, like Kierkegaard, he asserts that the touchstone of perception is the self. There is no need that we should search after [moral laws], or merely surmise them, as hidden in obscurities, or as having to be placed in a transcendent region beyond our horizon. We see them before us and connect them directly with the consciousness of our existence. The starting-point of the former is the place which we occupy in the external world of the senses, and as for the connection in which we find ourselves placed, its dimension is widened to an immeasurable extent, with worlds upon worlds, systems upon systems, and moreover, limitless times, in respect to their periodic motions, their beginning and their continuance. The starting-point of the latter is our invisible self, our personality, and exhibits us as having our place within a world which has true infinity, while, on the other hand, it is only the understanding to which it is discernable. (201) Kant presents a theory in which knowledge of the subject-object relation empowers the individual with superlative understanding of the metaphysical mechanics of the universe and one's position in relation to it, which connection, he stresses is “universal and necessary” (201).

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Freud responds to Kant’s assertion in "Dissection of the Human Personality" when he quips: “The stars are indeed magnificent, but as regards conscience God has done an uneven and careless piece of work” (61). At first glance it appears that Freud has misread Kant’s discussion of consciousness as a discussion of conscience, but a closer examination suggests that Freud conflates Kant's notions of moral law and consciousness into his definition of conscience. For, he states, “we are far from overlooking the portion of psychological truth that is contained in the assertion that conscience is of divine origin; but the thesis needs interpretation. Even if conscience is something ‘within us,’ yet it is not so from the first.” With this reference Beckett and Duthuit contrast the Kantian sublime with the Freudian subliminal. Kant describes the sublime as an overwhelming experience of something expansively greater than the self; it is "the faculty of being able to think the infinite of super sensible intuition, [which] surpasses every standard of sensibility, and is great beyond all comparison [....] nature is therefore sublime in those if its phenomena, whose intuition brings with it the idea of its infinity" (C. of Judge. 116). He separates this experience from mere perception or judgment of beauty--"we express ourselves incorrectly if we call an object of nature sublime, although we can quite correctly call many objects of nature beautiful" (C. of Judge. 103). Natural beauty, Kant writes, has a "purposiveness" of form that "seems pre-adapted to our judgment"; the sublime, in contrast, "may appear as regards its form to violate purpose in respect of the judgment, to be unsuited to our presentative faculty, and, as it were, to do violence to the imagination" (102-103). With language that must have appealed to Beckett and Duthuit's preoccupation with the void, Kant contends that the sublime, "is for the imagination like an abyss in which it fears to lose itself" (120). In contrast to Kant, Freud's psychoanalytic theories--especially about sublimation-- undermine both Enlightenment ideas of free choice, and the philosophical tradition, which Freud felt was prejudiced in favor of consciousness and pre-scientific superstition. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud posits that sublimation of the baser instinctual desires by creative pursuits is a socially acceptable alternative to the "non-satisfaction" which otherwise results from denial of the libido (27-28). "Sublimation of instinct," he claims, "is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic, or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life" (49). Like Kant's discussion of the sublime, Freud's system positions the rational consciousness--the "Ego"--

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against the volatile intuition--the "Id." Beckett's comparison of the two ideas by means of Freud's conflation of conscience and consciousness reveals a vital difference, however, for the sublime is the overwhelming victory of the irrational or intuitive; whereas sublimation is merely an apparent victory of reason over instinct, apparent because there exists the constant threat of a resurgence of the irrational forces that are restrained just beneath the threshold of consciousness. Kant’s definition of consciousness depends upon the connection between the world humans perceive and the self, upon a transcendental experience that gives meaning to existence, which meaning can be discerned through the subject-object relation. For Freud, in contrast, the self is fragmented and in turmoil; it is an unsteady term in the subject-object relation, and he rejects the notion that one can base any cosmological connection or moral law upon it. Beckett and Duthuit also juxtapose Kant's system (which Kant labels "transcendental" idealism), with that of Berkeley (which Kant dismisses as "dogmatic" idealism). Both philosophers argue for the possibility of knowledge beyond sense data: Berkeley when he outlines his notion of reflexion; and Kant when he separates perception into two categories-- phenomena and noumena. Kant defines phenomena ("that which appears" in Greek) as the "appearances" of objects as they are perceived using "categories" of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. Noumena ("that which is thought"), in comparison, are beyond the necessity for categories of space and time; they are "things that are merely objects of the understanding and that, nevertheless, can be given to an intuition, although not to a sensible intuition" (Pure 347). They are, as he explains elsewhere, a "thing that is not to be thought of as an object of the senses but rather as a thing in itself (solely through a pure understanding)" (Pure 350). Beckett alludes to, and ultimately dismisses, both this notion of unmediated perception of the noumenon or "the thing is itself," and Kant's notion of "pure" reason in "Les peintres des van Velde" when he writes of "the thing alone, isolated by the need to see it, by the need to see. The thing, motionless in the void, here finally, is the visible object, the pure object. I see no other" (Disjecta 126, emphasis added). The primary differences between these systems are that Berkeley rejects the possibility of the existence of objects (thus the label of "dogmatic" idealism), and also in a related vein, that Berkeley's system relies upon the intercession of deity to facilitate perception, which dependence Kant dismisses as "supernatural assistance" (Pure 436). Kant, in contrast, positions himself between Berkeley's certainty of the non-existence of objects, and the "possible certainty of

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objects of outer sense" that he associates with Cartesian dualism. He merely doubts the existence of "all objects of outer sense" (Pure 425), for his "transcendental idealism" posits the doctrine that phenomena "are altogether to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves" (426). In addition, unlike Berkeley, Kant relies upon intuitive human reason to organize and interpret sense data without the necessity of the attentions of a supreme being; he makes room for the existence of deity without postulating fallacious proofs of it. Coupled with the earlier reference to Kierkegaard, Beckett and Duthuit's complex use of Freud and Kant disavows Masson's efforts to navigate the void. Beckett and Duthuit underscore this commentary through a comparison of Masson’s approach to possession with that of Leonardo da Vinci. Masson’s “so extremely intelligent remarks on space breathe the same possessiveness as the notebooks of Leonardo,” B claims, “who, when he speaks of disfazione, knows that for him not one fragment will be lost” (100). Disfazione is an archaic Italian term, derived from the Latin facere (to make), that maintains its form solely in the modern word soddisfazione (fulfillment, satisfaction), but which has evolved into the term difacimento, which is translated as “undoing, collapse, destruction” (Cambridge Dictionary 240). Leonardo’s use of the term is rare in his notebooks, it appears almost exclusively in the remarks and accompanying drawings that make up his “Description of the Deluge.” First of all let there be represented the summit of a rugged mountain with certain of the valleys that surround its base, and on its sides let the surface of the soil be seen slipping down together with the tiny roots of the small shrubs, and leaving bare a great part of the surrounding rocks. Sweeping down in devastation from these precipices, let it pursue its headlong course, striking and laying bare the twisted and gnarled roots of the great trees and overturning them in ruin . . . (290) Ludwig Heydenreich argues that Leonardo’s method, “is that of materializing invisible cosmic forces in substances which are indeed the elements in which these forces work, but which are no longer decisively identified as such” (153). “The velocity of the air,” Leonardo writes for example, “is seen by the movement of the dust stirred by the running of a horse; and it moves as swiftly to fill up the void left in the air which had enclosed the horse as is the speed of the horse in passing away from the aforesaid space of air” (289). Heydenreich notes that the combination of written and painted description of the Deluge is a single work, that “the conception as a whole

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includes both scientific demonstration and pictorial imagination, influencing each other yet clearly separated” (156-7). He explains the significance of this wholeness: With this synthesis of scientific rationale and artistic imagination making its appearance as a vision of invisible effects in unknown future Leonardo drew near the utmost possibilities of his imaginative powers. In the extreme limits of art as a means of spiritual expression--limits which he himself had expanded immeasurably through the tasks he set himself--he experienced too the limits at which all human searching for knowledge must end [. . .] To the end of his life, however, he believed in the existence of a supernatural harmony which is operative in all forms and forces, in all places and at all times, and which appears even in the seeming chaos of the end of the world. He tried to seek out this harmony in all phenomena which his mind apprehended, and attempted to present it in his works through the media of his art, which was the instrument of his research and science. (160) B dismisses Leonardo's supreme confidence in his ability to perceive and express this harmony when he compares the possessiveness of Masson and Da Vinci. Yet this comment also alludes to Paul Valery’s 1894 study of the painter and rejects the assertions made therein. In his 1945 review “MacGreevy on Yeats” Beckett commends MacGreevy for “his admirable translation of Valery’s Introduction à la Méthode de Léonard de Vinci” (95). In this study Valery concentrates on Leonardo’s search for synthesis; he praises the artist for having overcome difficulties of perception and expression that damn other artists: Our understanding fails to grasp the continuity of this whole--just as it fails to perceive those formless rags of space that separate known objects and fill in random intervals in between; just as it loses myriads of facts at every moment, beyond the small number of those evoked by speech. Nevertheless, we must linger over the task, become inured to it, and learn to surmount the difficulties imposed on our imagination by this combination of elements heterogeneous to it. In this process all our intelligence is applied to conceiving a unique order and a single motive force. (4) This comment supports Heydenreich's observation about Leonardo's quest for "supernatural harmony" by means of the painter's “unusual refinement of visual perception” (150), which assures Leonardo that he will not lose a single fragment, or as Valery explains, “he is so formed as to overlook nothing that enters into the confusion of things; not the least shrub” (6).

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Leonardo’s cosmology is based on the dissolution and reformation of these fragments, as Valery explains: At a higher degree of complexity, periodicity is employed to represent continuous properties; for this periodicity, whether it exists in space or time, is nothing else than the division of an object into fragments, such that they can be replaced one by the other under certain conditions--or else it is the multiplication of an object under those same conditions. (30) B's use of the term fragment refers to Valery's study, and underscores the similarity between Valrey's assertions and André du Bouchet's claims about Masson. Beckett had praised Jack B. Yeats's similar notion of creation through decreation--the “analytical imagination” by which he takes the object “to pieces and makes a new thing, new things”--in “An Imaginative Work!” (89). He eventually abandons these methods as untenable, but Valery, while acknowledging the difficulties that threaten expression, asserts that Leonardo has overcome them. We have arrived at the conception that parts of the world let themselves be reduced, here and there, to intelligible elements. Sometimes our senses suffice for the task; sometimes the most ingenious methods must be employed; but always there are voids. The attempts remain lacunary. It is here that we find the kingdom of our hero. He has an extraordinary sense of symmetry that makes him regard everything as a problem. Whenever the understanding breaks off he introduces the productions of his mind. (31- 32) This symmetry is the same “continuity of being” that D claims Masson seeks, “which is absent from the ordinary experience of living” (99). With this comment, Beckett and Duthuit suggest that Masson, like Leonardo, attempts to penetrate the object and then, having gained an understanding of one element, to interpret the whole based upon this fragment. The authors' connection of these artists is informed by Du Bouchet's comment that in Masson's painting, "we have disorder recomposing itself" (90). For Leonardo and Masson, according to this interpretation, possession has little to do with the distinctions of the subject-object relation, because it is based upon formal mastery and superlative perception. B dismisses the notion that the artist is capable of such possession, along with the assertion that Masson’s revolutionary approach enables him to overcome the effects of the void: “forgive me if I relapse, as when we spoke of the so different Tal Coat, into my dream of an art

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unresentful of its insuperable indigence and too proud for the farce of giving and receiving” (100). The art B advocates is an art devoid of the preoccupation with possession, which D derisively labels “that impoverished painting, ‘authentically fruitless, incapable of any image whatsoever’” (100).45 This use of the term possession, however, does not come from Masson alone: Beckett used the term in Proust, wherein he states, “whatever the object, our thirst for possession is, by definition, insatiable” (17); and in “Peintres de l'empêchement” where he writes of traditional efforts to render the object that are “plus en plus possessionnelle” (Disjecta 135). The use in “Three Dialogues” of the dual meaning of possession as both acquisition and submission, however, comes from Baudelaire (1947), by Jean-Paul Sartre, who was an advisory editor and regular contributor to Duthuit’s Transition. In this text Sartre argues that a child experiences a process of self-recognition--a “universal subjectivism” (20)--and thus develops a sense of “metaphysical pride” at the realization if its own uniqueness. Yet, Sartre observes, this form of pride is as unhappy as it is pure because it revolves in the void and feeds upon itself. It is always unsatisfied, always exasperated and exhausts itself in the very act of asserting itself. It is founded on nothing; it is entirely in the air because the sense of being different, which creates it, is an empty concept that is universal. (21) This knowledge of self relies on self-perception which ultimately escapes Baudelaire, because, as in the systems of Kant and Kierkegaard, the self by which other objects are measured ultimately relates to the self. Sartre argues, for instance, that the whole of Baudelaire’s efforts were devoted to pushing to its last extreme this abortive duality which we call the reflective consciousness. If he was lucid from the first, it was not in order to make an exact inventory of his faults, it was in order to be two people. If he wanted to be two people, it was in order to realize in this couple the final possession of the Self by the Self. (25-26) Sartre's affiliation of the terms "abortive duality" and "reflective consciousness" refer to Descartes and Berkeley, and suggest that he rejects both mind/body separation and idealism in his evaluation of Baudelaire. His interpretation of reflection is different, however, from Berkeley's notion of reflexion as "immediate and intuitive knowledge" by which one perceives one's own being, for although in The Psychology of the Imagination (1948) Sartre asserts that "if we want to describe this consciousness, we must, as we have seen, produce a new consciousness

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called 'reflection'" (15), he maintains that this consciousness is separate from perception because the image, whether perceived or imagined, "always remains outside of consciousness" (7). Sartre's use of the term "abortive duality" suggests that he views Berkeley's reflexion to be cognate to the Cartesian "cogito." And he attacks Berkeley directly on this point when he contends that "Berkeley's error lay in ascribing to the image conditions which apply only to perception"(20). His basic argument in Psychology--that consciousness negates the world as it is and invents a possible one in its stead--informs Baudelaire, but actually finds its genesis in Being and Nothingness (1943), in which he postulates that "if in one sense my being-as-object is an unbearable contingency and the pure 'possession' of myself by another, still in another sense this being stands as the indication of what should be obliged to recover and found in order to be the foundation of myself"(364). In this study, Satre contends that being is a composite of "being- for-itself"(essence) vs. "being-in-itself"(existence). In both Baudelaire and Being, as in Freud's system, the Sartrean self is divided and in conflict both against itself and against outside expectations (Freud's "super-ego" and Sartre's "being-for-another.)" Once again, in language that appeals to Beckett and Duthuit's interest in the void, Sartre argues that the consciousness-- the "for-itself"-- can only define itself in relation to what is other than itself by means of "nihilation" (neantir), the process by which "consciousness exists as consciousness by making a nothingness arise between it and the object of consciousness" (631). Reflection is a necessary part of nihilation in two senses: first, reflection (reflet) as "the form in which the for-itself forms its own nothingness," in which, "consciousness exists as a translucent consciousness of being other than the objects of which it is consciousness"; and second, reflection (reflexion) as the "attempt of the consciousness to become its own object," which he divides into, "pure reflection," or the "presence of the reflective consciousness to the consciousness reflected on," and, "impure reflection," or "the constitution of 'psychic temporality' or the for-itself's contemplation of its psychic states" (633). Sartre views possession as an abortive connection that is valueless beyond the revelation that self-perception is impossible. Despite his efforts and “tricks,” Sartre contends, Baudelaire knew “that he would never attain true possession of himself, but simply the listless sampling of himself which is characteristic of reflective knowledge” (27). In contrast to Leonardo, Sartre argues that for Baudelaire a sample of the object is not enough, a whole possession of self cannot be extrapolated from a mere fragment of the self. In language evocative of Leonardo, however,

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Sartre asserts that Baudelaire rejects the notion of determinism, that objects are machines “which can be regulated by easy means.” Baudelaire, he continues, knew that springs and levers had nothing to do with his case; he was neither cause nor effect. He was free which meant that he could look for no help either inside or outside himself against his own freedom. He bent over it and became giddy at the sight of the gulf [. . .] Baudelaire was the man who felt that he was a gulf. Pride, ennui, giddiness--he looked right into the bottom of his heart. He saw that he was incomparable, incommunicable, uncreated, absurd, useless, abandoned in the most complete isolation, bearing his burden alone, condemned to justify his existence all alone, and endlessly eluding himself, slipping though his own fingers, withdrawn in contemplation and, at the same time, dragged out of himself in an unending pursuit, a bottomless gulf without walls and without darkness, a mystery in broad daylight, unpredictable yet perfectly known. (40) Due to this situation, the individual remains exhausted and self-devouring in the "bottomless" void. And thus, the self as a term of relation is unstable, as Sartre indicates when he too alludes to a Kantian passage: “Because the conscious self derives its laws from itself, it must regard itself in Kant’s words as the legislator of the city of ends” (41). The passage to which Sartre refers is found in Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals; and is known as the "Kingdom of Ends Formulation." In this thesis Kant argues that, "a rational being must always regard himself as the legislator in a Kingdom of Ends rendered possible by freedom of the will, whether as member or sovereign [...]" (434). This statement is intimately connected to Kant's notion of autonomy, specifically to his Categorical Imperative. If we think of ourselves as legislating universal law through our maxims, Kant would suggest, we must think of moral motivation as autonomous. His belief was that moral obligation arises from, and can only be traced to, the human capacity for autonomous self-direction. Sartre's statement that the self is both "perfectly known," and yet "unpredictable," suggests that he believes in human autonomy-- which results in existential "anguish"--but also, that since "existence precedes essence," one cannot look to outside sources for moral guidance as Kant suggests. Sartre's portrait of Baudelaire is much different from that of the self-assured composer of “Correspondences” against whose confidence in his own ability to express Beckett reacts in both the dialogues and his earlier criticism. The contrast to Leonardo, however, is particularly

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striking, because although Baudelaire’s approach to possession of the object differs from Leonardo's, he too attempts to create a wholeness based on a fragment, but in his case he works with time instead of force. Sartre argues, for example, that Baudelaire pursues “determination of the present by the future, of what already exists by what does not yet exist,” a process “which he called ‘non-satisfaction’ and which philosophers today call transcendence” (37). Leonardo expresses the object by means of his enhanced perception, through multiplication of a fragment to represent the whole, which process Beckett labels disfazione; Baudelaire expresses the self-as- object by means of his inability to perceive it, through demonstration of the ephemeral and deceptive nature of the reflective consciousness, through expression of his non-satisfaction. It is a uniquely Beckettian joke to link these two notions through a pun on these terms; the term he identifies with Leonardo’s method is a fragment of the modern Italian term for satisfaction, the lack of which defines the method of Baudelaire. But this is not all, for with this phrase Beckett also refers obliquely to Freudian sublimation, which although it is a victory of reason over intuition, results in "non-satisfaction" for the subject. With this play on words Beckett and Duthuit expand a similar notion that Beckett had articulated in Proust. In that 'gouffre interdit à nos sondes,' is stored the essence of ourselves, the best of our many selves and their concretions that simplists call the world, the best because accumulates slyly and painfully and patiently under the nose of our vulgarity, the fine essence of a smothered divinity whose whispered ‘disfazione’ is drowned in the healthy bawling of an all-embracing appetite, the pearl that may give the lie to our carapace of paste and pewter. (31) In this passage Beckett suggests that the fragment that survives the interdiction of the gulf may be the source from which the artist expresses, but that the result can only be a surface imitation at best and a lie at worst. Yet, like Baudelaire, (whom Beckett seems to dismiss here as a "simplist" instead of a Symbolist), Beckett observes that this process is driven by desire, which this passage suggests is a victory of an unconscious "all-embracing appetite" akin to Freud's bawling id (described elsewhere by Beckett as a need or obligation), which nearly overpowers-- or possesses--the creator. Beckett and Duthuit continue this discussion of possession in the third dialogue, but whereas the second dialogue dealt with possession as acquisition, the authors concentrate here on

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possession as unity and inspiration. They underscore this aspect of possession through D’s reference to Sufism: “Try and bear in mind that the subject under discussion in not yourself, nor the Sufist Al-Haqq, but a particular Dutchman by the name of van Velde” (102). In this passage Beckett and Duthuit use clever sleight-of-hand to suggest that “Al-Haqq” is a sufist mystic, one of a list of people who are not under consideration. In reality the phrase is a term from the technical language of Sufism. Louis Massignon observes that the term haqq is ambivalent, and that it has a variety of meanings: when used in the legal sphere, the phrase means “debt” or “claim”; in philosophy it means “truth”; in mysticism, he writes, it is phenomenal, “the implied subject of the inspired saying, of the preaching that personalizes and realizes; the Real, Creative Truth in act” (28). He cites, in addition, a famous statement attributed to the mystic Hallaj, “Ana al-Haqq,” which translates “My ‘I’ is the Creative Truth.” With this reference Beckett and Duthuit suggest that expression of self is a representation of a mystical union, the result of inspired perception. Andrew Gibson suggests that this is the case in his discussion of Beckett and Massignon, when he asserts that Beckett uses these terms as if they are synonyms, that the term al-haqq is cognate with what Beckett "calls 'occasion' or what Heidegger calls...Ereignis'" (7).46 With this seemingly offhand reference, Beckett and Duthuit not only draw a distinction between the types of possession used by Leonardo and Baudelaire, but they introduce the additional notion of possession as facilitation of perception and expression, that is, of possession as something akin to occasion. Following this reference, Beckett and Duthuit remind the reader of the difficulty faced by the critic who attempts to articulate the impossibility of expression--which “anguish of helplessness” contains in itself “the impossibility of statement”--when B states: There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said. I have experimented, as you know, both in public and in private, under duress, through faintness of heart, through weakness of mind, with two or three hundred. The pathetic antithesis possession-poverty was perhaps not the most tedious. (102) When interpreted within the fictional world of the dialogues, this passage suggests that the character B has attempted to articulate the discontinuity that inhibits expression in other episodes. Or if we assume that B represents Beckett, as is done commonly, the passage may refer to Beckett's own efforts to define this problem in his previous work.

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This notion of self-reflexivity is reinforced by B's use of the phrase “possession-poverty,” which also appears in Beckett's June 1949 letter to Duthuit when he writes, "I take advantage of a (passing) moment of lucidity to tell you that I think I see what separates us, what we always end up stumbling against, after many useless locutions. It is the possible-impossible, richness- poverty, possession-deprivation, etc. etc. opposition" (Oppenheim Painted 88). Beckett's observation that he and Duthuit are separated may indicate that they disagree, or that together they cannot overcome some obstacle. This latter possibility is suggested by Sartre's use of the phrase in Psychology, in which he equates a discontinuity of perception with poverty: The object of perception is constituted of an infinite multiplicity of determinations and possible relations. The most definite image, on the other hand, possesses in itself only a finite number of determinations, namely, only those of which we are conscious. These determinations can remain unrelated to each other, unless we are aware that they do possess such relationships. Hence, the discontinuity at thevery heart of the object of the image, something of a clash, qualities which dash towards existence and stop halfway, an essential poverty. (21) The continuation of B's statement, in which he notes that "the realisation that art has always been bourgeois, thought it may dull our pain before the achievements of the socially progressive, is finally of scant interest," reinforces this comparison to Sartre, at whose rapidly evolving materialism during this period Beckett and Duthuit make a small jab. The phrase "possession-poverty," however, also refers to Diotema’s "Ladder of Love," her instruction of Socrates regarding the nature of Eros in Plato’s Symposium. In this text Diotema explains that Eros is the son of the gods Poros (possession/resource) and Penia (poverty), and she identifies him as a “daemon,” a liminal entity who is charged with “interpreting and ferrying to gods things from human beings and to human beings things from gods” (33). Allan Bloom argues that Eros inherits this responsibility from his father, whose name Bloom connects with possession as inspiration: It is to be noted that the word poros, with the privative prefix “a,” means not only the same thing as penia but also the difficulty or perplexity that is provided by a contradiction in an argument. An aporia arises at the point in an argument when the interlocutor contradicts himself and must look for a solution but does not know quite how to do so. He is literally without resource. (Press 150)

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Because of his mixed heritage, Eros is cursed with this aporia, with the responsibility to communicate and the inability to do so. Beckett and Duthuit play on this linguistic similarity because B and D suffer from the same affliction as they attempt to escape the contradiction of expressing the impossibility of expression. Their use of the phrase hints at the performative subtext that is being developed and reminds the reader of the antithetical comparisons the author has made between those who claim to possess the object and those who are “unresentful” of their “insuperable indigence.” Beckett and Duthuit refer to Eros again, and underscore the unworkable nature of the possession-poverty antithesis, when B laments: It is obvious that for the artist obsessed with his expressive vocation, anything and everything is doomed to become occasion, including, as is apparently to some extent the case with Masson, the pursuit of occasion, and the everyman his own wife experiments of Kandinsky. (102) This reference to familial conflation is an oblique play on the first lines of Vasilii Kandinsky’s “On the Spiritual in Art” (1911), which states: “Every work of art is a child of its time. Often it is the mother of our feelings” (63). B’s comment makes reference to the unity Kandinsky envisions between the work of art and the artist, to the fact that he believes expression to be a conflation of self and object, a discovery akin to the discovery of “every-man-his-own-wife.” Yet the notion that each man is his own spouse also incorporates Alcibiades’s tale from the Symposium, in which he reveals that humans were at one time conjoined in pairs. The narrator relates that in their pride these beings “attempted to make the ascent into the sky with the view of assaulting the gods”--to take the responsibility assigned to Eros upon themselves--and were divided in two as a punishment (19). Ever since, he says, they are driven by the desire to find and entangle themselves with their other half “in their desire to grow together,” which need Alcibiades associates with Eros: “so it is really from such early times that human beings have had, inborn in themselves Eros for one another--Eros, the bringer-together of their ancient nature” (20). B’s comments suggest that he believes Kandinsky seeks this Platonic unity of self and object as a component of his expressive program. B intimates that Masson and Kandinsky share the same obsession, and he disavows the claims of both artists. The comparison between Kandinsky’s discovery of self through pursuit of the object and Masson’s discovery of the object

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through disunity of self--that is, through unity with the void--together with the concurrent references to the Symposium, also allude to the Freudian notion of Eros as the sex instinct that drives people together, the purpose of which is to make "one out of more than one.” But the conflation of every man with his own wife also refers to the Freudian idea of woman as the vagina/void--the personification of lack--by which connection Beckett and Duthuit suggest that void or lack is inherent within the artist. In addition to this notion of the conflation of subject and object, however, Beckett and Duthuit refer to Kandinsky’s discussion because of the artist’s comments on phenomenal materialism and the impact of spiritual forces on expression. Kandinsky begins "On the Spiritual in Art," with a discussion of how preoccupation with the object and the void causes despair, and results in a division of the soul: Our soul, which only now is awakening from a long period of materialism, conceals within itself the seeds of despair, of faithlessness, of purposelessness. The nightmare of materialist ideals has still not passed, and these are ideals which have made an evil, pointless joke out of the universe. The awakening soul is still very much under the influence of the nightmare. A light glimmers but faintly, a tiny speck in the vast blackness. This faint light is only a premonition and the soul lacks the courage to yield to it: perhaps the light is the dream and the blackness the reality? Our doubts, our oppressive sufferings caused by the materialist philosophy force a deep division between our soul and the soul of the Primatives. Our soul is cracked. (64) Kandinsky's use of the trope of a "vast blackness" must have appealed to Beckett and Duthuit, but this notion of a riven soul also reinforces the connection between Kandinsky and the Symposium, at least as the author's read it. The materialist philosophy Kandinsky rejects in this statement, however, is a preoccupation with the object, with “outward resemblance,” which, he argues, has no potential, as opposed to “inner resemblance,” which “contains the seeds of the future” for the artist (64). By making reference to this essay Beckett and Duthuit compare Kandinsky’s ideas to Bishop Berkeley’s notion of occasion. Like Berkeley, Kandinsky rejects materialism and suggests that perception and expression are spiritual functions. The artist, for Kandinsky, is prophetic; "just like one of us, he looks the same as everyone else, but upon him has been bestowed the secret gift of ‘seeing.’ And in seeing, he reveals” (65). He argues that this art is an “eternal language,” that it is “matter infinitely refined (or, as it is increasingly

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called, spirituality) which defies concrete expression and which cannot be expressed in too material a form” (69). And in a statement that reinforces the connection to the Symposium yet again, Kandinsky categorizes the method of refinement of the artist’s language as a contest between possession and poverty, and notes that “in painting these elements of impoverishment/enrichment are represented by form” (69). For this artist, expression is more than representation of the object, more than just an obligation for one who has been granted the gift of seeing, it is a method by which the individual discovers and nurtures the spiritual self: Painting is an art. Art is not the senseless creation of things, diffused in a vacuum. It is a powerful force and has many aims. It should serve the development and refinement of the human soul [. . .] Art is a language whereby we speak to the soul (in a form accessible and peculiar only to this language) of things which are the soul’s daily bread and which it can acquire only in this form. When art neglects this task, a vacuum remains, because there is no other power and force which can replace it. (99) Clearly, Kandinsky believes that the discovery and expression of this eternal language is possible and desirable, that it edifies both the artist and the viewer. B's allusion suggests, however, that the above "vacuum" remains in spite of the efforts of the artist. In “Three Dialogues,” for example, D alludes to the above passage and recognizes the similarity between the programs of Kandinsky and Masson when he observes, “Without renouncing the objects, loathsome or delicious, that are our daily bread and wine and poison, he [Masson] seeks to break through their partitions to that continuity of being which is absent from the ordinary experience of living” (99). While both artists seek the essential or spiritual unity between humans, and between humanity and spiritual forces, however, they differ on the function of the void. Masson seeks to merge with the discontinuity between subject and object, to find in this inconsistency an opening through which he can perceive and express this relation; Kandinsky feels that the pursuit of expression is an obligation, but that the void develops when one loses sight of the obligation to seek the spiritual self through expression. In a footnote to the above passage, for example, which links his remarks more fully to those made by D in the dialogues, Kandinsky cautions that for the inattentive artist, “this vacuum can quickly be saturated with poison and disease” (107). To avoid this fate, Kandinsky stresses, the search for the spiritual essence must guide the artist; the artist “must nurture himself and plumb the depths of his soul, he must conserve his soul and

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develop it so that his outer talent envelops substance and not be like a lost glove, a mere likeness of a hand" (99-100). Beckett and Duthuit extend this allusion further, when, having referred to the experiments of the former artist, B asserts: “No painting is more replete than Mondrian’s” (102). In this passage Beckett and Duthuit do not refer to a specific Mondrian text, but by mentioning him they suggest that something about Mondrian's work illustrates their point about Kandinsky. In “New Plastics in Painting” (1919) Mondrian outlines a program similar to Kandinsky's, in which he argues that the artist should seek a spiritual unity between subject and object: Modern man--although a unity of body, soul, and mind--manifests a changed consciousness: all expressions of life assume a different appearance, a more determinate abstract appearance. Art too, as the product of a new duality in man, is increasingly expressed as the product of cultivated outwardness and of a deeper, more conscious inwardness. As pure creation of the human spirit, art is expressed as pure aesthetic creation manifested in abstract form. (28) Kandinsky views “outward resemblance “ and “inward resemblance” as “diametrically opposed,” and argues that the purpose of expression is to enrich one’s understanding of one’s spiritual self. Mondrian acknowledges a similar opposition--a "new duality"--when he argues that “all relationship is governed by one prime relationship: that of extreme opposites” (30). Both assume a unity of self that Beckett and Duthuit reject. Yet Mondrian, in contrast to Kandinsky, sees the pursuit of an ideal vehicle of expression--expressing “determinately,” in his words--as a way of eliminating the personal and discovering universal consciousness. If unity is seen ‘determinately,’ if attention is focused purely on the universal, then particularity, individuality, will disappear from expression, as painting has shown. Only when the individual no longer stands in the way can universality be purely manifested. Only then can universal consciousness (intuition)--wellspring of all the arts--express itself directly; and a purer art arises. (30) Instead of a strictly spiritual possession, the unity Mondrian advocates is communal, a social/psychological consciousness akin to Jung’s universal unconscious. Mondrian contends that apprehension of this consciousness results in a discovery of a new subjectivity: The subjectivization of the universal is relative--even in art. A great heightening of subjectivity is taking place in man (evolution)--in other words a growing expanding

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consciousness. Subjectivity remains subjective, but it diminishes in the measure that objectivity (the universal) grows in the individual. Subjectivity ceases to exist only when the mutationlike leap is made from subjectivity to objectivity, from individual existence to universal existence; but before this can happen there must be a difference in the degree of subjectivity. This difference of degree is the cause of the differences on artistic expression and makes the new plastic the most direct aesthetic manifestation of the universal possible in a period that is still subjective. (41) Beckett and Duthuit reject the leap Mondrian postulates between subject and object, for B uses similar language to introduce to topic of discussion in the first dialogue: “Total object, complete with missing parts, instead of partial object. Question of degree” (97). And later, he uses this phrase to articulate the artist’s inability to perceive and express: “There is more than a difference of degree between being short, short of the world, short of self, and being without these esteemed commodities” (102). B speaks disparagingly of the search for this “unity of body, soul, and mind” when he argues that the history of painting is nothing more than a series of attempts to "find more authentic, more ample, less exclusive, relations between representer and representee," which, he observes, has been accompanied by "a kind of Pythagorean terror, as thought the irrationality of pi were an offense against the deity, not to mention his creature" (103). With this allusion, Beckett and Duthuit once again seem to lead the reader astray intentionally, for in the context of the dialogues, the terror to which he refers has as much to do with the nature of the self as with irrational numbers. For the Pythagoreans, the universe is numerical, made up of "limited" and "unlimited" elements; it is divided into a series of opposites in which qualities such as odd, male, straight, good, and at rest represent limit while their opposites are unlimited. In addition, the Pythagoreans believed in the doctrine of metempsychosis--the belief in the transmigration of the psuche (Gr. "psyche"--the soul) after death. Together with the division of the world into limit/unlimited, this doctrine seems to imply a sort of Cartesian mind/body dualism, but Jonathan Barnes rejects such a simple explanation, and argues that Pythagoras "does not need suppose that bodies are made of 'matter' and psuchai of that completely different substance, 'spirit.' Metempsychosis is transcorporation of the psuche: that implies nothing about the status of the psuche's constituent stuff" (112). Pythagoras never explained the process substantively, but

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clearly metempsychosis operates on a level in opposition to atomism, for Barnes suggests atomism as a foil for Pythagorean dualism. The opponent of Pythagoras, he writes, would have to prove that "the psuche and the body are identical" or at least of identical material. Insight into the meaning of Beckett and Duthuit's reference to "Pythagorean terror" comes from references in Beckett's other works to Hippasos, the Pythagorean disciple who was killed by a mob, ostensibly for revealing the existence of irrational numbers. First, Beckett mentions Hippasos in relation to the diagram--the "too regular dodecahedron"--he creates to explain the artist's situation in "Les deux besoins": Signature de Pythagore, divine figure dont la construction dépend d'un irrationel, à savoir l'incommensurabilité de la diagonale de carré avec le cóté, sujet sans nombre et sans personne. N'est-ce pas pour avoir trahi ce sombre secret que Hippasos a péri avant terme, lynché par la meute d'adeptes affamés, vierges et furibonds dans un égout public? (Disjecta 56) In this passage, the phrases "divine figure whose" construction is under examination and "subject without number and personality" seem to refer as much to the human subject as to irrational numbers. With this conflation of ideas Beckett suggests that the psyche is, for Pythagoras, unlimited; he asserts that the "constituent stuff" of the psyche is spiritual and that Pythagoras espouses a type of dualism. This notion is reinforced further by Beckett's reference to Hippasos in Murphy, where Neary associates irrational numbers and the human subject when he observes: "as it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places. Here are the pudenda of my psyche.

"Cathleen," cried Wylie.

"But betray me," said Neary, "and you go the way of Hippasos."

"The Akousmatic, I presume," said Wylie. "His retribution slips my mind."

"Drowned in a puddle," said Neary, "for having divulged the incommensurability of side and diagonal."

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"So perish all babblers," said Wylie.

"And the construction of the regular dodeca-hic-dodecahedron," said Neary. "Excuse me." (47-48) In this exchange Neary first sets up the mind/body connection--the conjoined nature of his "love of the body" and "friendship of the mind"--and then mentions the psyche in connection with Hippasos's death for revealing irrational numbers in a way that suggests that something he revealed about the psyche infuriated the mob and resulted in his death. This connection is reinforced by Wylie's reference to Hippasos as the "Akousmatic." This neologism contains the word "akousma" (Gr.) which means, "the thing heard," but which also carries the secondary meaning of "one eager to hear," or a disciple. At the same time, the second element of the word suggests asthmatic, which, together with the fact that Neary claims Hippasos was "drowned in a puddle" and that he was a "babbler," suggests that the Pythagorean's death is in some way linked to his irrational belief in metempsychosis. The irrational crowd cut off his breath, which can be interpreted as the elimination of his speech, but also as the freeing of his pneuma (Gr. "breath or spirit"). Beckett and Duthuit's reference connects the mathematics of Pythagoras to his spiritual theories, and suggests that the "incommensurabilty" of subject/object dualism causes a similar terror. Most importantly, however, Beckett's combined reference to the "every man his own wife experiments" of Kandinsky and Mondrian alludes to their shared interest in theosophy. Beckett and Duthuit's use of the above phrase points to theosophy by means of James Joyce as read through W. B. Yeats. As was discussed in chapter four, Yeats expresses a measure of his devotion to theosophy in his 1903 poem "Baile and Aillinn," which celebrates the spiritual growth the subjects experience through denial of their sexual desires. In the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter of Ulysses, Joyce mocks Yeats's claims with Buck Mulligan’s parody of the poem, in which he quips: “Being afraid to marry on earth / They masturbated for all they were worth” (176). The Theosophical Movement to which Beckett and Duthuit react represents a synthesis of European occultism (largely based in Pythagorism and Neoplatonism) and Asian mysticism (particularly Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism). Both Kandinsky and Mondrian

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subscribed for a time to these ideas. Mondrian joined the Theosophical Society of Holland in 1909, and although he later withdrew his membership, he remained a "faithful" advocate for many years (Seuphor 58).47 Martin James reasons that "Mondrian's theosophy was more than a personal quirk," that it, "easily lives within the romantic and symbolist theory of illuminism, which gives the artist, extraordinary, even occult power of insight into the nature of the world, the reality behind appearances--a new content for art"(Elgar 88-89). Although Mondrian removed his official membership from the organization after a time, Frank Elgar suggests that his withdrawal had less to do with disillusionment than the fact that his theosophy evolved into a new faith in his neo-plasticism (89). Unlike Mondrian, Kandinsky did not join with the movement officially, and seems to have lost interest after a few years, for Pat Weiss records that in an interview some years after the artist's death, Kandinsky's wife Nina "emphatically denied that Kandinsky ever had any serious interest in theosophy," and that she remembered it "angered" him in later years to be labeled a theosophist (157). Yet clearly aspects of theosophy attracted the artist for a time, for as Frank Whitford reasons, Kandinsky was drawn to Society founder Madame Blavatsky's assertion that every person emanates colored auras or "thought forms" which, she believed, were generated by the individual's spiritual energy and would provide an ideal form of communication between enlightened beings (21).48 In comparison, Weiss argues that Kandinsky "welcomed the movement chiefly because its apparent appeal seemed to suggest a general trend toward a less materialistic orientation, and such a less materialistically oriented public might be better disposed to accept, perhaps even comprehend, his efforts to reveal a significant and profound content through nonrepresentational painting" (6). In "On the Spiritual in Art" Kandinsky discusses Blavatsky's ideas, which he states, are in her view "synonymous with eternal truth," and he quotes a passage from Blavatsky's The Key to Theosophy, in which she claims that in theosophy, a "new manner of expression is created in which to clothe the new truths" (26). Although immediately following this passage Kandinsky expresses doubt that theosophy can provide answers to what he calls the "great, eternal question" of life, his essay is informed by the notion that spirituality offers this new manner of expression. In addition to this rejection of theosophy and spiritually facilitated expression, Beckett and Duthuit's allusion to the above Joyce/Yeats reference ties "Three Dialogues" to "Che Sciagura," in which Beckett makes a similar reference, which link underscores the subversive

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nature of his discussion in the dialogues. But the reference also connects Beckett's use of the phrase "disfaction complex" (literally "un-making" from the Latin "di-facere") which he associates with birth control in "Che Sciagura," with Leonardo's "disfazione," especially since both Yeats's spiritual refinement, and the Freudian notion of "non-satisfaction" which results from sublimation, depend upon the control of the sex instinct, Eros. More importantly, with these allusions Beckett and Duthuit suggest that one cannot apprehend the object because of the divided self. They refer to Cartesian dualism when, immediately after the allusions to Kandinsky and Mondrian, B observes: “But if the occasion appears as an unstable term of relation, the artist, who is the other term, is hardly less so, thanks to his warren of modes and attitudes. The objections to this dualist view of the creative process are unconvincing” (102-3). This use of the term “occasion” refers to the facilitation of perception and expression by some outside force: for Berkeley this force is god, for Kandinsky and Mondrian it is an amalgam of spirituality and universal consciousness. In the passage quoted above Mondrian labels this vehicle for navigating the void a "new duality," specifically a “cultivated outwardness” combined with a “deeper, more conscious inwardness” (28). When B asserts that objections to this reading of this "dualist" nature are unconvincing, he is not making reference to Cartesian dualism, but the "new" dualism Beckett and Duthuit observe in the theories of Kandinsky and Mondrian, which opposes the separation of mind and body Descartes advocates. Beckett, in particular, seems to be plagued by this separation, for his characters, who Paul Davies has labeled the "casualties of Cartesianism," not only struggle with the mind/body separation, but also with access to their own consciousness; each is "split off not only from the environment but also from its own organism" (45). B's rejection of these "dualist objections" based on the "modes and attitudes" of the artist alludes to Berkeley, who uses this former term to describe qualities of sense data, which can be misinterpreted by the perceiver, but also to Descartes, who divides the universe into the immaterial ("thinking substances") and material ("extended substances," which include the body and all other objects), and who uses the phrase "modes of extension" to describe the qualities of these objects by which the mind apprehends them: size, shape, motion, position, duration, and number. Beckett and Duthuit allude to these Berkeleyian and Cartesian modes in order to compare occasion, which closes the subject/object relation and dualism, which maintains that this separation is absolute. This comparison suggests that the "new occasion" B attributes to Bram van Velde is a conflation of Mondrian's new duality

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and Berkeley's occasion, and a rejection of the "unconvincing" assumptions underlying both of these theories. This rejection is reinforced further by the earlier disavowal of Sartre's position in Baudelaire, wherein the author writes of an "abortive duality," by means of which he believes the poet came to exploit the void. Clearly, Descartes seems to be at the heart of the dialogues, since this reference to dualism appears late in the text and is, by comparison, fairly obvious. But the series of references within references sets up an ironic use of the term dualism, by which the reader is led to believe that B rejects Cartesian dualism in favor of the "new occasion" Van Velde ostensibly creates.

Performative Subtext Beckett and Duthuit underscore this ironic rejection of a unified self in the final section of the text. In the first part of B's final statement, in which he proposes to articulate what he fancies Bram van Velde does, he argues that given the circumstance of the void, the only acceptable conclusion is to “make of this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation” and to express “the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, and expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation” (102). Yet having made this admission, B does not exhibit the characteristics of the unified self described by the above artists. In fact, B seems to be talking to himself at the end of the dialogues, to have a divided personality. B exhibits behavior he himself recognizes as indicative of an “unenviable situation, familiar to psychiatrists” that he brings upon himself, “and perhaps an innocent,” because of his inability to express his “fidelity to failure” (103). By means of this device Beckett and Duthuit allude to a psychological condition that resembles schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is marked by delusional formations, a retreat from reality, and even a sense of a divided personality. Like O at the end of Film, B is harried and disconcerted during this dialogue. This state does not appear until he is held accountable for his theories, until, for the first time in the text, his opponent presses him with a series of difficult questions and B does not retreat, but remains to attempt the answers. In addition, at the end of his monologue he makes comments that allude to the Rorschach visual association exam often used to diagnose schizophrenia: I know that my inability to do so places myself, and perhaps an innocent, in what I think is still called an unenviable situation, familiar to psychiatrists. For what is this coloured

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plane, that was not there before. I don’t know what it is, having never seen anything like it before. It seems to have nothing to do with art, in any case, if my memories of art are correct. (103) This statement encapsulates the expressive difficulty B struggles to articulate in the dialogues. B not only seems to be talking to himself, but he is unable to perceive or express any details of his art theory; he is trapped and afflicted by the same dilemma he describes. In another clever pun, B's reference to the “coloured plane” alludes to the painter’s use of color and canvas on one hand, but also to the intangible “plane of the feasible” on the other. B exhibits this dementia because he is both separated from reality by gaps in perception and expression, and driven to create works of art that he recognizes as deluded formations--imperfect, subjective, and ultimately incommunicative.

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CONCLUSION EFFLUENCE FROM THE VOID

“His senses tell him nothing, nothing about himself, nothing about the rest, and the distinction is beyond him. Feeling nothing, knowing nothing, he exists nonetheless, but not for himself, for others, others conceive him and say, Worm is, since we conceive him, as if there could be no being but being conceived, if only for the beer.” - Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

Hamm: One day you'll be blind, like me. You'll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, for ever, like me. - Samuel Beckett, Endgame

In his final installment of "Sartre's Last Class," which appeared in the Transition issue immediately following that featuring “Three Dialogues,” Georges Duthuit rearticulates his concern about the void and expression, and asserts that literature lacks solutions to this dilemma. In words that evoke his comments from “Cezanne and Truth” Duthuit argues that attempts to express truth result in a deceptive compromise: I asservate that the novel, the only art which, in its untruth, claims congruence with human life, is also the only art which cannot dispense with truth. In a cleft stick, the novelist, which doesn’t prevent him from pullulating like vermin. Nothing like knowing how to cheat. (T 6:90) At the same time, however, Duthuit asserts that certain “poets” or “poet-novelists” have overcome the inconsistencies of perception and expression created by the void; he suggests that he has been inspired to rethink his assertion in the Cezanne article that it is “better not to express frankly a questionable truth” (107). Duthuit praises Lautreamont, Jarry, Bove, and Beckett, and directs the reader to extracts from their works that appear immediately after his essay.49 Of these four, he intimates, the final author has been the most successful on the quest to engage the void, for in Beckett’s work, he asserts:

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The voice falters, the scene grows dim, beings dissolve and merge, time flows in upon itself, relief is blurred, whiteness wells and ebbs, words quail and vainly seek surcease in the inviolable silence of the innermost dereliction . . . A new murmur of pioetic indifferentiation . . . A new shudder, scarcely felt, an effluence from the void. (T 6:90) Duthuit suggests that, unlike other artists who ignore the disconnections created by the void, and who compromise the truth about expression in order to expedite their efforts, Beckett acknowledges the discontinuity in the subject/object relation, but he also expresses successfully. Beckett, observes Duthuit, attempts to express the fluid nature of perception and expression, of that state of “semi-consciousness, where the details of the forms which have helped create it scarcely exist, or disappear altogether” (90). The above passage describes how in Beckett’s writing, as Duthuit reads it, the effects of the void are addressed: time is altered, medium fails, and details of the outer and inner world blur. With these qualities in mind, Duthuit identifies Beckett’s post-dialogues method and isolates the characteristic that makes Beckett more successful in this search--his “pioetic indifferentiation.” With this neologism--a composite of the words pious and poetic; as well as indifferent and differentiation--Duthuit suggests that Beckett's success stems from the fact that he is more honest about the expressive deception that the artist must confront, but also systematically indifferent to meaning one might attach to this expression, especially metaphysical meaning.50 The neologism refers to the surface and subtext developed in "Three Dialogues" which exemplifies the concurrent statement and denial by which Beckett and Duthuit circumvent the aporia of expressing the inexpressible. This suggests that Duthuit finds meaning in Beckett’s juxtaposition of opposites, in this unending negotiation between impossibilities. At the same time, the use of a neologism, a practice that is linked to Joyce, Jolas, and Verticalism, reinforces the notion that Beckett has, for Duthuit, overcome the discrepancies the two authors identify in Jolas’s theory specifically and modernism in general. Ultimately, Duthuit’s comments about Beckett and the void suggest that he believes “Three Dialogues” represents a transition for Beckett; that he believes Beckett has overcome the subject/object discontinuity discussed in the dialogues and can now express truthfully in some way. Despite Duthuit's observations, clearly "Three Dialogues" is not Beckett's final word on the void, for the author remains preoccupied with this issue throughout his subsequent works. Beckett's late fiction, in particular, exemplifies the "semi-consciousness," faltering voice, dim

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scenes, and other formal qualities Duthuit associates with Beckett's "pioetic indifferentiation." In Nohow On the void approaches a character-like consciousness, as S. E. Gontarski argues in his introduction to that trilogy: "the closer we come to emptying the void, of man, boy, woman, skull, the closer the void comes to being an entity imagined in language and so no different from man or boy, woman or skull" (xxvi). Yet even this interpretation is unstable, for the late fiction also exemplifies Beckett's practice of using logical aporia to express the subject/object relation. Ill Seen Ill Said, for example, ends with the phrase, "Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness" (86). With this passage Beckett sets up an aporia like that those developed in the dialogues and by Duthuit above, where one can interpret words in many ways concurrently. "Grace" suggests that it is good to breathe that void, meaning correct or pious, but it also refers to occassionalism, where the grace of god is required to breathe that void; "breathe" can be read as both inhale and speak; and "know happiness" is a pun that suggests both denial (no happiness) and knowledge (know happiness) in which knowledge is mixed with lack of satisfaction. With this passage Beckett refers to "Three Dialogues" thematically, when he continues both the discussion of void and his method for discussing this issue, and directly, first when he alludes to the term disfazione by suggesting that one cannot find happiness or satisfaction because of the void, and second via Murphy, for this passage alludes to Hippasos, the Pythagorean "akousmatic" who is killed after he breathes (inhales, speaks) the irrational mysteries mentioned in the dialogues. One reason Beckett refers to “Three Dialogues” in these later works is because the dialogues illustrate the paradox about the void that still troubles him in this late fiction. If Beckett’s texts subsequent to the dialogues, as Ruby Cohn observed as early as 1959, “sound like variations upon the theme at which he arrived after long and bitter exploration” in the dialogues (“Preliminary” 131), this is because the discontinuity underlying 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” has not been fully eliminated. “Three Dialogues” illustrates this paradox well because Beckett and Duthuit respond to the self-assurance and technical mastery of those artists who claim to overcome the expressive discontinuity, to what John Barth, in "The Literature of Exhaustion," identifies as the “exhaustion of literary possibilities” (14) in a waning modernist "age of ultimacies and final solutions” (5). Barth later identifies this exhaustion as the rejection of high modernist artistic

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conventions, which, he argues, are "retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate a new and lively work" by artists such as Beckett and Gorges Luis Borges (38). “Three Dialogues,” to use Barth's description of Beckett's work, "reflects and deals with [the] ultimacy" of modernist aesthetics, "both technically and thematically" (5), because B and D discuss artists and issues of expression which are central to modernism, and because the text represents a culmination and confluence of Beckett and Duthuit's individual attempts to overcome the expressive void in their previous critical works. Most importantly, however, the text addresses modernist ultimacy because B and D not only react to Jolas’s efforts to codify modernist aesthetics when they renounce his manifesto, but they also deploy Jolas's rhetoric against itself. Their rejection of Jolas's orphic program through a direct refutation of pronouncement nine of the "Poetry is Vertical" manifesto, for example, wherein Jolas's assertion that, "Poetry builds a nexus between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ by leading the emotions of the sunken, telluric depths upward toward the illumination of a collective reality and a totalistic universe," is dismissed as yet another attempt "to escape from this sense of failure, by means of more authentic, more ample, less exclusive relations between representer and representee, in a kind of tropism towards a light as to the nature of which the best opinions continue to vary" (103), denounces the extremity of Jolas's position and the aesthetic impasse it creates, at the same time that it hints at new and lively aesthetic possibilities. Another reason Beckett refers to “Three Dialogues” in his later work is because the text not only illustrates the ultimacies of modernist aesthetics, but it also suggests a way forward from this aesthetic impasse. Clearly Beckett and Duthuit are disturbed by expressive discontinuity, and a Beckettian attempt to imitate his modernist forebears, who are unaware of or unconcerned by this void, would be, as Barth observes, "anticlimactic, feebly following a very hard act to follow" (24). In the above essay, for example, Barth observes that Beckett's "theoretical course" might ultimately end with the writing of empty pages, but he suggests that "even that would be imperfectly ultimate" (5), and that Beckett's best, last word might be to "cease altogether" (6). But Barth also observes that this trajectory is impractical, that there is a "difference between the fact of aesthetic ultimacies and their artistic use" (6). Beckett and Duthuit recognize this difference, for at the end of the third dialogue B retreats from "the expression that there is nothing to express" just far enough to suggest that he knows how Bram van Velde overcomes the void, but not far enough to share this knowledge (which he may not, in

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fact, have) with the reader. With this formal maneuver, Beckett and Duthuit employ another "intellectual dead end against itself" (Barth 8), by showing the inconsistency of their own theory and practice. Although the text makes use of modernist conventions (a wealth of allusion, complexity, elitism, and depth of meaning), with this indirect/self-effacing form the author's exhibit the type of postmodern playfulness which, Barth observes, "emphasizes the 'performing' self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness of modernism, in a spirit of cultural subversiveness and anarchy" (29). In a 1971 letter to Richard Seaver, Beckett reportedly identified “Three Dialogues” as the “least tedious” of his critical works (Bair 611). The complexity of the work and the amount of attention it has received bear this statement out. More importantly, however, Beckett's observation suggests that unlike his previous critical works, which in comparison to the dialogues are finite, concrete, assertive, and ultimately, repudiated by their author, the open- ended, complex, and problematic "Three Dialogues" still has significance for Beckett. What then is the significance of the dialogues for Beckett and his audience? Barth suggests that a "worthy program for postmodernist fiction […] is the synthesis or transcension of [two] antitheses, which may be summed up as premodernist and modernist modes of writing" (34). This synthesis, unfortunately, resembles Jolas's neo-romantic orphism, which was rejected by Beckett and Duthuit in "Three Dialogues," and so clearly the authors are synthesizing other antitheses. "The ideal postmodernist novel," Barth writes later, "will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and 'contentism,' pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction" (35). This "Literature of Replenishment," will rise above these binaries, he argues, with "one foot in fantasy, one in objective reality" (36). In the dialogues B and D argue loudly and absurdly that expression is impossible, at the same time that the references in the text suggest that one can express, but only indirectly. Beckett and Duthuit use these postmodern techniques to suggest that modernism has gone as far as it can, but they do not just reverse the modernist trajectory and move toward reduction--toward the "literature of the unword," as Beckett suggests in his 1937 letter to Axel Kaun (Disjecta 173), but instead, they reverse and twist the modernist aesthetic into a synthesis of expressive effulgence and impotence. This "new murmur of pioetic indifferentiation" a "shudder, scarcely felt, an effluence from the void" reminds one of Beckett's earlier assertion in "Che Sciagura" that "maximal negation is minimal affirmation." Replenishment, for Beckett and Duthuit, both makes the reader aware of the expressive paradox and suggests that great meaning

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is to be found on the other end of the "innermost dereliction" or "minimal affirmation" if the reader can discover it. Beckettian synthesis, then, is simultaneous denial and affirmation-- aporia. In "Three Dialogues" Beckett and Duthuit argue their way out of this expressive paradox in two ways. First, B and D perform their synthesis of expression and disavowal, which performance Beckett will revisit and refine through much of his late fiction. Beckett’s comments about his own work reinforce the importance of the aporia developed in “Three Dialogues” and suggest that these logical paradoxes are fundamental to interpreting his methods. In Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, Lawrence Harvey records that in 1962, "Beckett remarked that if he were a critic setting out to write on the works of Beckett (and he thanked heaven he was not), he would start with two quotations, one by Geulincx: "Ubi nihil valis ibi nihil velis," and one by Democritus: "Nothing is more real than nothing" (267).51 Similarly, in 1967 Beckett wrote to Sigle Kennedy, "If I were in the unenviable situation position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the 'Naught is more real...' and the 'Ubi nihil vales..." both already in Murphy and neither very rational (Disjecta 113). Although these comments are not news, and one should approach this sort of critical "clue" with caution, they provide insight into the meaning of "Three Dialogues" in several ways. First, the remarks follow Beckett and Duthuit's formal practice in the dialogues. Instead of making an assertion Beckett juxtaposes Geulincx and Democritus against one another like he does with the artists and theorists discussed in that text. Second, Beckett points to the dialogues when he refers to the same ideas and persons to which he alluded in that discussion. He suggests, for example, that critics seek out the connections in his work between Geulincx, the originator of occasionalism, and Democritus, whose atomism informs Leonardo's cosmogony. Finally, with this juxtaposition he illustrates a theoretical dilemma that provides insight into his discussion of a similar dilemma in the dialogues. Lawrence Harvey asserts that the Geulincx quote refers to the body, which Beckett thus suggests is "of negligible value" and a source of suffering, while Democritus refers to the void between atoms, which Harvey associates with the "microcosm of the mind" (267-8). Ultimately, this dilemma involves Beckett's preoccupation with Cartesian dualism, as Harvey suggests when he asserts: "The first phrase, then, condemns external existence while the second proposes a truer inner reality" (278). There is more to this comment, however, than a comparison between atomism and immaterialism, or an affirmation of Cartesian dualism, for

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Descartes denies the existence of empty space--he argues that "extended" or material substance can vary in density, but that a vacuum cannot exist--at the same time that he argues, as Bernard Williams asserts, for "three basic and unanalysable notions--the body, the soul, and the union between them" (76). The boundaries and function of this union inspired occasionalism when philosophers subsequent to Descartes found it problematic, and although Beckett might subscribe to dualism, his work demonstrates that he too finds Descartes's union between mind and body questionable and the presence of a void between subject and object too real. This union, perhaps, is the unbearable presence--“unbearable because neither to be wooed nor to be stormed”--at the heart of "Three Dialogues" which the authors cannot ignore. Although the void becomes a character-like in much of Beckett's late fiction, he gives this unbearable presence the greatest subjectivity in his 1976 text “neither”: To and fro in shadow from inner to outershadow

from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither

as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once turned away from gently part again

beckoned back and forth and turned away

heedless of the way, intent upon the one gleam or the other

unheard footfalls only sound

till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other

then no sound

then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither

unspeakable home (Complete Short Prose 258)

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In this text Beckett gives identity--a "semi-consciousness"--to the union of mind and body Descartes imagines, but for Beckett it is disunity, where the narrator drifts back and forth between subject and object, accessing neither and tormented by the inability to do so. Beckett's accomplishment in 1950, as Duthuit suggests with his label "pioetic indifferentiation," is the beginning of an experiment, and the dialogues provide clues to the nature and interpretation of this experiment, especially in its later stages. In Worstward Ho, for example, Beckett once again performs the synthesis of expressive effulgence and denial, and more importantly, approaches the limits of expressive possibility as he nears the "bounds of the boundless void" (116). At first, Beckett reduces the flow of perception and expression to a single pinhole in the forehead reminiscent of the "third eye" so important to Jolas's orphism. Stare clamped to stare. Bowed backs blur in stare clamped to stare. Two black holes. Dim black. In through skull to soft. Out from soft through skull. Agape in unseen face. That the flaw? The want of flaw? Try better worse set in skull. Two black holes in foreskull. Or one. Try better still worse. One dim black hole mid-foreskull. Into the hell of all. Out from the hell of all. So better than nothing worse they say stare from now. (114) The author acknowledges a compromise here when he observes that this expression is "better than nothing," but he also effaces this observation in the same gesture when he adds the comment "worse." In addition, he suggests that the perceiver and the perceived, like the characters in Film, are locked together, but now without distance between them--"stare clamped to stare." Eventually the boundary between subject and object is completely effaced so that only perception and void remain, with no mediation between subject and object: "The stare. The whole narrow void. No blurs. All clear. Dim clear. Black hole agape on all. Inletting all. Outletting all" (115). The text ends with the assertion that the narrator has arrived at the boundary of the void, at a place where expression seems impossible. Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. At least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on. Said nohow on. (116)

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Even at the bounds of expression, however, this text ends with a self-effacing statement, in which the narrator claims there is no way to express--to "go on"--and which is prefaced by a progressive lessening from less to worse to naught, but which statement is, in itself, still expression. Clearly Beckett seeks minimal affirmation--the smallest amount of expression one can make and still express--and thus, in the same way that an asymptote requires a change in mathematical measurement as one approaches a line or absolute, as Beckett approaches the ultimate penury of expressive impossibility, he changes the rules of measurement. He unwords the word as much as he can while still suggesting expressive possibility. The result of this change in measurement demonstrates the second way in which Beckett and Duthuit argue themselves out of their expressive paradox in "Three Dialogues." Initially, Beckett and Duthuit's subverson of Platonic dialogue form results in elenchus for the reader, who must account for an incomplete syllogism where one element is not just assumed or left out, but explicitly denied. More specifically, Beckett's fiction, as exemplified powerfully in the dialogues and Nohow On, forces a Beckettian catharsis on the reader. Traditional catharsis, according to Artistotle's Poetics, involves a "purgation" or "purification" that occurs when a viewer of a tragedy experiences pity and fear. This can only occur in a drama which is "the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself" (801). Moreover, Aristotle maintains that the tragic hero must be imperfect, but better than the average person; that the audience experiences pity for a good person who displays hamartia--an error of judgement which results in catastrophe--and fear that one may face similar disaster. Beckett and Duthuit manipulate traditional catharsis through the dramatic elements of the dialogues, which enable them to treat serious ideas in a not-entirely-serious fashion, and which text is blatantly, painfully incomplete. In addition, B's exemplifies hamartia when he claims to know how Bram van Velde expresses successfully, which error he confronts at the end of the text, as indicated by his assertion: "I am mistaken" (102). By means of this device Beckett and Duthuit inspire their own type of pity and fear in their reader, who experiences pity at the intelligent and informed B's inability to articulate his ideas, and fear when confronted by the ultimate impossibility of expression suggested by this inability. This study of the formal, contextual, and referential complex that is "Three Dialogues," together with Beckett's overt comments about his work and his practice in the late fiction suggest several conclusions about both the historical interpretation of this work, and of the positioning of

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Beckett in the modernism/postmodernism debate. The dialogues are absurd, especially since the word appears in the text at a time when the term was powerful, but the subtext is organized, deceptive, learned, and amazingly complex--and so this is not the existential absurd of "meaninglessness" but instead the notion of absurd as "irrational," or intentionally illogical. Clearly the work represents a transition for Beckett, not for what it says, as the bulk of Beckettian criticism would have us believe, but as a model of practice and a change of attitude, in which the authors no longer attempt to express expressive impossibility directly. The text is also metaphysical, because Beckett and Duthuit examine fundamental questions of ontology and epistemology in what P. J. Murphy identifies as an "unworkable alliance of phenomenology and existentialism" ("Philosophers" 223). But if the language sounds overtly metaphysical, it is because the authors refer to the texts of Berkeley, Kant, Jolas, and others who seek metaphysical "succor from without" to reinforce their theoretical inconsistencies, and because the process of elenchus requires reader participation as it forces one to question one's fundamental beliefs about modernism, aesthetics, expression, ontology, and epistemology. The text does not form a constructive theory, as some claim, but it is certainly a refutation of the aesthetics, philosophies, and religions alluded to in the text, a response to the elitism and self-assuredness of modernism, and the instigation of an experiment. "Three Dialogues" is not a blueprint, by which we can understand all of Beckett's future projects individually. But if the text is a key to Beckett, this is because the ideas he and Duthuit develop position him in relation to modernism and the particular attitudes/ideas of his theoretical progenitors, and because he and Duthuit demonstrate how one might escape the aporia of expressing the impossibility of expression. Beckett and Duthuit fail, as no others dare fail, in order to distract reader from subversive statements. They denounce direct and constructive methods for navigation of the void, expose the situation the artist faces, identify the existence of a subject/object discontinuity, and challenge artistic complacency about expression. The best interpretation of Beckett's "pioetic indifferentiation" and "Three Dialogues" in general might be that instead of giving us definitive answers about expression and truth, Beckett and Duthuit give us a point of departure.

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NOTES

1 For ease I will refer to this essay as “Three Dialogues,” although I prefer the complete title as it appears in the original publication (“Three Dialogues: Tal Coat - Masson - Bram van Velde”). Where possible, however, I have quoted the title as appears within the source at hand. My purpose is to display the diversity of designation as well as diverse interpretations.

2 The first quoted paragraph deals with “occasion” and begins with the phrase, “D’autres ont senti que l’art n’est pas necessairrement expression...” The large, final statement begins, “La chose que je n’arrive pas a dire, on peut ne pas y arrivir de bien des manieres...(1125).

3 Much of the detail about these extracts was compiled by Federman and Fletcher in Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics (23-4, 99-101).

4 In Martin Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd (1961 ed.), for example, the Bram van Velde catalogue appears in the bibliography while the original "Three Dialogues" does not. Misinformation of this type appears even in recent works, such as in The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett (2001), wherein the author makes the erroneous assertion that Esslin's 1965 collection "included a translation of 'Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit' (the first time this key work had been made widely available in English)" (Pattie 120).

5 For the sake of clarity I will refer to the pre-war journal using lowercase letters--transition, and the post-war journal with a capital--Transition. The premier journal was titled with lower case letters originally, although Jolas altered this practice beginning with issue 21. The second journal used the capital for all six issues. The conflated title--(t)Transition--will be used to refer to the combined history of both journals.

6 Actually, this passage appears in the first dialogue on Tal Coat.

7 Coe gets the source wrong in this passage when he connects Eugene Jolas with “Three Dialogues.” This could be the type of oversight that appears commonly in scholarship, and which has little effect on the argument. Yet this mistake hints that Coe may not have pursued the primary source, and may thus, at the least, be neglecting subtleties of context, and at most, might be relying upon the quoted material of other critics. To his credit, Coe’s bibliography lists the original source for the dialogues, as well as the Calder reprint, the Galerie Michel Warren extract, and the extract from the Nouvelle Revue Francaise. (114)

8 Esslin's collection includes Jacqueline Hoefer's article "Watt," reprinted from the Perspective issue discussed above.

9 My thanks to Philip N. Cronenwett at the Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, for pointing out to me the existence of these notes.

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10 Oppenheim’s “Three Dialogues: One Author or Two,” a compact version of this discussion that deals exclusively with the question of influence and authorship appears in JOBS 8.2 (Spring 1999): 61-72.

11 Specifically, Kennedy argues that critics "tended to avoid our current terminology of 'isms'" and the debate as a whole--"fearing an intellectual quicksand"--until the appearance of the "New Casebooks critical collection on Waiting for Godot and Endgame in 1992" (255).

12 See Hugh Kenner, "Modernism and What Happened to It,", 97; Irving Howe, The Decline of the New, 33; Marjorie Perloff, "The Space of A Door: Beckett and the Poetry of Absence," 200-247; Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination, 40; Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theorie, 7.

13 See Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?"; Stephern Barker, "Conspicuous Absence: Trace and Power in Beckett's Drama"; Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text; Angela Moorjani,, "Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett"; Carla Locatelli, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett's Prose After the Nobel Prize; Leslie Hill, Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words; and Thomas Trezise, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it illustrates the flurry of postmodern arguments that appeared during the early nineties, and underscores Andrew Kennedy's remark that when interpreting Beckett, "if you want to be 'with it' you must be postmodern" ("Modern/Postmodern" 255).

14 In "Late Modernism: Samuel Beckett and the Art of the Oeuvre," an earlier version of this article, Abbott had labeled this device "recollection by distortion" (75), which very likely gave a more pessimistic, postmodern tone to this device than the author intended.

15 See The Pound Era, 153. This idea of spatial structures is addressed much earlier by Joseph Frank in The Widening Gyre, 10.

16 David Weisberg, for example, misreads and misprints "aliment" as the "ailment"--or crisis in the occasion of language--which "Beckett refers to ironically" (145). 17 P.J. Murphy, for example, in his excellent article “Portraits of the Artist as a Young Critic: Beckett’s ‘Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ and the Rewriting of Joyce in ‘Assumption’” (JOBS 9:1(2000): 27-52) touches briefly on the context of transition 16/17 (in which the above texts appear initially), but he neglects the opportunity to address how this milieu informs these texts.

18 I'm citing these texts by title, issue, and page number in order to illustrate the timeline, and because some of the documents do not have titles.

19 For more detail on these debates see Jolas’s Man From Babel (110-111) and Macmillan’s Transition (204-215).

20 For the convenience of the reader I have included the lists of assertions from the two manifestos:

Revolution of the Word (transition 16/17, 1929)

1. The revolution in the English language is an accomplished fact.

2. The imagination in search of a fabulous world is autonomous and unconfined. (Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity . . . Blake)

3. Pure poetry is a lyrical absolute that seeks an a priori reality within ourselves alone. (Bring out number, weight and measure in a year of dearth . . . Blake)

4. Narrative is not mere anecdote, but the projection of a metamorphosis of reality.

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(Enough! Or Too Much! . . . Blake)

5. The expression of these concepts can be achieved only through the rhythmic “hallucination of the word”. (Rimbaud)

6. The literary creator has the right to disintegrate the primal matter of words imposed on him by text- books and dictionaries. (The road of excess leads to the palace of Wisdom . . . Blake)

7. He has the right to use words of his own fashioning and to disregard existing grammatical and syntactical laws. (The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction . . . Blake)

8. True “litany of words” is admitted as an independent unit.

9. We are not concerned with the propagation of sociological ideas, except to emancipate the creative elements from the present ideology.

10. Time is a tyranny to be abolished.

11. The writer expresses. He does not communicate.

12. The plain reader be damned. (Damn braces! Bless relaxes! . . . Blake)

Poetry is Vertical (transition 21, 1932)

[1] In a world ruled by the hypnosis of positivism, we proclaim the autonomy of the poetic vision, the hegemony of the inner life over the outer life.

[2] We reject the postulate that the creative personality is a mere factor in the pragmatic conception of progress, and that its function is the delineation of a vitalistic world.

[3] We are against the renewal of the classical ideal, because it inevitably leads to a decorative reactionary conformity, to a factitious sense of harmony, to the sterilisation of the living imagination.

[4] We believe that the orphic forces should be guarded from deterioration, no matter what social system ultimately is triumphant.

[5] Esthetic will is not the first law. It is in the immediacy of the ecstatic revelation, in the a-logical movement of the psyche, in the organic rhythm of the vision that the creative act occurs.

[6] The reality of depth can be conquered by a voluntary mediumistic conjuration, by a stupor which proceeds from the irrational to a world beyond a world.

[7] The transcendental ‘I’ with its multiple stratifications reaching back millions of years is related to the whole history of mankind, past and present, and is brought to the surface with the hallucinatory irruption of images in the dream, the daydream, the mystic-gnostic trance, and even the psychiatric condition.

217

[9] Poetry builds a nexus between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ by leading the emotions of the sunken, telluric depths upward toward the illumination of a collective reality and a totalistic universe.

[10] The synthesis of a true collectivism is made possible by a community of spirits who aim at the construction of a new mythological reality.

21 Boyle discusses the transition pronouncements in Being Geniuses Together, and observes several times that she “was not at all certain what they meant by that” (264).

22 Although the six issues are consecutively numbered, the cover includes the year of publication as well (e.g. Transition Forty-Eight, Transition Forty-Nine, etc.). Within the pages of the journal the title appears in a variety of forms: complete title, year, and number as above; as the title conjoined to the year in numerals (i.e. Transition49); or simply as Transition.

23 A partial list of the dialogue clusters present in Transition includes: Transition 1 On Surrealism: “Sartre’s Last Class I” Georges Duthuit “What is Literature” Jean-Paul Sartre “The Pulversized Poem” René Char “About a Journey . . .” Antonin Artaud On Metaphysics: “The Ultimate Instant” Georges Bataille “Note on Metaphysics” Jean Wahl “Enigma” Robert Margerit “The Philosopher’s Stone . . .” Jacques Gengoux

Transition 2 A Debate on Poetry “Letter - Red” Henri Pichette “In Reply to Pichette” Max-Pol Fouchet “Apoem 4” Henri Pichette On Surrealism, again “One Cause, Two-fold Defense” André Breton “On a Journey . . . (II)” Antonin Artaud “Why does one Write?” Jean-Paul Sartre “Three Poems” Samuel Beckett “Sartre’s Last Class II” Georges Duthuit

24 It is worth noting here that many of the contributors to this inaugural issue, including Sartre, are listed as advisory editors. The complete list from the title page reads as follows: Georges Bataille, René Char, Douglas Cooper, Max- Pol Fouchet, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Jean-Paul Satre, and Jean Wahl.

25 Letter from Eugene Jolas to Georges Duthuit (cir. 1941). Correspondence of Eugene Jolas (Box 2, Folder 15) contained in the Eugene and Maria Jolas Papers, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

26 For more information about information relative to personalities and publications discussed in this essay, please see Damned to Fame by James Knowlson, and Federman and Fletrcher’s Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics, Eugene Jolas’s Man From Babel, and Dougald MacMillan’s Transition 1927-1938.

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27 Actually, the reference in the manifesto is to “a nexus between the ‘I’ and the ‘you.’ McMillan’s use of the term “thou” is very likely an oversight, although intentional or not, it underscores the prominence of the new metaphysical orientation present in the “Vertical” manifesto.

28 Beckett’s contribution was substantial. “According to Rémi Labrusse,” Knowlson writes, “Mannheim wrote offering to have Beckett sign this translation but Duthuit replied negatively, explaining that Beckett had done it as a favor to him and did not wish to be acknowledged” (690). 29 Moes refers to Epistle VII, section 344.

30 Duthuit's contributions are substantial enough that I will, from this point forward, acknowledge the dual authorship of the text. At the same time, since both men formulated the ideas and phrases together, I will refrain from identifying the character B with Beckett's ideas and the character D with Duthuit's as is done customarily.

31 Critics are careful to distinguish, for instance, between the "historical" Socrates, Plato's Socrates, and the Socrates caricature from The Clouds by Aristophanes. See Fortunoff, 71-74.

32 “Oh the disaster of being without balls!” Beckett refers to the entire phrase by means of the title and the pseudonym “D.E.S.C.” ("d’essere senza coglioni") with which he signs the text.

33 The phrases from Ulysses to which Beckett alludes, for example, were largely responsible for the censorship problems Joyce faced with this text. See Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship, 1-9.

34 These dialogues are about the place of art in society. Actor, Actress, Dramaturg, and Electrician argue with a Brechtian Philosopher who wants to exploit their talent.

35 Orlando Harrison and Will Cox presented a reading of the text at a conference organized by the London Network for Modern Fiction Studies on the subject of "Three Dialogues," which took place at South Bank University, London, on November 10, 2001. John Calder had apparently petitioned Beckett to stage a reading in 1965, but Beckett refused: "What ever you like, but please not the Duthuit dialogues. We can always find something to replace them" (Gontarski "Beckett and Performance" 4).

36 This essay appeared in German in the Paris journal Unsere Zeit 8.3 (April 1935): 23-34. It was reprinted in English in Twice A Year, Tenth Anniversary Issue (New York 1948).

37 The list of poems includes “Alphabet-Incendie,” “Et le reste a l’avenant,” “Lions,” “Vent,” “Mer,” and “Depart” Les Temps modernes 39 (February 1949). The book of poems, Air, appeared in 1950.

38 Felix Feneon (1861-1944). “The various writings of this friend of Mallarme and of Seurat . . . were collected this year for the first time . . .” ("Notes on Contributors" 127).

39 In her discussion of Beckett and van Velde, Oppenheim argues for a profound affinity between these two artists. She uses the following van Velde quotes drawn from Charles Juliet's Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (originally published in 1975).

I paint to kill off the word.

My painting is bound up with the phenomenon we call seeing. What do we mean by seeing, since we never do see?

A painting is an instant of vision.

The canvas allows me to make the invisible visible.

219

These passages demonstrate the same internal inconsistencies evident in van Velde's "Sayings" (ostensibly one has to see to have a vision or appreciate the visible), which undermines Oppenheim's argument that Beckett found in van Velde an "endorsement of his own anaesthetic purpose" (85), and reinforces the ironic nature of B's evaluation of van Velde.

40 Ackerley revealed these connections in his paper, "Samuel Beckett and Max Nordau: Degeneration, Sausage- Poisoning, the Bloodied Rafflesia, Coenesthesia and the Not-I," at The Samuel Beckett Symposium, "After Beckett / d'apres Beckett, which took place at Sydney Autralia, January 6-9, 2003.

41 Beckett created these notes after the film was completed. They appear in a September 1964 letter to Alan Schneider and were later published with the Film script. In this letter, Beckett writes that the film "does in one sense fail with reference to a purely intellectual schema, that is in a sense which only you and I and a few others can discern" (Harmon 166).

42 Beckett includes the interpretation of these names and divided character in the notes to Film (163). Additional possibilities for interpretation present themselves, however. In Ghosts of Modernity, for example, Rabaté notes that in his fiction W. R. Bion, Beckett's London analyst, uses the character named "O" to signify knowledge (167).

43 “La perspective occidentale n'est qu'une longue suite de pièges pour la chasse aux objets. Espace possessif, heureusement transgressé par Bonnard dans ses œuvres denières, échappant aux cadastres et aux limites, atteignant le lieu où toute possession se dissout” (967).

44 This notion of the absolute seems to have been a serious impediment for the authors, and Beckett in particular. Duthuit writes to Beckett, "Reread everything you wrote about Bram, my dear friend, and tell me if, in ten places, it is not this search for this absolute, by way of possession and not conversion, which haunts and torments you" (Oppeneheim, Painted, 84).

45 Beckett quotes from Duthuit's letter to Beckett of June 9, 1949, wherein the author writes, "Does there exits, can there exist or not, an impoverished painting, useless without camouflage, incapable of any image whatsoever, whose obligation does not seek to justify itself?" (Oppeneheim, Painted, 89). The fact that in the text this idea is assigned to B when Duthuit wrote it reinforces the fictional aspect of the dialogues and undermines the conventional association of D with Duthuit and B with Beckett.

46 Andrew Gibson examines these ideas in his essay, "Three Dialogues and Beckett's Tragic Ethics," which he delivered at Samuel Beckett’s Three Dialogues: A Critical Reappraisal, a conference organized by the South Bank University, London, November 10, 2001. In this essay he discusses al-haqq and suggests that Massignon is a plausible historical source for Beckett and Duthuit's exposure to Sufist mysticism.

47 Michel Seuphor wrote to the Society about Mondrian's membership and received the following reply:

Piet Mondrian was in fact a member of the Theosophical Society, and for quite some time. We cannot say exactly for how long a time, because most of our papers were lost during the last war. The file on Mondrian, like so many others, could not be found. (58)

48 These arguments are articulated in Thought Forms, by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater (1905), a copy of which was owned by Kandinsky.

49 Beckett's contribution, entitled "Two Fragments," appears on pages 103-105.

50 This metaphysical interpretation is suggested by Duthuit’s use of the term “indifferentiation,” which sometimes refers to an ecumenical attitude toward metaphysical truth in general and religion in particular.

51 "Where you are worth nothing, you will want nothing."

220

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

David A. Hatch is a complex of many personas: husband, father, scholar, pilgrim, teacher, strategist, swordsman, provocateur, evil genius cursed with a moral streak. By day he has accepted a position teaching British Literature and Advanced Writing at Brigham Young University. By night he works on his point placement and reads to his kids.

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