Ann Banfeld
“PROUST’S PESSIMISM” AS BECKETT’S COUNTER-POISON
n obsession with generation traverses Samuel Beckett’s work. It is, to Aborrow Beckett’s phrase from Proust (III.260), “a neuralgia rather than a theme” (Proust 22).1 This obsession Beckett inherits from that Anglo-Irish tradition that W. B. Yeats invoked in his 1925 Senate Speech as “that small Protestant band” he, “a typical man of that minority,” was “proud” to belong to: “We are one of the great stocks of Europe,” “the people of Burke . . . of Grattan, . . . of Swift, . . . of Parnell. We have created the most of the modern literature of this country” (Castle 90). Yeats’s Anglo-Irish “band” are old men who survive when “All’s Whiggery now,” resisting that “levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind” (“The Seven Sages” 252) he saw as largely Catholic. “That is no country for old men,” the 1927 “Sailing to Byzantium” begins (204). “The young/In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,/ —Those dying generations—at their song,/The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,/Fish, fesh, or fowl, commend all summer long/ Whatever is begotten, born and dies.” “That country,” with its salmon-falls, is recognizably Ireland, from which Yeats sailed to Ravenna in 1924, the year the Free State was founded. It is also recognizably Ireland by its perceived fertility, despite demographic decline from famine and emigration (Whelan 59). In Yeats’s anxious vision, generation is frst this fertile, cyclic tide of life, the Catholic majority, threatening to overwhelm the band of old men “massed against the world” (“Under Ben Bulben” 356): “We Irish, born into that ancient sect/But thrown upon this flthy modern tide/And by its form- less, spawning, fury wrecked” (“The Statues” 362). Against this background, Yeats places Irish literary history. The old men are scarecrows, sterile, excluded from the democratic tide of life, a minority among the majority: “All hated Whiggery.” “Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke . . . . / Swift,” whose heart “had dragged him down into mankind,” all “Cast but dead leaves to mathematical equality” (“Blood and the Moon” 243).
1. I thank Ann Smock and David Lloyd for sharing their rich knowledge of the French and the Irish Beckett. I quote Beckett in French when the original was in French or translated by Beckett himself, with a few exceptions where the English wording adds to my argument.
The Romanic Review Volume 100 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University 188 Ann Banfield
This line connects generation to population. The Irish population problem was what Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal pretended to solve, making that connection explicit: “It would greatly lessen the number of Papists, with whom we are yearly over-run, being the principal breeders of the nation,” Swift’s Protestant persona states, with the exclusive “we,” like Yeats’s “we old men.” The lower classes were characteristically “the numerous classes.” The Anglo-Irish horror pleni is the fear the frst term—“anglo”—will be absorbed by the second, “dragged down” into mankind, paradigmatically Catholic Irishkind. Oscar Wilde put what was at stake several months after his release from prison, “I am now simply a pauper of a rather low order” and “also a pathological problem in the eyes of German scientists: . . . I am tabulated, and come under the law of averages! Quantum mutatus!”2 From the perspective of generations, the individual is merely a case history, a member of a class. Yeats’s “mathematical equality” is expressed in statistics, which treats great numbers of individuals as alike. Its most characteristic classes are populations. Yeats’s “renowned generations” (“Three Marching Songs” 360) from the cen- sus taker’s viewpoint are no exception to any survey of the Irish. Beckett, too, descends from the Anglo-Irish tradition. He like Wilde was a graduate of Portora Royal School and, like Swift, Wilde, and Synge, of Trinity, Dublin. Beckett’s major protagonists, if Irish, are recognizably Protestant3 and old men: “bah, j’ai toujours été vieux,” the Unnamable says (L’Innommable 187). Half-begotten, they are neither born nor dead—a Beckettian theme— descendants of Swift’s Struldbrugs.4 But their sterility is not straightforwardly coupled with a Yeatsian pride in compensatory literary productivity. If Beckett inherits Yeats’s anxiety, or Swift’s Gulliver’s, terrifed he is a Yahoo, whatever his ironic distance, his stand-offshness, from things Irish-Catholic, his horror of the crowd was never the cultured Protestant’s contempt for the Catholic masses nor even acknowledgement of kinship with reservations for “these
2. In Bristow 199. “Quantum mutatus” is the comment made of Ticklepenny, fallen from poet to male nurse in a mental hospital (Murphy 67). 3. The speaker of “L’Expulsé” clearly sees the Catholic as “the famous other,” watch- ing a funeral pass with “un papillotement de mille et mille doigts” and commenting that “si j’en étais réduit à me signer j’aurais à cœur de le faire comme il faut” and not like “eux” (Nouvelles, 23–4); he uses the typically Beckettian paranoid “they,” whose mark is to lack an antecedent. The generic present—“font”—makes it even clearer that “ils” belong to a larger class of which the present mourners are members. Surely Watt looks at Mr. Spiro, editor of Crux, “the popular Catholic monthly,” from the distance of difference. Mr. and Mrs. Rooney are identifed as Protestant. Of the major Beckett characters, only Moran is Catholic, the exception that proves the rule. 4. “Beckett’s characters . . . . are usually old . . . . Swift portrayed the superannuated in his Struldbrugs, who however do not speak; Beckett’s Struldbrugs do little else” (Ellmann 103). “Proust’s Pessimism” as Beckett’s Counter-Poison 189
Christs that die upon the barricades” of Wilde’s “Sonnet to Liberty:” “God knows it I am with them, in some things.”5 Beckett’s treatment of the cycle of generation he inherits with his Protestant exceptionalism took a form at once more abstract and more personal. Gen- eration in Beckett is a formalization of Yeats’s cycle of conception, birth and death, reduced to the process of like begets like. The products are what Beckett calls “brotherly likes” (How It Is 37), his translation of Comment c’est’s “mes semblables et frères” (58), with its Baudelairean echo. Beckett had already used “like” as a substantive in The Unnamable to translate “semblable”: Each new character will “be a like for me,” “un semblable, un congénère” (The Unnamable 378; L’Innommable, 152). The fnal word underscores that “likes” belong to the same species, sharing a similar reproductive origin. The round of generations is the potentially infnite series of “my father’s and my mother’s and my father’s father’s and my mother’s mother’s [earth]” in Watt (46–7). Such series are everywhere in Beckett. Later in Watt, we read of Mr. Graves that “his father had worked for Mr. Knott, and his father’s father, and so on.” “Here then was another series” (143), the text comments, and adds later “Mr Knott too was serial” (253). Yeats’s imperative to remember that restricted subset, the renowned generations, is followed by the warning “Fail and that history turns to rubbish,/All that great past to a trouble of fools” (360). For there is always the threat that the little band will be engulfed by sheer numbers, by fertility itself. Beckett’s series of mother’s mother’s and father’s father’s does turn to rubbish, ending with “An excrement.” But the similarity is partial: Beckett’s rubbish is generated by the series itself and no privileged subset escapes it. It is simply having ancestors and descendents, being born, which is the kiss of death. “Birth was the death of him” (The Collected Shorter Plays 265). An individual is sui generis, stands outside the round of generations like Yeats’s old men. Or, in the formula Beckett borrows from Jung, is not fully born: “il n’y a que moi d’immortel, que voulez-vous, je ne peux pas naître” (L’In- nommable 160). To be born, the Unnamable fears, is to enter the series, be duplicated, cloned. Generation as reproduction of like by like is “à tourner en rond” (Comment c’est 191), revolving “de la spermathèque jusqu’au four crématoire” (Murphy 61), where “the grave sheets serve as swaddling- clothes” (Proust 8) to “naîtr[e] enfn dans un dernier soupir” (L’Innommable 93)—“debout le mort, aux fourches spermatozoïde” (L’Innommable 153). For “The maximum of corruption and the minimum of generation are identical,”
5. “Beckett was more respectful of Yeats” than Wilde, for Yeats “transform[ed] himself from a nineteenth-century writer into a twentieth-century one. . . . Beckett and Yeats met only once” in 1932, when “Yeats astonished Beckett by praising a passage from ‘Whoroscope’” (Ellmann 109–12). 190 Ann Banfield in the formulation of “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce” (21): “moi qui suis en route, de paroles plein les voiles, je suis aussi cet impensable ancêtre dont on ne peut rien dire” (L’Innommable 110). Generation is arithmetical, adding, multiplying, reduplicating like count- able units, over and over, ad infnitum, Beckett’s mathematics being repeated application of the generative principle: “j’ai toujours aimé l’arithmétique elle me l’a bien rendu” (Comment c’est 57). Counting is Beckett’s way of catego- rizing, classifying, whether the sequence of generations, of Kraks, Kreks, and Kriks of frogs in chorus (Watt 137–8), “the multitude of looks,” possible and actual, exchanged by members of a committee (175), the Pims, Pams, Prims, Boms, Bems strung out in the mud in Comment c’est, the series of crawls and falls, affrmations and negations, footfalls, accompanied or not by “l’ombre de ton père” (compagnie 18), a “trotteuse et son ombre dans leur gyration parallèle apparamment sans trêve autour du cadran” of a watch (82). “Et ainsi sans trêve” (82). For the likes ultimately include not just the living but the dead—“leurs billions de vivants, leurs trillions de mort [sic]” (L’Innommable 81)—going from “one feeting generation to the next” (Watt 60). The genera- tional series is potentially infnite. “The mortal microcosm cannot forgive the relative immortality of the macrocosm” (Proust 10). What is distinct from Yeats’s version in Beckett’s formulation of the law of generation is not only that Beckett strips it to its very arithmetical basis, but that generation on the model of mathematical equality is applied to human activity, in particular, to literary history, yielding wry justifcation for the Beck- ettian native inertia: “[a]yant parcouru depuis tes premiers pas quelque trente mille lieues . . . Sans jamais dépasser un rayon d’une seule de ton foyer” (compagnie 84), “le chemin [étant] toujours le même” (50). “Je n’ai jamais été ailleurs qu’ici” (L’Innommable 62), i.e., “jamais quitté l’île” (66). All history, all writing, is repetition; art, “las d’accomplir un tantinet mieux la même sem- piternelle chose, las de faire quelques petits pas de plus sur une route morne” (Trois Dialogues 14), is forced to reproduce “les mêmes propos, les mêmes histoires” (Nouvelles 121), to “dire toujours la même chose, génération après génération” (L’Innommable 160)—“it’s mathematical,” Beckett’s English adds (The Unnamable 383). If the vision is Anglo-Irish, it is also post-Joyce. For between Yeats and Beck- ett had intervened something Yeats’s history scarcely foresees: the frst major Irish writer not Anglo-Irish but Irish-Catholic: James Joyce. Beckett is the frst major Anglo-Irish writer to confront a major Catholic forerunner. There was, then, one real sense in which Joyce was the frst in a series. More signifcant yet, at the moment Beckett seeks to enter Irish literary history, Joyce looms larger than any of those writers Yeats “shortlists,” marking some break in the descent Yeats sees himself in step with. The break coincided with the advent of the Free State. Ulysses appeared in 1922, a repercussion in literary history of “Proust’s Pessimism” as Beckett’s Counter-Poison 191 the nationalist struggle. The change was bound to affect Beckett’s allegiances. The “crisis of identity” of the Anglo-Irishman, who “learns that he is not quite Irish almost before he can talk” and then “that he is far from being English either,” that Vivian Mercier, himself a Portora Royal graduate, recognizes as “the question that every Anglo-Irishman must answer, even if it takes him a lifetime, as it did Yeats” (Mercier 26; see also Lloyd), would have taken a new turn for the latest descendent of the people of Burke, in encountering Joyce. Yet if Joyce inaugurated something new, he did not for Beckett defnitively open up new possibilities. This is because Finnegans Wake, the work that particularly attracted Beckett, if it is a beginning, also puts a defnitive “end” to something, as Jacques Lacan observes, punning on “Finnegan:” what Joyce hands down (“lègue”), by contrast with the continuity of Yeats’s “ancient sect,” is “mis comme un terme” to literary history and “met, à l’œuvre, fn, Finnegan, de ne pouvoir mieux faire” (Lacan 21). Joyce had his own position on the theme of generation. The family romance of Portrait whereby Stephen, with his “mild proud sovereignty,” sees himself as only the “fosterchild” of Simon Dedalus, his destiny to transcend his origins and fulfll the “prophecy of the end he had been born to serve” contained in “his strange name” (Portrait 105), is rewritten in Ulysses, another fgure of mythology there step-fathering Stephen, not an artist lifted above other men but an everyman content to step in line in the series of brotherly likes, as when Leopold Bloom thinks of the series of Molly’s lovers, refecting that “each one who enters imagines himself to be the frst to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the frst term of a succeeding one.” Bloom’s “imagining himself to be frst, last, only and alone, whereas he is nei- ther frst nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infnity” (716) can be taken as Joyce’s refection about himself. The author of Portrait’s surrogate Stephen Dedalus never doubts his primacy, his uniqueness; the author of Ulysses’ surrogate Bloom, far more serene than the young Joyce obsessing about Nora’s former lovers, smiles at such naïveté.6 Alain Badiou’s observation—“la jeunesse est aussi ce fragment d’existence où arrive aisément que l’on s’imagine très singulier, dans le moment où l’on pense ou fait ce qui restera comme le trait typique d’une génération” (5)—has the structure of Bloom’s refections as they might be applied to Stephen or those the older Joyce applied to his younger self. Yet just as Bloom’s acceptance of his place in the endless series in no way inhibits Henry Flower’s gusto in pursuit of Martha, so Joyce’s in no way stops his indefatigable “Work in Progress.” Joyce,
6. Ellmann invokes the friend who “claimed in 1909 that Nora Barnacle, in the days when Joyce was courting her, had shared her favors with himself” and Joyce’s trouble fve years later, when writing Ulysses, “reactivating the jealousy he had once felt so intensely” (69). 192 Ann Banfield to echo Lacan’s words, puts an end to the mathematical series which might be extended—so Bloom thinks—“and so on to no last term,” by paradoxically setting in motion a process generating endless variations on the same theme. His, not Beckett’s, is surely “l’increvable désir.”7 Such Bloomian refections are frequent in Beckett, but their humor has a violence undetectable in Joyce. As Richard Ellmann comments of Beckett’s lukewarm espousal of “Joyce’s motto, ‘the seim anew:’” “repetition did not arouse in him a feeling of tolerance” (115).8 Beckett’s protagonists, contrasted with Joyce’s, see stepping in line as an excuse not to budge, for if “ça fait du bien de changer de merde,” nonetheless “toutes les merdes se ressemblent” (Molloy 53). There is no point in acting, in getting out of bed. This applies a fortiori to the act of writing itself. Its very sources are contaminated with the already said. There is no point in getting in line after Joyce. Beckett seemed to feel acutely the impossibility of producing anything new in the wake of The Wake, whose processes virtually contain an infnity of possible works. The Anglo-Irish fear of being absorbed by the Irish masses thus reduces in Beckett, “in pursuance of the principle of parsimony” (How It Is 138; L’Innommable 172), to the fear of being absorbed by a single writer—Joyce— doomed only to repeat him. His horror pleni extends to the page. No “vide papier que sa blancheur défend” for Beckett; the page is already flled: “les mots se bousculent, comme des fourmis” (L’Innommable 133). The sign of his absorption is his very stylistic success. “Bon qu’à ça,” Beckett famously declared when asked why he wrote, thereby acknowledging a skill—he was “bon à ça”—toward which he also felt a méfance. Certainly the young Beck- ett worried in 1932 that “Sedendo et Quiescendo” “stinks of Joyce in spite of most earnest endeavours to endow it with my own odours” (Knowlson 159–60 and fn. 7). Beckett attributes to André Masson “une compétence qui doit lui être des plus pénibles” (Trois dialogues 16). His own facile virtuos- ity must have become equally intolerable to him. He felt infected by the very generative linguistic principles at work in Joyce, producing only what Joyce could produce in some possible work, Joyce aiming to absorb everything. Moreover, Joyce shamelessly borrowed wholesale, never revealing the shadow of an anxiety of infuence. So, from Beckett’s perspective, why go on, since Joyce had already said it all? As Lacan observes, and without Beckett in mind, “à suivre ses pas, on s’en trouve à la fn, fatigué” (25). Anyone following in Joyce’s footsteps is necessarily “l’épuisé” of Deleuze’s essay on Beckett, exhausted by exhaustiveness, by what Beckett in his Proust calls “the comedy of an exhaustive enumeration” (71), for, Deleuze states, “toute l’œuvre de
7. The subtitle of Badiou’s Beckett. 8. Ellmann concedes that “Beckett could have agreed with Joyce’s motto, ‘the seim anew,’ and in fact he begins Murphy with ‘nothing new’ and ends Worstword Ho with ‘Nought anew’” (115). “Proust’s Pessimism” as Beckett’s Counter-Poison 193
Beckett sera parcourue de séries exhaustives, c’est-à-dire, épuisantes” (60). So Beckett, like Wilde’s Ernest, had his origins in a terminus. Joyce becomes the last term in a series in which he, Joyce, is also frst. No wonder the young Beckett felt already old. In the Yeatsian vision of a cyclic return, the small band of survivors of another dispensation are not submerged by the leveling tide only by virtue of being old men, sterile, mechanical, unnatural. To generate is to produce selfsames—here nature’s is the true mechanical reproduction. Not to churn out the series of brotherly likes—an echo of Yeats’s Whiggery—is to refuse to join the round of generations. Perhaps this is the secret of Yeats’s exceptional late productivity and inspired revisions (Cf. Parkinson), merely perfecting a tradi- tion already culminated. So Yeats represented one end. In coming up against Joyce, in 1927 by repute, in 1928 in person, Beckett confronts the new tradi- tion, a generative mechanism applied to linguistic productivity, condemning him to another end in endless repetition. That juncture could only lead to a crisis, a Dantesque punishment either as “anxieuse inertie,” the phrase John Pilling fnds in Sodom et Gomorrhe for Beckett’s state, or endless repetition of what was once pleasure. The choice was either critical writing and an aca- demic career or setting off in Joyce’s wake, e.g., the essay “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce” vs. the French translation of Anna Livia Plurabelle Beckett undertook with Alfred Péron in 1930—translation seemingly the pure expres- sion of writing as the generation of likes. The book Beckett undertook to write in the same summer of 1930 on Marcel Proust is typically seen as the last gasp of the academic alternative. Kenner calls Proust an “academic soliloquy” (42) in which Beckett “is not clear whether he is a comic writer or simply a bitter one” (35): “the Cartesian clown is dormant in Proust” (42). But Proust can be seen rather as a crucial “way out” (The Complete Short Prose 137) of the impasse represented by the juncture of the Irish “two ways,” Yeats’s line and Joyce’s, a way out offered by a writer Beckett sees as moving “back toward Hugo,” with a “retrogressive tendency” (Proust 61)—as Worstward Ho puts it, “back is on” (Nowhow On 109). Beckett concludes that “for that reason he is a solitary and independent fgure” (Proust 61) with no “spiritual ancestors” (62), i.e., outside the round of generations. The brevity of Beckett’s text forced him to distill what he deemed essential in Proust. If one compares Beckett’s Proust with works he consulted by Léon Pierre-Quint, Arnaud Dandieu, Jacques Benoit-Mechin, and Robert Curtius, Beckett’s treatment looks far from predictable, for they contain noth- ing comparable to Beckett’s discussion of habit and involuntary memory. As Pilling observes, even if “much of the essay is ‘lifted’ from Proust,” Proust “is nonetheless an utterly original essay.” The importance of Proust for Beckett, the only writer, aside from Dante, Joyce and Johnson, he ever wrote about, is that he allows Beckett to free himself from the paralyzing belief that nothing changes. Kenner thinks Proust 194 Ann Banfield
“exudes” a “dreary dignity, surveying human experience:” fnding “nothing much to do but plant one foot before the other” is not a “doctrine” to “nourish a great comic writer” (45). Yet the weary counting of footfalls is inextricably linked to “the comedy of substitution” in love and “the comedy of an exhaus- tive enumeration” Beckett sees as the essence of Vaudeville (Proust 71). What he identifed as “Proust’s pessimism” (7) exposed circular history and fed what Kenner calls Beckett’s “comic genius.” But there are stages to Proust’s pes- simism. The frst gives Beckett his comic distance from the theme of likes in endless permutations; the second the theme which replaces it, when came his admitted “détérioration du sens de l’humour” (Comment c’est 27). The two provide twinned themes for Beckett, who once described himself as “a young man with nothing to say and the itch to make” (Harvey 305). For Proust’s treatment of habit and memory is couched in terms explicitly critical of the Yeatsian round of generations or literary history as a series of pastiches, a formula applicable to Joyce but only to the young Proust. In Proust, habit “paralyses” and “drugs.” Not only does “the predominat- ing condition and circumstance [of Proust’s world]—Time” (2) dictate that “We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before” (3), and thus deny an eternal return, but “a succession of habits” (8) converts the sequence of alienating changes into reassuringly familiar sameness. It is explicitly as reproduction of like by like, the “cycle habituel des naissances, vies et morts” (Molloy 68), that Beckett presents vol- untary memory and habit: “Considered as a progression, this endless series of renovations leaves us as indifferent as the heterogeneity of any one of its terms, and the inconsequence of any given me disturbs us as little as the comedy of substitution” (Proust 16). As with “resurrection of the soul,” vol- untary memory “insists on that most necessary, wholesome and monotonous plagiarism—the plagiarism of oneself. This thoroughgoing democrat makes no distinction between the ‘Pensées’ of Pascal and a soap advertisement,” leveling all literary production much as Bloom/Joyce does. Then follows: “if Habit is the Goddess of Dulness, voluntary memory is Shadwell, and of Irish extraction” (20).9 A la Recherche has its own version of “dying generations,” “mathematical equality” and literary history as “the same old mutterings,” what Deleuze labels “série et groupe” (Proust et les signes 89). Beckett sees Proust’s series of likes not, however, as the ultimate pessimistic reality, but as a screen against a worse pessimism.10
9. Beckett seems to accept Dryden’s confation of Irishness and dullness and his insin- uation, not quite true, in his satire Mac Flecknoe, that Shadwell combined the two. 10. Pilling claims “Beckett admitted” to “‘overstat[ing] Proust’s pessimism a little’,” but notes the manuscript of Proust “is littered with marginal marks” that emphasize the pessimistic reading. “Proust’s Pessimism” as Beckett’s Counter-Poison 195
Pierre-Quint (188) proffers as one source for Proust’s frst pessimism “l’Ecclésiaste,” the same source suggested by Clive Bell in his 1929 Proust. If Proust “has stripped the dirt and varnish from reality,” “seen life from a new angle,” his is “the conclusion to which came the Preacher:” “All is vanity” (Bell 98–9). But if Beckett rediscovered in Proust the “wisdom” that asserts “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” (Ecclesiastes 1.4) and “there is no new thing under the sun” (1.9), it sharpened his comic genius into Swiftian self-satire. Ecclesiastes would later furnish Murphy’s opening: “Le soleil brillait, n’ayant pas d’alternative, sur le rien de neuf.” (7) With this same “pauvre vieux soleil” not quite shining on him, Murphy faces the prospect of having to vacate the fat/cage in West Brompton, “ayant sur d’autres cages de dimensions moyennes exposées au sud-est une vue ininterrompue” where “il mangeait, buvait, dormait, s’habillait et se déshabillait” and “rappren[ait], dans un cadre tout à étranger, à manger, à boire, à dormir, à s’habiller et à se déshabiller” (Murphy 7), an unmistakable version of Proust’s narrator, his “current habit of living . . . incapable of dealing with the mystery of a strange sky or a strange room” (Proust 9). Yet Beckett, under Proust’s tutelage, could now present Murphy’s Marcel-like reactions, his depressing “wisdom,” as a soothing method of warding off the new. The proposition “there is nothing new” becomes a mantra. Habit, Beckett says, “drugs” (Proust 9); it is the “berceuse” that rocks the prematurely old man-child. Proust’s exposure of habit as calmative allows Beckett’s release from the vision of history as repetition. “La liberté d’indifférence, l’indifférence de li berté” (Murphy 79) that Murphy aims to achieve with respect to a box of assorted biscuits is one Beckett subjects to self-critical scrutiny and not, as Kenner concludes, Beckett’s uncritical espousal of Guelincx’s Cartesian ethic. Murphy spreads the biscuits out “dans l’ordre de ce qu’il tenait pour leur mangeabilité,” beginning with the least preferred and ending with the favorite. He realizes that “surmontant son aversion pour l’anonyme” and “vainqu[ant] son engouement pour le pain d’épice,” which both “viol[aient] l’essence de l’idée d’assortiment,” i.e., the interchangeability of all objects of desire, the biscuits would become “mangeable de cent-vingt façons différentes” (73) instead of only twenty-four. Kenner’s comment that “we have drifted without noticing, so great is fction’s narcotic power, to the very nirvana of all Beckett lucubrations, where effortlessly the mathematic powers cascade” (90), rightly connects Beckett’s calculations to numbing repetition. Replaced by Beckett’s series of characters/names, “assortment” becomes pla- giarism of the self multiplied for “company:” “j’ai manqué me prendre pour l’autre” (L’Innommable 48). Even if “il aurait dû être moi” (L’Innommable; 186), “the fable must be of another” (The Unnamable 398). In “Le Calmant,” the frst calmative is a story: “je vais donc essayer de me raconter encore une histoire, pour essayer de me calmer” (Nouvelles 40). The statistical law of 196 Ann Banfield
“company” works the substitutions out formally, yielding the strange “justice” of Comment c’est, whereby, let the series be “cent mille,” “cinquante mille couples” change partners in Proust’s “comedy of substitution” (Proust, 16), in “cinquante mille départs cinquante mille abandonnés:” “à l’instant où je rejoins Pim un autre rejoint Bem nous sommes réglés ainsi notre justice le veut. . . . c’est mathématique” (174). Proust’s tranquillizer/poison is what Badiou celebrates as “l’écriture du générique:” “il y a X, paradigme du genre humain, . . . avec joies et peines, peut-être une femme et des enfants, des ascendants certainement” (Nouvelles 163). Murphy’s calmative, “this endless series of renovations” (Proust 16), pro- tects against “a greater terror” than “the thought of separation,” the fear “that to the pain of separation will succeed indifference” (Proust 13–4), Murphy’s “self-immersed indifference” (Murphy 168). Beckett is not entirely Murphy. Habit protects against the naked reality of the absolute particular (unrepeat- able, susceptible of loss), whether self or other, whose differences the generic ignores in the attempt to prove its substitutability. Here Beckett’s reading of Proust diverges from Deleuze’s perhaps Beckett-inspired reading—both see the same themes, but order them differently, with different conclusions. “Nous nions que nous répétons, et croyons toujours à quelque chose de nouveau,” Deleuze explains (Proust et les signes 83). We deny anything is new and believe we do nothing but repeat, Beckett counters. He agrees to a “comique de la répétition,” and a consequent “joie de la répétition comprise” (Deleuze 89), but they are forms of comic pessimism. Deleuze writes that “dans le domaine de l’amour, l’essence ne se sépare pas d’un type de généralité proprement sérielle. Chaque souffrance est particulière . . . en tant qu’elle est produite par tel être. . . . Mais parce que ces souffrances se reproduisent . . ., l’intelligence en dégage quelque chose de général, qui est aussi bien de la joie” (89). By contrast, Beckett’s imagination “si entachée de raison” (compagnie 48), drawing conclu- sions from the comedy of generic substitution, extracting from the particular membership in a class, is another calmative. Habit is never a source of joy, but of boredom. Letting go of the reassuring belief in substitutes, at least momen- tarily, the subject confronts a reality at once worse and, strangely, better than the “loi de la série” (Deleuze 89), the “best bad worse of all” (Worstward Ho 108). The exposure risks the either/or of “cruelty” or “enchantment” (Proust 11) from the power of the particular to not repeat itself. Once the sway of habit is broken, repetitions are revealed as poor substitutes for “a succession of losses” (9). “The disintegrating effect of loss . . . breaks the chrysalis and hastens the metamorphosis of an atavistic embryon whose matu- ration is slow . . . without the stimulus of grief” (25). Avoiding exposure to time’s losses has deprived the embryo or “abortion” of acquaintance with the unknown territories of grief, has kept it from real entry into time’s movement, linear not circular: “les douleurs de l’abandon auraient alors été les terres que “Proust’s Pessimism” as Beckett’s Counter-Poison 197 nous n’aurions jamais connues, et dont la découverte, si pénible qu’elle soit à l’homme, devient précieuse pour l’artiste” (Proust, Pléiade, III.901). To exemplify “the pact” habit establishes between subject and environment “to spare his victim the spectacle of reality” (Proust 10) suddenly “waived in the interests of the narrator’s via dolorosa” (12), Beckett singles out a scene ignored by the critics he read (but which Bell quotes at length). In it, the narra- tor, hearing for the frst time on the telephone his grandmother’s “strange real voice,” “symbol” of “their separation” (15), rushes back to Paris and surprises her reading. His habitual tenderness for her “in abeyance,” “he realizes with horror that his grandmother is dead, that the cherished familiar” created “by the solicitude of voluntary memory” is now a “mad old woman,” “a stranger whom he has never seen” (15). This stark reality stops the “endless series of renovations” (16) which leaves us indifferent to any one of them. It endows the stranger with a difference the familiar lacks; she appears “as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family” and only then “a source of enchantment” (11). The initial “terror at the thought of separation” returns, Beckett suggests, with this difference: the frst was “the caricature furnished by direct perception” (4). For Proust’s narrator, Beckett observes, is like Fran- çoise, for whom “pain could only be focused at a distance” (30). Beckett’s own difference is that his sufferers’ inability to focus on what is present extends to pleasure; it, too, can only be focused when past, lost. To escape the endless series, to awaken from the anxious lethargy of Belacqua, they must desire something unpossessable: an object of regret returned as an image seized only in retrospect, glimpsed through the Proustian telescope, sep- arated from the desirer by time and forgetfulness: “première image un quidam quelconque je le regardais à ma manière de loin en dessous dans un miroir” (Comment c’est 12). The Beckettian image, which Kenner fnds a rare sign Beckett “heeded” Proust (45–6), appears frst in “L’Image,” origin of Comment c’est. In Comment c’est, above the series of Pims, Boms, and Pams lying in the mud appear “quelques images par instants dans la boue” (11). The images which punctuate the text—versions of involuntary memory—return to the one in the endless series in the mud scraps of the past: “l’image du moment” (7), “la belle époque” (3), glimpses of the “vie dans la lumière” (Comment c’est 12) above the mud. Although “toujours les mêmes” (64), they are not serial replacements for what is lost but precious signs of what cannot return. The frst of a sequence of works structured by memory, Comment c’est recounts a past: “comment c’était ça manqué avant Pim avec Pim tout perdu” (61); “j’ai fait le voyage trouvé Pim perdu Pim” (30). The Proustian echoes are unmistakable in the recognition that “Pim est fni” (35), “Pim disparu” (1). They give the lie to the illusion that “cher Pim” (14) “reviendra un autre reviendra mieux que Pim” (35). Instead “quelle infnie perte sans proft” (Comment c’est 173). The Unnamable’s mutterings tried to ward off fear that 198 Ann Banfield particular members of the series are irrevocably lost: “je ne le verrai plus, si, maintenant il est là, avec les autres . . . il reviendra, me tenir compagnie, seuls les méchants sont seuls, je le reverrai, . . . ou il ne reviendra pas, de deux choses l’une, tous ne reviennent pas, je veux dire qu’il doit y en avoir que je n’ai vu qu’une seule fois” (L’Innommable 186). The autobiographical “première personne du singulier” (compagnie, 20)—L’“Innommable. Toute dernière personne. Je.” (compagnie 31)—Beck- ett discovers is also particular, a Russellian “ego-centric particular” and not a universal, as in Hegel’s treatment of indexicals or Badiou’s claim that the Unnamable “touche à l’humanité générique” (Beckett, 22). For if it is “inutile . . . de parler de moi, alors qu’il y a X” (Nouvelles 163), if I “sait m’effacer derrière ma créature” (Comment c’est 82), behind the series of characters/ names, because “j’aurai voulu me perdre” (L’Innommable 175), the unnama- ble narrator discovers “je n’arrête pas” (88). (Proust’s I is with one exception likewise unnamable, the author externalizing parts of himself in some of the novel’s names.) Shifting variable unlike the variable x, which embodies “the plagiarism of oneself,” the self escapes the round of generation, the reproduc- ible Pims, Bems, Boms. Nor can the I speaking now be equated with the past self glimpsed in an image: “I see me,” How It Is (8) translates “me vois” (13) without the refexive, to underscore the Proustian telescopic distance. “Je suis celui qu’on n’aura pas, qui ne sera pas délivré,” the Unnamable says, “nous serions cent qu’il nous faudrait être cent et un. Je nous manquerai toujours” (L’Innommable 87). This conclusion is in striking contrast to the “justice” that matches tormentor and tormented in Comment c’est, for “the affrmation of equality involves only an approximate identifcation” (Proust 52):
ni dix millions ni vingt millions ni aucun nombre fni pair ou impair si élevé fût-il à cause de notre justice qui veut que personne fussions-nous vingt millions que pas un seul d’entre nous ne soit défavorisé [. . .] pas un seul privé de bourreau comme le serait le numéro 1 pas un seul de victime comme le serait le numéro 20 000 000 en supposant ce dernier à la tête de la procession . . . d’ouest en est. (191–2)
Proustian memory then is the “clinical laboratory stocked with poison and remedy, stimulant and sedative” (Proust 22), the antitheses “respect[ing] the dual signifcance of every condition and circumstance of life” (52). “From the victory over Time” Proust “passes to the victory of Time, from the negation of Death to its affrmation” (52). Time, “an endless series of parallels,” allows the time-traveler to be abruptly “switched over to another line” (Proust 26). One line continues the truth of endless series, as in the mud of Comment c’est; another annuls it in images, swinging back and forth from “boredom” “Proust’s Pessimism” as Beckett’s Counter-Poison 199 to “suffering” (Proust 8) but never forgetting Proust treats the frst as pain- killer for the second. Proust’s worstward version of how it was—where going backward is going lessward, “d’ouest en est,” d’Irlande en France—provides then the thematic antidote to being stuck in the Yeatsian round. It also ends the paralysis induced by Joyce’s infuence, fear of pages already flled like those of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, although not by Proust furnishing a stylistic model. If Joyce’s legacy, as Lacan claims, is “de ne pouvoir mieux faire” than Joyce, there is no alternative but to do worse, to “fail better” (Worstward Ho 89). And since Joyce’s best is to say more, with the aim of saying all, then Beck- ett’s way is to say less, to say not-all. Ecclesiastes 5.2 counsels “let thy words be few.”11 The discovery of a language—a syntax, to be exact—not already containing all that could possibly be said by infnite generation came via the experience of loss as well, that of a language which returns only as “quelques mauvaises bribes pour Kram qui écoute Krim qui note . . . témoin et scribe . . . penché sur moi jusqu’à la limite d’âge puis son fls son petit-fls ainsi de suite” (Comment C’est 207). “Happen[ing],” like Mr. Rooney, “to overhear what I am saying,” “struggling” like Maddy Rooney, to transmit what thus seems “a dead language” like “our own poor dear Gaelic,”12 Beckett recognizes that language too is subject to time, unlike the lamb’s “baa, baa,” one of those reiterative syllables that for Beckett captured language’s penchant to repeat the same old mutterings, “not changed, since Arcady” (The Collected Shorter Plays 34).13 “Si je disais plutôt babababa, en attendant de connaître le vérita- ble emploi de cette vénérable organe?” the Unnamable asks (L’Innommable 36). Instead of a language, like Wakese, containing all languages, Beckett’s is a particular language, reacquired by traveling backward and lessward. Like Proust’s narrator, whose grandmother is cruelly revealed as a stranger, Beckett returns to English not as his familiar mother tongue but one among languages, distanced in time, now become foreign instead of destined for him. Moving ever worstward, toward the “tattered syntaxes” (The Complete Short Prose 7) of the last works, Beckett hears in “quelques vieux mots” (Comment c’est 162) not the same old thing but a precious “voix ancienne en moi pas la mienne” (9) accompanying “quelques vieilles images” (64) of an irrecoverable past. The Proust who found in the generic a source of joy, a consolation of philos- ophy, is not the Proust who released Beckett from Yeats’s cyclic history. Its grey vision does fnd its place in the work in the series of likes. The counting of the
11. “Trop de paroles/sottises” is Marie Borel, Jean l’Hour and Jacques Roubaud’s Beckettian mirlitonnadesque translation (99). 12. “Une langue morte,” “elle fnira bien par mourir, tout comme notre pauvre vieux gaélique” (Tous ceux qui tombent 64). 13. “La leur n’a pas changé, depuis l’Arcadie” (65). 200 Ann Banfield series—“chers chiffres” (Comment c’est 73)—is a solace because a calmative, but hardly the “enchantment”—Beckett’s strikingly unbeckettian Proustian borrowing—that Beckett attributes to disruption of the series. It is rather the Proust who, faced with arguments to the contrary, could still set himself the hopeless task of recapturing the particularity of individuals now only forgot- ten names, who could write:
s’il est un moyen pour nous d’apprendre à comprendre ces mots oubliés, ce moyen ne devons-nous pas l’employer . . . cette loi du changement qui nous a rendu ces mots inintelligibles, si nous par- venons à l’expliquer, notre infrmité ne devient-elle une force nou- velle? (Proust, Pléiade, III.903)
It is to this task that the set of little Proustian novels—compagnie, Mal vu mal dit, Worstward Ho—dedicates its minimalist, i.e., non-Joycean, Proustian, “Recherches.” In it mother and father appear as unique and not members of an infnite series. The “vieille si mourante”of Mal vu mal dit (24) is reduced to a viewpoint, “style” as “vision” (Proust 67)—“De sa couche elle voit se lever Venus” (Mal vu mal dit 7)—and the I to an eye observing her as Proust’s narra- tor observes the grandmother, “present at his own absence” (Proust 15). Only at the end could Beckett, via Proust’s “inverted Calvary” (Proust 44), reach the point of no going on which Yeats spoke of in the fnal seven lines of “The Tower” invoked in “. . . que nuages . . .,” that point beyond “wreck of body” “or what worse evil come” when the history not of endless likes but of irrepa- rable loss, registered not as the generic but the absolute particular, is confrmed by movement worstward. Then and only then could “the idea that his suffer- ing will cease . . . more unbearable than that suffering itself” (Proust 42) be surrendered for a calm, not a calmative, but the reduction of loss to “but the clouds of the sky/When the horizon fades” (Yeats, “The Tower” 200), “cette onction de lumière tamisée sans soleil” that for Murphy’s Celia “était restée son seul souvenir de l’Irlande” (200). Its essence is a patch of blue revealed by the parting of clouds at the end of an overcast day, a cumulus from which falls a brief rain and emerges, too late, the blue sky: “Pleuvra sur lui comme au temps béni de bleu la nuée passagère.” (“Sans” 70 & 74) As the images come from the sky, like an Irish rain, which announces late-breaking light, so the eye that refects them—for “bleus les yeux” (Comment c’est 130)—also belat- edly drops its sudden rain: “avant que l’œil en ait le temps voilà que l’image s’embue” (Mal vu mal dit 40). Involuntary memory returns the past to reveal that it is over—a suffering that is a blessed antidote to the drug of an endless circulation of likes.
University of California, Berkeley “Proust’s Pessimism” as Beckett’s Counter-Poison 201
Works Cited Badiou, Alain. Beckett: L’Increvable Désir. Paris: Hachette, 1995. Beckett, Samuel. Comment c’est. Paris: Minuit, 1961. ———. The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett . New York: Grove Press, 1984. ———. Compagnie. Paris: Minuit, 1980. ———. The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1995. ———. “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce.” Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove Press, 1984: 19–33. ———. How It Is. New York: Grove Press, 1964. ———. L’Image. Paris: Minuit, 1988. ———. L’Innommable. Paris: Minuit, 1953. ———. Mal vu mal dit. Paris: Minuit, 1981. ———. Molloy. Paris: Minuit, 1951. ———. Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1957. ———. Murphy. Paris: Minuit, 1965. ———. Worstward Ho. Nohow On. New York: Grove Press, 1980: 89–116. ———. Nouvelles et Textes pour Rien. Paris: Minuit, 1958. ———. Proust. 1931. New York: Grove Press, 1957. ———. “Sans,” Tête-mortes. Paris: Minuit, 1972: 69–77. ———. Trois Dialogues. Paris: Minuit, 1998. ———. The Unnamable. Three Novels. New York: Grove Press, 1955. ———. Watt. New York: Grove Press, 1953. Bell, Clive. Proust. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1929. Benoit-Méchin, Jacques. La Musique et l’Immortalite dans l’œuvre de Marcel Proust. Paris: Simon Kra, 1926. Bristow, Joseph. “‘A complex multiform creature’: Wilde’s Sexual Identities.” The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, Ed. Peter Raby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997: 195–218. Castle, Gregory. Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Curtius, Robert. Marcel Proust. La Revue Nouvelle, Paris, 1928. Dandieu, Arnaud. Marcel Proust: sa révélation psychologique. Paris: Firman- Didot, 1930. Deleuze, Gilles. “L’Épuisé.” In Samuel Beckett, Quad et autres pièces pour la télévision suivi de L’Épuisé par Gilles Deleuze. Paris: les Éditions de Minuit, 1992: 57–106. ———. Proust et les signes. Paris: PUF, 1971. 202 Ann Banfield
Ellmann, Richard. Four Dubliners: Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett. New York: George Braziller, 1988. Harvey, Lawrence. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Seamus Deane. New York: Penguin, 2003. ———. Ulysses. New York, 1934. Kenner, Hugh. Samuel Beckett: a Critical Study. Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1961 [1968]. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. Lacan, Jacques. “Joyce le symptôme I.” Joyce avec Lacan. Sous la direction de Jacques Aubert. Paris, Navarin Éditeur, 1987: 21–9. Lloyd, David. “Frames of Reference: Samuel Beckett as an Irish Question”, to appear in Beckett and Ireland, ed. Sean Kennedy, Cambridge University Press. Mercier, Vivian. Beckett/Beckett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Parkinson, Thomas. W. B. Yeats Self-Critic: a Study of his Early Verse and the Later Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Pierre-Quint, Léon. Marcel Proust: sa vie, son œuvre. 1925. Paris: Editions du Sagittaire, 1946. Pilling, John. “Beckett’s ‘Proust.’.” n. d.