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Download (15Mb) University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/34693 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. 4 THE PARADOX OF SELF-ANNIHILATING EXPRESSION : REPRESENTATIONS OF ONTOLOGICAL INSTABILITY IN THE DRAMA OF SAMUEL BECKETT. PAUL ANTHONY LAWLEY B. A. A THESIS PREPARED IN THE DEPARTMENTOF ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK, AND SUBMITTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK FOR THE DEGREE OF Ph. D. OCTOBER 1978. CONTENTS. PAGE Introduction. 1 One: Waiting for Godot. 39 Two: Endgame. 57 Three: All That Fall. 91 Four: Krapp's Last Tape. 110 Five: Embers. 126 Six: Happy Days. 160 Seven: Cascarho. 179 Eight: Play. 194 Nine: Later Plays: Not I; That Time; Footfalls. 209 Conclusion. 254 Appendix. 257 Notes. 259. Abbreviations. 274 Selected bibliography. 275 r ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. I am grateful chiefly to Dr. Michael Bell, who supervised this thesis, and to my mother, Mrs. S. M. Lawley, who typed it. In addition I have benefited from conversations with friends, notably Mr. Vincent Mahon. All mistakes are, needless to say, my own. I have acknowledged my debts, so far as I am aware of them, to previous writers on Beckett and his plays. However, my sense of Ht&gh Kenner's having so often "been there before me" in his Critical Study is something to which the accumulation of individual references cannot do proper justice. It remains to be noted that, although I have included in my (1978) bibliography Deirdre Bair's Samuel Beckett :A Biography (1976), and Clas Zilliacus's Beckett and Broadcasting these books arrived to hand too late for use in the body of the thesis itself. P. L. SUMMARY One of the central critical problems about Beckett - how can we praise without feeling uneasy the work of an artist for whom "to be an artist is to fail"? - parallels the creative predicament of a writer whose "art of-failure" can only exist in an inherently expressive medium. How can an art which is anti-art remain true to itself? Is a truly self-annihilating expression possible? Two perspectives on the problem are opened. The first-i3 theoretical: a consideration of the Duthuit Dialogues confirms that Beckett- refuses to countenance an art which survives by making artistic failure itself the occasion of artistic creation. Rather he "dreams" of a genuine "art of failure": without occasion, in-expressive and indefinable. The second perspective (itself suggested by Beckett's critical tendency in the Duthuit Dialogues) is literary-historical: pertinent Romantic, nineteenth-century. and Modernist attitudes towards artistic failure are outlined and briefly considered. Such (and a consideration serves both to define the particular. unique) nature of Beckett's response to what may be seen as a traditional Romantic and Modernist problem, and to confirm the essentially ontological nature of what Beckett sees as the creative "obligation". (Failure to. create as failure to be. ) The Beckettian creative predicament is thus considered next in terms of individual identity, by way of the recurring motif of the "imperfect birth", and the paradoxical quality of Beckett's response to his creative problem is most clearly seen in the theatre, where he needs to represent degrees of ontological absence in what has been seen as the medium of "presence". Studies of the individual plays show that Beckett's method is to exploit the essence of theatre, which is playing, so as to suggest that the players are never really present, only playing, because obliged to play, over the void of (their own) identity. In order to render the creative-ontological situation of the imperfectly=born subject, Beckett seeks to produce, both in the text and the stage- picture and by a precise counterpointing of the two elements, the effect of parody presence. Examination of the plays in chronological order illustrates. a development towards abstraction and an increasing emphasis on shape and pattern. The central character becomes more and more obviously (by a creator and the same token) is revealed more and more clearly by the effect of parody presence as a created being, though imperfectly created. Thus theatrical presence is undermined and the Beckett play enacts its own self-annihilation. He: "Certain things are no longer possible, The pretence of feeling as a compositional work of art, the self-satisfied pretence of music itself, has become impossible and no longer to be preserved -I mean the perennial notion that prescribed and formalized elements shall be introduced as though they were the inviolable necessity of the single case. Or put it the other way round: the special case behaving as though it were identical with the prescribed and familiar formula. For four hundred years all great music has found its satisfaction in pretending that this unity has been accomplished without a break - it has pleased itself with confusing the conventional universal law to which it is subject with its own peculiar concern. My friend it cannot go on... Music,.. by untiringly conforming her specific concerns to the ruling conventions has as far as she could played a role in the highbrow swindle. The inclusion of expression in the general appeasement is the innermost principle of musical pretence. It is all up with it. The claim to consider the general harmonically contained in the particular contradicts itself. It is all up with the once blindingly valid conventions, which guaranteed the freedom of. play. " I: "A man could know that and recognise freedom above and beyond all critique. He could heighten the play, by playing with forma out of which, as ho well knew, life has disappeared. " He: "I know, I know. Parody. It might be fun, if it were not so melancholy in its aristocratic nihilism. Would you promise yourself much pleasure and profit from such tricks? " I (retort angrily): ttldo. " Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947). INTRODUCTION In an important review of nine critical books on Beckett in 1966, r J. R. Harvey insisted upon what must be recognised as a central problem of Beckett criticism, a problem which affects everything that has been. and will be said about Samuel Beckettts work. Noting that "the work of proving that Beckett is good" has never been done - (1978) a situation which obtains now as then - Harvey continues:, The work would certainly involve difficulties, and complications: I am not thinking of those things in Beckett that I dislike, but of the ways in which the art is self-convicted -- not true to itself. This does-not refer primarily to the paradoxes in the doctrine of anti-art, for I"Ir Becketts commitment to them is more nominal than real: the upshot, perhaps, of his desperate sense of being in an impasse, with no artistic genre to hand that suited his purpose. As an artist, he seems decidedly on the side, of expression, and to succeed in expressing all there is in him to express. On the other hand, critics with a bias for theory, and committed to the anti-art approach - like Mr Federman and fir Coe - must also be committed to resolving the inconsistency between their tributes to the poignant achieved expressiveness of his Work and the technique they celebrate, which I-Ir Federman summarises - the creator's mind now appears naked as it struggles with an inadequate form and language to perform a futile creative act. Failure and nothingness, the goals of this novel, become (Journey to 1 ) aesthetic experiences ... Chaos, p. 9. One cannot have it both ways: although. we may feel that it is not so much his critics, as Mr Beckett himself, who tries to have it both ways. At all events, there does seem to be a confusion in his mind as to what art is that may have been damaging to the proper success of his ambitions? After maintaining that Beckett seems "to succeed in expressing all there (in is in him to express"Harvey again becomes suspicious the penultimate sentence) - and I think rightly so. The possibility of dishonesty and insincerity ("solf-convicted", "not true to itself", "having it both ways") hand about Beckett's art more surely than even Harvey seems ready to admit. The irony of the claim that Beckett "seems decidedly on the side of expression" will 1 hope emerge in the course of this -2- study. At this early stage, however, all that is necessary is a brief indication that Beckett's commitment to "the doctrine of anti-art" is indeed real and not merely nominal, as Harvey suggests in an effort to extricate him. The word "doctrine" itself hints that the commitment might be other than real, might indeed be a. luxury of theory rather than a creative necessity, however problematic. That "doctrine" is. (a misleading and Beckett' commitment tolhnti-art" phrase which properly belongs with "doctrine") more than nominal is I think borne out by a well-known passage from Molloy: Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I. say that now, but after all what do I know about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully. named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
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