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Beckett and Europe: Poesis, Legibility, History

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Beckett and Europe: Poesis, Legibility, History BECKETT AND EUROPE: POESIS, LEGIBILITY, HISTORY by Jonathan S. Feinberg B.A. in English, University of Illinois, 2001 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Critical and Cultural Studies University of Pittsburgh 2012 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Jonathan S. Feinberg It was defended on April 9, 2012 and approved by Marcia Landy, Distinguished Professor, Dept. of English William Scott, Associate Professor, Dept. of English Giuseppina Mecchia, Associate Professor, Dept. of French and Italian Dissertation Advisor: Colin MacCabe, Distinguished University Professor, Dept. of English ii Copyright © by Jonathan S. Feinberg 2012 iii BECKETT AND EUROPE: POESIS, LEGIBILITY, HISTORY Jonathan S. Feinberg, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2012 Samuel Beckett’s works are characterized by a pervasive sense of lateness—of having arrived after the peak of European civilization, with no choice but to work with outdated materials—that informs the works’ challenging formal qualities and defines their historical consciousness with regard to the crisis of Europe in the twentieth century. The mutual and reciprocal articulation of this sense of lateness and the works’ radical formal, aesthetic, and even technological experimentation yields an instance of what Edward W. Said has called “late style:” works characterized by an historical untimeliness that is expressed formally. Close readings of the prose fiction reveal a generative, essayistic literary practice that relentlessly assays habitual or conventional literary forms and consistently refuses closure or culmination as only another example of these conventions. This essayistic procedure and its gesture of refusal—the mark of Beckett’s famous “fidelity to failure”—leave traces of the literary forms and conventions that the work has tried on and abandoned as obsolete. Within these traces, an image of Europe emerges—in the moment of its obsolescence—from the vestiges of forms of intelligibility that no longer communicate or have outlasted their use. “Europe,” in this reading, does not stand outside the work as the “context” that renders the work legible to and available for interpretation; rather, it emerges vestigially and in retrospect, as the detritus that the essayistic process of testing and experimentation leaves behind as it searches for new forms of intelligibility that will inaugurate new beginnings. Beckett’s career-long practice of self-translation contributes to this iv essayistic process by staking out a critical position between languages from which to test the limits and possibilities of each, while his experimentation with new technologies and media in his dramatic works seeks non-literary, non-linguistic poetic means in the wake of literature’s dominance as the bearer of culture. v TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 INTRODUCTION: ON BELATEDNESS AND BEGINNINGS .................................... 1 1.1 “OFF WE GO AGAIN” ...................................................................................... 1 1.2 “A NEW CONCEPTION” OF LITERATURE AND HISTORY ................... 5 2.0 ASSAYING THE HYPOTHETICAL: THE ETHOS OF THE ABANDONED WORK. ........................................................................................................................................ 19 2.1 BECKETT’S “WÖRTERSTÜRMEREI” ....................................................... 19 2.2 “FIDELITY TO FAILURE” ............................................................................ 29 2.3 THE CARTESIAN BECKETT ........................................................................ 34 2.4 ASSAYING THE HYPOTHETICAL: WATT ............................................... 38 2.5 “UNLESSENABLE LEAST” ........................................................................... 50 2.6 “OTHERWISE THAN UNAWARES” ............................................................ 56 3.0 READING THE VESTIGES OF EUROPE ................................................................... 58 3.1 “THE WESTERN PUBLIC AND ITS LANGUAGE”................................... 59 3.2 READING “EUROPE” THROUGH DANTE ................................................ 70 3.3 “SYNTAXES UPENDED” ................................................................................ 83 4.0 SELF-TRANSLATION AND THE AFTER-LIFE OF THE WORK ......................... 96 4.1 “THE LIFE OF LANGUAGE AND ITS WORKS” ...................................... 97 4.2 AUTRE(S) ET PAREIL(LES) ........................................................................ 104 vi 4.3 “EXCESSES OF LANGUAGE” .................................................................... 115 4.4 THE UNTRANSLATABLE ........................................................................... 129 5.0 TOWARDS A POST-LITERARY POESIS: TECHNOLOGY AND NEW MEDIA IN THE DRAMATIC WORKS .................................................................................................... 132 5.1 A NON-LITERARY PUBLIC ........................................................................ 134 5.2 DISEMBODIED VOICES .............................................................................. 149 5.3 A NON-LITERARY PUBLIC (FINAL) ........................................................ 160 6.0 CONCLUSION: IMAGINATION NOT DEAD YET ................................................. 165 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 169 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Watt's table of solutions and objections. ....................................................................... 39 viii 1.0 INTRODUCTION: ON BELATEDNESS AND BEGINNINGS “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” --Samuel Beckett, Murphy1 1.1 “OFF WE GO AGAIN” I would like to begin by commenting on how difficult it is to say something new about Samuel Beckett and his works, because so much has already been said, and so much of what has been said has been said so many times. But even that has been said before, and I cannot even acknowledge how late I have arrived at Beckett’s works (which, after all, are not that old) without falling into cliché, into a critical commonplace, even if I do so “otherwise than unawares.”2 If, in 1965, “one of the keys to the whole phenomenon of Samuel Beckett, his oeuvre, and its impact” lay, as Martin Esslin suggested, in the impasse between the author’s notorious reticence to discuss the meaning of his works and “the critics’ massive urge to supply 3 an explanation,” today’s readers of Beckett face the critical impasse of lateness, of having 1 Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 1. 2 Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, tr. by Samuel Beckett and Patrick Bowles (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 291. 3 Martin Esslin, “Introduction,” Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 1. 1 arrived after the fact, eager to contribute to a conversation that seemingly has already taken place. The unusually rapid proliferation of scholarship on Beckett’s works following his nearly instantaneous rise to international fame with the success of Waiting for Godot created this impasse almost immediately, however: Esslin already noted, in 1965, that “no writer of our time has provoked a larger volume of critical comment, explanation, and exegesis in so short a time,”4 and his preface to the second edition of The Theatre of the Absurd—which recalls a 1964 London revival of Godot that yielded the general verdict that the play was a “modern classic,” though “its meaning and symbolism were a little too obvious”—marvels at how quickly “the incomprehensible avant-garde work turns into the all too easily understood modern classic.”5 From this point on, the critic—whose work always occurs after the fact, in a sense—is too late: the work has already been domesticated, assimilated into the ranks of the “classics” and the critical categories reserved for them, and rendered innocuous. Having arrived too late, then, with so much having already been said, how and where can criticism begin? I pose this question not to speculate on what the considerable and imposing body of extant scholarship on Beckett might not yet have said, but rather to note how strongly the impasse that has quickly come to define the whole endeavor of reading and writing about Samuel Beckett resonates with the attitude that pervades and characterizes his works. “Off we go again,” Vladimir says—repeating word for word Estragon’s lament from the previous act, the previous iteration—as the Boy arrives to inform the two tramps, yet again, that Mr. Godot will not come that day, but surely the next, condemning them to wait, yet again, through another day, another 6 iteration without progress or culmination. Vladimir’s weariness at this prospect, his feeling that 4 Ibid., 1. 5 Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Overlook Press, 1973), ix. 6 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, tr. by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 105. 2 they’ve done and said all of this before, evinces a sense of lateness whose significance extends beyond his concern that he and Gogo may have missed their appointment. It expresses the historical consciousness that pervades Beckett’s oeuvre and drives its procedure, and it indexes an historical problematic in the face of which Vladimir can only articulate,
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