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Beckett and the Refusal Of... Judgment: the Question of Ethics and the Value of Art

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Beckett and the Refusal Of... Judgment: the Question of Ethics and the Value of Art BECKETT AND THE REFUSAL OF... 265 Beckett and the Refusal of... Judgment: The Question of Ethics and the Value of Art Mireille Bousquet (Université Paris-8 – Vincennes – Saint-Denis, France) Beckett’s work brings into the open various processes of indeterminacy, among them the absence of definite statement, the rhetorical question, and a writing that operates through decomposition and rearrangement, giving rise to new and infinite possibilities of meaning. Beckett himself provided few clues about the significance of his work–telling Tom Driver that the key word in his work is “perhaps,” and going so far as to explicitly assert the impossibility of judgment in conversation with Charles Juliet. The refusal of judgment raises the difficult question of the place of ethics in Beckett’s work; it also resonates suggestively with Gilles Deleuze’s own proposals “for having done with” this problem. This article will consider the possibility that Beckett’s texts may provide a different sense of the ethical than that given by the philosophers. Examining his work in this light will reveal the problematic mutual implication of questions of art, ethics and language. The acknowledgement that a fundamental indecision characterizes Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre is one of the stumbling blocks of criticism and is indicative of how language and art operate in his work. Georges Bataille was among the first to align himself with this position and uses the term “indifference” when speaking of a book which “explores with an unflinch- ing irony the extreme possibilities of indifference and misery.”1 In particu- lar, he analyzes the workings of the author-reader relation as one of attack: 1 Georges Bataille, “Georges Bataille in ‘Critique,’” in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, eds. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (New York and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 64. 266 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW This frantic progress toward ruin that animates the book, which, being the author’s attack on the reader, is such that not for an instant is the latter given the leisure to withdraw into indiffer- ence–could it have been produced if so persuasive a conviction did not originate in some powerful motive? Certainly, here all reasonable hopes and plans are engulfed in indifference. (64, 65) The analysis unfolds by way of the question of meaning and touches one of the most eminently problematic points of Beckett’s work: “the only meaning in all this lies in the fact that nonsense in its own way makes sense; a parody of meaning, perhaps, but finally a distinct meaning, which is to ob- scure within us the world of significations” (64). Once this indifference is extended to the whole of the work, inclusive of the author,2 and even his readership, the stakes are truly of an ethical or- der. Bataille concludes logically: to such a “limping, imperfect indifference, how can one after all not be indifferent?” (67). If the indifference that car- ries the work overwhelms the reader and elicits the same attitude in return, it becomes truly a matter of surprise that this limit-work should still find an audience! Doubtless it is because the force of this generalized indifference has the power to create its own capacity for regeneration. Bruno Clément’s findings in L’Oeuvre sans qualités apply with equal validity to the assertion of indifference and to the refusal to choose. The figure of epanorthosis, which, for Clément, characterizes Beckett’s work, is capable of figuring that which would be simultaneously form and movement, while, on the other hand, it carries a certain value, that of the absence of choice: In effect, epanorthosis is selected not because it allows, at almost each of its moments and places, the work to summon terms whose existence and relevance it would recognize and be- tween which it would never have to choose, but because the poles 2 It is moreover to this excess of indifference that Bataille attributes the comic base of the narrative: “An author writing while consumed with indifference to what he writes might seem to be acting out a comedy” (67; trans. modified). BECKETT AND THE REFUSAL OF... 267 that it names without disdain are for the work nothing more than empty places for dead objects.3 According to Clément the effect produced by the work is one of hesi- tation: Of course the statement of the question imposes, simultane- ously with the question, the terms in which it is posed. Above all, through the play of alternatives, it imposes its skillfully constructed ambiguity. Thus it says: either the sketch is the reflection of its ob- ject or it betrays the incapacity [...] of the subject. [...] Yet all that counts is the object produced by the text: hesitation. (421) Clément concludes his analysis with the state of perplexity of the reader (necessarily his lot): … nothing is as we thought. There is certainly someone, something, this moment is probably datable, this place locatable and there is well and truly a text. But we know nothing more. (425) Clément thus draws attention to the process of unlearning that Beckett induces in the reader. But this process of apprenticeship in reverse leads the reader to confront the interrogation to which the text gives rise. The old cer- tainties are truly undone, but nothing comes to replace them. If hesitation is in fact the sole object produced by the text, then it must be conceded that critical and interpretive reading reflects its own questions, as in a game of mirrors: only hesitation responds to the reader’s interrogation. This surely accounts for a good part of the fascination that Beckett’s work exercises, and poses a significant problem for criticism to the extent that the latter claims to formulate answers. So it is hardly surprising that, generally speak- ing, the critical gesture comes to the conclusion of indifference. Let us take up, as another case, the example of Leslie Hill, whose study of Beckettian discourse leads to the same conclusion of indifference. 3 Bruno Clément, L’Oeuvre sans qualités: rhétorique de Samuel Beckett (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 242. 268 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW According to Hill, the indetermination of which he gives an account consti- tutes an aporia,4 and his reading arises out of a careful examination of phi- losophies of language that take the side of the unnamable, thereby treating language as a problem of nomination, and looking for a way out: Beckett’s work pursues one end, which is the end of lan- guage. The end of language, however, never comes. Or rather it has always already taken place. Beckett writes in the name of something which has no name, but to which he struggles to give a name. That something is what throughout this book, for my part, I have named: indifference. Yet indifference is not stasis. It is the infinity of difference, the erasure of identity and the still turbu- lence at the centre of language and the body. (62) …[R]repeatedly [...] the writing refuses to allow itself to be read as some form of coded message [...] it does this in part by denying its own binary logic and stability. (62) The problem here is of knowing whether it is Beckett’s writing that re- fuses to be decoded, as if this were implicitly a function of all language, or whether we are dealing with a dubious conception of language, which the work itself criticizes. Additionally Hill’s conclusion broods over the ques- tion of negativity in Beckett, a negativity that is first of all tied to a concep- tion of language – even if Hill’s reflection on indifference is very strong, particularly when he speaks of an “infinity of difference,” it raises genuine questions while analyzing the ambivalent character of a work that invites in- terpretation even as it refuses it: What is left is a binary opposition which invites or solicits interpretation, yet refuses any contextual framework for interpre- tation. The contrast becomes crucial and indeterminate, signifi- 4 “In Beckett, aporia is usually signalled by devices such as the careful rhetorical bal- ancing of contradictory periods, the repeated use of terms like ‘d’un côté’ or ‘d’un autre côté,’ ‘peut-être,’ and the fondness for unanswerable rhetorical questions” (Les- lie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 62). BECKETT AND THE REFUSAL OF... 269 cant yet devoid of meaning. (62) How, in the end, is this negativity a problem? Perhaps because, in the last instance, everything that can be regarded as critical discourse leads to the assertion, which is to say the impasse, of aporia? Perhaps also because one senses here a kind of critical impotence, a renunciation that compels an exit from the work, to take the air as it were? From this point of view, Hill’s conclusion is remarkable: Negativity in Beckett’s work does not allow redemption; the issues it raises cannot be resolved by dialectical decision, by the covert imposition of a body of beliefs or doctrines. The force of indifference in Beckett’s writing cannot be incorporated. That is its definition. This is why, for this book at least, there is no exit from the labyrinth. The heavens, however, continue to gleam and one may still get a sight of the sun and the other stars. (187) Happily consolation is possible, but it is to be sought outside of the work, in the real world. Despite or alongside this force of indifference, another force is con- tinuously at work, the on: “I must go on.” For Shane Weller, the undecid- able character of the work is tied to this necessity of going on, to this im- perative that draws in its wake a questioning of ethics.
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