Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Arthur Broomfield - The Empty Too - Language and Philosophy in The Works of Samuel Beckett-Cambridge Scholars Pub (2014)
Arthur Broomfield - The Empty Too - Language and Philosophy in The Works of Samuel Beckett-Cambridge Scholars Pub (2014)
By
Arthur Broomfield
The Empty Too: Language and Philosophy in the Works of Samuel Beckett
By Arthur Broomfield
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
Foreword ................................................................................................... ix
The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett .............. 1
Bibliography ............................................................................................. 97
Index ......................................................................................................... 99
FOREWORD
BENJAMIN KEATINGE
SOUTH EAST EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY, MACEDONIA
It has been suggested that there are two ways of ‘doing’ Beckett and
philosophy. On the one hand, the recent archival turn in Beckett studies
has urged an empiricist approach based on Beckett’s exhaustive,
autodidactic study of (mainly) Western philosophy in the 1930s as
evidenced chiefly in his Philosophy notebooks held at Trinity College
Dublin. The leading advocate of this approach, Matthew Feldman, has
advanced a major revisionist reading of Beckett’s engagement with
philosophy in his 2006 volume, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of
Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’. More recently, Feldman has been at
work as co-editor of Beckett/Philosophy (Sofia University Press, 2012)
where a range of contributors have followed Feldman’s ‘falsifiability
principle’ in excavating Beckett’s debt to the philosophical tradition.
These scholarly works have confirmed what has long been evident, that
Beckett was deeply immersed in the world of ideas, but at the same time, it
has shown that some corrective readings are necessary as to the scope and
sequence of Beckett’s erudition.
The alternative approach might be termed the speculative or
exploratory approach, one which suggests affinities and confluence of
interests even in the absence of hard evidence of inter-textual
indebtedness. Much early Beckett criticism, based on Beckett’s presumed
allegiance with existentialist thinking, or with theorists of ‘the absurd’,
was based on a sense of Beckett’s affinities with various thinkers—Sartre,
Camus, Heidegger, E.M. Cioran—but without the benefit of actual,
verifiable evidence. Beckett himself, on the other hand, has said:
is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess. (Samuel Beckett,
interview with Tom Driver, Summer 1961)
Benjamin Keatinge,
Skopje, November 2013
THE REAL AND THE OTHER FROM PLATO,
THROUGH DERRIDA, TO BECKETT
Plato’s core thinking on the intelligible versus the sensible, the same
and the different, forms the foundation of Beckett’s works. Jacques
Derrida takes issue with aspects of Plato’s thinking and directs his focus to
the chora through which he seeks to break down the opposition between
the sensible and the intelligible in his thesis “Différance” (Rivkin & Ryan
1998). Beckett, through artistic and linguistic application of Plato’s
thinking, locates the question of language at the centre of the question of
being.
The question of being arises from the crisis between that which can be
intelligibly deduced and that which is perceived through the senses. To
argue that this crisis is evenly matched, so to speak, creates an impasse,
erects a barrier to the inquiry into the nature of being. It is a barrier that
Samuel Beckett in his important works, from Waiting for Godot (1956)
and The Unnamable (1959) on, addresses and overcomes. Beckett fine
tunes the relationship so that it is weighted in favour of the intelligible.
The intelligible to Beckett is that which, through reasoning and deduction,
can be shown to uniquely exist or be the real when all that is perceived
through the senses can only be doubted. He moves the thinking on being
forward to an emphasis on language. The real to Beckett is language; the
empty, pure word that remains after his process of interrogative deduction
has reduced the existence of the perceived to doubt. Before going into
deeper discussion on the thesis of the real and otherness that runs through
Beckett’s works it is necessary to refer to his great precursor, Plato, and
that which, in principle, links their thinking.
This relevant link in thinking is specifically related to what we call
“the real” in Beckett and “the same” in Plato. That which is relevant and
central is the leading question Plato (1997) asks (through Timaeus) in
Timaeus: “What is that which always is, and has no becoming, and what is
that which becomes but never is?” (1234). The former is grasped by
understanding, which “always involves a true account” (1254). It is
unchanging. The latter is grasped by opinion, which involves unreasoning
sense perception: “It comes to be and passes away, but never really is”
(1234). Central to that which is grasped by understanding is what Plato
calls “the same”; the same is “the same unchanging essence which is
2 The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett
thing in his imagined dimension, indeed the real. The perceived, on the
other hand, according to Plato, “can be perceived by the senses … it has
been begotten” (1255), brought into existence by the actions of the
corporeal. The perceived is unstable; it comes to be in one place then
disappears out of it. Because it is understood by opinion “which involves
sense perception” (1255) the perceived is unreliable, and does not have
support from independent evidence beyond the perceptions and opinions
of the corporeal. On the evidence of his analysis it seems logical for Plato
to call what has been deduced through intellectual investigation “the
same,” and that which has been arrived at through a combination of
sensory perception and opinion “the different,” which appears to draw a
clear distinction between them both. But, Plato argues, “we prove unable
to draw … these distinctions,” (1255) because there exists a third thing
that clouds the possibility of posing a neat argument in favour of the
intelligible, and against one in favour of the sensible. Plato argues that this
third place “provides a fixed state for all things that come to be” (1255). It
is understood through a “bastard reasoning” that does not involve
perception. Though things come to be, or into being, from the chora—
which can be best understood as a neutral, amorphous something which
cannot be destroyed—those things cannot be described definitively as
things as such; i.e. since none of these appear to remain the same, “which
one of them can one categorically assert … to be some particular thing,
this one, and not something else?” (1252). Bastard reasoning is “bastard”
because it creates a schism within the legitimate reasoning that
understands the same, which is invisible and cannot be perceived by the
senses, as the true account. The chora “is itself apprehended by a kind of
bastard reasoning” (1255). As part of the make-up of the chora, bastard
reasoning does not involve sensory perception, yet it is a kind of bastard
offspring that indulges sensory perception, and by so doing betrays its
rightful parent, the intelligible, that which reaches a true account through
reason. Hence, even though the chora is an amorphous space, an
indefinable “something,” it creates a situation where “it takes on a variety
of visible aspects” (1255). Therefore, the bastard reasoning element of the
chora is forced to identify it. However, the process of identification creates
a scenario where it cannot be dismissed even if identified by us in our
“dreaming state” (1255).
The acknowledgement of the chora challenges Plato’s notion of the
same because it takes on a variety of visible aspects which, being visible,
are perceptible to the senses. Bastard reasoning has allowed this situation
to occur because, it seems, it permits the application of pure reason to that
which has been infiltrated by the senses. Heretofore, Plato has argued for a
4 The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett
clear distinction between the intelligible and the sensible because “the one
is not like the other” (1254). However, in the chora the distinct
independence of both has been compromised by the intelligible, because
of the recognition of something that is hardly even an object of conviction
(through bastard reasoning)—and therefore hardly not—and the sensible
being the “wet nurse of becoming … [ensures] that it takes on a variety of
visible aspects” (1255). The chora is that place or process where invisible
being is made available, through the miscalculations of a bastardized
reasoning to appropriation by the senses—what Plato calls “becoming.”
These core principles in Plato’s thinking form the foundation of Beckett’s
thinking; he develops and recreates them artistically and they form the
bedrock of his artistic and philosophical vision.
Beckett’s thinking exceeds that of the better-known philosophers to
date, which may appear to be a sweeping claim. His philosophical thinking
is part of his art. His work corrects the apparent miscalculations in their
thinking and goes on resolutely in a specific direction from the point
where they falter, seemingly driven by what Andrew Gibson calls “a faith
in possibility” (2006, 133). For example, we can relate a similarity in
Plato’s thought on the same and the other to Beckett’s—Plato’s
description of the same as invisible and the impossibility of perceiving it
through the senses and Beckett’s silence, and through their common belief
that perceptions of the senses are unprovable, and therefore the different,
or the other, insofar as Plato’s thinking goes. However, Beckett insists on
going on from the impasse in Plato’s thinking and pursues what is
possible, that which is so obvious and so ignored—the question of
language.
We shall return to Beckett in greater detail, but first we must speak of
Derrida’s contribution through his method of Deconstruction to the
thinking on language and meaning, and to the relationship between the
word and the referent, and we will identify the point where he too
miscalculates, from which Beckett insists on going on from.
Plato’s realizations that a place or space—a chora—cannot be denied,
is there, so to speak, and that perceptions of the senses are unstable
digressions, steer him towards the discourse on the Forms and away from
an intellectual interrogation of language. The questions that expose the
unprovability of sensory perceptions, and that prompt an interrogation of
language and the real, remained unasked in a fully serious way until the
arrival of Derrida and Beckett well over two millennia later. Derrida
develops the thinking put forward by Plato in that key passage of Timaeus
(1997, 1251–1252) by applying it to his understanding of the relationship
between language and perceptions. He continues the intellectual
The Empty Too 5
that what we call meaning is no more than our attempt to make sense,
through language, of unstable and inconsistent perceptions. We defer
naming presence because the present is representable, hence the possibility
of the empty, meaningless word that we will discuss later. Rather than the
intelligible subordinating the sensible, the breakdown creates an equality
of sorts between the two where neither dominates. This is “an order that
resists philosophy’s founding opposition between the sensible and the
intelligible” (Rivkin & Ryan 1998, 387–8); both are an admixture of
themselves and the other, and both infiltrate and subvert the other. We
might attempt to simplify the complexities of Derrida’s prose by summing
up this parity between the intelligible and the sensible like this: the same,
which is invisible and cannot be perceived by the senses, infiltrates
opinion formed and gathered through the senses, thus rendering it not fully
of the senses and questioning the truth value of the opinion. It breaks down
the neat side of the opposition that had been thought to be the sensible into
a confusion of the sensible and the intelligible (or the same). The sensible
may attempt to articulate and represent the same, but it is infiltrating the
realm of that which it cannot perceive and purporting to represent the
representable (which is in fact the unpresentable), so that neither the
sensible or the intelligible is a concept. For sure, the supposed clarity of
the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible has been broken
down, but has it not been replaced by an aporetic undecidable that, by
giving equal status to the sensible and the intelligible, recognizes the
reality of the world of perceptions and by so doing restricts exploration of
the possibility of the empty word. Derrida advances the thinking on
language to a linguistic chora where there is continuous play between
language and perception, and resolution is not possible.
Nevertheless, differance is located in the play between language and
perception in the world which we believe exists. The parity of status
mentioned gives the world of perceptions—of “non-being’ for Beckett in
Film—an unjustified advantage over the intelligible, because recognition
of it as reality creates the inevitable aporia that restricts full exploration of
the possibility of language as the real. The effect of that which “resists
philosophy’s founding opposition,” that between the intelligible and the
sensible, is that which traps Derrida in a prison of his own making—the
prison of the undecidable, which inhabits the “philosophical opposition,
resisting and disorganizing it … without ever leaving room for a solution”
(Derrida 2002, 43). “‘Differance,” he claims, “is even the subversion of
every realm” (Rivkin & Ryan 1998, 401). To which we might respond—
every realm bar one, the realm of the empty word, for this is where
Beckett’s view of being differs from Derrida’s.
The Empty Too 7
common assumption about it, does not amount to saying that there is
nothing beyond language” (Kearney 1993, 173). The other to Beckett is
the different, non-being, the parasite that is a torment to the real.
From a Beckettian standpoint, differance is immersed in a discourse on
non-being, the world of perceptions that are received through the senses,
and the frustrating task of trying to represent them in language. Beckett’s
faith in possibility is thwarted by differance’s claim to make the possible
impossible. Derrida’s order that resists philosophy’s founding opposition
between the sensible and the intelligible is challenged throughout the
imagined dimension created in Beckett’s works through an insistence that
language is the real—to which we can link Plato’s same—albeit the real
that is annoyed and tormented by that from which it cannot disassociate
itself, that which is perceived through the senses. The impetus of this
dimension is towards freeing language from referent, subject,
characterization, time and space, and from knowledge of anything outside
of language. Some of the most frequently used words and phrases in
Beckett’s works are “things,” “nothing,” “matter,” “it,” “that,” “don’t
know,” “and,” and “go on.” The verb “to be,” especially in its present
tense, is used infrequently and with marked precision and purpose. He
narrates “by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered” (Beckett
1959, 267). Seemingly commonplace terms and phrases are defamiliarized
so that their accepted meaning is questioned, e.g. “no matter” in “no
matter how it happened” (267), where the focus is switched from the
everyday filler in conversation to implicitly asking if there is no matter
then how did the word “it” happen? This dimension is located in a moment
of decay in the existential world like that in The Unnamable where “it”
doesn’t “matter”—“that’s all words” (Beckett 1959, 381)—which the
reader finds it almost impossible to go beyond, just as the narrator cannot
get beyond the threshold of the story he would like to tell.
Because the objects and concepts of the perceived world are never
more than perceptions that cannot be conclusively represented in language,
they also cannot be dismissed as non-existent. Beckett acknowledges them
unenthusiastically, “since none of these appear ever to remain the same”
(Plato 1997, 1252). Because he understands perceptions as non-beings that
nevertheless co-exist in some kind of parasitical relationship with being,
the real, which is language, he is constantly on guard against granting
them legitimacy by being seen to acknowledge them as referents, even to
the stage of differance which would reduce language to their level of
indeterminacy (and thus compromise its possibility of emptiness). The
great question that is central to Beckett’s works goes something like this:
The Empty Too 9
another cryptic sentence from the opening page of The Unnamable: “The
fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only
that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak …” (Beckett
1959, 267). Beckett’s philosophy—that language as the real is privileged
over the perceptions which are doubted—is clear, but unlike Berkeley he
does not deny the existence of “facts” or “things,” or as he says later in
that long sentence: “I forget, no matter,” which may be taken as a
refutation of Berkeley’s maxim on the non-existence of matter. Rather
than guide or inspire, esse est percipi may be taken as an introduction to
the theme of Film, which is perception.
This chapter will argue that the subject matter of Film is the
questioning of perception by itself, i.e. by self-perception. It may be seen
as a chapter in Beckett’s philosophical thesis, one that seeks to isolate
perception from the real, from language, and to exhaust all the avenues of
possibility that could lead to definitive proof of the perceived to be the
real. This is argued in spite of the references to the “search of non-being”
(Beckett 1986, 323) and that “Self-perception maintains in being” (323) in
the screenplay, which would seem to argue that Film is about the search
for non-being by being. I do not think that anywhere in his works is
Beckett involved in the search for non-being, or in the escape from being
(Critchley 2009, 9); he is driven to prove the truth, that empty language is
the real, and to break free, to escape from the impediment which makes it
impossible to reach, or go on to the truth, it being the actions of the senses
of the corporeal that perceive, and whose existence, and therefore whose
findings, can never be independently verified. This argument can be
sustained through closer scrutiny of the relevant passages in the
screenplay. The search is not for non-being, and the passage reads “Search
of non-being in flight from extraneous perception” (Beckett 1986, 323),
which may read as the search of that which cannot be disassociated from
being, that from which being cannot extract itself, i.e. the corporeal and its
inability to escape the act or process of perceiving. This search of non-
beings in flight from extraneous perception, helped by an eye-patch over
his left eye, cannot succeed because he is perception itself, or at least
represents the consciousness of perception in the process of rejecting
extraneous perception as it moves towards self-perception. He may flee
from extraneous perception but this flight heightens his consciousness,
thus driving him towards self-perception.
If we read the corporeal as that which is part of what is perceived
through the senses and is, therefore, non-being, are we not leaving Beckett
open to the charge of negative metaphysicist? Surely, the negative of being
is non-being, it can be argued? It is indeed, if we look at being and non-
The Empty Too 15
reading of the texts will reveal his philosophy which, in turn, will explain
what are often misread as absurd contradictions therein. Beckett’s
philosophy, the belief that language is the real that is haunted by
perceptions, is inseparable from his texts. His quest is to prove that reality
and to distinguish it from perceptions which cannot be either proved or
disproved. His definitive instructions that “all extraneous perceptions [be]
suppressed (and) self-perception maintains in being,” however, bring the
text away from language and relate it to perceptions and concepts
“extraneous” to language, i.e. suppressed and self-perceptions. The
brusque command affirms, without suggestion of doubt, the reality of
perceptions, clearly in defiance of Beckett’s philosophical belief. The
affirmation is negated in “No truth value attaches to above” (323), but
also, importantly, it is of “merely structural and dramatic convenience”
(323), i.e. the temporary nod to the “reality” of perceptions is affirmed
merely to facilitate the narrative. Beckett, in The Unnamable, will not go
beyond language to tell the narrative. The novel closes with the narrator at
“the threshold of my story before the door that opens on my own story,
that would surprise me, if it opens?” (1959, 382), the same door whose
existence he doubts “it’s I now at the door, what door” (381). In Film he
puts the focus, as has been said, on the incredulity of perceptions; he
stresses the distrust of that on which the narrative is built. The emphasis on
always-doubted perceptions, however, cannot escape the presence of
being. Language is being, language that is “all words, there’s nothing else”
(381), though it can never be more than an aspiration, the to come of the
unpresentable presence, that is beyond experiencing in the existential
world. Beckett’s point that the relationship between the real and the
perceived is an imbalance that is weighted in favour of language being the
real. We must also remember that Beckett proceeds by affirmations and
negations “invalidated as uttered.” That imbalance is revealed to us in a
startling way in the phrase “no truth value attached to above” which, rather
than being an absurd negation for negation’s sake, releases the previous
instruction from what appears to be a unity of word and perception, of
signifier and signified. Any supposition that Film is about to embark on
some kind of narrative journey involving a struggle between credulous
extraneous and self-perceptions is immediately dispelled by the
qualification. The door is closed to the possibility that can lead to the
unacceptable reification of perceptions. Perceptions do not have a credible
future in the works of Samuel Beckett. To continue a narrative involving
belief in the existence of that which can be perceived would undermine his
philosophy; perceptions must be let wither on the vine so to speak,
condemned to the void.
The Empty Too 17
If Beckett’s negation “no truth value attaches to above” closes the door
on proceeding towards a narrative, it opens to an infinitely exciting
possibility—the possibility of the real, of language freed from meaning.
This is the possibility that Andrew Gibson says “Beckett edges towards”
(Gibson 2006, 133). This revelation in the passage—we might call it an
event—confronts the notion that Beckett’s text disappears into a void of
nothingness. Even Maurice Blanchot’s more enlightened misreading that
“the void … becomes speech” (Blanchot 2003 210), claiming that there is
a void of nothingness out of which speech “becomes,” is fundamentally at
odds with Beckett’s thinking on the void. If language is the real it cannot
be located in or “become” from, it merely is, without question (see chapter
5). Beckett’s philosophy is magnificently encapsulated in the passage from
Film, to which I here refer. Beckett does not merely affirm and negate, but
both affirmations and negations are invalidated as uttered, thus stripping
language of association to meaning yet showing it to continue in existence.
If we ask what is being affirmed, in the first instance the answer may
be the perception of extraneous and self-perceptions, but we must
remember that affirmation is simultaneously negated, “invalidated as
uttered, or sooner or later” (1959, 267). There is no value in the claim of
affirmation of perceptions because the claim of truth that is attached to
them has been invalidated, which gives us license to state, categorically,
that because we cannot in truth claim that the perceived for certain exists it
is not part of being, the real. What then of negations—what, firstly, is
being negated? That which is being negated may be the truth value in the
affirmation of perception which could suggest that the perceived does not
exist. Could this negation be construed as a descent into negative
metaphysics? If it were it would imply denial of the existence of the
perceived, but that is not what is happening here because the negation is
invalidated, as is the affirmation in the first instance. Does this mean, then,
that the perceived can now be argued to exist? Not at all. Just as the
invalidation of the affirmation undermines the certainty implied therein so
does the invalidation of the negation undermine any desire to claim
absolute non-existence of the perceived. That which is being affirmed
through the affirmations, negations and invalidations is the status of
perceptions, which runs through Beckett’s works, that are neither provable
nor unprovable, not of being but those which maintain in being. The search
of non-being confirms it as non-being. No truth value can be attached to
the passage in the screenplay because it is the perceptions of the
narrator/director, gathered through the five senses of the corporeal and
“uttered sooner or later” (267) through the sense of touch in writing and
presumably of speech on the set of the film. As perceptions are of non-
18 Film: Let’s Look at the Text
being they cannot verify any truth, only being can—so why does Beckett
include them in his text? Does his “structural and dramatic convenience”
fully explain the extent of his art?
By going away from the text to the world of perceptions, seemingly
without qualification, in the two paragraphs under discussion Beckett
could be seen to lapse into a narrative that would verify their reality.
Because Film is primarily involved in showing that perceptions are non-
being they need to be shown to be incapable of going on, as language can,
interminably; they remain stuck in some kind of aporetic limbo; the
highest state they can reach is not an understanding of reality but
perception of the self by the self, perception of the senses by the
perceiving senses. This inevitably calls into question the relationship
between language and perceptions; the reality status of both extraneous
and self-perceptions are re-presented in words in the screenplay of Film. If
we accept Beckett’s thesis that the existence of perceptions can neither be
proved nor disproved then we need to ask what precisely—and can we
actually say precisely?—does the language represent? Is the word re-
present a misnomer? Can something that is not a clear stable presence be
re-presented, or even presented and vested with what we call meaning, in
any instance? For Beckett the answer is “no” to all of the above questions.
No truth value attaches, not only to the possibility of the being of
perceptions but also to the claim to mean the language that purports to re-
present them. The structural process in the passage, when put under
scrutiny, is shown to de-structure the structure (which is more than
deconstruction—deconstruction implies a narrative in the perceived world
outside of the text, which the text subverts). The truth value of the
perceptions is invalidated; any and all claims of their non-being, or of
extraneous perceptions or self-perception’s inescapability, are relieved of a
relationship to truth, or so it could seem if we did not continue to apply, as
we must, Beckett’s prescribed rule of proceeding “by affirmations and
negations invalidated as uttered” to the rider of the screenplay’s direction.
When we do (apply it), the implied meaning in the rider itself is diffused.
The stern rebuke of any claim to truth in the previous paragraphs is
now directed to itself. The truth value of an edict that purports to affirm
truth value is itself negated and both are invalidated as the edict is uttered.
The relationship between language and perception is shown to be tenuous.
Language cannot truthfully represent perception that is in such a state of
confusion. We need to ask whether this means there is no truth per se.
First, we must look more closely at what is happening in the breakdown of
the assumption of re-presentation in the relationship between language and
perception. That which is perceived by the senses of the corporeal,
The Empty Too 19
doubt from which they cannot break free; as the gap in representation
between the word and the perception widens the actuality of the imbalance
between the intelligible and the sensible becomes apparent. There can be
no truth value to language that attempts to fix meaning, to freeze blurring,
shifting perceptions within the parameters of give words. However, the
possibility of there being truth in the claim that language is being, the real,
gains strength as the impossibility of proving, without doubt, the existence
of perceptions becomes evident. There can be no truth value to the
screenplay direction, or to the rider that pronounces it, because both
statements purport to know what cannot, for sure, be known; i.e. that
language can represent that which is true, and that which is not true. The
crisis in Beckett’s works is not centred on the undecidable, it is in the
imbalance from which, theoretically, it may be possible to “go on” to
prove that language is the real.
In the actual film of Film, the only spoken word to break the silence is
the “sssh” of part 1. The “sssh” itself breaks the silence when the woman
of the elderly couple is herself checking her companion as he is about to
speak. The inclusion of “sssh” is the exception that proves the rule; it
draws attention to the absence of any other language in the film as it
isolates perceptions to their fate in a world without words. Their inevitable
fate in such a world is to collapse unresolved on themselves, as O and E do
at the end. The collapse demonstrates the impossibility, even in the highest
state of perception-self-perception, of going beyond or making sense of, or
proving the existence or non-existence of the perceived. Self-perception is
perceiving itself, and that is as far as perception can go; all perception
breaks down, cannot escape from or go beyond perception.
Beckett, in most of his works, tries to prove the reality of language by
divorcing it from the unprovable perception. In the film production of
Film, however, he reverses this process to prove the same point.
Perception isolated from language is irresolvable, and language is
excluded from the production just as in other Beckett works perception is
reduced towards irrelevancy. In Film, perception is remorselessly
scrutinized until its inevitable collapse proves the point of the exercise.
Perceptions cannot be independently verified from outside, hence the
“sssh” of part 1 that prevents the intervention of explanatory or discursive
language. The search of non-being in the film breaks down when it
collapses into that which is inescapable—the realization that the “pursuing
perceiver is not extraneous but self” (Beckett 1986, 323). The film isolates
perception to prove that it is “unreal” (323). While Beckett’s pursuit of
non-being may appear to reach a smug finality in the film version, it is to
The Empty Too 21
the text of Film we should turn if we are to avoid falling into the fallacious
trap that sees Beckett’s thesis as pessimistic, or worse nihilistic.
O and E’s inevitable collapse marks the impossibility of making sense
of the perceived world; the film comes to an end with O (and E) sitting in
the rocking chair. The final direction tells us “[h]old it as the rocking dies
down,” which we could interpret as the characters’ acceptance of the state
of not knowing and their resignation to it, which more or less sums up
Beckett’s view of the existential world. To see Film only as the produced
film and to ignore Beckett’s text inevitably leads to the drawing of such a
conclusion. The release from this gloomy interpretation comes through the
realization that the text opens our understanding to the consideration that
there may be a reality beyond the non-being that is not evident as such in
the film production. The text goes on to the possibility of the world of the
real towards which even corrupted language, through its insistence to rid
itself of its tormenter, will bring us.
WEIGHING THE WAIT IN WAITING FOR GODOT
the realm of non-being. Being is “all words … all words, there’s nothing
else” (Beckett 1959, 381), so all that is not pure words is excluded from
being. The excluded would cover any distortions or contamination of
language that would arise from interventions of the corporeal—speaking,
writing and thinking. Words are reduced to “allness” through stripping
them of that which is not pure, or all words.
It is not true that nothing happens in Godot. Nothing much happens in
the existential world of non-being but much happens in the realm of the
real where language is forensically pruned and cleansed of all possible
association with perceptions. “Beckett’s lesson,” for Badiou, “is a lesson
in measure, exactitude and courage” (Oppenheim 2004, 81), pre-requisites
not merely in the creation of exceptional prose, but, ultimately, in
engagement with the question of being, for Beckett’s texts consist of a
“stenography of the question of being” (82). Beckett’s realignment of the
perceived relationship of language to perceptions creates a dimension that
makes it possible for him to express that philosophy through his art, and
by so doing show their mutual interdependence.
If How It Is can be read as drama masquerading as prose, then Waiting
for Godot, it can be argued, is prose masquerading as drama. Even though
it is laid out in dramatic form and its countless productions have, like Sir
Thomas Beecham’s cello, “given pleasure to thousands,” the subtlety of
the philosophical and linguistic implications of the text is of such
importance that their layered nuances can hardly be fully grasped by a
theatre audience out for a night’s entertainment. It is a measure of the
greatness of the work that it can appeal to those whose experience of the
text is necessarily fleeting and subject to mediation through a particular
interpretation. The aim of this chapter is to focus on the linguistic and
philosophical import of Godot through forensic reading of the words on
the page rather than through their interpretation by actors on the stage.
Ideally, the reader of Godot should begin on the last page where, in the
final lines, Vladimir says “Well shall we go?”, to which Estragon replies
“Yes, let’s go.” The stage directions tell us [They do not move]. So who
are the we and the us who decide to move and who are they who do not
move? Are they not the embodied figures of the two characters, Vladimir
and Estragon, who are speaking; are they not assuredly the human
presence, seen on stage, or drawn in the text? To go and yet remain in situ
would contribute to the common accusation levelled at Godot—that it is of
the Theatre of the Absurd, a misconception of the play, as is the common
assumption that the duo are tramps. To be confronted with this reality is to
bring us to the core of the question that drives Beckett’s major works,
namely that language is the real but how can it free itself from that which
The Empty Too 25
employing, and thus colluding with, the assistance of the senses. The I
cannot say “I am language,” but by asking in language “Am I” the I proves
that when all else is questioned—even, or especially, the sense and
meaning of I’s own question—divorced from links to a given referent and
bordering on the unreadable, language is still seen to exist.
We hear a lot about going beyond language, and the failure of
language, but for Beckett language is as far as we can go. We go on
towards unpresentable language through insistent interrogation of that
which distracts from that purpose —perceptions of things which can never
be more or less than doubted. “And things, what is the correct attitude to
adopt towards things? And to begin with, are they necessary?” (Beckett
1959, 267). Beckett certainly insists that we go beyond meaning, which is
an entirely different matter. Meaning is created by marrying the word to
the perception, the signifier to the signified, thus implying an equality of
status in the relationship of that which exists (the word) and that which
never exceeds the level of doubt (the perception), where a definite
inequality exists (the weight of certainty being on the side of the word). As
we see in Estragon’s “Am I?”, the assumption that language fails, or that it
can fail, is another common assumption that needs to be confronted.
Beckett argues that empty language is compromised through its
association with a perceived referent or signified that reduces it to an
agreed meaning based on the flawed belief that the signified exists, for
sure. If we divorce language from that association through proving that
perceptions, that are in continuous flux, are what fail, we will show that
language, freed from that association and the meaning implied therefrom,
will continue, will “go on” through meanings towards unreadability, will
never disappear and hence cannot fail. The so-called “failure of language”
is a term applied within the existential world by those who find difficulty
in ridding themselves of the addiction of metaphysical certainties.
Importantly also, and a consequence of the misunderstood nature of
language that sees it as capable of failing, is the erroneous claim that
words are on a so-called “chain of signifiers,” that language is involved in
some kind of struggle to find the right word to match a perception that, it
is believed, can be represented in language. To argue along these lines is
to persist in the quest to make sense of the existential world, to insist that
“stable” perceptions can be accurately represented in language, or, if they
cannot, it is because language has failed, where “all that can be said is
what is missaid” (Oppenheim 2004 81). “Missaying, however, is not a
failure of language” (Ibid.), it is what occurs when one acknowledges that
the necessary function of trying to apply meaning to unstable perceptions
through language is a violation of the real. Beckett, as we will see when
28 Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot
not treat the two equally. Rather than the doubt of perceptions holding
back the possibility of going on to pure language, in his work the balance
of probability is weighted in favour of language being the real. There is
not an aporia in this crisis between language and perception, and it is not a
question of “‘Differance’ (producing) what it forbids, (making) possible
the very thing it makes impossible” (Derrida 1974, 143), i.e. the
representation of perception produced by language forbidding the deeper
exploration of language as the real, because language is primary to
perception. Language will always forbid authentication of the concepts it
produces by virtue of the possibility of its reduction to meaninglessness
and unreadability, where concepts must reach out for justification to the
presumed existence of things. Language is a “neutral speech that speaks
itself alone … for it is the incessant, the interminable” (Blanchot 2003,
213), i.e. interminable in its Beckettian going on. Focus on language can
undo the certitude of the concept created by it, and undermine the
suppositions and meaning read from it; while they will have been fractured
and scattered from which the concept has been composed, language
remains empty and unreadable, which is the point to stress. Scrutiny of
language can and will undo the concept, but scrutiny of concept will have
no effect on the fundamental questions central to an understanding of
language as the real. The aporia, in fact, is to be found within the sensible
itself. Through our senses we perceive that these perceptions are
represented through language.
Beckett the philosopher/artist has created a dimension in Waiting for
Godot where past certainties are disintegrating and a heightened awareness
of the “to come” is challenging them. Far from being tramps, the main
characters, Vladimir and Estragon, represent this seminal moment in the
question of being. Their weariness of a world of failed perceptions is
contrasted to their acute awareness of language—“neutral speech,” free,
empty language that is incessant and interminable, is the only place to go
towards, the exclusive, messianic place of hope that is revealed through
the dialogue of the duo. In Endgame, Clov asks Hamm:
What then happens in Waiting for Godot? Or, more specifically, what
changes take place within and between the two acts? It will be argued in
this chapter that the measured fine-tuning of the dialogue between Acts 1
and 2 spoken by the linguistically conscious characters of the play,
Vladimir and Estragon, is the major event of the work. It is here we see
Beckett’s philosophy given “substance” through his art and his art justified
by his philosophy, i.e. that language is the ultimate truth beyond which we
cannot go or out of which we cannot get.
Of course other changes occur—Pozzo has become blind in Act Two,
and Lucky thinks in Act One, but not in Act Two. Lucky’s monologue
may magnify the chaos that ensues when the word is thought to represent
the perception, and when expressed information is assumed to be
knowledge.
That fine-tuning of language, though subtle and minimalist, is often
stressed through the pause or punctuation. It is in Beckett’s treatment of
language above all else—and that includes the appeal of Godot as a
theatrical spectacle and his philosophical views—that we experience what
we might call jeuissance, such is the intensity of Beckett’s artistic
examination of that which has always been there, and is not new under the
sun, but whose absolute significance had not been understood. Language is
that which “interposes itself between the void and itself” (Badiou 2005,
506–7). Badiou’s fascinating observation focuses attention on the real, the
void, and the gap in continuity between that which interposes itself—
articulated language—and that which cannot be presented—language
itself—as the real. To understand that articulated language is interposed
between the void and itself gets to the philosophical core of Beckett’s
thinking, i.e. that language, being the real, eliminates the possibility of the
void (see chapter five). Beckett’s created dimension in Waiting for Godot
is the place where the real becomes aware of its reality, and this reality is
contrasted to the ultimate void over which non-being, the perceived world,
is suspended.
Beckett begins the process of going on towards the real in a number of
instances in Act 1, some of which we will discuss here. The first is through
a leading remark by Pozzo: “You are human beings none the less,” in
reply to Estragon’s explanation “[w]e’re not from these parts, sir.” Pozzo
adds, in a typical Beckettian negation “as far as one can see” (Beckett
1959, 15), that stresses the doubt inherent in the perception. The second
instance comes when boy asks “What am I to say to Mr. Godot sir?”, to
which Vladimir replies “Tell him … [He hesitates] … tell him you saw,
us, [pause]. You did see us, didn’t you?” To which the boy replies: “Yes
sir” (45). Both instances employ the complexities of commonplace speech
34 Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot
to cast doubt on the existence of the corporeal and to suggest that there can
be no absolute certainty beyond language. You are human beings none the
less is actually a compliment to their raised consciousness, as it suggests a
minimalist trace of the human, an unlessenable degree, within the
existential which places an emphasis on their consciousness. That Pozzo
identifies the limitations of their humanity in “as far as one can see” is
ironic in view of Pozzo’s “humanity” in Act Two. It suggests that even he
may be aware that there is more than the physical to their make-up. The
happening that develops between acts one and two crystallizes when
Pozzo asks, in Act Two, “Who are you?” Vladimir’s reply “We are men”
is first met with silence, then with what can be read as Estragon’s
expletive: “Sweet mother earth.” Estragon’s response is a positive
rejection of the human element to his make up that he must, reluctantly,
bear. In the second instance Vladimir appears to celebrate the real when he
starkly says to boy “You did see us didn’t you?”, a far from forthright
question as it employs the confusing negative “didn’t you?” alongside the
interrogative “did” in the one sentence. So is boy’s answer “yes sir” “yes”
in reply to did you, or to did not you see us (author’s italics)? We could
profit, when reading Beckett, from Wittgenstein’s advice that one “keeps
forgetting to go right down to the foundations … (one) doesn’t put the
question marks deep enough down” (von Wright & Nyman 1980, 62).
Although Estragon engages with boy when they first meet it is Vladimir
who conducts the dialogue with him (boy), so there is ambiguity in
Vladimir’s “us” (“you did see us”). Are the “us” Estragon, who has moved
away to fix his boots, and Vladimir, or are they the “us” that Vladimir
recognizes in himself, the corporeal and the real? This point is worth
noting because of Vladimir’s early remark to boy: “You don’t know me?”
(44). If we read “didn’t you” as did not you see us and say that not you is
not you the corporeal, we can then argue that Vladimir sees the possibility
of relating to boy on a raised level of consciousness, that he detects an
awareness of the real in the boy. Vladimir’s transition from “me” to “us” is
encouraged by boy’s refusal to profess knowledge of Godot’s relationship
with him; he doesn’t know why Godot doesn’t beat him, or if he is fond of
him, but is confirmed in boy’s response to Vladimir’s question “You don’t
know if you’re unhappy or not ?” (45, author’s italics)—“No sir.” There is
a possibility that some of boy is “not”; that he is not “all humanity,” the
state that, through the senses, can experience unhappiness, the little heap
of bones that could have been Estragon’s fate. Vladimir can now relate to
boy: “You’re as bad as myself” (45). Vladimir’s probing, seen in Act One,
continues to stress the inseparable co-existence of the real and the
corporeal within that particular relationship in Act Two. Act Two is a
The Empty Too 35
Here Beckett goes further than the “who is Godot?” passage of Act 1,
where Godot’s reduction to a proper name is stated but then put in
The Empty Too 37
“Godot”—as responding to the “it” not the “him” of the question. Reading
“it” thus, the person Godot, as has been said earlier, is reduced to the word
“Godot,” but only in a Beckettian affirmation that is soon negated by
Vladimir’s “But who?” So the questions now appear like this—are you
sure, the it, the word Godot, wasn’t confused with, or contaminated by the
who, Pozzo? The intervention of “Who?” at that precise moment
underlines the inescapable contamination of the word by the senses. It
illustrates that the crisis between the real and the corporeal is caused by
the parasitical nature of the intrusive corporeal. It imports assumptions of
the corporeal to the essential purity of “it,” the word “Godot.” “Who”
destabilizes the affirmation attempted in Estragon’s question, and insists
on continuing to confront the question that haunts Beckett’s major
works—if language is the real, how can it be proved to be so if it is
haunted by perceptions of the senses that can be neither proved nor
denied? The question cannot be answered or the crisis resolved because of
the haunting presence of the perception, the “who.” Nevertheless, it is
cogently addressed in this important passage. The independence of the free
word is stressed through “it,” and for a moment “Godot.” The possibility
of “Godot” imposing its authority as “listless … empty speech” (Blanchot
2003, 213) emerges in the moment before the affirmation of the empty
word is put in question by Vladimir’s “but who?” This is important
because it favours the probability of the existence of language over
doubted perceptions, for which there is no evidence of a reciprocal quid
prop quo that would render the possible, pure language, impossible. So
when we ask who Godot is we can only answer that question from the
evidence provided by the text, and that evidence is acquired (by the duo)
second hand through the sparse and unreliable accounts relayed by the
boys. Estragon admits (to Pozzo): “Personally I wouldn’t know him if I
saw him” (Beckett 1959, 16). Godot, then, to the duo, is not even a
perception whose existence is in doubt. It could be argued that he may be
something like a shadow or a ghost that represents the hope that he will
take on the form of a perception; he is drawn so as to stretch the doubt
(that underscores our experience of perception) close to breaking point.
Yet to become exercised about perceptions to the degree of wanting to
celebrate them in literary works is unimportant in the dimension imagined
by Beckett. He reluctantly acknowledges Godot as the bleak bare ghost of
a perception who cannot be dismissed or be known by Estragon, even if he
were to assume corporeal presence. The text also draws attention to the
presupposition that the thing can be represented in words if only language
did not fail, as we can see in Pozzo’s deliberations over the name Godot:
“Godot … Godot … Godin … anyhow you see who I mean” (22). Pozzo,
The Empty Too 39
being “all humanity,” represents the intruder from the existential world,
hence his fixation on the thing Godot behind the name. “You see who I
mean” stresses the secondary role of language that is assumed to represent
the thing, hence the turn to the so-called floating signifiers Godot, Godot,
Godin. Pozzo’s intervention assumes the stable existence of the thing
Godot, despite all evidence being to the contrary, and is oblivious to the
primacy of language in the imagined dimension of Godot. Pozzo’s double
irony stresses the distinction between his level of consciousness that
solidly represents the they of the existential world, and Vladimir and
Estragon’s level of linguistic consciousness in the dimension imagined by
Beckett. The passage directs us to ask who is Godot, and why are the duo
waiting for “him”? To see Godot as the possibility of a corporeal
manifestation whose arrival the duo feels compelled to await would
undermine the impetus of the purpose in Beckett’s work, which is to stress
the primacy of language over perceptions. Based on the above reading of
the passage, it is logical to argue that Vladimir and Estragon are waiting
for that which they eventually decide to go on towards—the arrival of
Godot as godot, the word stripped of connection to referent.
Far from being a depressing reflection of the hopelessness of existence,
Waiting for Godot treats the grim existential as the transitory that must be
endured. Sense cannot be made of it so why bother trying? Those who try
fail—Pozzo who believes that things exist, and Lucky who doesn’t know
that we can’t know. The existential is the delusionary realm of non-being
that distorts our thinking on reality. That which is the obviously real—
language—is treated, in the existential world, as a mere tool through
which we can make sense of a “reality” that is no more than ever-shifting
glimpses, brief disclosures, of that which can neither be proved to exist or
to not exist. To relegate language to this role is to mis-say. It is to invest
language with “meaning” that robs it of its inherent freedom. Because
Godot is mediated in the dramatic form, the inclination is to accept the
characters Vladimir and Estragon as “real” people, but in Beckett’s works
all presuppositions can be reduced to their foundation, the free state, the
linguistic “I” speaking—that is, empty language. Beckett’s created
dimension, in which Godot is set, realigns the relationship between
language and perceptions that weighs the balance in favour of language.
He achieves this realignment through questioning and subverting the
assumptions that we presuppose when using so-called everyday language.
Beckett turns commonplace language into poetic language through
fastidiously measured and arranged texts where the punctuation (and its
absence) and the pause, the subtle disconnect, open words to a dimension
40 Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot
When we ask who is speaking in Godot we can answer, not the scorned
“that,” the das man of Act Two, the “they” who don’t move, nor the
corporeal perceptions Vladimir and Estragon, the “we” and the “us” within
whom the crisis between the real and the perceived is being played, but the
I of Estragon’s “Am I” (1)—empty language that is going on towards its
messianic destiny, purity beyond, and free of that which can be perceived
by the senses. It is significant that the last line, and the decision to “go,”
belongs to Estragon. Language, speaking through Estragon, will rise from,
and leave behind, the perceptions of the body and go on to be its
“unlessenable least”—the real.
HOW IT IS IN HOW IT IS
One can say of Samuel Beckett’s works what Jacques Derrida has said
of Georges Bataille:
[T]o continue to read, interrogate and judge Bataille’s text from within
“significative discourse” is, perhaps, to hear something within it, but is
assuredly not to read it. Which can always be done—and has it not
been?—with great agility, resourcefulness occasionally, and philosophical
security (Derrida 2001, 338).
central argument of this work is that Beckett should be read on his own
merit, rather than be interpreted through the philosophical security of those
who preceded and succeeded him. To interpret him through the latter is to
reduce his work to limitations that it exceeds, while to read it on its own
merit is to experience the event, not merely in the work, but in the word
itself.
How It Is continues the process of the linguistic I towards pure
language while remaining within the context of the question posed in the
crisis between the real and the perceived. It takes the process a stage
further than the “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” closure to The
Unnamable, albeit with an important linguistic change—the I now
becomes me, and me becomes I. Another significant step taken in How It
Is is Beckett’s attempt to signal his disassociation from the arrangement of
conventional syntax through his attempts to exclude any form of
punctuation throughout the text. The significance of these two points in
relation to the thesis statement of this book will be discussed in this
chapter.
As has been said before, Beckett’s vision is of an alternate dimension
to the one we perceive through our senses and which we believe to exist as
we perceive it. Consequently, his syntactical device of omitting
punctuation is designed to further portray that vision; it will move our
understanding of language away from the assumption that it is a tool
which we use to describe the world to fixing the focus on language itself
and how the one phrase or sentence can be dislocated from the perception
which it attempts to describe or explain. The perception is simultaneously
announced, doubted, and overturned by another that is in turn doubted, or
contradicted. This, as is known, is nothing new in Beckett; encapsulated
within the technique is his philosophical belief that while perceptions can
neither be disproved or proved, language can be proved to exist. However,
in How It Is his syntactical innovation of omitting punctuation has, or
should have, the effect of switching the focus from that which the word is
perceived to describe, and that which is believed to be beyond language,
back to language itself, to the words on the page. Such is his arrangement
of words in How It Is that our attention is drawn to them, and belief in
their primacy is favoured over that which, in normal prose, they would
struggle to describe. Through this syntactical device Beckett, yet again,
stresses the primacy of words over the perception of things. The virtual
absence of punctuation marks isolates the continuous stream of words that
we see as only words that, for the brevity of that all important moment,
stand alone, separated from meaning. In that moment, when our natural
inclination to convert them to meaning dominates, we are aware of the
The Empty Too 43
awesome reality that words may exist when stripped of referents, that
through them we can experience “a voice at last in the dark” (Beckett
2006, 488).
The root of Beckett’s vision is to get to that stage to which the
corporeal human cannot go, namely the voice that is “in me when the
panting stops” (Becket 2006, 41), the voice that will “go silent for want of
air, then the voice will come back and I’ll begin again” (Beckett 1959,
362). We may not necessarily interpret Beckett as meaning “death” here,
rather the going on to the world of the real which to Beckett, I argue, is
just that; neither in time nor place, language the real is devoid of all else.
Indeed, death is a much-challenged concept in his work, one example of
which we can see in the extract quoted from How It Is (below). The route
to Beckett’s root, so to speak, is through the dematerializing of language.
That this cannot be fully achieved brings the work to the Blanchot
question and its confrontation. If literature begins with a question, what is
that question in Beckett’s works? In initiating the process, Beckett opens
our thinking to the possibilities imagined in his vision. He cannot, being
material, and being unable to inscribe, other than through the corporeal,
dispense with the very material act of writing words and marks on paper.
But what he almost does in How It Is is remove those human inventions—
punctuation—as a stage in the process of de-coupling word from thing. Of
course, this intervention in the convention has a profound effect on how
we, the readers, engage with the text. On first sight it appears to be a
continuous tract of commonly used words that, however, seem to be
arranged in an order that compels us to ask what, if anything, they mean,
and why does Beckett bother spreading all of these words that seem to not
make sense over a hundred or so pages of useful paper?
This is the starting point from which if we proceed, in a particular
direction, we will understand the philosophy which drives Beckett, that
direction being towards non-meaning, towards the empty word that is
empty because it has been divorced from meaning. Unfortunately, because
of our inclination to try to make sense of the world, we go in the opposite
direction and try to invest those words with meaning. We link them to the
world that we perceive though our senses, and we do this in contravention
of what is obvious in Beckett’s texts, particularly in How It Is; that is that
he persists in his efforts to separate the word from the perception and that
he insists on favouring the existence of the word—inaccessible though it
is—over the doubted existence of perceptions. To go in this direction, that
is to proceed along the course clearly indicated by Beckett, will lead us
away from meaning towards the separation of word from perception, for
we must take the text as given to us by Beckett and accept that the
44 How it is in How It Is
face value the narrator is relating the hapless plight of his cohabitant, Pim,
albeit through a style that is totally unfamiliar to the general reader who
will find little evidence of an interesting narrative. Beckett’s project
aspires to isolate language that has been freed of semantic baggage, and so
prove its existence, and the arrangement of the text is central to the
project.
The first problem to confront the reader in addressing this passage is
where to begin reading? Should one go back to the previous paragraph? If
so, where does one establish a cut-off point? It is not possible—there is no
outside to language. Therefore, we might as well begin our examination of
the passage believing it to be one that undermines the possibility of words
ever being reduced to something called a passage, with all the implications
of fences, roofs and walls. The arrangement of the text challenges our first
assumption that a passage or paragraph is a separate piece of writing
intended to convey a single point or thought that differs from those that
precede or succeed it. In How It Is, the linguistic link is continuous, broken
only by a so-called blank space between the paragraphs. So do we read the
blank spaces as defining boundaries that separate and stabilize,
irrespective of thoughts, while simultaneously unifying them into a
coherent whole? It may be possible, with great difficulty and a highly
selective approach, to read it like this, but it is the kind of approach to
reading Beckett that this book seeks to challenge. If the language in the
paragraphs tends towards the meaningless then we could look at the spaces
from a perspective that challenges the normal. We could continue the logic
of the paragraph, its drift towards the empty word, and see in the “blank”
space Beckett’s insistent attempts to present that which is unpresentable.
The words of the paragraph progress towards the unpresentable, namely
the impossibility of presenting the word in its originary, empty state, i.e.
the word as separated from any intervention of the senses. Yet the task is
not complete, nor can it ever be, so long as the corporeal believes that s/he
manufactures paper or subsists within the realms of space. Yet the blank
space reveals the possibility of the dimension that is language; we see a
blank space on a page and we say “there is nothing there,” meaning no
words have been written on that space, which is true—they have not been
materially inscribed. The thing called the word is absent; it is not or no
longer a thing in the physical, material sense. Yet we can prove that it
continues to be presented even where it is not visible to the senses.
Language continues to present through the blank spaces, albeit unrelated
to the assumption of meaning in the inscribed passages. We do not look at
the blank spaces and go blank, so to speak. We look at them and say, “oh,
these are blank spaces, what does Beckett mean by leaving them so?” and
The Empty Too 47
(1) “[N]ever a gleam, no never a soul, no never a voice. No, I, the first. Yes
never stirred.”
(2) “Never a gleam, no. Never a soul, no. Never a voice, no I. The first yes
never stirred.”
(3) “Never a gleam. No never a soul. No never a voice. No I. The first yes
never stirred.”
(4) “Never a gleam?”
“No”
“Never a soul?”
“No”
“Never a voice, no I?”
“The first, yes? Never! (stirred)
2
For example, in Waiting for Godot Vladimir’s response to Pozzo’s question “who
are you,” “we are men,” draws the exclamation “Sweet mother earth” (74) from
Estragon, which can be construed to be an explicit challenge to the notion that
what is perceived, in this case “men,” is the real.
The Empty Too 49
“Ate?”
“No (pause) ATE, good and deep.”
The emphasis, stressed through the higher case letters, pulls the word
towards meaning and naming against the trend towards meaninglessness
that drives the passage and the work. It can be argued that to be the
insecure cornerstone that destabilizes the disunity of the work, just as in
deconstruction, certain textual anomalies are seen to subvert the unity of
the narrative, but this can also be seen to illustrate Beckett’s annoyance
with perceptions that, by refusing to go away, put his thesis statement into
question. The higher cases, and capitals, are evidence of the desire to make
sense of the sensory world. Their intervention in the text underlines
Beckett’s acknowledgement of both the doubted existence and the doubted
non-existence of the perceived. The hyphen in ditch-water is even more
interesting, for its presence weights ditch water towards a singular
interpretation as “ditch-water”—water that flows or lies in a ditch, and by
so doing makes it more difficult to argue for a number of possible
interpretations, e.g. “ditch” as in abandon, “water.” These examples tend
to stress meaning through “glamorization” of the mark. With the exception
of untypical interventions in the material inscription of the text, of which
the above are examples, How It Is is notable for its author’s extraordinary
and imaginative efforts to reduce the connection between the material act
of writing and the perceived. The disproportionately few capitals, higher
cases and hyphens to neutered inscriptions emphasize the direction
towards which the general text leads us, notwithstanding the doubts which
their presence stresses, that is towards the silence of uninscribed—through
writing, speech or thought—language.
That which drives Beckett—his philosophical belief that language
exists and perceptions are in doubt—that can be extrapolated from his
52 How it is in How It Is
of the senses to accurately perceive the stability of the thing. It is not just
the failure of language to describe it, it is our erroneous belief that
language can be made to describe that which cannot be proved to exist. To
talk of the failure of language is to accept that definitive, unchanging
meaning resides in language and that no word is available to represent the
particular perception or issue. Beckett shows that perceptions are always
in doubt, ever changing and unstable, even when we can claim to sense
them. Therefore, there can be no possibility of accurately representing
such a world through language. Such is the relationship between
perceptions and language that if it is agreed that such a word accurately
represents such a thing, even it, in times of stress, will come into question
as it, in reflecting the instability of the perception, inevitably distances
from it. Therefore, the word’s accepted meaning that had previously been
acknowledged as a true representation of the thing, in reflecting the change
in its perception also begins to crumble. So what do we see here that
supports Beckett’s thesis that pure language is all that we can be sure to
exist? Let us look again to a passage from page 519 of How It Is :
there was something yes but nothing of all that no all balls from start to
finish yes
this voice quaquaqua yes all balls yes only one voice here yes mine yes
when the
panting stops yes.
We should also bear in mind that the haunting of his thesis by the
doubt of perception is a necessary part of his thesis, as it will prove that
while perceptions remain in perpetual doubt the certainty of the emptiness
of the words that are used to describe them is beyond doubt. We can
illustrate this point by taking liberties with the absence of punctuation in
the original text, e.g. “there was something yes” is a definitive assertion,
not a speculation that is contradicted by what follows, “but nothing of all.”
If we remember that to Beckett the real is “all words, there’s nothing else”
(Beckett 1959, 381), then we will see the “something” as not of the real
but of non-being, possessing none of the qualities of “all … no all.”
However, if we read the line as “there was something yes but nothing of
all that,” we see that the “something” is the real that is decontaminated by
association to perceptions: “there was … nothing of all that, no! (That is)
all balls from start to finish.” “Something” now denotes not a thing but a
“something”—yes, there is a something we can claim that is beyond
doubt, and, as is argued throughout this work, the only something that is
beyond doubt is language. There was something, yes, but no thing. So the
something that was there is, as we see through the “yes,” not a material
54 How it is in How It Is
3
See Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading (1979, 11–12), where he transforms the
rhetorical question that ends Yeats’ “Among Schoolchildren”—“How can we
know the dancer from the dance?”—into an actual question.
The Empty Too 55
paragraph, if we may call it that, we see almost lavish use of the verb—
four in all in a short time: “that wasn’t” “it was” “how was it” “HOW
WAS IT”—which seems on first reading to be equally divided between
stressing the assertion and stressing the question in “was.” “That wasn’t”
and “it was” seem to confirm the assertive reading, and it is only when our
natural instinct is consciously challenged that we can see, or cannot fail to
see, the inherent question there. In a similar mode of thinking, both
instances of “how was it” draw us towards a reading that stresses the
question and a ready acceptance of reading it as such. If language is no
more than an agreed convention do we have the right to interpret the verb
in either way? If it is understood in both senses what gives us the power to
exclude one of them? The answer, as far as Beckett is concerned, is that
we assume that power is based on the belief in the existence of things
outside of language which cannot be proved, yet we do not have the right
to vest meaning in either sense, other than to satisfy our desire to make
sense of the world. By so doing, we overlook the essence of reality
through language, whose existence can be proved, in favour of that which
is beyond it but that cannot. Beckett, in these four examples of the verb “to
be,” is stressing the primacy of language; that once we go outside of it we
are trading our knowledge of reality for that which cannot be known. He
does this by dangling the obvious in front of us, by confronting us with
that which a millennia of thinkers have thought too unbelievable to
believe—that language is the essence of reality. He does this by offering
us a third choice, a third interpretation, but one we cannot argue against
that relocates language in a place where it presents rather than represents
reality, even if that presence is unpresentable. To the two interpretations
we need to add a third that radically shifts the emphasis from the verb “to
be” to what was formerly the interrogative “how,” which has now become
the subject. Reading it as “How was it,” we can argue that “how,” the
word “how,” now stripped of its meaning and reduced to an equal state of
emptiness to “it” was it, the empty word on the last possible stage in the
existential world before realization as the unpresentable in “the life to
come” of Hamm in Endgame (Beckett 1986, 116). Reading it so does not
get over the problem of the verb “was,” and its presence there stresses the
Blanchot question that torments Beckett throughout his works, but it does
prove that language can talk about language independently of things. Even
if the suggestion of things continues to haunt, and cannot be excluded
from, the context, things are in a secondary role to the favoured and
grammatically coherent exclusivity of language, which Beckett goes as far
as is possible to stress while still including the verb “was” by emphasizing
the exclusivity of language through the even distribution of the higher-case
56 How it is in How It Is
… only one voice here yes mine yes when the panting stops yes when the
panting stops yes so that was true yes the panting yes the murmur yes in
the dark yes in the mud yes to the mud yes hard to believe too yes that I
have a voice yes in me yes when the panting stops yes not at other times no
and that I murmur yes I yes in the dark yes in the mud yes for nothing yes I
yes but it must be believed yes and the mud yes the dark yes the mud and
the dark are true yes nothing to regret there no (519).
The crisis is acted out by two actors, the I and the me. If we can cut to
an affirmation of the text that follows the initial, seemingly unreadable
engagement, that is but a halting site on the way to its final
“unreadability,” or at least inability to conclusively go beyond language.
The dialogue form through which the good reader can best enjoy the
passage could be laid out as follows:
Me – Yes.
I – The dark?
Me – Yes.
I – The mud and the dark are true?
Me – Yes, nothing!
I – To…
Me – Regret? There (consoling) No!
perceptions until the moment is reached where the word stands empty as
the possibility of the real; all else is doubted. Beckett’s exhaustive
questioning brings us into language and away from what is outside it. That
journey shows us that perceptions can be no more than that, that ethics are
concepts thought up by humans to enforce order in the existential world.
Language needs to be appropriated and agreement needs to be reached on
specific meaning so that a code of ethics can be applied within society. But
using language thus is a long way from the fundamental questions asked in
Beckett’s works. Ethics are necessary in the existential world but “not at
other times,” i.e. the “time” that Beckett’s forensic examination shows
itself to be of a different dimension to the existential, the preoccupation
with the real. Language in the existential world is presumed to be no more
than a tool, and is not linked to the notion of the real which is thought to
be other than only language. Yet in Beckett, “Word and world cannot
coincide because the world is nothing, utterance everything” (Weller 2005,
108).
Much thought has been applied to what is erroneously called negativity
in Beckett’s work. To level this charge at Beckett is to expose an inability
to locate oneself in Beckett’s dimension, and to show that the accuser has
his/her feet and mind firmly planted in the metaphysical world. One finds
it necessary to express forthright disagreement, after a fairly intensive
study of Beckett’s major works, with this line of thinking. He, as is
stressed through this work, doubts the existence of things but affirms
language. Language is the “something yes but another” (Beckett 2006,
519) that is celebrated in his literature, the great positive against which all
else fades. He reverses the thinking that sees things as certainties and
words as “only language,” and remorselessly destroys the presuppositions
that sustain it. For Beckett, is will be “the words that remain” (Beckett
1959, 38). The raison d’etre of his works seems to be to establish this fact
without equivocation, in spite of the doubted perceptions that it
supersedes. Thus concepts, metaphors and the assumption of narrative are
rigorously contested. All are brought back to the words from which they
are composed to show us that when the concepts, metaphors and narrative
have been demolished, the words, like the scattered stones of a former
edifice, remain.
If language is the real, Beckett appears to say, let us put it to the test.
By so constructing his syntax, Beckett divorces language from perceptions
and allows us to read it as language talking about language. In it there is a
continuous contest taking place between language’s wish to describe
things and language talking about itself, which the latter invariably wins.
Through this contest Beckett asserts the primacy of language, its
60 How it is in How It Is
things, they are “something yes,” but something that is not a thing. Beckett
here wrenches something out of the assumption of the chain of signifiers
and asserts his authority to invest it with a meaning appropriate to its
status; Language is now something that has no relationship to nothing. By
so doing, it establishes the right of an individual to challenge the
ownership of the name on equal terms. He disputes the right to fix the
name “something” to a material thing; he wrests control of the term and
radically alters it to represent empty language in transition to being, the
unpresentable real. To the narrating voice it is different to both of these; it
is something that is unrelated to things in either the positive or negative
senses. The voice also dislodges “something” from any assumed place in
the so-called chain of signifiers. “Something” is here not linked to things
as in “every thing,” “all things’ things,” etc. It is now a word independent
either of link to referent or influence from its neighbours on the chain. The
voices descend into the murky world of meaning because it must establish
beyond doubt that the word as “something” exists. It needs to appropriate
the language of metaphysics, it needs it to communicate its truth, the truth
that drives the work, that language is a something, the real, it is the real
that is itself haunted. The voice, by declaring language to be a something,
emphasizes what is so vital to Beckett that the voice in How It Is must
condescend to compromise to have its truth understood. It will lead us to
understand that language is true; all implications of meaning can be
stripped from it. The mud and the dark are true; as words they exist, and
are grammatically correct, yet they are haunted by their possible
association to perceived things. The voice, by stressing “nothing,” by
including the word at all, of course insists on the real of language. It can
survive without linkage to things and prove it is true, but also conveys the
fear that the true may be corrupted by belief in the spectral. The real is in
constant danger of being disrupted by the spectre of the sensible, not the
reverse, as Blanchot says.
If there is a key to reading Beckett it is to grasp this understanding of
the raison d’etres of his works; “[t]hat the literary work remains fatally
split” (Oppenheim 2004 72) between the aspiration to completion and the
impossibility of completion, because language will always exceed and
disrupt, deconstruct that which its author aspires to narrate, and is a
problem that applies to the pre-Beckett novel. Beckett has left it behind
through his awareness that what Blanchot calls “the listlessness of an
empty speech” (2003, 213) is in fact the story. To get there he does his
utmost to undo the credulity of the narrative. His aspiration is not to
complete the narrative but to make a literary work in its own right by
going back into its component parts, the emptiness of the speech, the
The Empty Too 65
Unless we choose to pass over the question of being, the only positive
thing we can say of is is that it is an undecidable, and Beckett is aware of
this fact. Throughout How It Is, from the title on, the paucity of the
selection of “is” (in its various tenses) is rigorous in its relation to its
undecidability. By way of explanation we could look at “if all that is not
how shall I say no” (Beckett 2005, 519). Voice cannot affirm or deny all
that is or is not because the undecidable “is” will both assert and question
whatever he may say, so he cannot say anything definitive about “that” if
“that” is taken to mean something outside of language. However, if “that”
is taken to be the word that, that “that” is, it exists in its own right as the
word “that.” Though he cannot say no to the proposition “that is,” neither
can he say yes to it because of the possibility that “that” may refer to
unprovable perceptions. The logic of the undecidable becomes clear in
Beckett. “Is” asserts the reality of language “that is” and questions the
existence of perceptions, and the possibility of their existence haunts the
real, language. “All that,” the passage continues, “is not false” (519). The
undecidability of “is” is stressed, but beyond the falsity or otherwise of
“all that” the language in which it is written remains standing, so to speak,
and pursues the relentless journey towards emptiness.
So when we read “was” in “there was something yes but nothing” as
an undecidable, the apparent intention to stress meaning dissipates;
inevitably, it takes us on the journey through the assertion that language is
a “something” to questioning such a possibility, to the exposition of
“something” as the empty word, back to the reality of language being a
something. Yet even noting the undecidability of “was,” the point is still
made through language that is, basically, readable, even if it consistently
favours the inevitability of its unreadableness over its link to the
intelligible over the sensible.
We would now need to ask—is the verb to be an undecidable if it is
weighted in favour of the intelligible over the sensible? It is not an
undecidable to Beckett because it favours the intelligible over the sensible,
where Derrida sees an equality of sorts between the two through the cross-
fertilization process at work in the biphase, discussed at length in Positions
(1981). Beckett insistently “goes on,” so long as intelligent questions can
be answered in the intelligible, to where doubts cannot be resolved in the
sensible. He is left with the intelligibly-reached truth that the empty word
exists but is undoubtedly haunted by the possibility of both the existence
and non-existence of that which is perceived by the senses. We can
conclude from Beckett’s approach that “is” is not an undecidable, as an
undecidable “is” would create an aporia, or impasse, where both
interpretations would carry equal weight. An aporia would signify
The Empty Too 69
figure of the aporia in which ‘death’ and death can replace—and this a
metonymy that carries the name beyond the name and beyond the name of
the name” (79), all that is only possible as impossible. How close Derrida
is to Beckett’s thinking when he talks about “death” carrying the name
beyond the name and how much closer he would have been had he said
“carries the word beyond the name” etc. Where Beckett insistently goes on
to, and beyond, the stage where language “is dispossessed, can say,
nothing” (Bataille 1988, 14), Derrida is constrained by the
possible/impossible dichotomy of the equality of the intelligible/sensible
axis on which his thinking appears to be constructed. He, as Sarah Wood
remarks, is “committed to the belief that here is something other than
language” (Wood 2009, 147). It is this commitment that holds Derrida
back from going on, in the Beckett sense.
If we read Derrida from a Beckett viewpoint, one that would release its
thinking from a Derridean constraint, we would interpret death as “death,”
signifying the death of meaning. Such a reading would promise a “to
come” that would fine-tune the balance in favour of the intelligible, and
thus release us from the prison of Derrida’s possible/impossible
dichotomy. The death of meaning outweighs the perception of death of the
body. The word, hence, will be carried beyond the name of the name, not
to the stage Bataille calls “the annihilation of everything, which is not the
ultimate unknown” (Bataille 1988, 115–118), but to the state where
everything except empty language is reduced to doubt. The impossibility
for Beckett is to get to this place where the word can be seen to be beyond
the name, beyond meaning, but such is his certainty that language is the
real that he can hold out this place as a definite to come, if and when we
can rid ourselves of the hauntological perceptions. Such a Beckett reading
emphasizes the difference between the significance Derrida sees in “love
the gift, the other testimony and so forth” (Derrida 1993, 79), and
Beckett’s impatience with bothersome manifestations of the empirical
world in general. Beckett wants to go on beyond the aporia to the
incalculable. Even if Derrida says “the aporia can never simply be endured
as such” (78) and “the ultimate aporia is the impossibility of the aporia as
such” (78), it seems that his commitment to the belief that there is
something other than language forbids him from taking the step—that
Beckett takes—from belief to doubt. Derrida’s belief is that something
other than language links him to a belief in a reality that is radically
different from Beckett’s reality.
The question in How It Is that makes it literature, that marks the point
where literature and philosophy both challenge and support each other—if
language is the real how do we cope with the doubts in perceptions—
The Empty Too 71
4
In an excellent essay by Leslie Hill (“Poststructuralist Readings of Beckett” in
Lois Oppenheim’s Samuel Beckett Studies.
THE WORST WORD IS BEST
IN WORSTWARD HO
Godot (Beckett 1956, 76). The they want “me” to believe I have an ego as
they have, and can speak of it, as they of theirs. So who are the they, and
who is I/me—or can we say who? One of the aspirations of The
Unnamable is for “It (to) say it” (Beckett 1956, 267), for it to announce
and affirm itself as the word “it,” having undone the “cause of ‘meaning,’
‘belief’ and ‘knowing’ … The discovery of Endgame, both in topic and
technique, is not the failure of meaning (if that means the lack of meaning)
but its total, even totalitarian, success—our inability not to mean what we
are given to mean” (Cavell 2002, 116–117). So it should be clear that in
the early passage of The Unnamable, to answer Blanchot, language is
speaking; language freed of the curse of meaning, belief, knowing, ego
and referent, language that “can’t get born” (Royle 2003, 2224), that is
celebrating the probability of its liberation from the corporeal, not
bemoaning its exclusion, we could say, but to do so would be inferring
meaning which is the property of the living, the they from whom language
aspires to free itself. Language cannot yet be because it is compromised by
association with the senses that presume to mean and to know. The they
wonder if the I that is language believes it is speaking, but to wonder thus
is to presuppose that the drives of the sensible apply to the real, to a
dimension from which belief has been jettisoned, where empty language is
gloriously free.
The text of this passage compels us to continue asking “who is
speaking?” Who is the I who can’t get born, who apparently does not have
an ego, but can be thought to believe it has, who is in the middle, the
partition, neither one side nor the other? This I is not of the living but the I
“who” is; the living, the they that feel susceptible to entrapment in the
state of existence. This “middle” needs to be examined for one to hope to
understand Beckett on even a basic level, for there is more than one voice,
one “I,” one level of consciousness, speaking here. The I who can’t get
born may be understood to be the aspiration of language to be pure, but
pure language divorced from the corporeal cannot communicate with the
senses. It does not merely inhabit silence, it is silence itself because it is
the real: “Hearing it still without hearing what it says, that’s what I call
going silent” (Beckett 1959, 362). Here, the I aspires to this state of perfect
stillness where even what we take as the pronoun “it” to say can only be
heard “still.” The pure I that is language can’t get born even into the world
of the “middle” where the speaker is “the partition,” yet the pure I contests
every attempt of non-being to “snap me up among the living” (Royle
2003, 224). The I that is the partition may be the pure I infected by
association with the corporeal, but who does not belong to the worlds of
perception or language because s/he is aspiring to go on to the real and
78 The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho
… the language Beckett has discovered or invented (in) its grammar, its
particular way of making sense, especially the quality it has of what I call
hidden literality. The words strew obscurities across our path and seem
willfully to thwart comprehension; and then time after time we discover
that their meaning has been missed only because it was so utterly bare—
totally, therefore unnoticeably, in view. Such a discovery has the effect of
showing us that it is we who have been willfully uncomprehending,
misleading ourselves in demanding further, or other, meaning where the
meaning was nearest (2002, 119-120).
J. Hillis Miller’s “good readers” of Beckett’s works are aware that they
are not set in the existential world as it is or appears. Beckett has created
an alternate dimension, one in which the existence of perceived reality
cannot be proved beyond doubt, where language is elevated to a level
where its claim to be the real cannot be disputed. In this dimension the
perceived world can never attain the state of absolute reality reached by
language, and the perceived is always doubted. The word “it,” then, if we
follow the logic of such an interpretation of Beckett’s works, could not
The Empty Too 79
Worstward Ho opens and ends with the word “on.” “On. Say on”
(Beckett 2006, 471) and “No how on” (485). Approaching Worstward Ho
as the book of on may confirm it as the final affirmation of Beckett’s
philosophical impetus to go on through affirmation and negation towards
that final truth where the affirmation/negation dialectic breaks down, the
unlessenable least, the word that cannot be presented. The full opening
line reads: “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said
nohow on” (471) Between the two “ons” the text proceeds towards the
affirmation of being (the real). This progression contests each suggestion
of meaning, and guards against every desire to lapse into acceptance of
conventional interpretations of words and phrases. The fastidious undoing
of meaning emphasizes the disparity that distinguishes non-being, that
which is perceived through the senses, from empty language which will go
on towards being “all.” This distinction cannot be affected in the
existential world or even within the fictional reality created by Beckett,
tilted though it is towards the word being favoured over the perception. It
cannot because, even in Beckett’s fictional world, the word must be said,
heard, written and seen through the senses, and thus contaminated. Its “all”
has been diluted by that which is of non-being, yet the demand of language
insists on its speaking despite these obstructions. What we do see in
Worstward Ho is the accentuation of the primacy of empty language over
supposed meaning. From being a word in the opening of the work that can
be said and suggests an impetus towards a referent beyond itself, “on”
ends in isolated emptiness—there is no “how” to know anything about it,
other than its existence as a word. The impetus of the text compels us to
see “on” purely as the uncontaminated word on, and by extension all
words as empty, and to aspire go on beyond the inscribed to the pure word,
to being itself.
The contamination of the real, pure language is confronted in the
opening line of Worstward Ho in: “Be said on” (471). If being is “all
words,” pure language uncontaminated and undiluted by connection with
the corporeal, it clearly cannot speak; being could not have said “on,” and
to have done so would have introduced into being a function of non-being,
the corporeal. Any intervention, therefore, from non-being would be
missaid, and could not have been said by being, which is “all words.” In
The Unnamable the voice says “It will be I … that’s all words … all
words, there’s nothing else” (Beckett 1959, 381); it will be I, and the
corporeal will have disappeared into the void (see below), and it, language,
will be I, the I who speaks in the works of Beckett; but “it will be the
silence,” the uncontaminated pure I that is free of the torments of the
senses, that will be all words, there’s nothing else—that is the real.
The Empty Too 81
because of and through the body that is held to be non-being, and with
which it is in conflict, even in a situation where the distance between the
two has been stretched to its limit. Consequently, language, while
convinced of its destiny, cannot be the actual real in the existential world.
It speaks “as through a medium in an oracle” (Szafraniec 2007, 178) but
continually reminds the reader of the inferior status of the medium to
which it is, nevertheless, tied. If non-being thinks it can somehow go on,
language reminds it of its ephemeral state of existence and of the
permanence of language after the death of meaning. Be that said will
somehow go on until its end, until it cannot know how to go on, until there
is no way on, no “how” on. Language reappropriates “how” to its state of
meaninglessness—there is no how, how is now a word rid of its
association to non-being and freed of that which has been imposed on it,
the ability to mean, to know. Now it does not know how because there is
no “how” to know. “How” has been relieved of its obligation to know, yet
the word how remains, exists; even in its printed state it announces its
destiny, which is the affirmation of its existence, not in, or of, any time or
place but as the real, beyond, and uncontaminated by the senses. Shane
Weller asks “is that affirmation not ultimately like the text itself rather
than anything it might name or thematize?” (Weller 2005, 193). Before
responding to Weller’s significant observation we might refer to
Blanchot’s discourse on the demand of writing, that which is demanded
“by any morality of any man … maintains no relation with him, while at
the same time summoning him to support this relation” (Blanchot 2003,
31). This summons demands the impossible—that the unpresentable, pure
language that can neither speak nor write but is, be represented in writing,
not the uttering of useless true and simple words but those used in
Beckett’s texts that struggle to say words that unsay knowledge, meaning
and the desire to name. The demand is impossible to fulfil because the
relation between the text and language that is beyond the text, the real, is
unbridgeable. Beckett’s text does insist that language is the real through
persistent negation that leaves language standing, not through “rhymes or
alliteration” (Weller 2005, 193) that feed the illusions of the senses and
distract the script from pursuing this relation. Worstward Ho does not end
with the text, as many critics who have yet to appreciate the significance
of Beckett’s fictional world do not realize. It is the book of on that brings
us to the outer limits of meaning and exhausts, through logical
interrogation, any case that could argue for the unquestioned existence of
perception, and messianicaly implores us to seriously engage with the
possibility of disembodied language being the real. Beckett’s selection and
arrangement of the text—because it creates a fictional space in which the
The Empty Too 83
is all words then all words, i.e. words that are all, or words alone, words
divested of meaning, articulation and inscription, unattainable, empty, pure
words are being. We see this with the pronounced focus directed towards
various key words running through Beckett’s texts—“it,” for example, and
“that”; “it, say it, not knowing what” (Beckett 1959, 267), and “is that
what it is” (381). If we accept that in Beckett’s created dimension pure
language is believed to be the real and the aspiration is to “go on” to that
state, seeing the closing lines of The Unnamable as a two-part dialogue
will clarify the logic that drives the text:
Here we can see that the linguistic I, having throughout the text defined
the real towards which s/he aspires, agrees to go on towards and is
encouraged to do so by the corporeal which cannot. If we continue to ask,
after Blanchot, “who is speaking” in Worstward Ho, we will see that
language has now been almost completely decoupled from the referent.
Language now is the “what,” language speaking about itself with a greater
insistence of authority than in The Unnamable, where the necessity of a
defence system against that which threatens it is continually stressed.
Language has now gone on as far as it is possible in the existential world,
towards proving the argument that runs through Beckett’s works that being
is all words. It has exacted the admission of non-being from the corporeal
in the closing lines of The Unnamable and now feels no compulsion to
resort to the confusion that may be the cause of misreading the linguistic I
as the subject.
“Language speaks here itself” (Szafraniec 2007, 178). It looks forward
to its complete state of being when it will be all, having rid itself of that
which now contaminates it, its association with the senses. As Szafranciec
says: “This near autonomy of language reflects the position of God. As
Derrida says, ‘Language has started without us, in us and before us. This is
what theology calls God’” (178). The problem that confronts Beckett is the
question of how near language can get to autonomy in the existential
world. If words are “all” of being, how can we get to “all” if we of
necessity employ the trappings of non-being, of the corporeal, that are not
of all? Worstward Ho goes as far it is possible to go, in language as it is
understood in the existential world, towards autonomy. But in so doing
Beckett defines the distinction between being and non-being. Worstward
Ho therefore demonstrates the—to language—unnecessary contaminant by
The Empty Too 85
the existential world and shows that it can go on, despite the hindrance of
the desire to represent, to a state where language can proclaim its
autonomy, can speak of itself and thus affirm itself beyond the text.
Worstward Ho shows that language can never be dismissed as an option.
“It stands” (Beckett 2006, 471) when perceptions cannot go beyond being
doubted. Worstward Ho is the book of on. Having established the
possibility of language’s autonomy even in the existential, albeit fictional,
realigned world that Beckett creates and which furthers his philosophical
proposition, it must of necessity promise to go on, to be, to be the real.
The raison d’etre of Beckett’s works is to decouple language from
subject, knowledge and perception and so declutter the path to the real.
The speaker in Worstward Ho cannot represent that which is unpresentable
yet which is the real, so s/he forensically annuls the possibility of meaning
in words that could detract from the aspiration to go on towards the real.
We see this in the attempts of be to get beyond written and spoken
language where be is “missaid,” as in this opening citation: “Be said on.
Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. Say for be said. Missaid”
(471). But we also see the implications of meaning in “said” coming under
attack. Be said on until said can somehow go on; meaning will somehow
be sustainable until, that is, there is no how, no way, for “said” to sustain
its authority. Meaning in said is annulled, yet the word said stands alone
and empty. The point is stressed later “Whenever said said said missaid”
(481), but said cannot be missaid because said is said, and missaid is
another word—missaid, or is said missaid? “Said is missaid” (481) may
conceal, beneath the too obvious clarity in its assertion, an ambiguity that
Beckett reserves for his deliberate and limited use of the verb “to be,”
present tense. In fact, “is” is almost absent from the text of Worstward Ho.
Is makes an assertion and asks a question, and each interpretation must be
weighed in equal measure to the other if we are to exhaust full value from
the text. The obvious, first, reading of the line, if we take “is” as an
assertion, is that the implication of representation, the truth claim in what
has been said, is mistaken, and “said” has been “missaid.” Yet this reading
hardly goes deep enough if we are serious about going on towards the
unlessenable least, as we must if we are to remain true to the text. What,
then, if we read it as “Said is. Missaid”? We are obviously taking liberties
with Beckett’s punctuation, which we can justify after the precedent he
establishes in How It Is, but even without the obvious full stop we are at
liberty to interpret a significant pause after “is.”
Let us refresh our familiarity with the passage under discussion: “Be
said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. Say for be said.
Missaid” (471). We could also extrapolate the following—to say is to be,
86 The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho
and “say for be” is apparently confirmed in the assumed finality of the
tone in which “said” is delivered, which could be read thus, say for be.
Said! In this intervention in the text the distinction between “say” and
“said” is obvious. It affirms Beckett’s philosophical thinking on reality,
but in so doing it also affirms fixed meaning in both the terms “say” and
“said.” Unsurprisingly, the affirmation is followed by the hasty negation
“missaid.” To say for be said is missaid for a few reasons. To say, as has
already been noted, is to employ the use of the senses which would distort
being, and to attribute definite meaning to “say” and “said” would have a
similar effect through the implication of meaning in pure language. One
could go on almost indefinitely in this vein. The purpose of the exercise is
to argue that in Beckett’s works we cannot, with any confidence, go
outside language—language speaks itself, of itself. It continually exposes
the arbitrary connection between it and meaning. As a first step only in the
process of going on it reduces everything outside of language to doubt and
focuses on reducing language to the unlessenable least. Said, therefore,
can be taken, in Beckett’s approach of affirmation and negation, as an
assertion that: (a) what has been said has been said by being, “Be said on,”
and (b) that the word “said” is, from which we can extract two readings:
(i) that the word said means something has been said, in this case “on,”
and (ii) that it exists in its own right, decoupled from an association to
knowledge or representation. But the (equally significant) question part of
“is” attempts to negate these assertions, and by putting them in question it
reduces the assertion to the level of doubt beyond which it cannot rise. The
rare but significant use of “is” in this passage of Worstward Ho equates
meaning to existence. But that doubt introduced by “is” is eliminated
through the absence of the verb “to be,” present tense, in the next
sentence: “Whenever said said said missaid” (481).
We need to dwell on the supposed distinction between “say” and
“said” that seems to run through the early stages of the work. The speaker
asks us to “Say for be said” (471). We could say “a body” where “none,”
which could be taken to say there is no body, and to ask where is the
location where “none” can be found/exists? In either case, even when the
mind is non-existent “no mind” (471), we can say the word “body.” These
syntactically and semantically complex orderings of the text undermine
any claim of connection between word and referent. Said is now
decoupled from meaning—“From now said alone” (481)—as is missaid
which is now equal in meaninglessness to said, as is seen where the
negation of the earlier affirmation of “say for be said” (471) itself seems to
be negated in “said for missaid” (471). In “For be missaid” (481), “for”
and be are both missaid once they are said at all, and they employ the
The Empty Too 87
services of the senses, even when they imply emptiness. The logic of the
project that is Worstward Ho insists that we cannot go outside of language,
and the more we look into language the more assuredly we are going on to
prove the truth that language is empty and meaningless and will stand
alone when stripped of meaning that is imposed upon it by the unified
subject. The distinction between say and said has been broken down
through the lessening of meaning that reduces both words to the
“formation of an initial speech whereby words that say something will be
distanced” (Blanchot 2003, 375, citing Mallarrne)—“The say? The said.
Same thing. Same nothing” (Beckett 2006, 481)—and they have the
potential to be the real, to be “all,” but for their relationship with no things
of non-being, “Same all, but nothing” (481). Once words are established as
being empty, language is in a position to go on towards being as we see
with the dissection of back (Beckett 2006, 481). Back is now alone, and
like “say” and “said” it has been lessened to “the listlessness of an empty
speech” (Blanchot 2003, 213) and can go somehow on. The apparent
contradiction “Back is on” (Beckett 2006, 481) is no longer that when we
realize that “back” has been divested of meaning; this process is some
“how” “on,” as it can be accomplished “within the arena of its limitations”
(Badiou 2009, 25), i.e. within the existential world where it is within our
power to prove that meaning is no more than a convention. The power,
“the how,” that makes it possible to create and attribute meaning to words,
can equally question and undo meaning. It can “lessen” meaning to a stage
where the spoken and written word is perceived to be empty. The methods
used in “how” challenge the perceived meanings of words until all of them
are subverted and the word is left alone. The word is lessened but not to an
unlessenable least, as this is not possible within the limitations of the
perceived world; hence some “how” will, through rational interrogation,
bring the word, as it is understood, to the limits of where it can go when
accompanied by the senses of the corporeal. But still the word is prepared
and poised to go on to be “all,” pure, being, uncorrupted by the non-being
of the perceived world. In this book of on, every supposition of meaning
and perception is put in question until the speaker’s aspiration to be “all
words” is emphasized beyond doubt. The significant invalidation of
meaning in “say” and “said,” to which we have referred, prepares the
reader for the messianic conclusion “Said nohow on” (Beckett 2006, 485).
The say and the said may be equal in meaninglessness but they are also the
same in “all,” and both have the potential to be the real. It is towards their
capacity to be, once rid of the nuisance of the attendant non-being, that
words can go on, to “the true silence … the real silence at last” (Beckett
1959, 362), through the stillness of the existential world which is not true
88 The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho
(which might be of interest to those who like to write about ethics and
nihilism in Beckett’s works). The speaker asks “What word for what
then?” When language is the real, then what can the word “what”
represent when perceptions have already been consigned to the void?
Because the real is “good” and “all” it cannot “be” anywhere, certainly not
in a void. The void is part of the perceived world and, like it, cannot be
proved to exist. What, then, of the intriguing dash in “no hands in the—No
save for worse to say” (480) (?) It could be argued that the dash represents
the so-called failure of language, but as is argued elsewhere in this book,
language cannot fail in the real sense. There are indeed many examples of
language failing to represent perceptions. In those cases it is the “dim
white empty hands” (480) of the perception that instigate the chain
reaction, resulting in what is called the failure of language. Language may,
in such instances, fail to represent, but it does not fail and will continue to
renew and to re-represent some freshly conceived perception, some
unprovable manifestation, some shade of what we call existence until the
application of Beckett’s logic will prove it to be empty and infinite. Like
most of Beckett’s texts, the passage in question here is open to more than
one interpretation. So why the dash, what does it signify? It could indeed
be argued to represent the failed attempt of language to represent an
indefinable perception, a “what” on which he elaborates in what “words
for what then?” (480). However, to read it as such still leaves too much of
a remainder, too much slack, some of which can be lessened before the
suggestion of meaning is exhausted. It is noteworthy that Beckett ends this
sentence with a question mark, implying that the first “what” retains its
conventional interrogative meaning, the question being directed towards
the discussion around the absent “what” of the dash; if what is implied as
the absentee in the blank space, then what is that “what”? Can it represent,
or is it specifically the empty word “what” that defies the notion of
representation? But even then it is lessenable, insofar as the physical act
that inscribed it as a material perception can be undone and replaced by
another act that will reduce it to an implication, albeit one that is
dependent on the implied meaning in the words that surround the blank.
Or should we insist that because the dash is not a blank it is a mark? Yet
this implication to which “what” has been reduced is of profound
significance to those who would wish to understand what is going on—or
precisely what going on is—in the works of Samuel Beckett. The dash is
the best worse least in the realm of perceptions, yet it is not the
unlessenable “least which” is pure language, uncontaminated by
inscription. Because the unlessenable least cannot be perceived it is
therefore unpresentable. The reduction of what (?) to “what” and “what” to
The Empty Too 93
see that the word void too has become empty, which is of profound
significance to the overall understanding of what Beckett is about. To
avoid becoming bogged down in a fruitless and interminable argument
based on the supposed meaning or metaphysical import of the sentence,
the reader could profitably relocate to Beckett’s imagined dimension and,
remaining true to his textual support in “the empty too,” empty the words
of meaning. If we do this the sentence following on from the shortened
version already discussed will read like this: “Void, no, if, not, for—
good.” It will be seen to list a succession of words emptied of meaning, all
of which, in their empty state, are equal, value-free examples of Beckett’s
philosophical notion of the good. This reading goes on, in this book of on,
from the earlier example that sees the word void questioning the existence
of the perception void to the stage where language, because it has been
divested of meaning, cannot question, it is “being Unquestioning” (Beckett
1959, 267). It stands visible to the senses because it has been inscribed but
is otherwise empty, which is as far as it can go in the existential world.
The sentence aspires to the real, to be all words, and therefore is consistent
with its aspirations to read it as all words. When we do this we see that
void is equal in meaninglessness to those others on the list that define real.
“Void” can have no meaning and cannot exist where the real is all words.
To apply meaning to void is to relocate it in the area of non-being, of
perceptions where its realness will be contaminated by that which is
destined for its actual void.
Though it is argued throughout this book that Beckett’s thinking
exceeds that of most philosophers, or at least the impositions on his texts
of “an impression of fashionable philosophy” (Cavell 2002, 115), we can
acknowledge similarities between his thinking, in certain areas, and that
of, for example, Plato on the intelligible and the sensible, Descartes on
Cartesian doubt, and Berkeley on perception. Yet Beckett is never a mere
philosopher; he is a philosopher-artist whose thinking may coincide with,
even be influenced by, others, yet through his texts we can see where this
point of convergence separates and where his thinking goes beyond theirs.
Berkeley’s central idea that “any sensible object should be immediately
perceived by sight or touch, and at the same time have no existence in
nature, since the very existence of a thinking being consists in being
perceived” (Berkeley 2004, 86) is especially interesting when considering
Beckett’s philosophy. That an object can be perceived through senses yet
have no existence in nature seems to be a trigger point for Beckett’s
thinking that the perceived is not the real. Berkeley’s claim that “we
cannot attain to any self-evident or demonstrative knowledge of the
existence of sensible things” as well as reflecting Cartesian doubt is also
96 The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho
seen in Beckett’s “Enough still not to know” (Beckett 2006, 479) and his
insistence, running throughout his texts, that we cannot know. But
Berkeley, like Plato, does not really consider the centrality of language to
being. Plato sees “the same” as that which “cannot be perceived by the
senses at all” where Berkeley retreats to the comfort zone of “that Eternal
invisible mind which produces and sustains all things” (Berkeley 2004,
88). If Berkeley’s thinking supports Beckett’s notion on perceptions,
Plato’s thinking on the same establishes a base from which Beckett can
project his theory that language is the real. It may not be coincidence that
he actually mentions the terms “the same” in a significant reference that
appears to correct the flaw in Plato’s thinking that fails to consider the
centrality of language to being. The same is “Same thing. Same nothing.
Same all but nothing” (Beckett 2006, 481). For both Plato and Beckett the
real, or the same, cannot be perceived by the senses at all, but for Plato it
is the Forms where for Beckett it is pure empty language, the real that is
“all words” is the same, which is all “but nothing,” that excludes
everything that is not pure language (which to Beckett is non-being).
Beckett, possibly unlike Plato and Berkeley, is an artist. Where they step
outside of language to define their representation of the real, Beckett, by
proving that language can with certainty only talk about language, creates
an art form that purges language of all possible association with that which
is outside it in the existential world, which proves that “It stands” (472)
when reduced to “all words.” He departs from the logic of Plato’s and
Berkeley’s thinking once it becomes unsustainable through Cartesian
interrogation, insisting on staying within that from which there can be no
release, that which is not an option—irreducible language.
Worstward Ho is the book of on in which we witness the aspiration of
pure language speak to speak. The aspiration to purity is intensified by
going into language and by creating doubt of the existence of that which
corrupts it, perceptions of the senses which nevertheless continue to haunt
it on its passage through the existential world. Pure language is the
unpresentable real to Beckett, that messianic to come that is beyond time,
place and ethics. It inhabits no zone—it is all. That which is not of all is
non-being and is destined for the void.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anthologies
Bennett, Andrew and Royle, Nicholas. An Introduction to Literature,
Criticism and Theory, Hertfordshire, Prentice Hall/Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1995.
G.H. von Wright, H Nyman, editors. Culture and Value Oxford, Blackwell
1980.
Rivkin, Julia, and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: an Anthology:
Oxford, Blackwell, 1998.
Oppenheim, Lois, editor. Samuel Beckett Studies, Palgrave, London, 2004.
Journals
Emerging Perspectives. Post graduate journal in English Studies, vol. 3,
Dublin, University College Dublin, English Graduate Society, 2012.
Denis Devlin in ‘Transition,’ Paris 27, April May 1938.
Websites
Critchley 2009 http:nakedpunch.com
INDEX
the same, ix, xi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, void, vi, 10, 11, 17, 33, 73, 81, 84,
10, 11, 16, 20, 26, 54, 69, 72, 82, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97
88, 91, 95, 96 Von Wright & Nyman, 73
The Unnamable, 1, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, Waiting for Godot, vii, xi, 1, 23, 24,
29, 31, 37, 42, 52, 57, 61, 64, 69, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 48, 50, 74,
74, 75, 77, 81, 84, 85, 90, 94, 95 77, 98
Timaeus, 1, 5 Weller, Shane, 59, 73, 82, 89, 99
University College Dublin, 100 Wittgenstein, 34
unnullable, 83 Wood, Sarah, 70, 71, 99
unpresentable, 2, 3, 6, 16, 27, 30, Worstward Ho, vii, xi, 11, 73, 74,
35, 46, 53, 56, 64, 83, 85, 92, 97 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 94,
unprovability, 5, 13, 59 97
Yeats, 54