INTRODUCTION ROMANTIC IRONY

When a Romanticism has been analyzed into the distinct strains or ideas which compose it, the true philosophic affinities and the eventual practical influence in life and art of these several strains will usually be found to be exceedingly diverse and often conflicting. Arthur O. Lovejoys On the Discrimination of Romanticisms

Samuel Becketts aesthetic sensibility was essentially Romantic. Yet, surprisingly, there exist virtually no detailed analyses of the subject in any language. In their recent tour-de-force entitled The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Readers Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (2004), C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski note this peculiarity: A good study of the Romantic impulse in [Becketts] writings, revealing unexpected insights into a tradition vehemently rejected but never quite denied, is currently lacking (487). This critical lack is surprising indeed given not only Becketts lifelong preoccupation with the legacy, say, of German Romanticismconfirmed, for example, by his fondness for the poetry of Hlderlin, the music of Beethoven and Schubert, and the art of Kaspar David Friedrichbut also given his own deep engagement with more pervasive Romantic themes, the logic of which Beckett, with his unmistakable voice, was to push to their limits: the nature and function of human perception; the sublime and mans relation to the ineffable; the relationship between subject and object; and what James Engell, in The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (1981), elegantly defines as the quintessence of Romanticism (4), the concept of the imagination. Beckett consistently stressed that his was an art of feeling, of emotion, of spirit. Although mathematics, geometry, and formalistic patterning and order figure into his work in various ways, Beckett ultimately privileges a kind of artistic sensibility that the ironclad rigors of logic cannot constrain. Logic in Becketts work, no matter how elegantly he expresses it, always begins and ends in parody and impasse. Murphys biscuits, Molloys sucking stones, and virtually every scene in Watt are just a few examples of this tendency. Becketts patent rejection of the Cartesian method that renders matter inert extension is perhaps the most obvious,

undeniable point of departure for Beckett. His world is visceral, and he explicitly rejects the Age of Reason in favor of what one might call an Age of Unreason. Beckett appreciated Dostoevskis preservation of the inexplicable, unforeseeable quality of the human being (Burrows 8) as well as Bergsons vitalist philosophy, both of which stress the liminal and dynamic over and above the static and predictable. As opposed to what Beckett refers to in Dream of Fair to Middling Women as Balzacs clockwork cabbages (120), Beckett praises characters who are obscure, indeterminatecharacters, as he stressed in his Trinity lectures, who preserve the integrity of incoherence. He relates Proust to Dostoevski and admires them both for stating their characters without explaining them (Proust 87). It is this inexplicability that Beckett sees as endemic to modern life. In the Greeks, ones fate is sealed from the beginning, thus leaving little or no room for mystery and doubt regarding human motivation. On the other hand, in modern literature, which Beckett considered best exemplified in the work of Racine, Stendhal, Dostoevski, and Gide, the action is inner and unpredictable since motivation is unforeseeableto the author, character, and reader. Becketts distaste for realism and naturalism was unqualified. These schools of art, he maintained, were artificial and prefabricated, not complex, multidimensional, vertical. Hence his love, as he wrote in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy in 1930 (TCD), of Keatss brooding, crouching quality and of that awful sweetness and thick soft damp green richness [. . .] and weariness of a line like Take into the air my quiet breath (from Keatss Nightingale ode, Becketts favorite). For Beckett, then, there is a breakdown of intelligibility and a concomitant substitution of intuition and feeling. Beckett maintains that Proust is romantic in his substitution of affectivity for intelligence [. . .] (Proust 81), and Beckett admitted in an interview with Gabriel dAubarde that he himself worked on the same affective level: Im no intellectual. All I am is feeling. Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel (qtd. in Graver and Federman 217). When the actress Jessica Tandy complained to Beckett that one of his plays was unintelligible because of its rapid pace, Beckett responded, I hope the piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect. Similarly, John Pilling notes how Becketts syntax [. . .] operates on our sensibilities by insinuation rather than assertion, by its infinite suggestibility rather than by its vehement

rigour (Frescoes 178). More specifically, in a discussion of Still (1974), Pilling further argues that this piece only requires [the reader] to keep his sensibility, in particular his aural sensibility, receptive (178). Becketts love of music, particularly Schuberts, is germane in the context of the aural sensibility that is required in the apprehension of Becketts fiction and drama. Beckett even referred to Schuberts A-minor string quartet as a work expressive of pure spirit. Beckett, in fact, was consistently preoccupied with spirit and, on 10 November 1955, explicitly stated as much to Patrick Bowles. People are not in touch with their spirit. What counts is the spirit, he said emphatically to his co-translator of Molloy (Bowles 28). Traces of his lifelong engagement with the protagonists broken spirit in Schuberts Winterreise are present even in a late work like What Where (1983), a play in which the winter journey motif is structural: I am alone. / In the present as were I still. / It is winter. / Without journey. / Time passes. / That is all. / Make sense who may. / I switch off (476). As James Knowlson testifies, Beckett (and his wife, Suzanne) adored Schuberts Winterreise, particularly the version by Gerald Moore and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to which Beckett would listen spellbound (685), as well as Schumanns Dichterliebe. Beckett even found himself at Ussy in 1975 Shivering through the grim journey again (625). Also, Schuberts Death and the Maiden looms menacingly over the haunting radio play All That Fall, and of course Beckett set Nacht und Trume to the last seven bars of Schuberts lied of that title. One of the many surprises in Becketts writing is the astonishing extent to which certain well-known Romantic excesses surface, and sometimes dominate, his work. The protagonists of More Pricks Than Kicks and Murphy, both of whom struggle against the restrictive norms of society and seek escape from the physically and morally confining environment of the city, are not unconnected to Goethes Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). As various allusions indicate, Beckett took Goethe seriously. Throughout 1934-5, when he was working intensely on his German, Beckett read quite a bit of Goethe, taking forty-one pages of notes in German, for instance, from his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit. He also studied and took extensive notes from Faust in 1936, and he typed out Goethes poem Prometheus in his notes on literature (TCD MS: 10971/1, Folio 72r-v). His notebooks further indicate that he read Tasso and Iphigenie (Ibid.). Allusions to many other Romantics abound. In Waiting for Godot,

Estragon, once a poet, quotes from Shelleys To the Moon and confounds Vladimir in the process:
VLADIMIR: [. . .] What are you doing? ESTRAGON: Pale for weariness. VLADIMIR: Eh? ESTRAGON: Of climbing heaven and gazing on the likes of us. (50)

When Harold Bloom first saw the play, as he relates in The Western Canon (1994), he found this allusion startling: I first saw Waiting for Godot before I read it, and I remember being startled at hearing [Bert] Lahr quote Shelley when the moon rises. [. . .] Beckett, like Joyce, did not share Eliots professed distaste for Shelley (it turned out that Eliot did not share it either) (501). Many of Becketts late works, too, bear the trace of a Romantic excess that he was never able to slough off. Romantic sentimentality, undercut though it is by the mechanistic tape recorder, overshadows Krapps Last Tape, particularly Krapps nostalgic remembrance of things past with the girl in the punt, and in Endgame Nagg and Nell invoke a human nostalgia and pathos in an otherwise harsh play where the irredeemably cruel Hamm dominates the stage. Becketts mature fiction like Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worsward Ho, despite (or because of) its minimalism, also evokes pathos in the reader. In relation to the late work, Knowlson has written that Beckett has a startling ability to encapsulate emotion and express it memorably. So, as you read late Beckett, you may find yourself suddenly and unaccountably moved to tears (671). Even a text like Worstward Ho, which Knowlson identifies as part of the strategy to be rid of Romantic accretions (675), evokes a pathos from which Beckett himself was not immune: Yet, however dimly perceived or imagined, a startling image is created that Beckett admitted to me was one of the most obsessional (his word) of his childhood memories: that of an old man walking hand in hand with a child (676). Knowlson concludes that the imagination however ruined is still alive (677). Nacht und Trume, a deeply moving nocturne that Beckett wrote in the final decade of his life, features a disembodied left hand resting gently on Bs head. The softly humming male voice, which eventually softly sings the last three bars of Schuberts lied, expresses a religious serenity that is crystallized in the image of the grail that provides B with a deep spiritual consolation. The last line of the lied is a yearning for the holy night to return:

holde Trume, kehret wieder! (i.e., Sweet dreams, come back!). Knowlson writes sensitively and poignantly about the plays haunting beauty: It evokes more clearly perhaps than any other of Becketts plays that purity of the spirit that had long been important in his life as well as in his work (683). Beckett also had a marked distaste for Romantic clichs that he would have gleaned from his meticulous reading in the early 1930s of Thophile Gautier's Histoire de Romantisme (1927) and Mario Prazs The Romantic Agony (1930; trans. 1933). Readers looking for evidence to confirm or disprove Romantic traces in Becketts work, however, must in the end rely on something other, or at least more, than the books he read. As even the most cursory glance through his many notebooks indicates, he read and took detailed notes on the history of everything, from the Greeks onward, so his intimacy with the themes and modes of Romanticism does not suggest much in and of itself. The vast majority of his work, anyway, reads like a systematic perversion of some of the most well-known Romantic themes, the pastoral clamour, as he writes in More Pricks Than Kicks (115), being an obvious and persistent one. At the beginning of Walking Out, for instance, the narrator, in a sightless passionate kind of way, surveys the scene and notes that the larks were singing, the hedges were breaking, the sun was shining, the sky was Marys cloak, the daisies were there, everything was in order, a spring evening so beautiful, indeed, that it is a matter of some difficulty to keep God out of ones meditations. But the grass, the narrator further reports, was spangled with scarlet afterbirths (101), and Belacquas Kerry Blue bitch was hot and bored (102). Beckett seems, then, to have been searching for a less Wordsworthy (Murphy 106) mode of expression, a mode, in other words, that was not slavishly tied to the strictures of mimesis or verisimilitude. Beckett time and again rejected the mimetic illusion, what he was fond of calling an art of surfaces, primarily because, for Beckett, the referential quality of language was seriously questionableif not utterly defunct. In his 1934 essay Recent Irish Poetry, Beckett identifies the space that intervenes between [the artist] and the world of objects as a direct consequence of a rupture of the lines of communication (Disjecta 70). Four years later, in Murphy, Beckett satirized Wordsworth, that most excellent man, in a passage that describes the miserable-looking sheep in Hyde Park:

The sheep were a miserable-looking lot, dingy, close-cropped, undersized and misshapen. [. . .] They simply stood, in an attitude of profound dejection, their heads bowed, swaying slightly as though dazed. Murphy had never seen stranger sheep, they seemed one and all on the point of collapse. They made the exposition of Wordsworths lovely fields of sleep as a compositors error for fields of sheep seem no longer a jibe at that most excellent man. (99-100) Nearys comment Since heaven lay about you as a bed-wetter (217) offers yet another perversion of Wordsworths poetry, this time of the sixty-sixth line from the Immortality ode: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! As early as Dream, in fact, Beckett had already treated Wordsworth with irony, Belacquas emotion recollected in [. . .] tranquility (185) amounting to little. In the first English translation of Mercier and Camier in 1974, Beckett unexpectedly includes a long descriptive passage about the celebrated pastures, only to dismiss it at the end with a self-conscious editorial comment that draws attention to the description as mere fabrication, an artificial exercise in mimesis: All seems flat, or gently undulating, and there at a stones throw these high crags, all unsuspected by the wayfarer. Of granite what is more. In the west the chain is at its highest, its peaks exalt even the most downcast eyes, peaks commanding the vast champaign land, the celebrated pastures, the golden vale. [. . .] It is here one would lie down, in a hollow bedded with dry heather, and fall asleep, for the last time, on an afternoon, in the sun, head down among the minute life of stems and bells, and fast fall asleep, fast farewell to charming things. Its a birdless sky, the odd raptor, no song. End of descriptive passage. (97-8) In his essay Les Deux Besoins of 1938, Beckett writes that Il y a des jours, surtout en Europe, o la route rflte mieux que le mirroir [There are some days, especially in Europe, where the road reflects better than the mirror] (Disjecta 55). The allusion is to Stendhals famous image from Le Rouge et le noir (1830) of the novel as a mirror strolling along a highway. But one could just as well argue that self-reflexive passages like the one from Mercier and Camier are themselves instances, and not particularly original ones, of Romantic irony. As Lilian Furst writes in Fictions of Romantic Irony (1984), Traditional irony resides in the space between the

narrative and the reader who is able to reconstruct the intended covert meaning. [. . . ] Romantic irony, on the other hand, is situated primarily in the space between the narrator and his narrative (229-30). Becketts indeterminate narrative structure in a work like Watt, with its willful and seemingly whimsical violation of the fictive illusion, is merely a further instance of Romantic irony in the vein, say, of Sternes Tristram Shandy (1761), the great predecessor of Romantic irony in English letters, or of Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde (1799). In his Critical Fragments (1797), Schlegel had already theorized that great art necessitates fragmentation, incomprehension, irony, a continuous self-parody (43, no. 108). The meta-fictional technique of Tristram Shandythe taunting insertion of blank spaces, dashes, asterisks, and question marks to subvert fictional conventionsis a consistent trope in Watt, a work that subverts itself at every turn: The song that Erskine sang, or rather intoned, was always the same. It was:

?
Perhaps if Watt had spoken to Erskine, Erskine would have spoken to Watt, in reply. But Watt was not so far gone as all that. (85) The ironic distancing of Schlegels romantisch novel Lucinde offers yet another example of a narrative technique that Beckett utilizes time and again. The novel is highly self-conscious, fragmentary, and discontinuous. The narrator even confesses that he is a blunderer who hopes that the reader is not too particular about the plausibility and consistency of an allegory and that he is ready to accept as much narrative clumsiness as one has to expect in the Confessions of a Blunderer (52). In the ironic Addenda to Watt, the narrator likewise admits that he too is a blunderer, that fatigue and disgust prevented him from incorporating the following precious and illuminating material (247) into the novel proper. This is the same disgust, one presumes, that prompted him to withhold other precious and illuminating material by inserting blank spaces and question marks where there would otherwise be dialogue and exposition. Goff permitted himself an expression, says the narrator at the beginning of the novel, that I shall not repeat (15). Later in the novel the narrator similarly declares that much might be written,

of great interest and significance, about Watts clothing (219), but the narrator never provides any details. The space between the narrator and the narrative continues to widen throughout the text so that the reader is not sure whom to trust, for the identification in Part IV of Sam as the narrator is perplexing and unconvincing. Toward the end of the novel, the editorial note (Hiatus in MS) (238) abruptly halts the narrative and reminds us that we are reading a fictional account of a fictional account. Becketts meta-fictional technique corresponds to Schlegels aphorism in his Athenaeum Fragments (1798), which were instrumental in laying the theoretical groundwork for what critics would retrospectively term Romantic irony, that poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry (195, no. 238). The narrative of Watt, therefore, is indeterminate in its uncompromising strategy of what Schlegel further calls self-mirroring (195, no. 238), and as John Francis Fetzer argues, the deliberate destruction of the illusion [in Romantic irony] is not the result of an arbitrary whim on the part of the writer, but rather an intrinsic symbol of the artists acknowledgement of the indissoluble dichotomy between aim and accomplishment, which forever precludes aesthetic fulfillment (25). Becketts ironic attempts to fail better in a text like Worstward Ho are perhaps further instances of Romantic irony, a rhetorical strategy of subversion that Beckett never quite abandoned. Becketts distaste for the mimetic, however, remained steadfast, yet his elision of objective re-presentation in favor of the expression of the inner world of feelings, intuitions, and the unconscious has its roots in the eighteenth century precursors to the Storm and Stress movement of the 1770s, that is, in the work of Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Hamann and Herder, who developed an impressionistic philosophy of feeling (thereby anticipating Walter Paters critical impressionism) that opposed the tyranny of reason, exercised a lasting influence upon later German Romantics like Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Novalis (1772-1801), Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), Karl Solger (17801819), and Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825), all of whom would in turn influence English Romanticism in their substitution of the merely objective representation of nature with the subjective expression of feeling and intuition. Similarly, rather than going outward toward the sublimity of nature, Beckett went inward toward the sublimity of psyche, but this may in the end be a difference in degree. His is a Romanticism, to be sure, of contraction, descent, evaporation,

but again, such a subjectivist program was in fact essential to virtually every strand of Romanticism from the eighteenth century onward, as a number of profoundly influential critics in the decades following the Second World War first acknowledged. Northrop Frys The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism, an essay that he originally published in Romanticism Reconsidered (1963), was instrumental in establishing the critical view that Romanticism largely involved an emphasis on the inner processes of the individual mind: We have found, then, that the metaphorical structure of Romantic poetry tends to move inside and downward instead of outside and upward, hence the creative world is deep within (16). The second essay in the collection, M.H. Abramss English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age, further highlights the subjectivist dimension of Romanticism, for Abrams argues that disillusionment with the realities of the French Revolution were transformed into an internal spiritual agon. Abrams greatly expanded this thesis in Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971), a study that sets out to examine the cognitive aspect of the millennial pattern of thinking: For Wordsworth and his contemporaries [. . .] the millennium didnt come. The millennial pattern of thinking, however, persisted, with this difference: the external means was replaced by an internal means for transforming the world. Such a substitution had a precedent early in the Christian era when, the assurance of an immediate Second Coming having been disappointed, Biblical exegetes postponed the literal millennium to an indefinite future and interpreted the prophesies of an early kingdom as metaphors for a present and entirely spiritual change in the true believer. [. . .] Romantic literature, however, differs from these theological precedents in that its recourse is from one secular means of renovating the world to another. To put the matter with the sharpness of drastic simplification: faith in an apocalypse by revelation had been replaced by faith in an apocalypse by revolution, and this now gave way to faith in an apocalypse by imagination or cognition. (334) For Frye and Abrams, the interiority of Romantic metaphoric structures was central, and Harold Bloom, particularly in The Internalization of Quest-Romance, an essay that he originally

published in The Yale Review in 1969 and then included a year later in his landmark collection entitled Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (1970), extends this line of argument: English Romanticism legitimately can be called [. . .] a revival of romance. More than a revival, it is an internalization of romance, particularly of the quest variety, an internalization made [. . .] in the humanizing hope that approaches apocalyptic intensity. The poet takes the patterns of quest-romance and transposes them into his own imaginative life (5). And Bloom is quick to note the high cost of this internalization: The high cost of Romantic internalization [. . .] shows itself in the arena of self-consciousness. The quest is to widen consciousness to an acute preoccupation with self. This shadow of imagination is solipsism (6). In the Biographia, Coleridge derides Wordsworths poetic method for its slavish dependence on mimesis, a dependence that consequently led Wordsworth to mistake the copresence of fancy with imagination for the operation of the latter singly (I, 194). Coleridge, on the other hand, stressed the primacy of pure imagination as a means of poetic expression. But even Wordsworth himself had signaled in Home at Grasmere a poetic journey that necessitates a potentially treacherous internal descent: For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink / Deep [. . .] Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man / My haunt, and the main region of my song (2842). Granted, Wordsworths intent was to descend deeper only to rise higher, but such a descent entailed the dangers of self-consciousness and solipsism, the dangers of what Wordsworth calls ill sights (74) and solitary anguish (77), dangers, indeed, that Coleridge himself explores in such haunted poems as Ne Plus Ultra, Fears in Solitude, Limbo, Frost at Midnight, and the Dejection ode. NothingNot Chaos, not / The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, / Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out / By help of dreams (35-8)is as potentially treacherous as the Mind of Man, writes Wordsworth in Home at Grasmere. Keats, who rejected Wordsworths egotistical sublime, was no stranger to the treacheries of the imagination. And Shelley refers with immense terror to the Spirit of Solitude, Blake the Spectre of selfconsciousness. This is not the pleasing melancholy of the eighteenth-century poet of sensibility, writes Abrams in Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric about the recurrent theme of dejection in Romantic poetry, but a profound sadness, sometimes bordering on the anguish or terror or despair, at the sense of loss, dereliction, isolation, or inner

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death, which is presented as inherent in the conditions of the speakers existence (225). Rimbauds explosion of the selfs habitation, which Beckett did embrace, is merely a continuation of the dark undercurrents, the intense and often self-conscious investigations into the protean nature of subjectivity, within what many would term mainstream Romanticism. The term Romanticism, therefore, becomes exceptionally difficult to define with any degree of linearity or uniformity, and indeed, if Becketts aesthetic sensibility is Romantic, as this dissertation claims, then one must presumably have a stable definition of the alternatives Modernist, say, or Postmodernistagainst which he is able to make such an assertion. But these terms are at least as slippery as Romantic, if not more so. No critic after Arthur O. Lovejoys essay On the Discrimination of Romanticisms, first published in PMLA as early as 1924, can use these terms without extreme caution and qualification. Lovejoys infamous thesis is that The word romantic has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign (232). He goes on to establish the rich ambiguity of the word (232) by providing a number of examples that demonstrate just how selfcontradictory the term was, even among artists who claimed it for themselves. Lovejoy, who is well aware that scholars will never abandon the word altogether, proposes a remedy: we should learn to use the word Romanticism in the plural. [. . .] What is needed is that any study of the subject should begin with a recognition of a prima-facie plurality of Romanticisms, of possibly quite distinct thought-complexes [. . .] (235). His conclusion points toward a new way of reading, one that works from an a-logical associative process of ambiguity, not from single chronologically determinate schools of thought: The categories which it has become customary to use in distinguishing and classifying movements in literature or philosophy and in describing the nature of the significant transitions which have taken place in taste and in opinion, are far too rough, crude, undiscriminatingand none of them so hopelessly so as the category Romantic. It is not any large complexes of ideas, such as that term has almost always been employed to designate, but rather certain simpler, diversely combinable, intellectual and emotional components of such complexes, that are the true elemental and dynamic factors in the history of thought and of art; and it

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is with the genesis, the vicissitudes, the manifold and often dramatic interactions of these, that it is the task of the historian of ideas in literature to become acquainted. (253) Marshall Brown begins his essay Romanticism and Enlightenment (1993) with Lovejoys premise as a foundation, thus arguing that the word Enlightenment is equally manifold: Properly speaking, this chapter should be entitled Romanticisms and Enlightenments, a multiplicity that leaves the student no hook except the little word and to hang a hat on (250). 1 Brown goes on to develop a more dialectical account than has hitherto been customary (31). Despite Ren Welleks Concept of Romanticism in Literary History (1949), an essay in which he critiqued Lovejoys thesis by claiming that he (Wellek) saw complete agreement among English, French, and German Romantic writers on all essential points (193), Jerome McGanns critique in Romantic Ideology (1983), a study that extended Lovejoys thesis into a radical pluralism, has had a more lasting impact upon contemporary attempts to deconstruct a Romantic ideology than Welleks reactionary identification of a unified Romantic discourse. In Beyond Romanticism (1992), just to name one example that McGanns critique of Romantic ideology clearly influenced, Stephen Copley and John Whale argue that the essays in their collection challenge past claims for Romantic transcendence and see the value of exploring the periods cultural productions outside the prevailingand often literaryterms of Romanticism.
1

The Storm and Stress movement of the 1770s, which critics generally consider the forerunner of the German Romantic tradition, has itself been the recipient of critical controversy in recent years. In Literature of the Sturm und Drang (2004), David Hill, much like Brown, identifies the difficulties inherent in any project that seeks to establish uniformity in literary time periods, even in one as seemingly straightforward as Enlightenment: Older literary histories tended to present the Sturm und Drang as a reaction against the Enlightenment, an outburst of irrationalism in an ordered, rationalist world. They used the term Enlightenment in a narrow sense to refer to the rationalist [. . .] traditions of culture betweenapproximately1720 and the 1770s, after which they saw the decline of these traditions in the Late Enlightenment (from the 1770s until the end of the century). More recent critics have drawn attention to the continuities between the Enlightenment and the Sturm und Drang and have seen the Sturm und Drang as a particularly radical set of attempts to achieve the emancipation of the self, which was, indeed, a central goal of the Enlightenment. [. . .] Many writers who were active within the Enlightenment in its narrower sense also wrote in what is called the rococo style, which adopted the anacreontic conventions of celebrating wine, women, and song. This style has been rather underresearched, because its frivolity and mild eroticism conflict with the high seriousness and the middle-class inwardness that have often been considered typical of eighteenth-century literature in Germany. In particular, it does not quite fit the traditional image of the Enlightenment [. . .] (5-6). The implications of this re-visionary strategy are wide-ranging, as various twentieth century movements like Dada and Surrealism, while on the surface rejecting the Enlightenment, may in fact be nothing more (or less) than further radical attempts to emancipate the self once and for all. Beckett, indeed, may be more dialectically engaged with the Enlightenment than one may have heretofore assumed.

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Significantly composed of both Romantic insiders and outsiders, this volume gives voice to a new generation of younger British critics. [. . .] Even the most flamboyant new voices in the recent debate continue to wrestle with a definition of the Romantic at the same time as claiming to have found a way out of its ideology (3-4). It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the terms Modernist and Postmodernist are no different in their pluralities of meaning, and Jean-Franois Lyotard has even argued against linearity in The Postmodern Condition (1984) by paradoxically claiming that In an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern (79). Perhaps the advent of post-structuralism and, more broadly, of postmodernism was necessary, as David Ayers suggests with a nod to Lyotard, to discern certain trends that were always already present in Romantic and Modernist texts; the poststructuralist account of textuality, Ayers suggests, seemed to make visible for the first time features of radical modernist texts which, once we had identified them, seemed to have been present all along, even if the proponents of literary modernism had never discussed their work in these terms (124). In his attempt to define postmodernism in The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (1987), Ihab Hassan notes that his project has proven more diverse than I originally expected and that defining such a term would require me to critique, even briefly, my own changing perception of that phenomenon we call postmodernism (xvii). Hassan does nevertheless see a pattern that many others have seen (xvi), though this pattern, as he sketches in his first chapter, has its roots in mannerism, romanticism, modernism, in a tradition of silence extendingthrough Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett, antipodal writersto the present (xii). Hassan identifies the terror that runs throughout Romantic poetry, in fact, as the genesis of a vast, revisionary will in the Western world that unsettles or resettles codes, canons, procedures, beliefs (xvi). Hassan looks to the emergence of Mannerism, the formal dissolution of the Renaissance style (14), as the first phase of a cultural movement toward antiform, and he argues that the Romantics went even further toward unsettling literary forms: The dark company of Romantic heroesFaust, Endymion, Alastor, Don Juan, Julien Sorel, Manfred, Axelwere forever threatening to break out from the mold

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that constrained them, in proud insurrection against their makers. The Self had erupted in literature, and so had the dream and the unconscious. Novalis and Nerval, Hoffmann and Poe, Kleist and Bchner, Coleridge and Keats carried language into the midnight terrain of the soul, or else they cultivated that notorious romantic irony that served to incorporate in every statement its own negative. At other times Romanticism denied itself the possibilities of harmony or resolution by the perversity of its own spirit. It explored sadism, demonism, cabalism, necrophilia, vampirism, and lycanthropy, reaching for a definition of man where no human definition could obtain. It is no wonder that Goethe throught Romanticism to be a form of disease, and Hugo identified it with the grotesque. I am aware, of course, that I am emphasizing the nocturnal impulse of the movement. But that was precisely the impulse from which a large part of modern literature derived its energy. (15) So the modernist and postmodernist text remains something of a bogey that seems always to elide the identifiable, an elision that postmodernism claims to have built into its own selfcanceling system. Diane Elam, in Romancing the Postmodern (1992), endeavors to go beyond definitions of Romanticism by identifying an atemporal, unstable Postmodernism that always differs from itself (6). Postmodernism, Elam argues, is not a perspectival view of history; it is the rethinking of history as an ironic coexistence of temporalities [. . .] (3). In her insightful essay Modernist Studies (1992), Marjorie Perloff similarly notes that the real question is why we continue to be haunted by the desire to set up anything so totalizing as a modernist model in the first place (169). The answer to this question, at least in part, may have something to do with the persistent remnants of Enlightenment paradigms. As we come to the end of the century, continues Perloff, it is the variety of modernisms that strikes us; indeed, the totalization often attributed to modernism belongs much less to the literature of modernism than to its theorists (170). Perloff also lists Hassans schema from The Dismemberment of Orpheus (1971) that charts the differences between modernism and postmodernism, but she concludes that so many of theses postmodern qualities [in Hassans right-hand column] were already present in the work of the early centurywork that, indeed, cannot be accommodated to

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Hassans left-hand column (170-1). Hassan, presumably, would be the first to admit this inconsistency. Similarly, Peter Nicholls, in his fine study, appropriately chose the title Modernisms (1995) to highlight the inherent multiplicity of the term: The beginnings of modernism, like its endings, are largely indeterminate, a matter of traces rather than of clearly defined historical moments. To make those traces visible [. . .] is to reconstitute a pre-history of the various modernisms without which their own exemplary works can hardly be understood. Indeed, much that has proved controversial about the literary forms of modernism has its origins in the writing of the nineteenth century, and especially in the work of the French poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stphane Mallarm. (1) This premise was already evident as early as 1957 when Frank Kermode first published his influential Romantic Image, a study that considers twentieth-century poetry, even antiRomantic poetry, a continuation of the Romantic emphasis on the poetic image: Very briefly, [. . .] the image is, in Wyndham Lewiss phrase, the primary pigment of poetry; and [. . .] the poet who uses it is by that very fact differentiated from other men, and seriously at odds with the society in which he has to live. Thoroughly Romantic they may be, but they are none the less fundamental to much twentieth-century thinking about poetry; and this remains true for critics and poets who are militantly anti-Romantic. (vii) Later, in 1963, Northrop Frye invoked Kermodes thesis from Romantic Image and presented a similar line of argument: The charge of subjectivity, brought against the Romantics by Arnold and often repeated later, assumes that objectivity is a higher attribute of poetry, but this is itself a Romantic conception, and came into English criticism with Coleridge. Anti-Romanticism, in short, has no resources for becoming anything more than a post-Romantic movement. The first phase of the reconsideration of Romanticism discussed by this group is to understand its continuity with modern literature, and this phase is now well developed in the work of Professor Frank Kermode and others. (The Drunken Boat 24)

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Later still, Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson blurred the lines between Romanticism and Modernism even further in The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature (1965). In their preface, they drew attention to the indeterminacy of the term modernism and argued that If we can postulate a modern tradition, we must add that it is a paradoxically untraditional tradition (vi-vii). A glance at the collections table of contents reveals the extent of this indeterminacy. Under the section The Interaction of Imagination and Literature, for instance, they included excerpts from Kant, Coleridge, Rilke, and Hans Arp. The rest of the sections are equally motley, thereby obscuring the lines to such an extent that one begins to wonder indeed where the Romantic tradition ends and the Modern tradition begins. And this was exactly their point. At its most audacious, therefore, this dissertation seeks to read Becketts relationship to Enlightenment, Romantic, Modernist, and Postmodernist aesthetics critically, dialectically, allowing the ambiguities and indeterminacies to speak for themselves. So many of the themes that Beckett develops are themes that poets and critics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Shelley, Keats, Lautrament, Huysmans, Stendhal, Proust, and Rimbaud developed from yet earlier philosophers like Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Herder, Schiller, and Schelling. One of the primary theses of this dissertation, then, is that Beckett merely pushes the logic of certain strains of Romanticism, latent though this logic often was, to its furthest possible conclusion, thus establishing the Enlightenemnt, Romantic, Modernist, and Postmodernist continuities. The fulfillment of a central classical ideal, indeed, is the note on which my final chapter ends. In the recent Romanticism and Postmodernism (1999), Edward Larrissy accepts these continuities tacitly and utilizes them as the underlying principle for his collection of essays: The title of this collection refers to two separable but closely related topics. One is a genetic thesis about the persistence of Romanticism in the present, both in thematic and stylistic tendencies: just as it has often been claimed that Modernism is essentially a remoulding of Romanticism, so this volume addresses the proposition that Postmodernism is also yet another mutation of the original stock. But the title also refers to the problem of interpreting the past: to the ineluctable capture of definitions of Romanticism in current interests and ideologies. It could

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thus be seen as referring specifically to the typically postmodern discovery of Postmodernism in Romanticism, or whatever is taken to be Romanticism. (1) Throughout this dissertation, I am careful to note, as consistently as possible, the exact strains of Romanticism that Beckett is adopting and adapting, never losing sight of their original historical context and cultural implications. The underlying assumption of this approach to Becketts texts is that we should approach literary time periods with skepticism, that we should ultimately consider such boundaries porous, tenebrous, liminal, indeterminatelike Becketts work itself. In The Ghosts of Modernity (1996), Jean-Michel Rabat, much like Elam and Perloff but with an explicit psychoanalytic approach, maps the dim contours of a haunted modernity revisited by spectrographic analysis, a modernity that is by definition never contemporaneous with itself, since it constantly projects, anticipates, and returns to mythical origins (3). Such a modernity, argues Rabat, resists any attempt to supersede it and any effort to declare it obsolete, even if these efforts come from a so-called postmodernity (3). His use of so-called is particularly instructive. With Lovejoys essay as an inspiration, then, let me at the outset define the parameters of Romanticism within the context of this dissertation, after which we may dialectically trace Becketts relationship to those definitions. The two elemental themes of this dissertation, as well as of Becketts aesthetics, are the gulf between subject and object and the related issue of imagination as reconciling power. I limit my use of the term Romantic, in other words, to denote any philosophical position, based on an equally dynamic view of mind and matter, that considers it the organic function of imagination to reconcilenot a posteriori but as cognitive experiencethe gulf between subject and object. This, then, is the organizing principle, even if the definition and import of a term as seemingly straightforward as imagination are themselves ambivalent and open to debate. The problem of the dichotomy between subject and object, nevertheless, is central to most, if not all, versions of Romanticism in eighteenth and nineteenth century thought. Schellings System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), a key text in the history of ideas, opens with this distinction and with the assumption of their reconciliation. Similarly, in his Philosophical Lectures, Coleridge maintains, For in this, in truth, did philosophy begin, in the

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distinction between the subject and the object (116). In his book What Coleridge Thought (1971), Owen Barfield argues that, in regards to the relationship between subject and object, those few who have really endeavored to master [Coleridges] philosophy are likely to have concluded that a grasp of this relation, as Coleridge saw it, is the pons asinorum of the whole endeavour (13). One of the explanations for Schellings and Coleridges shared preoccupation with outness is most certainly their shared absorption of the German idealist philosophers Kant, Fichte, and Hegel chief among them. As for Beckett, Knowlson writes that he has a profound interest in the mechanics of the relationship between subject and object (Frescoes 244). Beckett is not only as interested as Romantics like Schelling and Coleridge with the problem of what Watt describes as the emptiness between things (81), but the manner in which Beckett responds to this problem is strikingly related to Schellings and Coleridges own responses. In what is to my knowledge the only sustained examination of imagination in Becketts work, The Ideal Real: Becketts Fiction and Imagination (1994), Paul Davies seeks to establish Becketts art as the overflowing of the creative imagination (13), and Davies, who claims that Beckett is a true Romantic (34), goes on to supplement what a great many critical accounts of Beckett ignore, namely that it is on this ground, a sacred space within the magic circle of imagination, where Becketts narrators experience the many sudden gleams of inspired perception which steal in on their mechanistic, reason-ridden normal consciousness and transform it completely (19). S.E. Gontarski has likewise noted on more than one occasion the imaginations undeniable presence, even its efficaciousness, in Becketts fiction. In The Conjuring of Something out of Nothing: Samuel Becketts Closed Space Novels, for instance, Gontarski detects in those minimalist works the imaginations persistence even in the face of the death of imagination. [. . .] Even when the imagination is dead, a perverse consciousness struggles to imagine its death, which paradox seems to have launched Beckett on the enterprise of the late, closed space fiction (xvii). Critical consensus about the import of imagination, however, is far from uniform. One would be hard pressed to find two figures in Enlightenment, Romantic, Modernist, or Postmodernist thought who agree wholly on the subtle dynamics, or lack thereof, of imaginative activity. Hobbess definitions of fancy and imagination in Leviathan differ significantly from, say, Schillers, Tetens, Kants, and Fichtes. And Schelling

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and Coleridge, despite many similarities between them, differ fundamentally in their approach to reality, the former (as an absolute idealist) stressing the constitutive and regulative function of imagination, the latter the mediating function. Becketts complex relationship to these disparate approaches provides the friction for a dialectical examination of the concept in the chapters that follow. The organizing principle of this dissertation, however, requires further apology, particularly in the wake of such influential theorists as Paul de Man. The first and most important distinction between classical and romantic that would later influence a major strand of twentieth century Romantic criticism occurred in A.W. Schlegels Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature that he delivered in Vienna from 1808-09. This is the distinction that Coleridge absorbed and used in his own lectures on literature between 1812-13. In Schlegels first lecture, he argued that classical literature aims at the perfection of being: The whole of their art and poetry is the expression of a consciousness of this harmony of all their faculties. They invented the poetry of joy (24). Romantic (what he also calls modern) literature, on the other hand, remains torn between ideal and physical reality, thus expressing its work in a dialectics of becoming that hovers betwixt recollection and hope (27). Schlegel contrasts the poetry of perfection with the poetry of infinite longing, and indeed, words and phrases like melancholy, unattainable striving, desire, internal discord, and keen struggle figure into his examination of the romantic mode: The whole play [in nature] of vital motion hinges on harmony and contrast. Why, then, should not this phenomenon recur on a grander scale in the history of man? In this idea we have perhaps discovered the true key to the ancient and modern history of poetry and the fine arts. Those who adopted it, gave to the peculiar spirit of modern art, as contrasted with the antique or classical, the name of romantic. (21) The modern or romantic artist is the recipient, Schlegel argues, of the unbridgeable split between the finite world of nature and the infinite surge of the human spirit that the introduction of Christianity in modern Europe inaugurated. The Grecian ideal of perfection, of the balance of nature and spirit, was no longer possible for the modern artist, who gropes through a kind of

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forest of symbols that, as Schlegel describes it, anticipates Baudelaire and the whole of Symbolist aesthetics: The Grecian ideal of human nature was perfect unison and proportion between all the powers,a natural harmony. The moderns, on the contrary, have arrived at the consciousness of an internal discord which renders such an ideal impossible; and hence the endeavor of their poetry is to reconcile these two worlds between which we find ourselves divided, and to blend them indissolubly together. The impressions of the senses are to be hallowed, as it were, by a mysterious connexion with higher feelings; and the soul, on the other hand, embodies its forebodings, or indescribable intuitions of infinity, in types and symbols borrowed from the visible world. In Grecian art and poetry we find an original and unconscious unity of form and matter; in the modern, so far as it has remained true to its own spirit, we observe a keen struggle to unite the two, as being naturally in opposition to each other. The Grecian executed what it proposed in the utmost perfection; but the modern can only do justice to its endeavours after what is infinite by approximation, and, from a certain appearance of imperfection, is in greater danger of not being duly appreciated. (27) Schlegel is drawing on his brother Friedrich Schlegels Athenaeum Fragments (1798), particularly the most famous one in the collection, fragment 116: Other kinds of poetry [i.e., classical] are finished and are now capable of being fully analyzed. The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected (175). M.H. Abrams, perhaps the most influential critic of Romanticism in the post-WWII era, takes up and extends the argument of the brothers Schlegel, particularly in relation to what A.W. Schlegel identifies as the modern endeavor to reconcile inner discord and ideal harmony. In English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age, Abrams discusses the fusion of biblical and classical imagery in the transference of millennial hope in revolution from the history of mankind to the mind of the single individual, from militant external action to an imaginative

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act, for the marriage between the Lamb and the New Jerusalem has been converted into a marriage between subject and object, mind and nature, which creates a new world out of the old world of sense (59). For Abrams, the dialectic between subject and object and the hope of an imaginative synthesis lie at the center of the Romantic endeavor. Two years later, in his essay Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric, Abrams cites Coleridge to buttress his argument about the centrality of the theme of subject-object coalescence. Abrams contends that Romantics like Coleridge were reacting against Descartes and Lockes views of mind and matter: In the course of his survey of the dominant philosophy of the preceding age, it becomes clear that Coleridge found intolerable two of its main features, common both to philosophers in the school of Descartes and in the school of Locke. The first was its dualism, the absolute separation between mind and the material universe, which replaced a providential, vital, and companionable world by a world of particles in purposeless movement. The second was the method of reasoning underlying this dualism, that pervasive elementarism which takes as its starting point the irreducible element or part and conceives all wholes to be a combination of discrete parts, whether material atoms or mental ideas. (217) Ultimately, Abrams argues that the reintegration of the divided self (of head and heart) and the simultaneous healing of the breach between the ego and the alien other (of subject and object) was for Coleridge a profound emotional need which he translated into the grounds both of his theory of knowledge and his theory of art (220). This subjectivist view of Romanticism, the view of Frye and Abrams and Bloom, is the guiding paradigm for this dissertation, but this paradigm, it must also be noted, is not without its formidable detractors. In his extraordinarily influential essay The Rhetoric of Temporality (1983), Paul de Man challenges the view that Romanticism set itself the task, specifically through the use of symbol rather than allegory, of overcoming the split between subject and object. The full details of this debate fall outside the scope of this project, but a brief summary of the main lines of argument is necessary given that de Mans position represents a trend in Romantic scholarship that continues to dominate the contemporary academy. Essentially, de Man performs a

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deconstructionist reading of Coleridges distinction between symbol and allegory in The Statesmans Manual and accuses Romantic poets in general (as well as Abrams and Wasserman) of repressing the fundamental temporality or finiteness of the self and of the language that constitutes the self, both of which, because of their finiteness, can never achieve an identity with absolute or transcendent truth. The specific passage from The Statesmans Manual, which Abrams quotes in Structure and Style and de Man critiques in The Rhetoric of Temporality, is worth reproducing given the subtleties of the debate: Now an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other hand a Symbol [. . .] is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes [this is key] of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity of which it is the representative. (30) De Man argues, however, that allegory is preferable to the mystification of the symbol because allegory acknowledges its own abstraction, its own limitation, within the field of time: Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference. In so doing, it prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self. It is this painful knowledge that we perceive at the moments when early romantic literature finds its true voice. [. . .] We are led, in conclusion, to a historical scheme that differs entirely from the customary picture. The dialectical relationship between subject and object is no longer the central statement of romantic thought, but this dialectic is now located entirely in the temporal relationships that exist within a system of allegorical signs. It becomes a conflict between a conception of the self seen in its

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authentically temporal predicament and a defensive strategy that tries to hide from this negative self-knowledge. On the level of language the asserted superiority of the symbol over allegory, so frequent during the nineteenth century, is one of the forms taken by this tenacious self-mystification. (191) De Mans argument is incisive, but as Thomas McFarland has demonstrated in Involute and Symbol in the Romantic Imagination (1990), his convincing riposte to de Mans groundbreaking essay, de Mans entire argument is founded upon a false premise, for symbol has historically been a conception in the service of theological concerns, and only secondarily in the service of literary concerns (41). De Man betrays his bad faith, according to McFarland, by conflating symbol (as the Romantics understood it) with rhetorical and figural language: First, [. . .] symbol has an ontological, not a critical function. Symbol cannot be pressed into service as a tool of criticism: allegory is unraveled by criticism; symbol is not. [. . .] Secondly, the theological primacy of symbol dictates, against de Man, that symbol does not reside in the realm of metaphorical diction. [. . .] In general, it might be said that the unsatisfactoriness of de Mans analysis arises from a confusion of symbol with rhetoric and figural language. Though in its literary appearances symbol is compatible with the rhetorical figure of synecdoche, it stems from different roots and is an entity of a different kind. (423) Contra Mans contention, quoted above, that The dialectical relationship between subject and object is no longer the central statement of romantic thought, but this dialectic is now located entirely in the temporal relationships that exist within a system of allegorical signs, McFarland argues that the dialectic between subject and object is a real ontological concern, one that dominated philosophy since Kant: The dialectic of subject and object is intrinsic to human awareness and therefore cannot be restricted to Romantic thought; nevertheless, and unequivocally against de Man, it does figure in that thought powerfully and definitively. [. . .] Philosophically, an abstract dialectic of subject and object, arising from Kants first Critique, totally dominated German systematic thought, and it is intensely

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presented in the writings of Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel. But the dialectic of subject and object was ubiquitous. (46-7) This dialectic, rather than de Mans linguistic system of allegorical signs, forms the basis for my reading of Becketts own complex relationship to questions of post-Cartesian, post-Kantian dualisms within and without the self. As I go on to demonstrate, Beckett is consciously and systematically engaged with the dialectic between subject and object and, more to the point, with the rupture between the two. De Mans deconstructionist reading spawned a new generation of Romantic criticism in which poststructuralist critics interpreted, and continue to interpret, the basic strategy of Romantic poetry as one where the poets sought to evade recognition of their own temporality and of the temporality of the language that constitutes the self. One of the most important collections of essays on this subject is Arden Reeds Romanticism and Language (1984), a title that echoes Blooms classic Romanticism and Consciousness (1970), the implication being that consciousness and language are interchangeable and that deconstruction offers a way to interrogate the ideologies by which earlier critics had underwritten Romanticism while still allowing for, if not encouraging, a sustained reading of that literature (17). Such poststructuralist readings of Romanticism are compelling and, at times, illuminating, but this dissertation does not seek to graft a belated theoretical system, self-canceling though it may purport to be, onto the texts under scrutiny. That would be a very different project, one that may in the future yield further unexpected insights into Becketts own explorations of the interdependence of language and consciousness. In both the final chapter and the conclusion, however, I do suggest that Becketts conception of the ideal real, an ever-shifting and openended linguistic state of being, is essentially poststructuralist but that the poststructuralist emphasis on linguistic play and insolubility is itself a fundamentally Romantic notion that has its roots in what many would consider classic Romantic texts. This underlying argument, in fact, is one of the most important in the dissertation because it stresses the contrapuntal lines of continuity in a series of Romanticisms that are themselves discontinuous. Chapter One seeks to establish how Becketts early work, steeped in irony though much of it is, remains fundamentally indebted to a vocabulary and a trove of themes that he inherited

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from a wide array of philosophers and poets writing as early as the seventeenth century. As James Engell notes, There is not one important thinker on the imagination who did not owe a debt to several writers in the period from 1660 to 1760 (6). Beckett, by extension, is no exception. All the terms and arguments in Proust, for instance, are rooted in seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century dialogues about the nature and function of empiricism, imagination, and idealism. Beckett appropriates key neo-Romantic concepts in both Dante . . . Bruno . . Vico . Joyce and Proust like hieroglyphic, apprehension, and expression to buttress his own highly Romantic readings of Proust and Joyce, readings that ultimately reveal more about Becketts burgeoning aesthetics than about his subjects at hand. His first short story, Assumption, despite its ironic and subversive tone, is replete with a quasi-mystical language and a decadent sensibility that Gontarski, in From Unabandoned Works, identifies as convincing evidence of the German Romanticism [that] Beckett never quite purged from his art (xix). The storys struggle with the pain of Beauty, in fact, denotes Becketts early fascination with an aesthetic[s] of pain (Gontarski xix). This aesthetics, which partly carries through to Becketts later work, is indebted to the darkest strains of Romantic thought that would have appealed to Beckett as he read Prazs decadent study, The Romantic Agony. Perhaps most important, in these early works Beckett inaugurates his lifelong preoccupation with the gulf between subject and object and, though at this point he is far from reconciling this gulf in his own art, suggests that his path of reconciliation will have something to do with music, what he calls the catalytic element in the work of Proust (92). Chapter Two begins with T.E. Hulmes neo-classic emphasis on fancyinsofar as it represents a major strand of Modernist thought that culminated in the conservative theories of Irving Babbitt, Eliot, Pound, and the New Criticsand Becketts rejection of it as a means of artistic expression. Time and again, Beckett lauds the imaginationnot fancyas a proper conduit for art. This chapter also analyzes the inherent dangers of imagination and the threat of solipsism that run throughout quite a large number of Romanticisms, and throughout all Becketts work. So much of Becketts own struggle with solipsism is rooted in the darker, more sinister aspects of Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. In Murphy, Watt, and All Strange Away, Beckett critiques the notion that the mechanical-mathematical paradigm of explanation,

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which necessarily leads to materialism and/or dualism, is an accurate description of reality. Beckett, indeed, is quite closely aligned with an absolute idealist like Schelling, who stresses the dynamism of mind and matter rather than a static conception, say, of matter as inert extension. Materialism and dualism, for Beckett, are equally unsatisfactory. And fancy merely renders static and lifeless what is otherwise dynamic and alive, namely, the human imagination that the text of All Strange Away throttles with an unbalanced reliance upon the fixities of fancy. Chapter Three explores more specifically Becketts debt to Surrealism, to theories of imaginative autonomy, to intuitive reliance upon unconscious impulses, to Bergsons dure, to Rimbauds explosion of unified subjectivity, and to the integrity of incoherence that contains all these trends. Rather than Hulmes neo-classical emphasis on clear-cut images, Beckett is only interested in what he called the clair-obscur and liminal consciousness. His early poems For Future Reference, Malacoda, Enueg II, and Dortmunder reveal the extent to which he flirted with the Surrealist technique of auto-dictation (a technique that was not without precedent in eighteenth and nineteenth century thought), and although he was ultimately unable to embrace this theory of unconscious production without tempering it with the establishment of a shaping authorial presence, it remains central to his aesthetics of indeterminacy. His early translations of the Surrealists, particularly for the special Surrealist issue of This Quarter, influenced him greatly in this regard. Krapps Last Tape, furthermore, demonstrates the extent to which Bergsons neo-Romantic vitalist philosophy influenced Beckett, while Film and Ohio Impromptu indicate how the doppelganger motif, particularly as filtered through Schuberts Der Doppelgnger, informed Becketts imagination throughout his life. Furthermore, Imagination Dead Imagine, Enough, Lessness, Fizzles, Verbatim, The Voice, and Company move away from the solipsistic world of All Strange Away toward a recognition of the external world and, most significantly, to imaginative possibilities that are never absent in Becketts purgatorial world of movement, flux, vitality. The narrator of Company, in particular, demonstrates the interactive relationship, as Coleridge defined it, between the primary (passive) and secondary (active) aspects of the imagination to the dynamics of the creative act itself. The passive, autonomous aspect of imagination that Beckett explored in his early Surrealist-influenced poetry is here moderated with an active imagination (indeterminate though it is) that shapes the images

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into new wholes, something, not incidentally, that the narrator of All Strange Away was unable to accomplish with his reliance upon mere fancy. Chapter Four charts Becketts complex relationship to mystical theology. A theological language of distress, similar to John of the Crosss theology of privation, permeates Becketts writing, a language that he appropriated from his deep reading of key Christian texts and, what is more, from their translation into nineteenth and twentieth century Romantic aesthetics. His German Letter of 1937 and Three Novels, the former of which is particularly indebted to Fritz Mauthners Contributions towards a Critique of Language, are perhaps best understood in a mystical theological context, particularly in relation to W.R. Inges Christian Mysticism (1899), a study that Beckett read intently in the 1930s and from which he appropriated certain key concepts for his own aesthetics of erasure, stripping, detachment. The apophatic tradition, in conjunction with Becketts lifelong attempts to reconcile words and music, forms the basis for his desire to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All (Disjecta 172). A large portion of this chapter, moreover, focuses on Becketts relationship to the artistic milieu surrounding transition, a periodical that Eugene Jolas, a self-proclaimed neo-Romantic, published beginning in 1927. Beckett appeared in five of the pre-war issues, and as innumerable echoes in his work testify, the themes and vocabulary of transition were often strikingly related to Becketts own. The periodical was primarily concerned with healing the scission between the I and you (no. 5, 1927, 146) through the dynamic function of imagination, a theme that recurs in every pre-war issue. Beckett and Jolas certainly did not agree on everything (they ultimately diverged in their critical assessments of Joyce), but the extent to which the neoRomantic manifestoes of transition coincided with Becketts aesthetic sensibility is striking, and often surprising. Chapter Five begins with Becketts concept of nature as experience, particularly as outlined in his Trinity lectures, Proust, and Three Dialogues, and then goes on to analyze how Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho demonstrate, through an unparalleled imaginative and linguistic agility, the dynamism of the artist and his material, thereby effecting the ideal real: an extratemporal interplay or oscillation between subject and object, form and content, eye and mind, empiricism and imagination. This to and fro movement is crystallized theoretically in For

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Avigdor Arikha and neither, but in Ill Seen and Worstward Ho Beckett uses a hieroglyphic language to actualize and apprehend the ideal real on the subtle level of narrative itself, one of his most Romantic gestures. Beckett achieves the unachievable in these texts, and he does so with a language of becoming that is perfectly intelligible and perfectly inexplicable (Proust 92).

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CHAPTER ONE

THE HIEROGLYPHICS TRACED BY INSPIRED PERCEPTION: THE ROMANTIC FOUNDATION OF BECKETTS EARLY WORK

The spiritual is felt when the very letters and points of charactered language show like the hieroglyphics of beauty;the mysterious signs of an immortal free-masonry! Keats on Edmund Kean The only reality is provided by the hieroglyphics traced by inspired perception (identification of subject and object). Becketts Proust

Becketts interest in Romanticism arrived early and stayed late. Indeed, his first published story, Assumption, appeared in transition in 1929 when he was a mere twenty-three years old. Though critics and readers alike often ignore the majority of his early fiction and poetry, perhaps for good reason, Assumption is one of Becketts most overtly Romantic pieces, and it foreshadows almost all of the serious Romantic themes with which his art is concerned. Lawrence Harvey, in what remains, to this day, the single most erudite critical examination of Becketts early work, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (1970), summarizes these themes succinctly: In Assumption the relationship between love, mysticism, and artistic creation becomes clear. [. . .] It seems fairly certain that the tale told is of the making of an artist (287). Ruby Cohn, in her magisterial A Beckett Canon (2001), is less certain about her reading of the story and castigates Harvey, perhaps rightly, for his presumption: Lawrence Harvey confusingly pays tribute to its clarity (6). The story is most certainly difficult to paraphrase given its obscure references and convoluted syntax, and this may reflect Becketts early intoxication with Joyces revolution of the word; Beckett admitted to Charles Prentice in a letter dated 15 August 1931 that his story Sedendo et Quiescendo stinks of Joyce in spite of most

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earnest endeavors to endow it with my own odours (Reading Archive), and we could probably apply this candid observation to Assumption without much exaggeration. The events of the story, though the story is largely uneventful, seem to be the occasion for the narrator to discourse pedantically about aestheticsabout the difference between Beauty and Prettiness, for instancerather than for the sake of narration itself. The story opens with a paradox that will resurface time and again in Becketts writing, the imperative to give voice to artistic expression and the inability to do so: He could have shouted and could not (3). Becketts use of and instead of but deepens the creative paradox rather than producing an aesthetic inertia. The protagonist of the story struggles with a wild rebellious surge that aspired violently towards realization in sound (4), and he seems to seek for some kind of mystical absorption either to rise above or to descend beneath the mire of creative suffering, the crucible that results from the inability and the obligation to express. A mysterious Woman (5) enters the story and appears both threatening and as an object of desire, perhaps in the way that Celia will prove to be for Murphy. After the protagonist and she have sexual intercourse, he is released into a timeless parenthesis (6). This happens repeatedly: each night he died and was [. . .] engulfed [. . .] in infinite fulfillment (6-7). After sexual intercourse on one particular occasion, however, something changes, although the narrator is far from clearis in fact opaqueabout the specificity of the event. The woman (7), her generic name no longer capitalized, releases something larger in the protagonist, a great storm of sound (7), presumably the turmoil that he has been whispering down (3) since the beginning of the story. The release of this turmoil, for no apparent reason, literally kills him, as opposed to his previous little deaths by orgasm, and he is released once and for all into the breath of the forest and the throbbing cry of the sea (7). 2 The last line of the storyThey found her caressing his wild dead hair (7)is bizarre and inexplicable, and it is certainly in keeping with what Cohn identifies as the narrators romantic extravagance, which she further associates with certain well-known Shelleyan excesses; Cohn ends by suggesting that Beckett [. . .] indulges in such abstractions as Beauty, pain, Power, infinite fulfillment, and he wallows in a stale romanticism
2

Compare Becketts definition in Proust of attainment, what amounts to a Schopenhauerian ablation of desire: But what is attainment? The identification of the subject with the object of his desire. The subject has diedand perhaps many timeson the way (14).

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embedded in such words as wild, violent, dreaming, throbbing, twilight, hopeless, and the many repetitions of silence (6-7). Although Assumption is not a particularly good story by anyones standards, and certainly not Becketts, Cohns assessment of Becketts stale romanticism is too dismissive, for while Assumption is most certainly extravagant, the work of a young man with nothing to say and the itch to make, it remains pivotal in the history of Becketts development and, consequently, deserves careful attention for an understanding of the Romantic impulse that runs straight through to the apotheosis of his late, mature Romanticism. The narrators romantic extravagance in Assumption, as Cohn describes it, is certainly in keeping with the facts of Becketts life during the time of his writing the story. The late 1920s were a time of great experiment for Beckett, both intellectually and romantically, but he was struggling: While so much was happening to him intellectually, Becketts emotional life was in turmoil. He had spent the greater part of the summer of 1928 in the company of Peggy [Sinclair] who had initiated, then led, their sexual explorations. But he was confused about sex (Knowlson 108). Becketts sexual explorations and confusion certainly found their way into Assumption, and it is no surprise that S.E. Gontarski, in From Unabandoned Works: Samuel Becketts Short Prose, was able to translate the pain of Beauty in the story into an aesthetic[s] of pain, convincing evidence of the German Romanticism [that] Beckett never quite purged from his art (xix). Though Gontarski interprets Assumption as a working through (and finally against) the image of a Promethean artist, of course an all too familiar Romantic image, he does identify the protagonists romantic agony (xx), a logical connection given the fact that Beckett, shortly after publishing Assumption, was comprehensively to read Mario Prazs famous study of the erotic and decadent sensibility in Romantic literature, The Romantic Agony (1930). It is within this Romantic context that we can now turn to Becketts Assumption as the work that first deals with the ontological problems associated with the rupture between subject and object. The true momentum behind the story, to be sure, is not an aesthetics of pain for its own sake. Rather, the key Romantic themes that underlay the protagonists struggle for divinity (4) in Assumption are the same as they are in Becketts early critical writings: the moral and aesthetic implications of the dynamic reconciliation of subject and object through sympathy, the roots of which are in late eighteenth century thought;

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German idealist philosophy; the Romantic expressive theory of art; Hazlitts notion of gusto; Burkean conceptions of the Sublime; and the Coleridgean doctrine of fusion. Assumption, first and foremost, inaugurates Becketts lasting interest in mystical theology, an interest that was to resurface throughout his life and even in the deep spiritual overtones of the late Nacht und Trume. During the late 1920s and early 30s, Beckett immersed himself in Augustines Confessions and copied out dozens of passages from the text. In Dream of Fair to middling Women, 3 on which Beckett was working during the time of Assumption, he applies many of the terms from his reading of Augustine to the spiritual image of the woman whom Belacqua loves: She is, she exists in one and the same way, she is everyway like herself, in no way can she be injured or changed, she is not subject to time, she cannot at one time be other than at another (42). This characterization corresponds to one of Becketts entries in the Dream Notebook, which he ticked, from the Confessions: incorruptible, uninjurable & unchangeable (18). 4 As Knowlson identifies it, These are the precise words that St Augustine uses to define true Being (109). Assumption, predating Dream by only a couple of years, probes this mystical state in German, French, and English Romantic terms. Becketts fondness for Keatss poetry is also apparent. The Woman in the story, for instance, fits into a long line of Romantic seductresses; Lamia and La Belle Dame Sans Merci come immediately to mind as analogues. Keatss Lamia is Some demons mistress, or the demons self (I, 56), and in Assumption the Woman is even beyond demon-like: An irruption of demons would not have scattered his intentness so utterly (5-6). As Praz writes, the relationship between beauty and death, an all too familiar Decadent theme, recalls the central theme of an extraordinary number of Romantic texts: But there is no end to the examples which might be quoted from the Romantic and Decadent writers on the subject of this indissoluble union of the beautiful and the sad, on the supreme beauty of that beauty which is accursed. [. . .] In fact, to such an extent were Beauty and Death looked upon as sisters by the Romantics
The lack of capitalization for middling was Becketts own. See John Pillings A Companion to Dream of Fair to middling Women (10). 4 He uses this exact series of adjectives, this time ironically, to describe the thermolaters in Recent Irish Poetry: The thermolatersand they pullulate in Irelandadoring the stuff of song as incorruptible, uninjurable and unchangeable [. . .] (70).
3

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that they became fused into a sort of two-faced herm, filled with corruption and melancholy and fatal in its beautya beauty of which, the more bitter the taste, the more abundant the enjoyment. (31) Beckett expresses the relationship between beauty and death in More Pricks Than Kicks, for instance, through Belacquas masochistic eating habits. His meal, which he was at such pains to make ready (12), causes Belacqua an ecstasy of anguish: He would snap at it with closed eyes, he would gnash it into a pulp, he would vanquish it utterly with his fangs. Then the anguish of pungency, the pang of the spices, as each mouthful died, scorching his palate, bringing tears (13). Belacqua doesnt want a piece of cheese with merely a faint fragrance of corruption (14); he wants a good green stenching rotten lump of Gorgonzola cheese, alive, and by God he would have it (14). When he does finally eat his lunch, he experiences an orgasmic explosion of pain and delight: Also his teeth and jaws had been in heaven, splinters of vanquished toast spraying forth at each gnash. It was like eating glass. His mouth burned and ached with the exploit (17). 5 In Dream, Beckett similarly refers to Belacqua as being fused to his love in an ecstasy and an agony of mystical adhesion (70). Assumption recalls this lineage. In the story, Beckett establishes the intimate union, what Praz calls fusion, between Beauty and Death, thus recalling the central thematic concern of Keatss Lamia: Then Lamia breathd death breath; the sophists eye, Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly, Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging: she, as well As her weak hand could any meaning tell, Motiond him to be silent; vainly so, He lookd and lookd again a levelNo! A serpent! echoed he; no sooner said, Than with a frightful scream she vanished: And Lycius arms were empty of delight, As were his limbs of life, from that same night. (II, 299-308)
5

Cf. Keatss burst Joys grape against his palate fine (28) from his Ode on Melancholy.

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Similarly, when the Woman, with her jaws (6) and the extraordinary pallor of her lips (6), leaves in Assumption, the protagonist, feeling a profound sense of loss, is left alone and palely loitering: When at last she went away he felt that something had gone out from him, something he could not spare, but still less could grudge, something of the desire to live, something of the unreasonable tenacity with which he shrank from dissolution (6). Beckett echoes the above interplay between silence and sound in Lamia, with minor variations, in Assumption. The Decadent fusion of Beauty and Death begins most famously, of course, with what Praz, in a chapter title, calls The Shadow of the Divine Marquis, and it follows through Baudelaire, Huysmans, and even the Surrealists, 6 all of whom influenced Beckett, to varying degrees, throughout his life. In 1938 Jack Kahane asked Beckett to translate de Sades Les 120 jours de Sodome, and although he ultimately rejected the commission because he feared that it might hinder his own literary freedom (Knowlson 293), he clearly admired de Sades rigorous work for filling him, as he wrote to MacGreevy on 21 February 1938, with a kind of metaphysical ecstasy (TCD Archive). In an entry from the German Diary dated 23 February 1937, Beckett had written quite revealingly about his own attraction to the macabre: Curious that I can court a person that essentially I shudder away from. My need of the sick & evil (Reading Archive). Dream, indeed, refers explicitly to Justine and Juliette: That was the modus vivendi, poised between God and Devil, Justine and Juliette, at the dead point, in a tranquil living at the neutral point, a living dead to love-God and love-Devil, poised without love above the fact of the royal flux westering headlong (27). But this derives, as Becketts Dream Notebook clearly indicates (38), from his close reading of Praz. Beckett, too, had studied Baudelaires supremely decadent Fleurs du Mal at Trinity College Dublin, and during one of his fifty-minute lecture periods, which he abhorred, he stated that Correspondence provided the text for French Symbolism: Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire were the precursors of symbolism. Baudelaire provided the text in Correspondence. Verlaine the music. Rimbaud the dislocation of verse as affected by the Symbolists. Romanticism plus irony equals symbolism. (qtd. in Bair 123)
6

If we turn to the surrealists, writes Praz, we shall find that sadistic themes loom large in their works (194).

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It was specifically during this time, the late 1920s and early 30s, when Becketts interest in the relationship between subject and object, particularly their rupture, commences. He was well aware, by 1934, that there was a rupture of the lines of communication, as he wrote in his scathing critique of Recent Irish Poetry: The artist who is aware of this may state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects; he may state it as no-mans-land, Hellespont or vacuum, according as he happens to be feeling resentful, nostalgic or merely depressed. (70) It was his reading of various versions of Romanticism, Decadence and Symbolism chief among them, that provided Beckett with a vocabulary for a sustained engagement with the ontological problems inherent in the dichotomy between subject and object, and this vocabulary is crucial for an understanding not only of the Romantic foundation of Assumption, but also for the vast majority of Becketts later fiction. In his person copy of Swanns Way, for instance, the influence of the Symbolists on both Proust and Beckett is clear. He wrote Communion in the margin next to the following line: Mais, quand dun pass ancient rien ne subsiste, aprs la mort des tres, aprs la destruction des choses, seules, plus frles mais plus vivaces, plus immatrielles, plus persistantes, plus fidles, lodeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des mes, se rappeler, attendre, esprer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, porter sans flchir, sur leur gouttelette Presque impalpable, ledifice immense du souvenir (73). 7 Prousts allusion here to the Symbolist fusion of senses runs throughout the novel, and interestingly, Beckett notes Communion specifically in relation to lodeur et la saveur and mes, both of which he underlined darkly with a pencil in his personal copy. Beckett began working on Proust in 1930, and his critique of Baudelaire, and sympathy for Proust, is noteworthy within the context of the entire monograph. Proust, contends Beckett, understands the meaning of Baudelaires definition of reality as the adequate union of subject and object, and more clearly than ever the grotesque fallacy of a realistic art (76). Beckett, though, rejects what he calls the Baudelarian unity as post rem:
7

All references to Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu and to Becketts marginal notes are from Becketts personal copy, the Nouvelle revue franaise (Gallimard) edition, which the Reading Archive houses along with some of Becketts provisional notes toward the monograph.

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But Proust is too much of an affectivist to be satisfied by the intellectual symbolism of a Baudelaire, abstract and discursive. The Baudelarian unity is a unity post rem, a unity abstracted from plurality. His correspondence is determined by a concept, therefore strictly limited and exhausted by its own definition. Proust does not deal in concepts, he pursues the Idea, the concrete. [. . .] We are frequently reminded of this romantic strain in Proust. He is romantic in his substitution of affectivity for intelligence, in his opposition of his particular affective evidential state to all the subtleties of rational cross-reference, in his rejection of the Concept in favour of the Idea, in his scepticism before causality. (79-81) In this key passage, Beckett implicitly situates himself in one of many eighteenth-century dialogues about the relationship between subject and object, a dialogue that includes such thinkers as Shaftesbury, Leibniz, Addison, Mark Akenside, Hume, and Johnson. In the above quotation, in fact, Beckett invokes Leibnizs notion of LHarmonie Prtablie and la matire organique partout, which for Leibniz requires an imaginative power 8 that unites the soul with the external world and reflects divinity itself. Leibniz, whose religious faith sustained much of his thought and whose reading of Shaftesburys The Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody (1709) profoundly influenced his own ideas, avoided Spinozas pantheism, a position that was more of a static presence that did not urgently require an active union between self and other. Beckett was no doubt to refine his understanding of this possibility, particularly in relation to the creative act of imagination and the dynamism of the artist and his material, but suffice it to say that, as early as Assumption, he was consciously engaged with articulating the gulf between subject and object. His critique in Proust, therefore, of the Baudelarian unity as post rem, that is, a unity abstracted from plurality, echoes Leibnizs LHarmonie Prtablie as well as Schellings and Coleridges later dynamic theories, based in part on Leibniz, of what Coleridge

Burke refers to the creative power of the imaginative faculty (see below). Hazlitt likewise defines gusto as power or passion defining any object (79), and of course Coleridge, in the Biographia, makes an appeal to the imaginative power (see, for example, II, 16). In Assumption, Beckett specifically refers to the protagonists wild rebellious surge as the Power (4). Engell summarizes this tradition succinctly: In the 1770s and then through the Romantic period as a whole, the imagination was looked upon more and more as a power that not only worked in the mind but could really connect and even unite the self with the outside world (160).

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called Multity in Unity. The Beckett of Dream apparently derides such a notion, for the narrator ironically states, The only unity in this story is, please God, an involuntary unity (133), but the implication here may be more complex than an initial reading would suggest. Beckett rejects the possibility of an a posteriori unity, but his aesthetic struggle throughout his life was to find a new way to accommodate the mess, to give a shape and a significance to an otherwise chaotic universe. Beckett is certainly not intent on destroying form per se, quite the contrary, writes S.E. Gontarski, who further stresses that in the act of Becketts compositional process, form and content are separate problems, the conjunction of which may occur only in the pineal gland of art (The Intent 14-18). Becketts offhand statement in Dream, then, may actually point toward some kind of organic unity in nature after all, but his concept of nature is key here. Nature for Beckett is experiential; it is, in other words, non-logical (Proust 86) in that it occurs instinctively (83)involuntarily, as he writes in Dreambefore the reflecting mind distorts it into intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of cause and effect (86). Without this pre-established harmonyor, to invert Becketts critique of Baudelaire, without plurality abstracted from unitythe instinctive experience of nature as a unity of perceiver and perceived, what he calls in the Three Dialogues a composite of perceiver and perceived, not a datum, an experience (101-2), would be impossible. The disembodied nature of music, particularly as filtered through Schopenhauer and Proust, may have offered Beckett, even in his own writing that will later aspire toward the condition of music, the most direct way of accessing this nature-as-experience, particularly in the late work where Beckett erodes the trap of the mimetic by merging form and content so completely that they become indistinguishable. Becketts world, far from being a lifeless, mechanistic one, is always already dynamic, what he calls in Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce hieroglyphic and alive (28), rather than static like Spinozas lifeless system of an all-embracing is. 9 Molloy, after having left Lousses house, connects music with the cosmos and its movements in a passage that directly recalls Leibniz. I am going toward the sun, says Molloy, for I am no longer with Lousse, but out in the heart again of the pre-established harmony, which makes so sweet a music, which is so sweet a music,

On Spinoza, see Engell, pp. 25-6.

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for one who has an ear for music (67). Music, in the end, may be the only salvation afforded the Beckettian character. Giambattista Vicos New Science (1725) specifically influenced Becketts notion of poetry as hieroglyphic and alive, for Vico offered him an important (one might say convenient) structural device for his extraordinary interpretation, in Dante . . . Bruno, of Joyces Work in Progress. The notion of a pre-established harmony is essentially the fulcrum of Becketts argument, particularly as it relates to his theory of the Purgatories at the end of the essay. At the outset, Beckett locates Vicos ineluctable circular progression of Society [. . .] in Giordano Brunos treatment of identified contraries (20). For Bruno, God was the meeting of opposites, the coincidentia oppositorum, which Beckett goes on to summarize as follows: The principle (minimum) of one contrary takes its movement from the principle (maximum) of one another. [. . .] Maximal speed is a state of rest. The maximum of corruption and the minimum of generation are identical: in principle, corruption is generation. And all things are ultimately identified with God, the universal monad, Monad of monads. (21) Coleridge, also drawing on Bruno, develops this idea into a polar logic that Beckett himself is espousing in this essay, and this polar logic is crucial for the unfolding of Becketts aesthetics. Bruno anticipates many Romantics, Schelling and Coleridge for instance, and sets up what becomes for Beckett, even as early as Assumption, the purgatorial aspect of the work (29), as he writes in Dante . . . Bruno. The Leibnizian doctrine of pre-established harmony, like Brunos identified contraries, confronts the problems inherent in the Cartesian and Occasionalist descriptions of the relationship of body and mind by proposing that God has harmonized these once and for all time, so that their changes correspond or synchronize without either influencing the other, and without requiring Gods incessant intervention. Beckett writes in Dante . . . Bruno that the individual and the universal cannot be considered as distinct from each other (22). Schelling, too, regarded the philosophies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as responsible for a dualism that had assailed man ever since. He sought to return the subject and the object to their pre-established harmony through the mysterious power of Kraft, which for

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Schelling, as well as for late Beckett, necessitates a dynamic dialectic between the ideal and the real. Kants transcendental idealism, despite its attempt to solve the immanent crisis of the Enlightenment by escaping the snares of skepticism and naturalism that had haunted the Aufklrung, merely exacerbated the Cartesian split between the self and external reality. Kant had developed what amounted to what Hegel called a subjective idealism when Kant suggested that even our most secure knowledge reflects the nature of the human subject rather than the essence of the objects of knowledge themselves. Hegel, in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), contrasted absolute idealism with the subjective idealism of Kant: Objectivity of thought, in Kants sense, is again to a certain sense subjective. Thoughts, according to Kant, although universal and necessary categories, are only our thoughtsseparated by an impassable gulf from the thing, as it exists apart from our knowledge. But the true objectivity of thinking means that the thoughts, far from being merely ours, must at the same time be the real essence of the things, and of whatever is an object to us. (41, 86) Fichtes ethical idealism also recognized and sought to mend such Kantian dualisms. The primary agenda for Fichte in his Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge (1794), for instance, was to defeat Spinozas materialism and the neo-Humean skepticism, so Fichte conceived of an absolute ego, of which the ego and the non-ego, the subject and object of experience, are parts or aspects (I, 105-23). But Fichte ran into the same problem as Kant and was consequently vulnerable to criticism from the skeptics: if the absolute ego were not within the limits of experience, then how could we be sure of its existence? To solve this problem, Fichte postulated a philosophy of infinite striving (Strebensphilosophie), in which the absolute ego, which creates all nature, is not a reality but an idea, the never-ending goal for the striving of the finite ego. Although this idea caught on with the young Romantics like Hlderlin, Schelling, Hegel, Novalis, and Schlegel, they soon criticized it, among many reasons, because the concept of striving ultimately traps the ego inside the circle of its own consciousness so that it knows either itself or nothing. These young Romantics, therefore, developed their own response, their Naturphilosophie, to the problems of Kantian dualism.

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All of these ideas informed Becketts own imagination, either directly or indirectly, 10 as he wrote Dante . . . Bruno, particularly as he wrote the climactic final paragraph in which he discusses his own Strebensphilosophie that posits a cyclic dynamism of the intermediate [. . .] and the fusion of these primal essences into an assimilated medium for the exteriorization of thought (29). Becketts theory of the Purgatories is pure Vico, and pure Bruno through him, and it foregrounds the majority of Becketts fiction, Assumption included. Schopenhauer had written in The World As Will and Idea (1819), a work that is the foundation for much of Proust, that the escape from Will is possible only for the saintly person who can merge his self with the whole of the phenomenal world. Arts audience, as Schopenhauer put it, finds in the aesthetic experience the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing (I, iii, 38). Many critics, in the wake of Martin Esslins influential Theatre of the Absurd (1961), dismiss those genuine moments of transcendence in Becketts writing and focus entirely on the pensum, thus neglecting the theory of Purgatories that stands at the center of Becketts aesthetics and, consequently, damning Becketts characters to Hell or Paradise, both of which are the same because static and unrelieved. Time, for Beckett, is that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation (Proust 11). Moments of transcendence occur not when time is recovered but when it is obliterated. The only reality, as Beckett writes in Proust, is provided by the hieroglyphics traced by inspired perception (identification of subject and object) (84). One thinks, for instance, of Morans pure contemplation of the honey-bees dance (155-6); of Molloys moments of inspired perception when he forgets to be (Yes, says Molloy, there were times when I forgot to be [46]); of the unnamables unexpected merging with the cosmos (everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, Im all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me [443]); of that miraculous moment when the left hand gently rests on Bs head in Nacht und Trume; and of the old womans experience, amidst her coming and going, of the silence that

10

As his unpublished Whoroscope Notebook indicates, in the late 1920s, Beckett read and took extensive notes from Wilhelm Windelbands comprehensive A History of Philosophy (1893/1901), particularly with respect to the PreSocratics, Scholasticism, and Leibniz, but Windelband does conclude with a detailed study of German philosophy, from Kant to the Absolute Idealists, and with the philosophy of the nineteenth century. Becketts close reading of Windelband was a rich source for his early and subsequent writing.

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underlies All (The silence merges into music infinitely far and as unbroken as silence. Ceaseless celestial winds in unison [74]). Taken in the full context of his theory of the Purgatories, then, Becketts characters are not denied the miraculous precisely because such an uncompromising denial would merely correspond, as he explicitly writes at the end of Dante . . . Bruno, either to Hell or to Paradise, the former being the static lifelessness of unrelieved viciousness, the latter being the static lifelessness of unrelieved immaculation (33). Either way, argues Beckett, there is no room for movement, for human life as only it can be. For all things hang together, by the operation of the Holy Ghost, says Molloy (43), and he emphasizes his intuition of union later when he similarly says, It was from this cloud the above rain was falling. See how all things hang together (67). The Holy Ghost, the third Person of the Trinity, is movement and works to incorporate all things into the life of the coeternal Godhead. Earth, as Beckett knew subtly but surely, is the right place for love. One is reminded of Eliots Four Quartets, in which the detail of the pattern is movement, not culmination: There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. (128) Even Molloy, who feels as though he is suffering in infernal depths (87), is profoundly aware that, at the deepest level of his being, he has never been exiled from his true home: if it is true that regions gradually merge into one another [. . .] then I may well have left mine many times, thinking I was still within it. But I preferred to abide by my simple feeling and its voice that said, Molloy, your region is vast, you have never left it and you never shall (71). Becketts theory of the Purgatories is based on flux, vitality, and conjunction, three words that he uses strategically to convey his idea that Purgatory, unlike Hell and Paradise, is hieroglyphic and alive: Dantes [Purgatory] is conical and consequently implies culmination. Mr Joyces is spherical and excludes culmination. [. . .] Hell is the static lifelessness of unrelieved viciousness. Paradise the static lifelessness of unrelieved

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immaculation. Purgatory a flood of movement and vitality released by the conjunction of these two elements. There is a continuous purgatorial process at work, in the sense that the vicious circle of humanity is being achieved, and this achievement depends on the recurrent predomination of one of two broad qualities. No resistance, no eruption, and it is only in Hell and Paradise that there are no eruptions, that there can be none, need be none. On this earth that is Purgatory, Vice and Virtue [. . .] must in turn be purged down to spirits of rebelliousness. Then the dominant crust of the Vicious or Virtuous sets, resistance is provided, the explosion duly takes place and the machine proceeds. (33) His invocation of the spirits of rebelliousness recalls the Promethean spirit that runs throughout Romantic literature. 11 Empedocles held that the stolen fire, Prometheuss gift and burden to the world, made possible the dual capacity for joy and despair, and of course Blake and Shelley regarded the Promethean fire as the poets creative imagination. The Promethean spirit, indeed, is what provides the heat of the conflict in Assumption (4), the resistance for the eventual conjunction of opposites, as Beckett intimates in Dante . . . Bruno. In Shelleys agnostic Prometheus Unbound, Demogorgon, a mighty darkness (II, iv, 2) that is shapeless (II, iv, 5), is a dialectical process, A living Spirit (II, iv, 7), which represents the principle of change. And Shelleys Prometheus is himself paradoxical, as is apparent in his opening speech, and could well serve as a spokesman for the vast majority of Becketts genuinely questing characters who are pale for weariness: No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure (I, 24). It is essential to keep in mind that for Beckett, unqualified denial of release would represent a false movement of the spirit. That is exactly the kind of static view against which Beckett is arguing in his theory of the Purgatories. After all, humanity, writes Beckett, is being achieved, an achievement that can only occur through a dialectic of movement, of flux. Otherwise, humanity would be lifelessno ripe fruit would fall, and the boughs would hang always heavy in that
Beckett does occasionally draw on Shelleys Prometheus Unbound, but he preferred Goethes poem Prometheus, which he typed out verbatim in his notes during the mid-1930s (TCD MS: 10971/1, Folio 72r-v). Beckett identified with Goethes Prometheus, perhaps, as a figure who revolts against the gods, is subsequently punished, but will not stop cursing them. There is an echo to the Promethean spirit in Lessness: He will curse God again as in the blessed days face to the open sky the passing deluge (197). This figure clearly ignited Becketts imagination.
11

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perfect sky, unchanging. Blakes line Without Contraries is no progression from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) may also be an analogue here, for Becketts theory rests upon just such a marriage of opposite or discordant qualities. Becketts logic, like Blakes and Coleridges, is polar and remains so throughout his writing. Becketts theory of the Purgatories also recalls the dynamic process that captivated Bruno, F.H. Jacobi, and Coleridge. The dialectic of the real and the ideal, the natural and the transcendental, is reconciled in Coleridges notion of a third force, what he refers to as the tertium aliquid, a third element that is the dynamic synthesis of the dialectic. For Schelling, too, active and passive interplay in an unending dialectic. And Hazlitts notion of organic sensibility is also an analogue, for Hazlitt, much like Coleridge, had maintained that the process of imagination was living and vital. Keats adopted Hazlitts notion of gusto and often used it to characterize the vitality of language. In his review entitled On Edmund Kean As a Shakespearean Actor, which first appeared in The Champion on December 21, 1817, Keats praised Kean as a relict of romance and described his acting in general as full of gusto: Amid his numerous excellencies, the one which at this moment most weighs upon us, is the elegance, gracefulness, and music of elocution. A melodious passage in poetry is full of pleasures both sensual and spiritual. The spiritual is felt when the very letters and points of charactered language show like the hieroglyphics of beauty;the mysterious signs of an immortal free-masonry! [. . .] The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of Kean, and to one learned in Shakespearian hieroglyphics,learned in the spiritual portion of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual grandeur: his tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees, and left them honey-less. There is an indescribable gusto in his voice, by which we feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and the future, while speaking of the instant. (229-30) In Dante . . . Brunowhich certainly echoes Wordsworths famous definition of poetry as a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, Hazlitts gusto, Keatss emphasis on excess and intensity, and even Paters neo-Romantic critical impressionism in The Renaissance (1871)Beckett places Work in Progress alongside the hieroglyphic language of Shakespeare

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and Dickens, and he echoes Keatss review of Kean when he characterizes the Beauty of Work in Progress as being predicated on the vitality, what could almost be the gusto, of Joyces language: This writing that you find so obscure is a quintessential extraction of language and painting and gesture, with all the inevitable clarity of the old inarticulation. Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics. Here words [. . .] are alive (28). In his interpretation of Joyces Work in Progress, Beckett is overtly espousing, to a surprising degree, what M.H. Abrams, in his classic study The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), identifies as the expressive theory of art (22), which characterized the Romantic, as opposed to the Classical, poetic sensibility. Abrams writes that the shift in Romantic theory from a mimetic to an expressive theory was characteristic of the age: The change from imitation to expression, and from the mirror to the fountain, the lamp, and related analogues, was not an isolated phenomenon. It was an integral part of a corresponding change in popular epistemologythat is, in the concept of the role played by the mind in perception which was current among romantic poets and critics (57). The idea of mind as expressive rather than reflective goes back to Plotinus, whom Abrams cites as the begetter of much Romantic theory (59). Beckett, in fact, once again uses specifically Romantic terminology in his critique of the mimetic theory of art and aligns himself, instead, with the expressive theorythe artist, Beckett declares in Three Dialogues, has an obligation to express (103)that became a staple of Romantic theorists. The eleventh Revolution of the Word proclamation that Jolas published in the same issue of transition as Dante . . . Bruno is aligned with Becketts own theories regarding the poets expressive function: THE WRITER EXPRESSES. HE DOES NOT COMMUNICATE. Indeed, Beckett seems to have influenced Jolas himself in this regard. In Jolass Notes on Reality, which he published in transition no. 18, 1929, he wrote that Artistic creation is not the mirror of reality. It is reality itself (20). This most likely refers to Becketts claim in Dante . . . Bruno, which he had published in transition in the previous issue, 16-17, that in Joyces Work in Progress we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression [. . .] Here form is content, content is form. [. . .] He is not writing about something: he is writing something (248). This version differs slightly from the corrected version that appeared in transition, but Jolas most likely read the corrected version first since it technically appeared one month earlier in Our

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Exagmination. Regardless, Becketts essay, which Jolas clearly appreciated and from which he directly quoted in The Language of Night (1932), seems to have influenced Jolas in this regard. Using Vicos own philosophy for his own critical purposes, Beckett further argues that, just as Vico distinguishes between writing and direct expression [in which] form and content are one (25), Joyces Work in Progress presents not a mirror of reality but a direct expression of it. The corrected, earlier version reads as follows: On turning to the Work in Progress we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expressionpages and pages of it. [. . .] His writing is not about something; it is that something itself. [. . .] When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep. (See the end of Anna Livia.) When the sense is dancing, the words dance (26-7). Later, in 1938, Beckett once again patently rejected mimetic art, writing in Les Deux Besoins (Disjecta 55) that Il y a des jours, surtout en Europe, o la route rflte mieux que le mirroir [There are some days, especially in Europe, where the road reflects better than the mirror]. The allusion is to Stendhals famous image from Le Rouge et le noir of the novel as a mirror strolling along a highway. Beckett clearly privileged expressive modes of art. Again, Wordsworths definition of poetry, in his Preface of 1800, as spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings is in keeping with this shift in epistemology, and Coleridge, though he differed from Wordsworth on several key issues, ultimately conceived of the mind or perception as active rather than as a merely passive receiver of external stimuli. But most importantly, many Romantics placed an idealistic emphasis on the interaction and fusion of perception and external stimuli. For many Romantics, writes Abrams, poetry is an interaction, the joint effect of inner and outer, mind and object, passion and the perceptions of sense (51). In A Defense of Poetry (1820), Shelley writes that man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody (121). This interaction between inner and outer, subject and object, is tantamount, in Wordsworths terminology, to the great consummation that is not so much ever accomplished as it is ever about to be. In this sense, too, Beckett is very close to the absolute idealists. The Romantic response to the dualisms that Kant had exacerbated was their Naturphilosophie, an all-encompassing philosophical position that Schelling, Novalis, Schlegel, and Hegel developed. These Romantics

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considered the source of modern epistemological dualisms to reside in the Cartesian conception of matter as inert extension, which Beckett himself was later to parody in most of his fiction where characters from Murphy to Molloy essentially deconstruct the implications of materialism, that mind or life might be conceivable in spatial or mathematical terms. For the Naturphilosophen, as long as this concept of matter prevailed, there could only be two unsatisfactory options in the philosophy of mind: dualism or materialism. To escape this impasse, they conceived, vis--vis Leibniz, of matter as living force. 12 There is a single force, they claimed, of which the subjective and objective, the ideal and the real, are simply different expressions, in degree and not in kind, an idea that was profoundly to influence Coleridge. The subjective and ideal are the internalization of living force, while the objective and the real are the externalization of living force, for in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), Schelling declares that [M]ind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind (42). Absolute idealism is essentially an organic conception of nature, in which the Romantics saw all of nature as a living organism, an idea that Kant himself had already suggested, to a degree, in The Critique of Judgment (1790). In section 65 of The Critique, Kant defined an organism or natural purpose by two characteristics: the whole precedes its parts and the parts are mutually the cause and effect of one another. The latter characteristic, Kant argues, further implies that an organism is selfgenerating and self-organizing, having the cause of its motion within itself: Where a thing is a product of nature and yet, so regarded, has to be cognized as possible only as a physical end, it must, from its character as set out in the preceding section, stand to itself in the relation of cause and effect. [. . .] Now the first requisite of a thing, considered as a physical end, is that its parts, both as to their existence and form, are only possible by their relation to the whole. [. . .] But if a thing is a product of nature, and in this character is notwithstanding to contain intrinsically and in its inner possibility a relation to ends, in other words, is to be possible only as a physical end and independently of the causality of the conceptions of external rational agents, then this second requisite is involved,
In his Whoroscope Notebook (Reading Archive), Beckett wrote, unseen vicissitudes of matter. In the following chapter, I will examine more closely his dynamic theory of the artist, art, and nature, particularly as evidenced in Watt.
12

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namely, that the parts of the thing combine of themselves into the unity of a whole by being reciprocally cause and effect of their form. [. . .] Only under these conditions and upon these terms can such a product be an organized and selforganized being, and, as such, be called a physical end. (II, 19-22) The absolute idealists lauded this Kantian conception of an organism, but as Frederick Beiser writes in his essay The Enlightenment and Idealism, they differed greatly from Kant and Fichte in at least one important way: It is important to see that absolute idealism involves a profound break with what is called the subjective idealism of Kant and Fichte. It would be a serious mistake, as is often done, to interpret the absolute of absolute idealism in terms of some universal and impersonal ego or subject. The romantics decisively reject such a subjectivist interpretation of their absolute, which they insist transcends all finite determinations, such as the subjective and objective. Hence they persistently define the absolute in terms of the unity or indifference of the subjective and objective. (34) We will return to Becketts organic or holistic view of nature, the natura naturans, in relation to Watt, but presently Schopenhauer offers a bridge from the Naturphilosophen to Becketts own thesis in Proust. While writing Proust, Beckett was heavily under the sway of Schopenhauers The World As Will and Idea, a work that he read in the late 1920s and one that provided him with the philosophical foundation for Proust. Both Decadents and Symbolists drew on Schopenhauers philosophy, the first for its mordant pessimism, the second for its promise of a resurgent idealism (Nicholls 48). Beckett dwells somewhere in between these two perspectivesin what he calls the ideal real (Proust 75). The opening sentence of The World As Will and Idea, in fact, offered Symbolism a creed. The world, wrote Schopenhauer, is my representation [Vorstellung], thus providing a succinct and, indeed, neo-Kantian expression of his view that everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation (I, 3). Beckett was consistently preoccupied with questions of representation and frequently revisited Schopenhauer

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in this regard. As late as 1981, in the so-called Sottisier Notebook that contains various quotations and the beginnings of what was to become Company, he was including quotations from Schopenhauers Von Leiden Der Welt. He noted on 23 March 1981, for instance, Die welt ist meine Vorstellung and [Die welt ist] mein Wille (Reading Archive). In this the Symbolists found a buttress for their neo-platonic concept of art as the disinterested contemplation of pure forms, and Beckett, as he writes of Proust, is no less Romantic in his rejection of the Concept in favor of the Ideain his apprehension of reality, as he noted in the margin of his personal copy of Proust (123). Schopenhauer, like Beckett, was particularly insistent on the primacy of music as catalyst for the listeners becoming the Idea itself, the pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world (I, 186): We lose ourselves entirely in this [aesthetic] object [. . .]; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object [. . .] and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one. (I, 178) Similarly, the protagonist in Assumption seeks and finds in the image of the Woman what he calls uninterested detachment (3), and this translates in Dream as Belacquas Limbo purged of desire, in which he is disinterested (44). There is also an echo here of Leopardis poetry, which was formative on Becketts early aesthetic development. Beckett read Leopardi during his third year at Trinity College Dublin and associated him, along with Schopenhauer, with what he morbidly called an intellectual justification for unhappiness in a letter to Tom MacGreevy dated July, 1930 (TCD Archive). Beckett refers to Leopardis poetry in Proust, Dante . . . Bruno, Dream, and, appropriately, in the epigraph to How It Is (e fango il mondo, i.e., the world is mud). 13 His invocation of Leopardi in Proust illuminates not only that essay but also Assumption and Dream, for the context of his quotation of Leopardis poem A s stesso (To Himself) is love and friendship, particularly as they relate to an ablation of desire: And as before, wisdom consists in obliterating the faculty of suffering rather than in a vain attempt to reduce the stimuli that exasperate that faculty. Non che la speme, il desiderio . . . (63). The lines from A s stessoIn noi di cari inganni / Non che la speme, il desiderio
When Proust appeared in 1931, in fact, Beckett had included the Leopardian phrase e fango il mondo as an epigraph, but it inexplicably disappeared in the 1965 Calder reprint.
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spento (In us has been extinguished not only the hope, but the desire of dear illusions) further highlight the need for a cessation of desire in order to transcend the will-full demands of the self. Beckett had even worked with this idea in Eleutheria (the Greek word for freedom), a play (his first) that he wrote in January of 1947 as a relief from the fiction. Becketts central idea, writes Knowlson about Eleutheria, was to create a main character in Victor who renounces the world of will and deliberately cultivates a Schopenhauerian will-lessnss (364). Praz had identified this theme in the work of many Romantics, whom he divides in his chapter on La Belle Dame Sans Merci into exoticists and mystics: The [mystic] projects himself outside the visible world into a transcendental atmosphere where he unites himself with the Divinity; the [exoticist] transports himself in imagination outside the actualities of time and space [. . .] Every artist is, in a certain general and provisional sense, an exoticist, inasmuch as he projects himself in imagination outside the immediate present. (210-11) They are both, claims Praz, ascetic in a certain sense, and they both transfer the fulfillment of their desires to an ideal [. . .] world (211). Schopenhauers asceticism and renunciation inspired the Decadent imagination, and as the century moved towards its close, literature was dominated increasingly by tropes of withdrawal from the world and by extreme attempts to recover a lost spirituality in the realm of the aesthetic (Nicholls 48). Murphy, at least in part, is in this lineage, for he seeks to transcend the part of himself that he hates, the part that desires Celia. As for the Decadent sensibility, Huysmans novel A rebours (Against the Grain) of 1884 promoted an extreme aestheticism expressing itself in luxuriant symbolism, paradox, and perverse eroticism, as in the paintings of Gustave Moreau, which Huysmans admired and imitated. In Proust Beckett senses within Huysmans something of the retrogressive tendency he detects in Proust, but, Beckett writes, Huysmans loathed it in himself and repressed it while speaking bitterly of the ineluctable gangrene of Romanticism (80). The penultimate section of Proust illuminates the tensions in Assumption by returning to the ending of Prousts novel, and to the events of the matine, in terms of the mystical experience and then the implications of that experience applied to the shaping of the work of art. This will constitute, firstly, the victory over Time and, finally, the victory of Time, the two

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(salvation and damnation) being fused. Then follows the analysis of the Proustian experience: Becketts image of the vases in which experiences are suspended and the identification of the immediate with past experience. In a key passage, Beckett insists that the identification of immediate with past experience, the recurrence of past action or reaction in the present, amounts to a participation between the ideal and the real, imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and substance (74). To emphasize his stress on the confluence of imagination and empiricism, Beckett restates his point half a page later when he writes that involuntary memory is at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extra-temporal [italics mine] (75). His coalescence of imagination and empiricism, which is central to his formulation of the ideal real, recalls British empiricists such as Thomas Hobbes, William Law, and Walter Harte. Hobbess Leviathan (1651), for instance, had for the first time brought the discussion of empiricism within the sphere of the individuals mind, thereby laying the psychological groundwork for an empirical study of the imagination that was to take place over the next century through thinkers such as Locke, Hume, and Burke. In Part I of Leviathan, entitled On Man, Hobbes distinguished, rather confusedly and confusingly, between the Latin imaginatio and the Greek phantasia, arguing that the former is nothing but decaying sense (27), which he links to sense memory, while the latter is compounded, as when, from the sight of a man at one time and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a centaur (28). Coleridge later picks up on this theme but reverses them and distinguishes between them more sharply. Hobbes, like many theorists after Coleridge, ends up collapsing the two terms or seeing imagination as a subset of fancy (it is not entirely clear which): This decaying sense, when we would express the thing itselfI mean fancy itselfwe call imagination [. . .] (28). In his later fiction, most explicitly in All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine, Beckett himself enters into the long-established discussion of the differences between fancy and imagination, but at this stage, he is already using the terminology that the British empiricists inaugurated and the later Romantics honed. Becketts discussion of the confluence of empiricism and imagination goes far beyond Hobbes, though, and despite Becketts statement in Dante . . . Bruno that Vico is as far removed from the mystical as it is possible to imagine (20), Beckett is in fact much

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closer to Coleridge in his mystical inflection. For Beckett, after all, the Proustian experience communicates an extratemporal essence whereby the communicant is for the moment an extratemporal being: Time is not recovered, it is obliterated (75). This is exactly the aesthetic experience that the protagonist in Assumption strives to achieve, albeit in vain. As Beckett says of Proust right before his discussion of the matine, the protagonist will suffer a religious experience in the only intelligible sense of that epithet, at once an assumption and an annunciation [italics mine] (69). The protagonist in Assumption, though the story is subversive in its self-mockery, becomes pure knowing subject, achieves uninterested detachment (3), in his contemplation and absorption of this woman (6). Hazlitts On Gusto, a short essay that greatly influenced many later Romantics such as Keats, also illuminates the protagonists absorption into the Woman. By gusto, Hazlitt meant an excitement of the imagination in which the perceptive identification with the object is complete; the dividing line between subject and object is obliterated in an intense apprehension where pleasure and pain convey a total Inhalt and suchness of the thing. In a word, writes Hazlitt, gusto [. . .] is where the impression made on one sense excites by affinity those of another (80). Greek statues, argued Hazlitt in German idealist terms, are the apotheosis of the gusto in art: The gusto in the Greek statues is of a very singular kind. The sense of perfect form nearly occupies the whole mind, and hardly suffers it to dwell on any other feeling. It seems enough for them to be, without acting or suffering. Their forms are ideal, spiritual. Their beauty is power. By their beauty they are raised above the frailties of pain or passion; by their beauty they are deified. (81) Becketts claim in his review of Denis Devlins Intercessions, which first appeared in the highly Romantic periodical Transition (no. 27, 1938), that Art is the sun, moon and stars of the mind, the whole mind is strikingly similar to Hazlitts definition of gusto as the sense of perfect form in art that nearly occupies the whole mind, and it echoes both Schellings contention in Concerning the Plastic Arts that Art brings the whole man [. . .] to a knowledge of the highest, and in this rests the everlasting distinction and wonder of art (III, 629) and Coleridges related theory in the Biographia that the poetic reconciliation of opposites, described in ideal

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perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity (II, 16). In Dante . . . Bruno, Beckett uses apprehension, a word that is remarkably similar in its import to Hazlitts gusto and to J.G. von Herders Besonnenheit (total awareness of the whole undivided human soul), to denote the total impression of a thing, particularly of Becketts subject at hand, Joyces Work in Progress: Perhaps apprehension is the most satisfactory English word. [. . .] There is one point to make clear: the Beauty of Work in Progress is not presented in space alone, since its adequate apprehension depends as much on its visibility as on its audibility. There is a temporal as well as a spatial unity to be apprehended. (28) Beckett uses the word apprehension both in the marginal notes of his personal copy of Proust and in the monograph itself. The most immediate source for Becketts use of the word apprehension in the context of Work in Progress is Joyces use of it in the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen distinguishes in his pedantic conversation with Lynch two kinds of art: kinetic, which is pornographic or didactic because it evokes desire or loathing from the spectator; and esthetic, in which the mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing (471). Pressed by the rather prosaically-minded Lynch, Stephen further expounds his decidedly Idealist, and organicist, conception of art: Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty. [. . .] Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the aesthetic whole of which it is a part. (472-3) Stephen, whose esthetic theory is essentially applied Aquinas (476), then divulges the crux of his argument: Aquinas, said Stephen, says that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases. [. . .] This word [apprehension], though it is vague, is clear enough to keep away

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good and evil which excite desire and loathing. It means certainly a stasis and not a kinesis. [. . .] [T]he true and the beautiful are akin. [. . .] The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension. [. . .] [T]he most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you will find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur, integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance. (474-9) The reference to Aquinas is explicit, but there is also a reference to Keatss famous Ode on a Grecian Urn in which the speaker, in his apprehension of the a-temporal urn, that still unravishd bride of quietness, experiences the interdependence of beauty and truth: When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst, Beauty is truth, truth beauty,that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (233-4) Stephens aesthetic sensibility, a sensibility that eschews desire and loathing as well as good and evil, also echoes Hazlitts idea, quoted above, that the beauty of Greek statues is such that they are raised above the frailties of pain or passion. And Aquinass third quality of esthetic beauty, claritas, looks ahead to Herders Besonnenheit, for Stephen explains that claritas, or radiance as he defines it, yields the total impression of the thing-in-itself, its Inhalt or suchness: The radiance [. . .] is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has

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been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure [. . .] (480-1) These ideas probably informed Becketts distinction in Assumption between Beauty and Prettiness: Before no supreme manifestation of Beauty do we proceed comfortably up a staircase of sensation and sit down mildly on the topmost stair to digest our gratification: such is the pleasure or Prettiness. We are taken up bodily and pitched breathless on the peek of a sheer crag: which is the pain of Beauty. (4) The idea of being taken up bodily by the apprehension of Beauty may be the inspiration for the storys title, and the Romantic association in further strengthened in the idea of being pitched and breathless on the peek of a sheer crag, which may be an allusion to Caspar David Friedrichs Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c.1818). Beckett had immense admiration for Friedrichs brand of Romanticism, and, indeed, he spent an entire day in the Alte Akademie where Friedrichs paintings apprehended him to such a degree that he confessed in his German Diary in an entry dated 14 February 1937 that he had a Pleasant predilection for 2 tiny languid men in [Friedrichs] landscapes, as in the little moon landscape, that is the only kind of romantic still tolerable, the bmolis [minor key] (Reading Archive). 14 Friedrichs two paintings Man and Woman Observing the Moon (1824) and Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819) ended up serving as the source (his word) of the much later Waiting for Godot. 15 At any rate, all of these ideas were no doubt echoing inside the chambers of Becketts mind as he wrote about the total apprehension that Joyces Work in Progress effects. Hence, too, the protagonists own apprehension in Assumption, for it is when he apprehends the Woman that Time and subjectivity are obliterated:

In his personal copy of Proust, Beckett underlined the word bmolise in the section where Swanns conscious memory is entirely obliterated (as Beckett notes in the margin) by the sublimity of the sonata (I, 300). 15 Knowlson cites Beckett as saying to Ruby Cohn, as Beckett and Cohn were looking at Friedrichs Man and Woman Observing the Moon, This was the source of Waiting for Godot, you know, but Knowlson also suggests that Beckett may well have confused two paintings. For, at other times, he drew the attention of friends to Zwei Mnner betrachten den Mond (Two Men Contemplating the Moon) from 1819 [. . .] (378).

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[H]e was unconditioned by the Satanic dimensional Trinity, he was released, achieved, the blue flower, Vega, GOD. . . . After a timeless parenthesis he found himself alone in his room, spent with ecstasy [. . .] (6) This may constitute nothing more than a post-coital release with the Woman in which he is unconditioned, but when taken in the full context of certain related passages from Dream, the narrator is nevertheless rendered, as Beckett intimates in Proust, a-causal: When the subject is exempt from will the object is exempt from causality (Time and Space taken together). And this human vegetation is purified in the transcendental apperception 16 that can capture the model, the Idea, the Thing in itself (90). Becketts vocabulary and themes are essentially Romantic, even if they are, at this early stage, shadowed by irony and subversion. The quotation from Proust unites all the above traditions and recalls not only Schopenhauer and Novaliss blaue Blume that was for the Symbolists the emblem of impossible longing (as was the green carnation for the Decadents), but it also, and perhaps more interestingly, echoes the sublime conclusion of Coleridges Biographia: It is Night, sacred Night! The upraised Eye views only the starry Heaven which manifests itself alone: and the outward Beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the aweful depth, though Suns of other Worlds, only to preserve the Soul steady and collected in its pure Act of inward Adoration to the great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from Eternity to Eternity, whose choral Echo is the Universe. (II, 247-8) The connection to Coleridge is not arbitrary. The narrator of Assumption, in fact, twice uses the word fused, that most Coleridgean term, to characterize the ontology of the protagonists union of self and other. The first instance, which recalls Coleridges choral Echo, speaks of the fusion of self and cosmos: He felt its implacable caged resentment, its longing to be released in one splendid drunken scream and fused with the cosmic discord (4). The second instance, by far the more interesting of the two, establishes the protagonists timeless parenthesis specifically in terms of dispersion and fusion:
Leibniz held that while the imagination turns outward and inward, thus uniting inner and outer, it can also differentiate between them through profound self-consciousness, what he calls apperception (sappercevoir). For Leibniz, as for Beckett in this case, self-consciousness, in its broadest and most positive sense, is an imaginative act, but the shadow of Cartesianism looms large, as will be evident in Becketts later fiction.
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While the woman was contemplating the face that she had overlaid with death, she was swept aside by a great storm of sound, shaking the very house with its prolonged, triumphant vehemence, climbing in a dizzy, bubbling scale, until, dispersed, it fused into the breath of the forest and the throbbing cry of the sea [emphasis mine]. (7) Throughout the Biographia, Coleridge maintains that the imaginative faculty diffuses and fuses opposite or discordant qualities (II, 16), through what Beckett in Assumption calls that inexplicable bombshell perfection (4). Here is Coleridge on the poetic reconciliation of opposites: The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. (II, 16) Coleridge later uses similar language to describe the blending, fusing power of Imagination and Passion, the alien object to which it had been so abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an intimate (II, 150). Coleridge, among other sources, certainly had Akensides The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) in mind here: With fixed gaze He marks the rising phantoms. Now compares Their different forms; now blends them, now divides, Inlarges [sic] and extenuates by turns; Opposes, ranges in fantastic bands, And infinitely varies. (III, 390-5) In Dream, Belacquas poem for his darling blue flower (70) again uses the word fused to denote his mystical adhesion to her: At last I find in my confusd soul, Dark with the dark flame of the cypresses, The certitude that I cannot be whole,

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Consummate, finally achieved, unless I be consumed and fused in the white heat Of her sad finite essence, so that none Shall sever us who are at last complete Eternally, irrevocably one, One with the birdless, cloudless, colourless skies, One with the bright purity of the fire Of which we are and for which we must die A rapturous strange death and be entire, Like syzygetic stars, supernly bright, Conjoined in the One and in the Infinite! (70) There are parts of Belacquas poem that Beckett took directly from Assumption. Thus, writes the narrator, each night he died and was God, each night revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness, so that he hungered to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfillment (7). The light of eternity recalls the earlier merge with Vega, both in Assumption and in the poem from Dream quoted above, Vega being a star in the constellation Lyra, the brightest in the northern hemisphere. A syzygy, from the Greek syzygia (pair), was a term that early Gnostics used to indicate a pair of cosmological opposites, for they believed that the interaction of pairs, such as male and female, brought the universe into being. 17 Blakes doctrine of the contraries is clearly associated, too, and will become even more central as Becketts aesthetics develop. 18 Rimbauds Le Bateau Ivre (1871), a poem that Beckett translated in the early 1930s, represents a journey where subjectivity, the I, tosses about like a cork on the billows (95) and fuses with things outside itself: Thenceforward, fused in the poem, milk of stars, Of the sea, I coiled through deeps of cloudless green, Where, dimly, they come swaying down,
Cf. Murphy: But what made Murphy feel really confident was the sudden syzygy in Suks delineations of lunatic in paragraph two and custodian in paragraph seven (93). 18 Krapps Last Tape, for instance, is essentially Gnostic or Blakean. Even the bipartite structure of Molloy is reminiscent of such a cosmological vision.
17

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Rapt and sad, singly, the drowned [. . .] (95) The phrase milk of stars / Of the sea recalls Coleridges example in the Biographia of Fancy, which he demonstrates by quoting Thomas Otways line that arbitrarily yokes together disparate images into a new unity: Lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber (84). But Rimbaud fuses them in the poem so that they produce movementa swaying downof subjectivity itself. Ultimately, Rimbaud offered Beckett an alternative to the subjects stability and habitation in Baudelaires Correspondences. Rimbauds visionary perspective exploded this very stability and, through disorganizing all the senses, opened a space of indeterminacy where subject and object could flow and fuse into one another. During one of his lectures at Trinity College Dublin, indeed, a young Beckett, as one of his students stated in an interview many years later, praised the integrity of incoherence that writers like Dostoevski, Stendhal, Gide, and Rimbaud preserved in their writing (Burrows 14). The notion of a fusion between subject and object did not begin, of course, with Coleridge. Beckett, that is, fits into a long tradition of artists who were struggling to find some way, through the living work of art, to coalesce the two. The roots of this creative impulse stretch far back into the eighteenth century: in 1712, for instance, Joseph Addison wrote his Spectator series on the pleasures of the imagination, which was to influence Mark Akensides The Pleasures of Imagination, a poem that was in turn to influence Alexander Garard, Burke, Vico, Johann Nicolaus Tetens, Kant, Schelling, Hazlitt, and Coleridge himself. Akensides The Pleasures of Imagination employs many of the verbs that appear in Becketts own writing on the imaginative fusion of subject and object. The imagination blends, divides, and diffuses, for instance, in a process that mirrors Gods own eternally regenerative creation of the universe. In what will come to be central to Becketts own aesthetics, Akenside, who much in the tradition of Longinus acknowledged the importance of frenzy in the creative process, even uses the Miltonic image of the dark abyss to designate the plastic power that Pours out her births unknown (III, ii, 383-91). As we shall see in the second chapter, the imagination has its desert places, too. Burke and Hazlitt extended Akensides theory of the creative imagination and forged a connecting link between the mid and late eighteenth-century theories about the unitary function

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of sympathy. Edmund Burkes Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) begins with an empiricist assumption but ultimately looks to the imagination as the basis for the dynamic relationship between mind and nature: The mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they are received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order. This power is called Imagination; and to this belongs whatever is called wit, fancy, invention, and the like. (15-16) The foundation of Burkes conception of the sublime, however, is the emotion of terror, a notion that Longinus had suggested long ago. The a-causal, will-less, uninterested detachment that the protagonist of Assumption experiences, then, is also informed by Burkes Enquiry, which had appeared sixty-one years before Schopenhauers masterpiece, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Burke, in common with others during his time, uses the word detachment to designate the state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror. He goes on to argue that, in such a state of astonishment, the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. The sublime, then, hurries us on by an irresistible force, and the interior effects of the sublime are admiration, reverence, and respect (II, 1). Burke classifies a number of ideas that are sublime and then explains the workings of each of them: obscurity, power, privations, vastness, infinity, difficulty, and magnificence. There are inflections of the Burkean sublime throughout Becketts mature fiction, but Assumption opens the subject by tapping into the sublime in all its terrifying, arresting force. The creative urge that threatens to break through the protagonists dam is terrifying: So each evening, in contemplation and absorption of this woman, he lost a part of his essential animality: so that the water rose, terrifying him (6). He experiences fear (5) in the face of this overwhelming prospect. It is just this breakthrough, though, that produces his release, his detached absorption into, or fusion with, the breath of the forest and the throbbing cry of the sea (7), thus rendering him spent with ecstasy (6).

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In a related vein, one of the major themes of mid and late eighteenth-century thought was the moral and aesthetic implications of what Coleridge, in Religious Musings (1794), calls sacred sympathy (43): On a high philosophical plane, sympathy could be considered the cohesive force behind an organic view of the universe. Yet on a more manageable scale, sympathy also becomes that special power of the imagination which permits the self to escape its own confines, to identify with other people, to perceive things in a new way, and to develop an aesthetic appreciation of the world that coalesces both the subjective self and the objective other. (Engell 143-4) Some of the writers who plumbed the sacred depths of sympathy were Francis Hutcheson, James Arbuckle, Archibald Campbell, John Gilbert Cooper, and Hazlitt, whose Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) incorporated the sympathetic imagination as a central premise. In his Defense, Shelley himself, in relying on both Platonism and psychological empiricism, had even written that the imagination was a principle of synthesis by which individuals can conceive an identity with one another: The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively.; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. (131) In Dante and the Lobster, Beckett invokes the idea of sympathy in the figure of Belacqua, who is both sympathetic to another creature, which comes to symbolize all forms of life, and is the recipient of sympathy from another. The latter is fleeting and comical, but it fits into the storys overall theme of sympathy for, and union with, all fellow sufferers. Lawrence Harvey notes this theme as central to Becketts humanism: In Becketts humanistic scheme [. . .] compassion is central, compassion not for the dead, since hell has become a literary fiction, but for the living, who suffer in the earthly inferno of life (112). Writing specifically about Dante and the Lobster, Paul Davies similarly contends that at the beginning of Becketts writing career [. . .]

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compassion was the only emotion to escape the knives of his irony and deprecation. Davies goes on to acknowledge the pervasive emphasis on compassion in all Becketts subsequent work, often to the virtual exclusion of the other emotions (235). In the story, Belacqua, who is at odds with society not unlike Goethes young Werther, visits the grocer who, though himself no stranger to the pathetic, feels sympathy for the hapless young man: The grocer, without closing his eyes or taking them off the receding figure, blew his nose in the skirt of his apron. Being a warm-hearted human man he felt sympathy and pity for this queer customer who always looked ill and dejected. (15) Belacqua starts off in the story quite unsympathetic but ends with a deep sympathy for a doomed creature. In the beginning of the story, he hastily and impersonally prepares his meal on a piece of newspaper that bears the face of McCabe (11), that is, the assassin or Malahide murderer whose petition for clemency has been rejected. Belacqua, though, comes to feel deep sympathy for the lobster at the end of the story when he realizes that it is to be boiled alive, a scene that remains one of the most truly sympathetic in the entirety of Becketts writing: They assured me it was fresh said Belacqua. Suddenly he saw the creature move, this neuter creature. Definitely it changed its position. His hand flew to his mouth. Christ! he said its alive. His aunt looked at the lobster. It moved again. It made a faint nervous act of life on the oilcloth. They stood above it, looking down on it, exposed cruciform on the oilcloth. It shuddered again. Belacqua felt he would be sick. My God he whined its alive, whatll we do? [. . .] Well she said it is to be hoped so, indeed. All this time muttered Belacqua. Then, suddenly aware of her hideous equipment: What are you going to do? he cried. Boil the beast she said, what else? But its not dead protested Belacqua you cant boil it like that. She looked at him in astonishment. Had he taken leave of his senses?

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Have sense she said sharply, lobsters are always boiled alive. They must be. She caught up the lobster and laid it on its back. It trembled. They feel nothing she said. In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. It had survived the Frenchwomans cat and his witless clutch. Now it was going alive into scalding water. It had to. Take into the air my quiet breath. (21-2) Belacquas sympathy for the doomed lobster coalesces with his literary imagination and brings him outside of himself. The reference to Keatss Ode to a Nightingale solidifies the connection: Take into the air my quiet breath. The narrators subtle fusion of third and first person points of view, in other words, suggests Belacquas compassionate identification with a suffering creature outside himself. This is reminiscent of Leibnizs sens interne (inner sense), which exposes us completely to the outside world. This is the familiar theme of fusing subjective and objective, releasing the self from the pit of its own experience, opening it to other experiencing natures (Engell 284). Even if momentarily, subject and object become one. At this stage, Beckett is far from coalescing the ideal and the real on the subtle level of narrative itself, but he clearly inaugurates the theme of coalescence early in his career. The upshot of Becketts argument in Proust, which amounts to whether or not the subject is truly able to become one with the object, is not easy to discern. It is true that the monograph is at times pessimistic, and after Prentice had published it, Beckett himself seems to have been embarrassed. He wrote to MacGreevy, for instance, that he was dissatisfied with its opacity: I read the book through quickly and really wondered what I was talking about. It seemed like pale grey sandpaper, stab stab stab without any enchantment (TCD Archive). Prior to this letter, Beckett had written to Prentice in a letter dated 16 February 1931: I hope sometime to send you something more genuine and direct (Reading Archive). Throughout his reading of A la recherch du temps perdu, though, Beckett often indicated, with marginal notes, his belief in the possibility of transcendence through music, vis--vis Schopenhauer, as is evidenced in his reading of Swanns experience of the Vinteuil Sonata. Beckett noted, Purely musical impression, independent of memory. Compare with the experiences of un peu de temps letat

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pur: released for P. [Proust] by fortuitous encounter with certain object, at times when conscious memory is entirely obliterated (I, 300). In the passage where Swann hears the SonataMme cet amour pour une phrase musicale sembla un instant devoir amorcer chez Swann la possibilit dune sorte de rajeunissement (I, 302)Beckett noted in the margin his estimation of that experience: Salvation. Within the context of his other marginal notes, we have no reason to read this comment as an instance of irony. When Swann hears the sonata again in the next volumeune marge y tait reserve aucun objet extrieur et qui pourtant au lieu dtre purement individuelle comme celle de lamour, simposait Swann comme une ralit suprieure aux choses concrtes (II, 33)Beckett again noted, Salvation. Becketts emphasis on instrumental music as sacred, as he notes in the margin of his own copy (I, 301), is connected to the expressive theory of language that he had espoused in Dante . . . Bruno, and it alludes to the Frhromantiker, who pressed Herders ideas to the extreme. Writers like Novalis and Tieck, for instance, replaced painting with music as the art that had the greatest affinity with poetry, for whereas a picture is tied to mimesis, they argued, music, of all the arts, is liberated from the distortion of reflection: As a result music was the first of the arts to be generally regarded as non-mimetic in nature; and in the theory of German writers of the 1790s, music came to be the art most immediately expressive of spirit and emotion, constituting the very pulse and quiddity of passion made public (Abrams 50). For Beckett, just as for early Romantics, there can be no doubt that instrumental music was and continued to be the purest art, and the one most immediately expressive of spirit and emotion. Knowlson testifies to Becketts vehemence in the 1930s about many of the themes that were to resurface throughout his writing life: Although he was often silent, Becketts ideas on the inadequacy of language and the superiority of music as an art form, on the relation between the subject and the object in art and on the notion that rationalism was an aberration and naturalism in art was an impoverishment could flow with so much passion that he was embarrassed by his own fervour, even his wildness. He was aware of the difficulty of what he was groping to express, for himself as well as for others. (258)

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Becketts 1937 German Letter inaugurates this position and finds further articulation in Proust. In the German Letter, Beckett wondered if it were possible to produce a literature that, like instrumental music, was not bound by the veil of signifiers: [I]s literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralyzingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethovens seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? An answer is requested. (172) Likewise, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder had written in his Phantasien ber die Kunst (1799) that music shows us all the movements of our spirit, disembodied (58). Indeed, as for his favorite composer, Romantic or otherwise, Beckett, late in his life, reported to his cousin, John Beckett, I think that the opening of Schuberts String Quartet in A minor [. . .] is more nearly pure spirit than any other music (qtd. in Bryden 42). Becketts insistence in Proust that opera, because of its dependence on a libretto, is a hideous corruption of this most immaterial of all the arts (92) further entrenches his theory of music deep in the Frhromantiker emphasis on the disembodied nature of instrumental music, which Beckett was to push to its absolute limits in his own experiments with dissolving the image, with worsening words, and with probing more fully the structure and morphology of the fundamental sounds that are so characteristic of his late work. In the second section of Proust, which is essential for an understanding of Becketts pun on defunctus at the conclusion and the related issue of music as disembodied, he specifically and unambiguously indicts our dream of a Paradise with retention of personality, since our life is a succession of Paradises successively denied, and he insists that the only true Paradise is the Paradise that has been lost, and that death will cure many of the desire for immortality (26). This is key because it underscores Becketts point that the death of ego, i.e., will-less-ness or

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pure subjectivity, 19 is the precondition for Paradise, which, paradoxically, is Paradise that has been lost, a Paradise that is unknowable as such and so a not-Paradise: Timea condition of resurrection because an instrument of death (35). This is why he, along with Romantics such as Schopenhauer and Proust himself, lauds instrumental music as the catalytic element (92), for such music, Beckett insists, is perfectly intelligible and perfectly inexplicable (92). There is an echo here of Hlderlins notion of the unknowability of absolute Being, which for Hlderlin, particularly as he argued in Judgment and Being and Hyperion, was the unified ground that makes self-reflection a possibility. We will return in more detail to his idea of absolute Being in relation to Three Novels, but in the early 1930s, Beckett was already well aware that Being as such is and always remains perfectly intelligible and perfectly inexplicable. Beckett even goes so far as to argue in Proust that such moments of brief suspension (23) are in fact our first nature: Our first nature, therefore, correspondingly, as we shall see later, to a deeper instinct than the mere animal instinct of self-preservation, is laid bare during these periods of abandonment (22). The fusion of intelligibility and inexplicability, the elements of communion (36), is the entry into the mystical experience (93), but mysticism, as Beckett conceives it, is necessarily tied to the pensum. Necessarily, once again, because in Becketts theory of the Purgatories, Paradise and Hell, in and of themselves, are lifeless and static, but Purgatory, which entails pensum, is vital and, therefore, is a source of enchantment (23). It allows for periodic release, the peace that passeth understanding. Hell and Paradise, being unrelieved as Beckett writes at the end of Dante . . . Bruno, do not. Beckett acknowledges how his idea of enchantment has the air of a paradox (22), for it is only in the light of ignorance (23) that enchantment, what he also calls a period of abandonment (22), may occur. For all the apparent pessimism in the monograph, then, everything hinges on what Beckett is actually saying in the final long, convoluted sentence, a sentence that thematically wraps back around to the beginning of the essay in true Vicoian and Joycean fashion. Within the context of the entire monograph, and within the context of his theory of the Purgatories, Becketts use of the word that he borrowed from Schopenhauer, defunctus, which suggests
Beckett writes in Proust that the wisdom of all the ages, from Brahma to Leopardi, [is] the wisdom that consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire (18).
19

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completion, perfection, and death, serves to underscore the notion that there is no completion of the pensum per se but, rather, a perfection and death in those moments when, through the prayer of something as miraculous as the Vinteuil Sonata (93), the impure listener is no longer distorted and will-full: The old ego dies hard. Such as it was, a minister of dullness, it was also an agent of security. When it ceases to perform that second function, when it is opposed by a phenomenon that it cannot reduce to the condition of a comfortable and familiar concept, when, in a word, it betrays its trust as a screen to spare its victim the spectacle of reality, it disappears, and then the victim, now an ex-victim, for a moment free, is exposed to that reality [. . .] (21) Beckett relates the meaning of the word defunctus not only to the bodys literal death, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to the annihilation of subjectivity, which asserts to [Prousts] unbelief the permanence of personality [italics mine] (92). Again, this refers back to the second section where Beckett connects the retention of personality to our dream of a Paradise (26). Ultimately, it is only in the pensum that deathand lifemay occur. And this is why Beckett sets the invariable world and beauty of Vinteuil against the doomed body on earth as a pensum, for it is only through time that time is conquered. The meaning of the word defunctus, therefore, is precisely this: there could be no moments of beauty, prayer, and inspiration 20 without the fact of the bodys eventual permanent death and the metaphorical death of ego (pure knowing subject, in Schopenhauers terms): The Proustian world is expressed metaphorically by the artisan because it is apprehended metaphorically by the artist (88). At such moments, which are not moments after all because Time is obliterated, there occurs an identification of subject and object (84), but this hieroglyphic traced by inspired perception cannot last: So now in the exhaltation of his brief eternity, having emerged from the darkness of time and habit and passion and intelligence, he understands the necessity of art (756). Novaliss eleventh aphorism in his Miscellaneous Writings (1797) is germane in this context:

It is certainly no accident that Beckett chose to use these words in the conclusion of his monograph. Indeed, Beckett writes the word revelation throughout his copy of A la recherch du temps perdu, and in the margins of Du ct de chez Swann alone, he writes that word no fewer than five times.

20

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Death is an overcoming of the self, and like all self-conquest creates a new, and lighter, existence (85). Despite the youthful extravagance that does characterize Assumption, More Pricks, Dante . . . Bruno, and Proust, these works demonstrate what became for Beckett a lifelong Romantic preoccupation with the relationship between a perceiving subject and an object perceived. Essentially, he writes about little else. This relationship, though, is part of a conversation that goes as far back as the Enlightenment, the period that created the idea of the imagination (Engell 3). As his style developed and he found his distinctive style, free from the constraints of Joyces voices, Beckett merely refined his understanding of the imagination and explored even more profoundly its function for modern man in search of a soul. In the next chapter, I shall examine Becketts decidedly Romantic understanding of Fancy and Imagination as evidenced in such works as Watt, Murphy, and All Strange Away. It is in these works that Beckett, in line with many Romantic precursors, probes the mechanical nature of Fancy and the dynamic nature of Imagination in an attempt to bridge the subject-object dichotomy with the reconciling power of the latter.

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CHAPTER TWO FANCY MURMURED DEAD: MECHANICAL FANCY AND THE DANGERS OF IMAGINATION

[F]or the philosophy of mechanism, which, in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect, strikes Death, and cheats itself by mistaking clear images for distinct concepts [. . .] Letter from Coleridge to Wordsworth, 1815 Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Realitys dark dream! I turn from you, and listen to the wind, Which long has raved unnoticed. Coleridges Dejection: An Ode [. . .] in sleep demons not yet imagined all dark unappeasable turmoil [. . .] Becketts All Strange Away

T.E. Hulme was an important force in the history of the neo-classical strain of modernist aesthetics, and he influenced the formation and development of Imagism by extolling clarity and precision in poetic diction. Hulme, who early in his career had revered what he called Henri Bergsons new philosophy, exerted a decisive influence on two figures who themselves became major forces in the history of modernism, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, and in addition to being a close friend of Gaudier-Brzeska, he championed the visual art of Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg. Most memorable, though, was Hulmes influence on the young, impressionable T.S. Eliot. It was on the strength of Hulmes essays of the early twentiethcentury that Eliot was later to hail him as the initiator of a new intellectual attitude, distinct from the democratic and liberal ideals of the late nineteenth century, and it was Hulmes early essays that Eliot frequently cited in his own criticism of the 1920s. Hulmes essay Romanticism and Classicism (1909 or 1914) 21 is an interesting modernist document in which he rails against Romanticism and prophesies that a classical
Although critics often date this essay at 1909 or 1914, Karen Csengeri, as editor of Hulmes collected writings, argues that internal evidence strongly suggests a date of late 1911 or early 1912 (59).
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revival is coming (59). The essay is polemical and, as such, is uncompromising in its emphasis on fancy. I want to maintain, begins Hulme, that after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival, and that the peculiar weapon of this new classical spirit, when it works in verse, will be fancy. And in this I imply the superiority of fancy (59). Hulme then cites two leaders of the French reactionary political movement LAction franaise, Charles Maurras and Pierre Lassarre, as apt models because they regard romanticism as an awful disease from which France had just recovered (60). Hulme castigates Rousseau in particular for claiming that man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him. Remove all these and the infinite possibilities of man would have a chance (61). Against this claim, Hulme posits his idea, which was greatly to influence Eliot, of Original Sin, on which he expands in his Preface to Sorels Reflections on Violence (1914) where he claims that we may define Romantics, then, as all who do not believe in the Fall of Man (250). In his preface, Hulme goes on to write that Romanticism confuses both human and divine things by not clearly separating them. [. . .] [Romanticism] blurs the clear outlines of human relations whether in political thought or in the treatment of sex in literatureby introducing into them the Perfection that properly belongs only to the non-human (250). The same recognition of the limitation of the individual produced in other modernist writers, like Pound and Eliot, an insistence on strict, authoritarian regulation of the individual, the germ of fascist tendencies for which the Men of 1914 became notorious. Hulme speaks negatively of liberty and revolution, and he cites the French Revolution as evidence that without restraints on individuals, what emerges is their destructiveness and greed. Hulme, like Eliot, lauded religion for its power to control human depravity through traditional order. Humanism, claimed Hulme, thus really contains the germs of the disease that was bound to come to its full evil development in Romanticism (250). In Romanticism and Classicism, he similarly argues for a resurgence of a type of poem that is all dry and hard, a properly classical poem (66), one that recognizes that man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant (61). As opposed to the Romanticwho messes up, falsifies, and blurs the clear outlines of human experience in what amounts to split religion (62)Hulme champions what he calls the exact opposite view in which poetry isnt damp

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(66). He summarizes his view of classicism by claiming that even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas (62). As a point of contrast, one is reminded of Keatss poetry, which is often concerned with mans frequent inability to fade away into the forest dim. At the conclusion of the Ode to a Nightingale, indeed, the word forlorn is like a bell that wrenches the speaker out of his blissful reverie and reminds him that he is, as ever, solitary and, as it were, mixed up with earth. Nevertheless, Hulme simply has no patience for Romantic poetry, which he lumps under a single broad category of sloppiness: I object even to the best of the romantics. [. . .] I object to the sloppiness which doesnt consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other (66). While most people believe that poetry must lead them to a beyond of some kind (66), Hulme believes in a poetry that is accurate, precise and a definite description. [. . .] The [classical] artist I take to be the man who simply cant bear the idea of [. . .] approximately. He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. [. . .] I can now get at that positive fundamental quality of verse which constitutes excellence, which has nothing to do with infinity, with mystery or with emotions (68). Pounds Imagist doctrines, which he articulated in the March 1913 issue of Poetry, were clearly indebted to Hulmes own theories of exactness, for Pound had stressed the importance of direct treatment of the thing and of not using any word that did not contribute to the presentation. Also, Eliots impersonal theory of poetry in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) comes directly out of Hulmes dry, hard, emotionless theory of classical poetry. Ultimately, Hulme lauds fancy as the vehicle for the impending classical verse because, as he suggests, it is fancy, and not imagination, that can render language precise (71). And it is for this reason that, in his essay Modern Art and Its Philosophy (1914), Hulme defended geometrical (as opposed to vital) art: the re-emergence of geometrical art may be the precursor of the re-emergence of the corresponding attitude towards the world, and so, of the break up of the Renaissance humanistic attitude (269).

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One might initially be tempted to assume that Beckett, given his professed distaste for excess and his own particular kind of exactness and minimalism, would be sympathetic to Hulmes early theories that had so profoundly influenced Pound and Eliot. Beckett, after all, had in 1934, when he was 27 years old, written a similarly scathing attack in Recent Irish Poetry of the Irish Romantic poets, the antiquarians (70) or twilighters whose jewels of language render their poetry theme-less: a flight from self-awareness (71). As opposed to these Revivalists, Beckett praises Jack Yeats and Eliot (he specifically cites The Waste Land) because they were aware of the breakdown of the object, whether current, historical, mythical or spook. The thermolaters, on the other hand, adore the stuff of song as incorruptible, uninjerable and unchangeable (70). Four months later, in the December issue of The Bookman, Beckett wrote a review of Pounds Make It New entitled Ex Cathezra in which Beckett lauds Pounds penetrating account of the deterioration of Provenal poetry after the crusade of 1298 (77), his many insights into the French poets, and his discussion of Cavalcanti, a most terrific organon (78). Beckett summarizes his review in a characteristically terse manner: In sum, a galvanic belt of essays, education by provocation, Spartan maieutics (79). But Becketts distaste, say, for Wagner and Mahler and his castigation of the twilighters should not in any way be confused with Hulmes neo-classicism, a position that was entirely alien to Becketts aesthetic sensibility. As early as 1932, Beckett had in the Poetry is Vertical manifesto, a document that he signed with eight other artists, explicitly espoused his distaste for classicism. This manifesto, a supremely Romantic document that first appeared in the momentous 21st issue of transition, is self-consciously Surrealist and idealist in tone, and it declared their artistic direction as being against the renewal of the classical ideal, because it inevitably leads to a decorative reactionary conformity, to a factitious sense of harmony, to the sterilization of the living imagination. The extent to which Beckett accepted the doctrines of the manifesto is not entirely clear, but he was for many years associated with a self-proclaimed neo-Romantic periodical that unambiguously privileged the living imagination far above the classical ideal. This youthful declaration, though, extends well into Becketts mature periods. In his famous interview with Israel Shenker twenty-four years after the Poetry is Vertical manifesto, for instance, Beckett once again declared that the classical (what he called Apollonian)

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approach to art quite simply did not apply to the modern dilemma, and certainly not to Becketts. I think anyone nowadays who pays the slightest attention to his own experience, responded Beckett, finds it the experience of a non-knower, a non-can-er. The other type of artistthe Apollonianis absolutely foreign to me (qtd. in Graver and Federman 148-9). Earlier in the interview, Beckett had dissociated himself from Joyces omniscient and omnipotent status as an artist. Im working with impotence, ignorance, Beckett famously declared (148). This would also explain Becketts sympathy, as he had stated in an early lecture at Trinity, for Rimbauds intuition regarding the necessity of artistic disorder, for as he had written in his review (in transition number 27, 1938) of Denis Devlins Intercessions that The time is perhaps not altogether green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear [. . .] (94). Hulmes insistence in Romanticism and Classicism, therefore, that man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant and that there are clear outlines of human experience which the classical artist should render with accuracy and precision, without sloppiness, was antithetical to the experience of Beckett and his characters, who, as he told Shenker, seem to be falling to bits. [. . .] At the end of my work theres nothing but dust (148). As opposed to Hulmes clear outlines of human experience, Beckett preferred what he referred to in his Trinity lectures as the clairobscur, a French term for the Italian chiaroscuro, literally light-dark, that characterizes the artistic device, which Rembrandt and Caravaggio mastered and Beckett inherited largely through Dostoevski, of boldly contrasting light and shade in order to strengthen an illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface and, most importantly, of defining an object not with a contouring line but by the contrast between the colors of the object and its background. This blurring of sharp contours corresponds to the liminality that Beckett stressed in his lectures, and it would account for his insistence that the integrity of the real, which is tantamount to what Beckett also called the integrity of incoherence since (as he said) the psychologically real cant be stated (Burrows 15), was preserved in writers like Dostoevski, Stendhal, and Gide. In his 1938 essay Les Deux Besoins, in fact, he deliberately writes a series of disjunctive paragraphs, which seem themselves to be falling to bits, expressly to demonstrate the necessity of an irrational art (Disjecta 55-7). Clarity and simplicity were quite simply of no use to Beckett.

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Becketts characters, who seem to be falling to bits, have their roots in Strindbergs drama. In the preface to A Dream Play (1901), for instance, Strindberg had articulated his own Dionysian approach by writing that the imagination spins and weaves new patterns in which the characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, assemble (555). The Romantic language is unmistakable, for these are many of the same verbs that Akenside and Coleridge employ in their articulation of the pleasures of the imagination. All Strange Away, indeed, is a demonic work, a kind of black mass, that illustrates exactly how fancy strikes Death when it is not fused with the dynamic function of Coleridges secondary imagination. Becketts interview with Tom Driver in the summer of 1961 (Beckett was by this time fifty-five years old) further supports his lack of sympathy for the classical approach to art, and certainly to modern art, since it cannot admit what he calls the mess, the chaos, or, in a phrase that recalls Murphy, this buzzing confusion (qtd, in Graver and Federman 218-19). The only chance for renovation, suggests Beckett, s to open our eyes and see the mess: It is not a mess you can make sense of. [. . .] One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of the mess. [. . .] What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. [. . .] To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now. (218-19) Becketts preference for the Dionysian approach to art is solidified in his wonderfully impetuous response to Drivers question, Isnt all art ambiguous? Not this, he said, and gestured toward the Madeleine. The classical lines of the church, which Napoleon thought of as a Temple of Glory, dominated all the scene where we sat. The Boulevard de la Madeleine, the Boulevard Malesherbes, and the Rue Royale ran to it with graceful flattery, bearing tidings of the Age of Reason. Not this. This is clear. This does not allow the mystery to invade us. With classical art, all is settled. But it is different at Chartres. There is the unexplainable, and there art raises questions that it does not attempt to answer. (219-20)

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Hulmes proposition that classical artdry, hard, and properdoes not dabble in chaos and mystery would clearly have been inconceivable to Becketts experience of the world, an experience in which we are obliged, as Beckett says so poignantly, to allow the mystery to invade us. Distress, Beckett went on to tell Driver, is quite simply ubiquitous: One does not have to look for distress. It is screaming at you even in the taxis of London (221). In Modern Art and Its Philosophy, Hulme sets out to distinguish two kinds of art, geometrical and vital, [which are] absolutely distinct in kind from one another (269). Hulme asserts that geometrical art may be the precursor of the re-emergence of the corresponding attitude towards the world, and so, of the break up of the Renaissance humanistic attitude (269). Hulme argues that there is a tendency to abstraction in art and that it will culminate, not so much in the simple geometrical forms found in archaic art, but in the more complicated ones associated in our minds with the idea of machinery. In this association with machinery will probably be found the specific differentiating quality of the new art (282). This new art, explains Hulme, will not aim at the satisfaction of that particular mental need, which in a vital art results in the production of what is called beauty (282). Hulme cites Wyndham Lewiss pictures as a good example of this geometrical art that turns the organic into something not organic (283), for it is obvious, Hulme writes, that Lewiss interest in the human body was in a few abstract mechanical relations perceived in it, the arm as a lever and so on. The interest in living flesh as such, in all that detail that makes it vital, which is pleasing, and which we like to see reproduced, is entirely absent (283). It is important to note that Hulmes view of art is antithetical to Hazlitts, for Hazlitt, it will be remembered, had defined gusto in art as power or passion defining any object, and it was for this reason that he praised the gusto in the colouring of Titian. Not only do his heads seem to thinkhis bodies seem to feel. This is what the Italians mean by the morbidezza of his flesh-colour. It seems sensitive and alive all over; not merely to have the look and texture of flesh, but the feeling in itself (79). Beckett, as we shall see when we come to All Strange Away and the texts that follow, was much more sympathetic to Hazlitts organic sense of gusto than to Hulmes geometric sense of abstraction and machinery. Watt, in fact, offers a firm foundation upon which to construct an analysis of the Romanticism of Becketts later, and much more epistemologically sophisticated, works. Part I of

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the novel describes the eccentric, hilarious journey of Watt to and from Mr. Knotts house. Along the way, Watt encounters Mr. Spiro, who discourses on religion without ever getting to the crux of the matter, after which Watt encounters Lady McCann, who, faithful to the spirit of her cavalier ascendants, throws a stone at Watt, causing his hat to fall on the ground (32). He then finds himself, in one of many inexplicable scenes to come, in a ditch listening to a mixed choir (3). He then furthers his journey, and when he arrives at his destination, he finds Mr. Knotts house in darkness, which foreshadows the epistemological impasses that he will encounter during his stay there, and in fact never understands how he actually enters the house as all the doors were locked. This is the first indication that effects do not logically proceed from determinate causes. Part II details Watts employment as a servant in the house and his futile attempts to understand the mysterious goings-on of the household, which are clearly outside the realm of reason or, by extension, sanity. Although Watt has no direct dealings with Mr. Knott, the latter is a good master, in a way (67), the qualification indicating the extent to which nothing can be known in Watts world with any degree of certitude; all is and is not at one and the same time. Part III is set in an asylum, and the reader learns (perhaps) that Sam, Watts confidant in the asylum, has been narrating the novel as he heard it from Watt, though Sam is an imperfect witness (203), the events even more imperfect given the unreliability of a narrator, himself a patient, who is telling the story as he hears it from someone who has suffered a mental breakdown and cannot form coherent words or sentences, much less construct a coherent, unified narrative of his experiences. Watts language, indeed, fractures in a manner that recalls Becketts early translations of Surrealist poems that simulated the verbal symptoms of mental illness. The events of the story, in short, are ill told, ill heard, and more than half forgotten (74). Part IV, the shortest in the novel, shifts back to Watts departure from Mr. Knotts house, the plot uneventful and Watts desire to have his uncertainty removed (226) frustrated. Despite Becketts subversion at every turn of all points of view, it is fairly safe to assume that, in a work like Watt, Beckett is at the very least parodying Cartesian dualism, materialism, and the related issue of the body as machinein short, the unredeemed split self (188) that is the root cause of Murphys own materialist and skeptical dilemmas. Like Watt, Murphy is a supremely physical and rational being (177) whose mind functioned not as an instrument but

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as a place (178). Like Watts windowlessness (152), Murphy is a seedy solipsist (82) who actually endeavors, albeit in vain, to bracket out the big blooming buzzing confusion (14) in order to reach, vis--vis Schopenhauer, the will-lessness, a mote in its absolute freedom (113). As early as the esoteric poem Whoroscope, his first great send-up of Descartes Method, Beckett had written in the notes that Descartes, through an exhaustive and ultimately circular logic, proves God by exhaustion (6), an idea that Beckett was later to apply, with devastatingly comical results, to much of his subsequent fiction. Watt, for instance, contains many references to Descartes life and ideas. As Rubin Rabinovitz observes in The Development of Samuel Becketts Fiction (1984), Watt is in many respects a model Cartesian. He has great faith in rational inquiry and considers it useful for solving every kind of problem. At times Watt proceeds as if he had memorized Descartes Rules for the Direction of the Mind and resolved to follow its precepts literally (125). The Cartesian emblem of the body as a machine, to which Hulme implicitly refers in his laudatory assessment of Lewiss depiction of the arm as a lever, had always appeared absurd to Beckett, who was much aligned with the absolute idealists and, by extension, the English Romantics vitalist, organicist conception of nature and of the imagination. Coleridge, much in line with many German contemporaries, equated human rationality, when it dominates, with the Biblical account of the Fall of Man. In The Statesmans Manual, for instance, Coleridge wrote that The rational instinct, therefore, when taken abstractedly and unbalanced, did, in itself, (ye shall be as gods, Gen. iii. 5) and in its consequences [. . .] form the original temptation, through which man fell (64). Beckett conceives of rationality in much the same way, often intimating that the birth of language, of self-consciousness, is born astride a grave. The speaker in A Piece of Monologue exemplifies this paradox: Birth was the death of him. Again. Words are few. Dying too. Birth was the death of him. Ghastly grinning ever since (425). In Book XII of The Prelude, Wordsworth likewise experiences a crisis of rationality, or of Fancy, that threatens to engulf him, for he writes that, in demanding formal proof as the result of his following the intellectual and social theories of William Godwin, he lost / All feeling of conviction, and, in fine, / Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, / Yielded up moral questions in despair. / This was the crisis of that strong disease (301-6). But this sickness, of course, is the prelude to reunion, on a higher level,

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through the healing function of imagination, through the spots of time that render Wordsworth a-causal. First dirty, then make clean, utters the Unnamable (341). In Dream, Beckett implicitly subverts both the classical emphasis on geometrical modes of perception and Hulmes neo-classical preference for Lewiss arm as a lever when he describes how the Smeraldina-Rima, who is a slob of a girl with a face that is more beautiful than stupid (3), took off her bret when Belacquas ship began to clear: It might have been a tuft of grass growing the way she ripped it off her little head and began to wave it with an idiotic clockwork movement of her arm, up and down, not to flutter it like a handkerchief, but grasping it in the middle to raise it and lower it with a stiff arm as though she were doing an exercise with a dumb-bell (4). This movement thematically presages the peculiar way in which Watt walks, as though he is a Cartesian machine that advances, in a method that parallels his attempts to understand the ever-elusive Mr. Knott, by exhaustion: Watts way of advancing due east, for example, was to turn his bust as far as possible towards the north and at the same time to fling out his right leg as far as possible towards the south, and then to turn his bust as far as possible towards the south and at the same time to fling out his left leg as far as possible towards the north, and then again to turn his bust as far as possible towards the north and to fling out his right leg as far as possible towards the south, and then again to turn his bust as far as possible towards the south and to fling out his left leg as far as possible towards the north, and so on, over and over again, many many times, until he reached his destination, and could sit down. (30) Such mathematical permutations become more and more absurd as the novel progresses so that even Watt, at one point, could not hide from himself for long the absurdity of these constructions (133). Murphy and Watt are not only severe critiques of the Cartesian postulate that the mind and body can be separated, though they are most certainly that; their critique is of a much greater intellectual climate that had been forming since the crisis of the Enlightenment. Watt, in particular, is a sustained attack on the Age of Reason in which reason itself was considered a faculty of criticism, which meant the power to examine beliefs according to the evidence for

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them; and a power of explanation, which meant the capacity to understand events by seeing them as instances of general laws. The paradigm of explanation that the Enlightenment used, mechanism, derived from the new physics of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, and it led to a mathematical conception of nature where all laws could be formulated in precise mathematical terms. As Abrams writes, For it is clear that the course of English empirical philosophy was guided by the attempt, more or less deliberate, to import into the psychical realm the explanatory scheme of physical science, and so to extend the victories of mechanics from matter to mind (The Mirror 159). The two demons of the Enlightenment, skepticism and materialism, were inevitable. The former development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the development of epistemology in the name of radical criticism, ended in an impasse of dualism: If sensory organs and perceptual activities in cognition make the immediate objects of perception not things in themselves but the ideas we have of them, as the theory of ideas had demonstrated, then, at best, only the ideas were knowable, not the things-in-themselves; the existence of the external world, or of other minds for that matter, could not be verified. Kants transcendental idealism, as we saw in the previous chapter, had merely exacerbated this problem. The latter demon, materialism in the name of a radical naturalism, likewise ended in an impasse, this time in the impasse between the material and the mental worlds: If everything that exists is explicable, quantifiable, and measurable according to mechanical and mathematical laws, as the Enlightenments paradigm of explanation implied, then anything that falls under mechanical and mathematical laws must be extended into having a determinate size, shape, and weight. In other words, something must be material in order to be quantifiable and measurable, the result of which was a paradigm that was forced to distinguish between extended substance, which falls inside nature, and mental substance, which falls outside it. Beiser summarizes the necessary impasses of the Age of Reason by writing that the Enlightenments mechanical-mathematical paradigm of explanation seemed to lead to an aporia in the philosophy of mind where the only possibilities were materialism and dualism. But both are unacceptable. For if materialism explains the mind, it also denies its distinctive status, reducing it down to a machine; and if dualism recognizes the unique qualities of mind, it makes

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it into a mysterious entity. Hence the mind becomes either a machine or a ghost; on no account is it possible to explain its characteristic qualities according to natural laws (21). It is these two impasses of the Enlightenment, skepticism and materialism, that Beckett criticizes so memorably in Murphy, Watt, and the vast majority of his subsequent fiction and drama in which character after character tries, always in vain, to understand his own mind or the world around him in spatial or mathematical terms. The dilemma in Endgame, at least in part, is a total disconnect between the workings of the mind, which the play actualizes, and the world outside the skull, inert extension that is, as Clov devastatingly reports when he looks on the without with his telescope, Corpsed (106). Hulmes neo-classicism, his interest in mechanical and geometrical art, is of course implicated in Becketts severe critique of dualism. In the German Letter, Beckett describes his literature of the unword in terms of Nominalism, in the sense of the Scholastics (Disjecta 173), and goes on to suggest to Kaun that some form of Nominalist irony might be a necessary stage (173). His preference for a Nominalist irony echoes Fritz Mauthners skepticism, which Beckett tempered with an equal emphasis on the necessity of expression, and it reflects the Nominalist (as opposed to the Realist) opinion that sees in universals only designations or terms which apply commonly (Windelband 272), that is, the idea that Universals are names only, expressing the qualities of a reality posterior to things. One of the most memorable scenes in Watt that parodies the pitfalls of skepticism and materialism, and one that invokes Nominalist irony, is Watts run-in with the unknowable pot. Watts experience (or lack thereof) of the pot is bound up with the question of skepticism and the related problem of knowledge. In a scene that reads like a deliberate parody of the solipsism that ensues from Kants subjective idealism, which in the end indicates that (at best) we know only our ideas of things rather than the things-in-themselves, Watt tries in vain to know the unstable thing (84), but the thing-in-itself remains unknowable precisely because of its status as inert extension. The pot at which Watt looks was not a pot at all. It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot, and be comforted. [. . .] And it was just this hairbreadth departure from the nature of a true pot that so excruciated Watt (81). Watt becomes locked in a cycle of subjectivity that resembles Hegels critique, in The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences from which I quoted in the last chapter, of Kants subjective

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idealism. Once again, Kants conception of thoughts, as Hegel argued, leads to just such an impasse: Thoughts, according to Kant, although universal and necessary categories, are only our thoughtsseparated by an impassable gulf from the thing, as it exists apart from our knowledge (41, 86). Hegels detection of an impassable gulf from the thing translates in Watt as the emptiness between Watt and things (84), an emptiness that causes him great consternation: And Watt was greatly troubled by this tiny little thing, more troubled perhaps than he had ever been by anything [. . .] (82). The story of the Lynch family and their famished dog yields similar results that Watt is quite simply unable to comprehend. The mystery of Erskines bell and Watts failure to comprehend in the painting on Erskines wall the relationship of the circle and point are also part of this problem of knowledge, which extends throughout Three Novels in which Molloy struggles in vain to order his sucking-stones. Murphys obsessive arrangement of his ginger biscuits is really the seed for many of the subsequent works in which characters are paralyzed by obsessive, never-ending mathematical variations: But were he to take the final step and overcome his infatuation with the ginger, then the assortment would spring to life before him, dancing the radiant measure of its total permutability, edible in a hundred and twenty ways! (96-7). This prospect, though, overwhelms Murphy: Overcome by these perspectives Murphy fell forward on his face on the grass [. . .] (97). In lieu of the subjective idealism that haunts Watt, and in some senses Murphy, Beckett implies that he is closer to the absolute idealist conception of nature and of mind. Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre, which was an ethical idealism that sought to defeat the skeptical idealism of Hume and the mechanistic materialism of Spinoza, began with the assumption that understanding and sensibility, the form and content of experience, stem from a single source and unifying principle; hence, in his Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre (1794), he postulated an absolute ego, of which the ego and the non-ego were merely parts (I, 105-23), but he, too, ran into the skeptical problematic because this so-called absolute ego, if it were not within experience, was transcendent and, ultimately, unknowable. It is for this reason that Fichte insisted that the absolute ego is a regulative idea that is the goal for the striving (Streben) of the finite ego. In conceiving of an infinite striving (Strebensphilosophie), which hinges on the ceaseless struggle to make nature conform to the demands of its rational activity, Fichte intended

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to resolve the dilemma of the dualism between the subject and object of experience. Fichtes ethical idealism deeply impressed the young Romantics, but they quickly began to criticize his system because it did not, after all, answer the problem of skepticism, and, what is more, it did not surmount Kants dualisms but only restored them in new form. The Fichtean subject is active, noumenal, and purposive, while the Fichtean object is inert, phenomenal, and mechanical. [. . .] To be sure, Fichte, unlike Kant, thinks that the striving subject makes some progress in reducing the dualism; but insofar as its striving is an infinite task the dualism must remain (Beiser 30-2). The Romantic solution to these problems came in the form of Naturphilosophie, a philosophy of nature that Schelling, Novalis, Schlegel, and Hegel developed and Coleridge later wholly absorbed, with minor variations, into the fabric of his Biographia and Theory of Life. The intention of these young Romantics was to coalesce, once and for all, the Cartesian and Kantian dualisms that had plagued Western philosophy ever since. The source of the dualism between subject and object, argued the absolute idealists, was in the mistaken Cartesian idea of matter as inert extension, and it was for this reason that they conceived of it instead as living force. Rather than two different forces, mind and extension, the Romantics posited a single force in which mind and matter were different in degree and not in kind; they were, that is, different degrees or manifestations of the same living, vital force. Perhaps most impressive of the earliest proponents of the Naturphilosophie was Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), to whose highly elaborate system Watt bears traces like a palimpsest. Beckett, indeed, knew of Schellings philosophy at least through his deep reading of Wilhelm Windelbands History of Philosophy (1893), the latter sections of which discuss in detail the German idealists and, in so doing, Schellings Philosophy of Nature. Schelling actually illuminates many of the epistemological cruxes that Watt exposes, and his philosophy provides a clue to Becketts own agenda in that complex novel of ideas. Through Windelband, indeed, Beckett received a comprehensive primer on the development of German idealism and on Schellings contributions to it. Windelband writes of Schellings conception of Nature as a connected whole of forces: Nature is the ego, or self, in process of becomingthis is the theme of Schellings Philosophy of Nature. This task, which had its basis in philosophical premises,

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seemed at the same time set by the condition of natural science, which had once again reached the point where scattered detail-work craved a living conception of Nature as a whole. And this craving asserted itself more vigorously, as the progress of empirical science gave little satisfaction to the highly pitched expectations which had been set upon the principle of the mechanical explanation of nature after the seventeenth century. (596-7) Windelband goes on to stress that the central conception [of Schellings Philosophy of Nature] is life, and it makes the attempt to consider Nature from the point of view of the organism, and to understand the connection of its forces from the ultimate end of the production of organic life (598). There are several evolutionary stages, with each phase subsuming the previous one, to Schellings system, which commences with his rejection of Fichtes subjective idealism and then successively morphs from the Naturphilosophie to a transcendental idealism, then to the Identittssystem, and then, finally, to his theistic phase. As Windelband suggests, Schelling attempted to coalesce the subjective Ich bin with the objective es bibt, for he had opened his Transcendental Idealism with the premise of absolute unity of subject and object, which the process of thought then sunders. His system, founded upon the healing function of the productive imagination, was motivated by the desire to abolish the dualisms between subject and object, intelligence and nature, conscious and unconscious, freedom and necessitydualities that had resulted from seventeenth and eighteenth century scientific rationalism. Schellings logic, like Coleridges after him, is polar, and the dynamic process that he postulated deeply attracted Bruno, Jacobi, and Coleridge, who actually acknowledged Schelling in the Biographia as not only [. . .] a great and original genius, but as the founder of the PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE, and as the most successful improver of the Dynamic System which, begun by Bruno, was re-introduced [. . .] by KANT; in whom it was the native and necessary growth of his own system (I, 162-3). Schelling held that all creativity, including the cosmos itself, had a productive synthesis of oppositions, an interdependent relationship, through the unified point of Indifferenzpunkt, between the ideal and the real, which Coleridge was later to refer to in the Biographia as a third force, the tertium aliquid that is no other than an inter-penetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both (I, 300). Becketts conjunction of [. . .] elements, on which his

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theory of the Purgatories hinges in Dante . . . Bruno (33), is clearly based on a similar dynamic concept. In his 1936 review of Jack Yeatss novel The Amaranthers, entitled An Imaginative Work! (the title was not Becketts), Beckett distinguishes between the critics, or the chartered recountants, and the creative artist: the former take the thing to pieces and put it together again, while the latter takes it to pieces and makes a new thing, new things. He must (89). This distinction parallels Johann George Sulzers distinction in his Allgemeine Theorie der Schnen Knste (1771-4) between Einbildungskraft, which he considers the lower power of imagination, similar to Coleridges primary imagination; and the much higher, and livelier, function of Dichtungskraft, which melts the fragmentary nature of experience and creates an entirely new and total impression (I, 683-4). Schelling and Coleridge later refined this distinction; Coleridge, for instance, distinguished in the Biographia between Fancy, a strictly mechanical faculty, and secondary imagination, which he identifies as different in degree and not in kind in its ability to dissolve, diffuse, and dissipate in order to re-create [. . . .] It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead (I, 304). Becketts theory of the Purgatories, once again, is a polar logic that he specifically identifies as vital (note the repeated use of strong verbs and the lack of sympathy for the Hulmian position): Purgatory a flood of movement and vitality released by the conjunction of [. . .] two elements. There is a continuous purgatorial process at work [. . .] (33). Friedrich Schlegel had similarly stated that we must put aside the concept of an eternal, unchanging, constant being and put in its place the opposing concept of that which eternally living and becoming. True philosophy [. . .] finds the highest reality only in an eternal becoming, in an eternally living and moving activity which, under ever changing forms and shapes, engenders an endless fullness and diversity (111-12). In his review of Jack Yeats, Beckett echoes Schlegels concept of dynamic becoming by considering Yeats an artist who demonstrates that [t]he moments are not separate, but concur in a single process: analytical imagination (89). Yeatss discontinuity, in other words, allows him to coalesce (Becketts word) the dichotomy between the ideal and the real into the ideal real of Prowst [sic] (89). The ideal real, like Schellings das ewige Copula, allows for the creative presence of what Beckett calls the reality of the imagined (89). Schelling calls the

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mediating power between the ideal and the real Einbildungskraft, and Beckett is very close to this idea. The undeniably Romantic conclusion of the short review, with Yeatss clear references in the quotation to Coleridges famous distinction in the Biographia between Fancy and Imagination, is astonishing: The landscape is superb, radiant and alive, with its own life [. . .] The end, the beginning, is among the hills, where imagination is not banned, and Gilfoyle saying to the Amaranthers, their cowering skyscraper days over: You begin to stop emptying your heads, every time they begin to fill with thoughts, and then you will begin to think, and then you will stop thinking and begin to talk. . . . And then you will stop talking and begin to fancy, and then you will stop fancying and begin to imagine. And by that time it will be morning. He has been through it, and so he knows. (90) The dynamic radiance and vitality of the landscapeto which Beckett himself nods with his invocation of the green, living world that characterizes From an Abandoned Work, Enough, Still, and Old Earthparallel Schellings use of natura naturans as nature creating, for as Beckett writes in Proust, The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day (19). The conclusion to his book review, indeed, further serves as an instructive guide to a deeper understanding of the epistemological concerns in Watt and even in his later fiction such as All Strange Away and its most directly imaginative companion piece, Imagination Dead Imagine. To stop fancying and begin to imagine is a leitmotif in Watt. It is the primary struggle of the novel and the impetus for Watts ultimate residence in the nuthouse. In his essay A Study of the Imagination in Samuel Becketts Watt, John Wall argues that the novel combines elements of Immanuel Kants dynamic imagination as developed in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (533). Wall goes on to suggest that, since [t]here is no longer any sympathy for the view of an aesthetic philosopher-poet like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for whom, echoing Kant, the poetic imagination constituted the original faculty wherein the objects of perception and the categories of the understanding were combined into intelligible form (556-7), Beckett, whom Wall identifies as an anti-humanist, supplements the consciousness-based understanding of the imagination with an exploration of the role of word,

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image, and music in forging the forms and figures of poetic understanding (533-4). Wall further argues that Watts mind occupies the ground between the material and the cerebral. [. . .] To use the Kantian idiom, in Watts world, phenomena like day and night become a matter of disparate forces converging on the manifold of the imagination where they are then shaped into objects of perception and understanding (538-9). Arsene and Watt, according to Wall, represent two aspects of a dialectic: Watts pseudo-Kantian imagination must be brought in to supplement Arsenes negativity. [. . .] I would suggest that the bizarre worlds of Arsene and Watt represent two irreducible dimensions of the dialectic of the corporeal world and its expression. Arsenes contribution [. . .] consists of the force of negativity. Watt, on the other hand, introduces the corporeal dimension (544-5). While this argument is interesting in its identification of the possible idealist foundation of the novel, it is problematic because, as we have seen, Kants subjective idealism is part of the impasse that the novel seeks to expose and satirize as corrupt. Watts pseudo-Kantianism is exactly the problem, not the positive side of a dialectic (the other side of which, in Walls schema, is Arsenes negative contribution). Again, Kants transcendental idealism, despite its attempt to solve the immanent crisis of the Enlightenment by escaping the snares of skepticism and naturalism that had haunted the Aufklrung, had merely exacerbated the Cartesian split between the self and external reality. Even the subjects most secure knowledge, in the Kantian system, reflected the nature of the subjects perception rather than that of the object itself. In short, as I have suggested above, Kant ends in the skeptical impasse that Watt actualizes in the novel. Wall, in fact, seems implicitly to acknowledge the threat of Kantian skepticism when he suggests, and perhaps rightly, that Watt shows very little interest in the world of empirical objects, preferring instead the effect they have on the mind that supposedly gives them form in the first place (538). But Wall asserts that Watts pseudo-Kantian imagination functions as a manifold of elemental interaction, thus lending density and weight to the symbolic order, and that the functioning principle of Watts mind reveals the positive, creative, synthesizing power associated with the Kantian imagination (545). Beckett, claims Wall, keeps faith with the notion that music is an integral structural component of expression. [. . .] Beckett brings the nonrational component of music to bear on the fundamental structure of Watts imagination, the

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source of the narrative (553-5). Rather, Watts lack of the living Power of Imagination accounts for the skeptical impasse in which he finds himself, and, by extension, Beckett at least implies that the absolute idealists offered a way out of this impasse with their Naturphilosophie, a way that is alien to Watt given his sole reliance on the mechanical nature of Fancy. Two scenes that suggest this interpretation occur in the context of the unknowable bell and, as above, with the unknowable potbehind which the Idea is prisoner, as he writes in Proust (79). In each case, the Kantian ding-an-sich remains inaccessible, a prisoner, precisely because Watt lacks the productive imaginative faculty that would establish an unending dialectic, through what Schelling calls produktive Anschauung (i.e., productive perception or intuition), between the es gibt and the Ich bin. Despite Walls claim that Watt is a different creature [than Murphy], more of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than Murphys seventeenth century provenance (538), Watt is more accurately a victim of seventeenth and eighteenth century scientific rationalism. His attempts at knowledge, as Mr. Hackett says in another context, function like the frigid machinery of a time-space relation (21). The problem of knowledge regarding the pot ends up extending to the problem of selfknowledge itself, for Watts inability to define this indefinable thing (82) renders suspect all his knowledge of both object and subject: he would set to trying names on things, and on himself, almost as a woman hats. [. . .] But for all the relief that this afforded him, he might just as well have thought of himself as a box, or an urn (83). The indeterminate narrative structure further exacerbates, or may in fact be the source of, the problem of knowledge that Fancy cannot ameliorate, for we learn in the third chapter that Sam is telling the story as he heard it from Watt, though either one of them (or both) may in fact be an imperfect witness (203). In the second part, for instance, what we may assume is the narrator confesses, in the first person, I know nothing on these subjects, except what Watt told me (125). The introduction of me as early as the second part, in fact, establishes a mysterious point of view that is never fully disclosed. In the second part, we are told, again in the first person, that the narrator, despite his being most careful to note down all at the time, in my little notebook (126), may be utterly unreliable: It is so difficult, with a long story like the story that Watt told, even when one is most careful to note down all at the time, in ones little notebook, not to leave out some of the things that were told,

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and not to foist in other things that were never told, never never told at all (126). The subsequent inversion and deterioration of language, then, may be a consequence of Sams own subjective indeterminacy (164-9). The Kantian subjective idealism in which the narrator (and, perhaps through him, Watt) is trapped is primarily a Cartesian symptom of his regarding matter as inert extension, which the absolute idealists rejected, as we have seen, in favor of their concept of matter as living force, a concept that Henri Bergson would later adopt (and Beckett through him) for his theory of the lan vital. Here again Hegels critique of Kants dualistic conception of nature is illuminating. In The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1892), Hegel wrote that Kant holds that both the form and matter of knowledge are supplied by the Egoor knowing subjectthe form by our intellectual, the matter by our sentient ego (42, 90). Hegel implied that Kants dualism between sense and intellect was one manifestation of his general tendency toward dualism. Hegel held that the various dualisms that are in Kants philosophy can be traced back to the fundamental dualism between intuition and concept, the objects of sensibility and understanding respectively, but Hegel further argued that, as opposed to the Kantian implication that this opposition was insurmountable, the task of philosophy was to show how the appearance of opposition itself arises from a fundamental or absolute unity. This original synthetic unity, wrote Hegel in Faith and Knowledge (1802), is a unity that must not be conceived of as the product of opposites, but rather as a genuine necessary, absolute, original identity of opposites, and is a principle of productive imagination (70). In turn, the productive imagination is a genuine speculative idea in the form of sensible intuiting as well as in the comprehension of intuition or experience (71), by which Hegel means a unity that is more fundamental than two apparently dualistic faculties while at the same time being the source of the appearance of their difference. The imagination, he writes, must not be understood as a middle term that is shoved in between an existing absolute subject and an absolute existing world, but must rather be understood as that which is first and original and out of which the subjective I as well as the objective world first separate themselves into a necessary bipartite appearance and product (73). This is related to Fichtes thesis in Science of Knowledge and to Schellings Identittsphilosophie, which is panentheistic (rather than pantheistic) because it sees God as the unmanifested Being, Absolute Identity, that is both an individual who created the

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universe and an all-pervasive presence throughout his creation. In an idea that parallels Hlderlins notion of the unknowability of Being as such, Schellings Absolute is an inexpressible imaginative potentiality out of which all individual forms arise. The novels dilemma, then, is that narrative and character lack the imaginative power that would enable them to gain access to the world outside themselves, to obtain knowledge, to coalesce subjectivity with the object perceived: two separate and immanent dynamisms related by no means of synchronization (Proust 17). Beckett further establishes this when, in the midst of Watts inability to know the pot, the narrator, if we decide to believe the authenticity of a narrator who knows nothing on these subjects (125), writes that Watt could not imagine what else to call it, if not a man. But Watts imagination had never been a lively one (83). It is precisely at this point that Watts own identity begins to blur so that he might just as well have been a box or an urn. Later, when Watt is racking his brain trying to understand the source of a bell that sounded in Erskines room (120), the source of the bell remains unknown and unknowable because his logic tells him that there is no bell on the ground floor and that, as he finds when he gets into Erskines room, Erskines bell is broken. Immediately prior to this scene, when Watt is wondering whether or not Arsene, Walter, Vincent, and the others had passed through the same phase as that through which Erskine then was passing, the narrator says once again that Watt could not easily imagine Arsene ever behaving in such a way, nor himself either for that matter. But there were many things that Watt could not easily imagine (120). He is a victim of Fancy. But again, the problem may be Sams. Either way, the indeterminacy of character and narrative, both of which are instances of Romantic irony, renders suspect all knowledge that the reader obtains from a book that may be ill heard, ill written, and ill understood. In the first phase of Schellings system, the Naturphilosophie, he sought to fuse, through a dynamic dialectic, the two opposing world views of Spinoza and Leibnizthe es gibt of Spinoza with the Ich bin of Leibniz and Fichte. The productive imagination, for Schelling, mirrors Gods divine imagination or the imagination of nature, which is dynamic and never fixed, and it was the only power that could reconcile the spiritual sickness that ensued from mans solipsistic disconnection from nature. As he wrote in his Philosophy of Nature, So long

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as I myself am identical with nature, I understand what a living nature is as well as I understand my own life. [. . .] As soon, however, as I separate myself [. . .] from nature, nothing more is left for me but a dead object (II, 57-8). The natura naturans, as opposed to the natura naturata, is the term that Schelling used to designate nature creating, which he associates with the divine imagination; it is the bridge, the beginning of his grand synthesis, between the ideal and the real, a key aspect, as we have seen, of Becketts own theory. In Watt: Music, Tuning, and Tonality, Heath Lees argues that Murphy and Watt share a similar problem: Musically speaking, the novel [Watt] might be described as a diminuendo al nientea fading into nothingand symptomatic of Watts failure to achieve what Murphy too fails to achieve, Attunement (167-8). Indeed, Murphys Cartesian dilemma stems, as Neary tells him, from the fact that his conarium has shrunk to nothing (6), the conarium being a common designation for the pineal gland, Descartes location of the otherwise incomprehensible intercourse between mind and body. Neary, laments the narrator, could not blend the opposites in Murphys heart (4). Writing specifically about How It Is, H. Porter Abbott suggests that Beckett may be totally unclear as to where mind and body meet, but there seems little doubt that he includes both mind and body in whatever reality is. (Indeed, it is hard to reject the interplay of mud and mind that goes on in the narrators self-creation.) (44). Similarly, Watt is disconnected from himself, with no hope of Apmonia or Isonomy or Attunement, and from living nature, which the protean Mr. Knott represents. Natura naturans, as Schelling conceived it, is the force responsible for an objects being: The nature we perceive [according to Schelling] is the material side of a grand dialectic. It is actually part of an ideal world. Consequently, nature is as meaningful as any mind; it is as meaningful as the ego or self. It is a huge arena in which the individual human mind can seek the moving spirit of the world and in which we learn to imitate the divine creative force. [. . .] In the creation of nature the divine imagination forms specific material things as symbols of the ideal world, things which in themselves contain the ideas, the natura naturans, that inform them. In the perception of nature as symbolic, mans imagination sees at once the ideal and the real inherent in the universe. For Schelling, Gods

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creative imagination makes the universe dynamic. [. . .] The identity of everything is thus in relationship to everything else. [. . .] There is no rest, no still point in the turning world except the Absolute, God, the creating intelligence itself. To reach this point is the highest goal of the Naturphilosophie. (Engell 313) This may explain Becketts random jotting in the Whoroscope Notebook (Reading Archive): unseen vicissitudes of matter. In the much later Three Dialogues, too, Beckett similarly writes, with a hint of Bergsons theory of dure, The world a flux of movements partaking of living time, that of effort, creation, liberation, the painting, the painter. The fleeting instant of sensation given back, given forth, with context of the continuum it nourished (101). Watts lack of imagination, his inability to perceive or imagine nature (the seen and unseen vicissitudes of Mr. Knott) as symbolic and as partaking of living time renders static and lifeless his universe. Watt tries to understand the essence of his masters being, but that being is unknowable precisely because the method that Watt uses is based on logical and rational enumeration; Watt, in effect, tries in vain to prove Mr. Knott by exhaustion, and his scientific rationalism plunges him deeper and deeper inside himself. Mr. Knotts identification as the Absolute, God, or the creating intelligence itself is highlighted by the fact that Watt wishes to see Mr Knott face to face (146), for Watts interest is in the spirit of Mr Knott [. . .] Add to this that the few glimpses caught of Mr Knott, by Watt, were not clearly caught, but as it were in a glass, not a looking-glass, a plain glass, an eastern window at morning, a western window at evening (147). The allusion is to Pauline theology, the language of 1 Corinthians, and the dynamic, shape-shifting presence that Mr. Knott (dis)embodies (the face changing, but perhaps the face ever changing [131]) is quite simply inaccessible to Watt the model Cartesian: Add to this that the figure of which Watt sometimes caught a glimpse, in the vestibule, in the garden, was seldom the same figure, from one glance to the next, but so various, as far as Watt could make out, in its corpulence, complexion, height and even hair, and of course in its way of moving and of not moving, that Watt would never have supposed it was the same, if he had not known that it was Mr Knott. (147)

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Wildelband notes that Schellings Naturphilosophie, which repudiated the principle of the mechanical explanation of Nature after the seventeenth century, was founded upon a dynamic system: Nature is the ego, or self, in process of becomingthis is the theme of Schellings Philosophy of Nature (597). Mr. Knott is that very process to which Watt has no access. The mechanical explanation of Nature after the seventeenth century is exactly what Coleridge had in mind when he wrote in a letter that the philosophy of mechanism [. . .] strikes Death, and cheats itself by mistaking clear images for distant conceptions [. . .] (Letters II, 649). Beckett, it seems, could not have agreed more. Scientific rationalism is at the heart of the Beckettian dilemma. Engell poignantly summarizes the errors and imbalances that had resulted from this decidedly modern epistemological quandary: In the Naturphilosophie Schelling was trying to correct errors or imbalances that he believed had split apart man and nature. The culprit was seventeenth and eighteenth century scientific rationalism; man had become too much the object of his own reflection. As a result, he saw nature as completely external and material. This created a sense of alienation, a crevice between mans mind and nature which pure doses of empiricism only served to widen [. . .] Images were no longer trusted to carry the force of ideas; real circumstances were separated from appearances, and nature took on the aspect of a great illusion or cruel joke. This alienation from nature soon became an alienation from the self; the mind found that if it could not trust its perceptions of the world, then it could not trust its perceptions of its own self either. The endless circle of reflection could not be broken, and a spiritual sickness set in. (314) The implications of the spiritual sickness that set in as a result of seventeenth and eighteenth century scientific rationalism are profound, particularly in relation to so-called Modernist and Post-Modernist developments, and these implications go a long way in helping to clarify the exact nature of Becketts epistemological struggles in a bizarre text like All Strange Away. The Enlightenments theory of ideas is a convenient marker, for in this theory, the emphasis was upon the ideas we have of the objects of perception rather than on the objects themselves. The

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subject, therefore, was engulfed in a veil of perception in which he knew, at best, only his ideas of things. In Proust, Beckett connects this veil of perception with Habit, which obscures the source of enchantment: Unfortunately Habit has laid its veto on this form of perception, its action being precisely to hide the essencethe Ideaof the object in the haze of conceptionpreconception (23). Skepticism and solipsism, of course, are inevitable results of such a perceptual veil, the only escape from which, as we saw in the last chapter, is, at least for Beckett in Proust, the brief suspension of [Habits] vigilance (23). As for Kants transcendental idealism, which sought to ameliorate this epistemological dilemma by establishing that the reality of objects outside ourselves consist in their conformity to universal and necessary forms of consciousness, was unsatisfactory, for his critics were quick to point out that Kant had demonstrated how space itself was nothing but a form of representation. There was no escape in the Kantian (dualistic) rubric from the demons of egoism and solipsism. Fichtes ethical idealism and Schellings absolute idealism sought to go beyond such dualisms, but they, too, often ran into the same trap of skepticism. These concerns, though, were not confined to the realm of philosophy, for all the major Romantic poets struggled with identical issues in their poetry, and it was these issues, often the treacheries of the imagination, that Beckett was later to push to their limits in his mature fiction and drama. Reductive descriptions of Romantic poetry as affirmative flights of imagination, soaring to the heights of sublimity and joy and describing the wondrous beauty of nature, quite simply are inaccurate, or at least woefully incomplete. There is a deep ambivalence, even an underlying terror, at the heart of much Romantic poetry. In his essay That Other Will: The Daemonic in Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lawrence Kramer argues that pure imagination, at its extreme, is a desperate compulsion that seems to act as a kind of anti-self. [. . .] The self, in other words, acts like a hostile other; and the visions themselves appear, irresistibly, as a kind of negative inspiration (298-9). Beckett merely pushed the full logic of Romanticism to its inevitable conclusion, and in this sense, he demonstrates perhaps better than any other twentieth century writer the interrelatedness of Romanticism and the diverse versions of PostRomanticism.

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The significance of the French Revolution, what Shelley in a letter to Byron called the master theme of the epoch in which we live (I, 504), was profound, particularly in relation to the failure of its promises. In Natural Supernaturalism, M.H. Abrams explains that the French Revolution was not only a political and social crisis but also an intellectual, moral, and imaginative one [. . .] An essential attribute of this revolution, as a cultural influence, is that it was a revolution which had failed. The great Romantic works were not written at the height of revolutionary hope but out of the experience of partial or total disenchantment with the revolutionary promise (329-35). The disappointments of the French Revolution, in other words, were often transported into the realm of the psyche itself and seen as reflections of psychological struggles and, at times, breakdowns. Wordsworth himself was not immune to the dangers of the imagination and wrote in Chapter XI of The Prelude, for instance, about the utter loss of hope itself / And things to hope for (6-7). His entire program for poetry, as he wrote in Home at Grasmere, necessitated a potentially treacherous internal descent: For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink / Deep [. . .] Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man / My haunt, and the main region of my song (28-42). Such a descent, of course, contained the seeds of heaven and of hell, of what Wordsworth calls ill sights (74) and solitary anguish (77). As Douglas B. Wilson writes in The Dreaming Imagination: Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth, imagination requires a descent into the awful lair of madness to be fully itself (80). In addition to the apocalyptic Ne Plus Ultra, Coleridges Limbo is an extraordinary expression of a psychological terrain that resides somewhere between being and non-being, a kind of phantasmagoria or waking nightmare in which the real and ideal obscure one another. The poem, in fact, may hearken back to the Biographia, in which Coleridge had written about the twilight of [. . .] consciousness (I, 230) and, specifically in the context of Wordsworths Intimations Ode, about the flux and reflux of ones inmost nature, which requires that one venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which [. . .] the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien (II, 147). Surrealism is a version, a later manifestation, of this nocturnal venture. Beckett, whose own work resides in just such twilight realms, the space of neither, had similarly written in Proust, which presages the Poetry is Vertical manifesto, that an immersion is necessary for the

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poet: The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn in to the core of the eddy (65-6). It is for this reason that the ideal core of the onion would represent a more appropriate tribute to the labours of poetical excavation than the crown of bay (29). There is certainly an echo here, in addition to Jungs essay Psychology and Literature, 22 of Novaliss dictum that the mysterious path leads inwards. In Limbo, the speaker cries out that his imagination has been pulverized by Demogorgons power (4), and what consequently ensues is a truly bizarre series of visions, worthy of Beckett himself, that occur in a Limbos Den (1), the depths of the speakers tortured mindscape. He is engulfed in a state of half-being (14), which rather looks forward to a theme that recurs throughout Becketts fiction and drama, an idea that he got from a lecture by Jung at the Tavistock Clinic in 1935, that he had never been properly born, as he states in the Addenda to Watt (248). 23 In the second stanza of Limbo, the speaker introduces a strange old man who gazes into the abyss, which then gazes back at him in a moment of sublimity to which the speaker himself has no access: An Old Man with a steady look sublime, That stops his earthly task to watch the skies; But he is blinda Statue hath such eyes; Yet having moonward turned his face by chance, Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance, With scant white hairs, with foretop bald and high, He gazes still,his eyeless face all eye;
Beckett had most likely read Jungs essay Psychology and Literature when it appeared in the same issue of transition as Becketts poem For Future Reference. This particular issue of transition (19-20) was published in June of 1930, three months before Beckett submitted the manuscript of Proust to Chatto & Windus. The Poetry is Vertical manifesto was published in transition two years later. 23 Jungs comment, that one of his patients who had amazing mythological dreams had in fact never been born entirely, resurfaces in Becketts writing throughout his life; All That Fall, Watt, Play, Not I, The Unnamable, and Footfalls all bear traces of it. As for Footfalls, May was actually modeled on the little girl of whom Jung had spoken, and, indeed, when the actress who played her in a 1976 version asked about the psychological nature of her character, Beckett uncharacteristically related Jungs story of the girl who had never been born entirely as a key to understanding both the character and the play. Even the unnamable suspects that he has [c]ome into the world unborn (396), that he shall never get born, having failed to be conceived (403), and, again, that he has never [. . .] been born (434). Worm, the unnamable queries, will I ever get born? (402). And, later, I cant get born (439). Echoes of this lecture abound.
22

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As twere an organ full of silent sight, His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light! Lip touching lip, all moveless, bust and limb He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him! (20-30) This strange old man actually has quite a bit in common with Mr. Endon in Murphy, for Mr. Endon (the name comes from the Greek for within), who is a schizophrenic of the most amiable variety (186), is a source of deep fascination for Murphy, but Murphy is unseen by him: Mr. Murphy is a speck in Mr. Endons unseen (250). Mr. Endon may see, therefore, but he does not apperceive his own existence (a kind of blindness): Mr. Endon lay back and fixed his eyes on some object immeasurably remote [. . .] (248). The cost of attaining the freedom of the mind, in other words, is the abnegation of self-awareness, and that is a price, Murphy suddenly understands, that he is unwilling to pay. Similarly, the speaker in Limbo has no access to the old mans steady look sublime, and the poem concludes with a nightmarish vision of imprisonment and the more terrifying threat of oblivion: No such sweet sights doth Limbo den immure, Walled round, and made a spirit-jail secure, By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all, Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthrall. (31-4) The spirit-jail secure and the threat of Naught-at-all (Knott-at-all?) look forward to the small rotunda (362) of The Unnamable and to the claustrophobic psychological terrain of the later Closed Space novels. Keats had long been aware of the dangers of what he referred to as Wordsworths egotistical sublime, a fear of subjectivism that probably stemmed from Hazlitt. The introspective sentimentalism and often gloomy melancholy of Goethes Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), Rousseaus Les Rveries du promeneur Solitaire (1776-78), and Byrons Manfred (1817) offered examples of an extreme self-centeredness that was to be avoided rather than embraced. Keats lauded Shakespeare, on the other hand, for his ability to assume all forms and all passions without tainting them with his own personality and identity. Coleridges Dejection: An Ode (1802), though, does not offer an example of the egotistical sublime so

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much as it does a meditation on the threat of skepticism and solipsism that had haunted epistemology since Kant had exacerbated it with his critiques. The terrifying implication of Coleridges ode, a poem to which Abrams poignantly refers in Natural Supernaturalism as a crisis-autobiography (275), is that skepticism and solipsism are at least potential results of the Romantic program for poetry. In other words, Dejection is not only about what happens when the poet loses his shaping spirit of Imagination (86), although it is certainly about that, but more importantly, the speaker implies that meaning and value come from within the self, that no a priori meaning or value exist independently of the subject, and this is a vision of apocalyptic magnitude. The speaker of the poem is oddly dispassionate; looking at the stars, he laments, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! (38). The only hope that exists for him is the spontaneous, miraculous eruption of Joy, but as he is keenly aware, that must come from within: I may not hope from outward signs to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within (45-6). In Home at Grasmere, Wordsworth had written that the individual Mind and the external World are fitted together, the realization of which was the great consummation devoutly to be wished: How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external World Is fittedand how exquisitely, too Theme this but little heard of among men The external World is fitted to the Mind; And the creation (by no lower name Can it be called) which they with blended might Accomplishthis is our high argument. (63-71) Blake flatly rejected this idea (You will not bring me down to believe such fitting and fitted I know better and Please your Lordship), and in Dejection Coleridge at least implicitly questions whether or not the individual Mind [. . .] to the external World / Is fitted when he writes that Joy comes not from the Wind, which ravst without (99), but, for better or worse, from his own soul:

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Ah! From the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element! It is the realization that all in fact may come from within that produces viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, / Realitys dark dream! (94-5). If this is the case, in other words, then Joy is arbitrary, autonomous, and utterly subjective (cf. the egotistical sublime against which Keats had warned), that it cannot be grounded in anything outside the self; and if this is the case, then how can the self be certain that anything exists independent of the Spectre of subjectivity? The veil of perception from the Enlightenments theory of ideas is back with a vengeance. Even Wordsworth, proclaiming in Tintern Abbey the existence of a spirit in Nature that rolls through all things (102), admits that the senses half create (106) all that we behold (104). This is Idealist in tone, but the threat of solipsism is an undercurrent. In the 1850 version of The Prelude, too, Wordsworth admits the crushing weight of self-consciousness: It seemed the very garments that I wore Preyed on my strength, and stopped the quiet stream Of self-forgetfulness. (V, 294-6) Similarly, in the Biographia Coleridge writes that the modifying colours of imagination can induce a sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both (II, 5). And if this modifying colour is absent, as we saw in Dejection where the faculty of value abides within the soul, then the mind becomes its own place that makes a hell of a heaven. Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats all worked through this Spectre, but it is always a formidable presence for each of them. Harold Bloom, in his essay The Internalization of Quest-Romance, writes about this strain of solipsism in Romantic poetry:

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The high cost of Romantic internalization, that is, of finding paradises within a renovated man, shows itself in the arena of self-consciousness. The quest is to widen consciousness as well as to intensify it, but the quest is shadowed by a spirit that tends to narrow consciousness to an acute preoccupation with self. This shadow of imagination is solipsism, [. . .] the avenging daimon who is a baffled residue of the self, determined to be compensated for its loss of natural assurance, for having been awakened from the merely given condition that to Shelley, as to Blake, was but the sleep of death-in-life. (6) Shelley, indeed, was well aware at an early age of the Spirit of Solitude that threatens solipsism and extinction. When he was twenty-three years old, Shelley composed a blank-verse rhapsody entitled Alastor (Greek for avenging demon) in which the Poet, a descendent of Wordsworths Solitary in The Excursion, is haunted by his own acute self-consciousness. Keatss Endymion could not have been composed without the influence of Alastor, a quest-romance, as Shelley himself explain in the Preface, that is doomed to fail: The Poets self-centered seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power [Imagination] which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, and such as they, have their appointed curse. (401) In The Visionary Company, Harold Bloom writes that The burden of Alastor is despair of the human condition (285), and there is no doubt that this despair runs deep: And my heart ever gazes on the depth / Of thy deep mysteries (22-3). Becketts own Closed Space fiction, which is nothing if not a series of crisis-autobiographies (Abrams 275), is in fact the brain-child of

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this Romantic internalization of quest-romance, the shadow of which looms menacingly large throughout his oeuvre. All Strange Away, for instance, probes the solipsistic and even masochistic consequences of the imagination turned in on itself. In The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough, Gerald Graff argues cogently that the Modernists and PostModernists merely used the tools that the Romantics forged: The ultimate futility and impotence of art [in postmodernism] was implicit in the very terms with which the romantics, and subsequently the modernists, attempted to deify art as a substitute for religion (388). To support his thesis that there is a single tradition of romantic and modernist art (395), Graff cites Coleridges influential assertion that a good poem should contain in itself the reason why it is so and so, and not otherwise. From this premise, Graff, concludes, all of postmodernism springs: The logical consequence of the organicist principle is to fence off the work of art from intellectual references, meanings, and concepts, things which must be dismissed as outside or extrinsic to the work of art, not self-contained within it. Though Coleridge and his contemporaries did not drive the logic of organicism to such reductive conclusions [. . .] this logic in itself tends toward the view that a work of art finally means itself. From this position it is only a further step to the idea that a work of art has no meaning at all. (396) After establishing that the very concept of a creative imagination contains an inherent contradiction and thus an unavoidable irony (388-9), Graff further distinguishes two strains of postmodernism, the apocalyptic and the visionary, which are different in degree and not in kind, but he mistakenly lumps Beckett into the former category without any textual justification: The healthy-minded, untroubled postmodernism expressed in such phenomena as happenings, Living Theater, the music and writings of John Cage, the more beatific poetry of the Beats, the fiction of Ken Kesey and Richard Faria, and the more hopeful and ebullient strains of the rock and psychedelic movementsthis contrasts with the ironic, disillusioned vision of such writers as Barthelme, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Borges, the Barth of The End of the Road, and the Nabokov of Invitation to a Beheading. What links these two strains of

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postmodernist art together is their common commitment to an apocalyptic view of the world, one predicated on the assumption of the disappearance of significant external reality and the consequent uselessness of traditional ways of making sense of the world, the uselessness of art, literature, and language themselves. But one group sees this situation as a ground for celebration, the other as a ground for pathos. (392) While Graff is most certainly correct to argue that postmodernism exploits the radically nihilistic and skeptical premises latent in literary thinking since the romantic period (403), he is reductive in placing Beckett, without qualification, in the apocalyptic camp. It would be more accurate to argue that Beckett spans both these categories and does not ultimately reside in either of them. Of course there is an apocalyptic strain in Becketts writing (what is Endgame if not apocalyptic?), but in the late fiction Beckett works with and through the Blakean Spectre of solipsism by wedding perception and imagination in a dynamic oscillation that ultimately rests on neither. For Keats, who knew perhaps better than any other English Romantic poet the nihilistic threat that the imagination posed, man can seize and participate in the dynamism of nature through what he called a greeting of the spirit in which man is not isolated and solipsistic but integrated and engaged. In All Strange Away, however, no such greeting of the spirit ultimately occurs, though there are intimations of such a greeting, and the love that was for Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Schelling the securest bond between self and other is conspicuously lacking. 24 It is a text that could well be described as a Keatsian Ode to Psyche in which the imagination becomes its own subject. With All Strange Away and the texts that it engenders, then, we come to the heart of Becketts self-conscious investigations into the nature and function of imagination. In his previous works, and in Watt specifically, Beckett had been a rather dispassionate critic of the mechanistic mode and a propagator, as he had espoused in the Poetry is Verical manifesto, of the organic rhythm of the vision in which the creative act occurs, but with All Strange Away we enter new territory. It is with this truly bizarre text, and the cycle to which it belongs, that we enter a critique that takes place at the level of narrative
Beckett noted in the Dream Notebook, vis--vis his deep reading of Augustines Confessions, the necessity of the glue of love (14), which is reflected in Belacquas desire for mystical adhesion in Dream (70).
24

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itself, and in this sense Beckett pushes the logic of Romanticism to its furthest possible end. As Paul Davies writes, Although all Becketts novels are works of imagination, none before All Strange Away comes near to making imagination into the protagonist of a myth (137). In his essay The Pornographic Imagination in All Strange Away, Graham Fraser likewise notes that All Strange Away is a reflexive assessment of the imagining narrators own imagination. The box or rotunda is a projection of the narrators own skull, a displacement of his own imaginative space, which he can use to explore the dynamics of his own imagination. Thus the climate and goings-on within the rotunda illustrate [. . .] the imaginative aesthetics which inform their very narration (515-16). And in his classic study in Frescoes of the Skull, John Pilling analyzes the ways in which Becketts conception of the imaginative process manifests itself in All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine, but Pilling, in an otherwise astute essay, concludes, perhaps rather predictably in this regard, that Becketts use of Fancy in All Strange Away renders him at odds with the Romantics: [The protagonists] interest in measurement is not a simple matter of scientific accuracy; here it is somehow bound up with the exercise of the imaginative faculty. Beckett hereabouts resuscitates the category of Fancy which the great Romantic poets considered decidedly inferior to Imagination, reminding us implicitly that he is a good deal less interested in the Sublime than they were. (138) But Pillings account of the divorce in Romantic theory between Fancy and Imaginationhe makes no mention of specific Romanticsis oversimplified and, ultimately, self-contradictory, at least as far as Coleridge was concerned. Although Coleridge does famously distinguish in the Biographia between Fancy, whose product is fixities and definites through the vehicle of mere metaphor (I, 305), and Imagination, whose product is the re-creation of a new unity (I, 304), his conception of how these two processes work, and we should remind ourselves here that his conception is rendered even more problematic since he divided imagination into two more subcategories, is significantly more complex than Pillings assessment allows. Coleridge, in fact, founds his theory upon the

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function of Polarity, which he works out, with scientific overtones and mystical undertones, in one of his notebooks: Polarity is not a Composite Force, or vis tertia constituted by the moments of two counteragents. It is 1 manifested in 2, not 1 + 1 = 2. [. . .] The polar forces are the two forms, in which a one [sic] Power works in the same act and instant. Thus, it is not the Power, Attraction and the Power Repulsion at once tugging and tugging like two sturdy Wrestlers that compose the Magnet; but The Magnetic Power working at once positively and negatively. Attraction and Repulsion are the two Forces of the one magnetic Power. (Egerton ms. 2801, f. 128; qtd. in Barfield 203) It is within this context, then, that Coleridges distinction, which he would be quick to remind us is not necessarily synonymous with separation, between Fancy and Imagination resides. When therefore Wordsworth objected in his Preface of 1815 to what he considered to be Coleridges definition of Fancy as the aggregative and associative powerinsisting that to aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the imagination as to the fancy Coleridge responded appropriately in the Biographia by implying that Wordsworths conception of imagination, based merely on a reductive conception of polarity, was significantly less comprehensive and mysterious than his own: I reply, that if by the power of evoking and combining, Mr. W[ordsworth] means the same as, and no more than, I meant by the aggregative and associative, I continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the imagination; and I am disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the co-presence of fancy with imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may work with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its share in the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and different. (I, 294) Coleridge most succinctly expresses this complex theory of Polarity when he concludes in Table Talk that Genius must have talent as its compliment and implement, just as, in like manner, imagination must have fancy. In short, the higher intellectual powers can only act through a corresponding energy of the lower (I, 426). Coleridge puts his theory to practice in his

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interpretation of Shakespeares Venus and Adonis, in which Coleridge sees both Fancy and Imagination at work, and in his reading of Wordsworths own poetry where the co-presence or fusion of Fancy with Imagination is so often present through what he calls, in Theory of Life, the principle of unity in multeity (575). The problem is when Fancy predominates, when it is not allied to the higher function and living Power of the imagination, that it strikes Death by mistaking clear images for distinct conceptions. The point here is that Pillings interpretation of the function of Fancy and Imagination in All Strange Away renders faulty his own conclusion. If, as he claims, the protagonists interest in measurement [i.e., Fancy] is [. . .] somehow bound up with [again, Coleridges word for this is fused] the exercise of the imaginative faculty, then the logical conclusion, at least within a Coleridgean paradigm, would have to be that Beckett hereabouts resuscitates the categories of Fancy and Imagination, reminding us that he is a good deal interested in the Sublime as was at least one great Romantic theorist. Instead of simply eulogizing the death of the Romantic imagination, therefore, the imagination as it has been traditionally espoused in poetry, as Paul Davis astutely suggests, is subjected to the severest possible review in the Rotunda texts (Ideal Real 137). The result, argues Davies, is a renewed interest in an imagination which has actually proved impossible to regard as dead (137-8). But All Strange Away, which is obsessive and uneasy, does ultimately seem to strike Death. Davies is again helpful when he suggests that the problem stems from the predominance of mere Fancy: The provisional, speculative, and idly permutative language which generates the bulk of the text is clearly an example of fancy running away with itself, left on its own by the dying imagination to sustain itself solely on [. . .] alternative arrangements of known units, coordinates, fixities, and definites. [. . .] Far from positing a radically new conception of imagination and jettisoning the traditional living Power, All Strange Away ruthlessly documents the ravenous machinations of fancy alone, which are only occasionally alleviated by some final gasps of the imagination. (144-5) In addition, it is important to note, though few critics ever do, that Coleridge further distinguishes in the Biographia between active and passive Fancy, both of which he apparently

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links to memory. Fancy is always the ape, and too often the adulterer and counterfeit of our memory (II, 235), and passive Fancy, like ordinary memory, must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association (I, 305). It is, Coleridge states, the universal law of the passive fancy and mechanical memory that supplies to all other faculties their objects, to all thought the elements of its materials (I, 104). The empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE (I, 305), distinguishes active fancy from delirium, which it would otherwise become. In his book on What Coleridge Thought, Owen Barfield helps clarify this rather opaque distinction: This linking of [fancy] with memory indicates fancys playing a part in the genesis of consciousness at an altogether earlier stage than literature could be concerned with. Besides playing with the fixities and definites that are given to it, fancy has evidently taken a hand in producing themin rendering them the very fixities they are. And, especially in [Coleridges] references to this stage, the pejorative vocabulary (dead, mechanical, artificial, ape, adulterator) strongly suggests, no longer a natural degree within the one ascending series that manifests the seminal principle of mind or intelligence, but an almost hostile interference with it from a source outside itself. [. . .] In the first place, then, fancy has its proper and beneficent place in the genesis of consciousness as a whole and, particularly, in the conversion of perceptions into memories. But it is easily debased. In its debased form it is, as passive fancy, more or less identical with precisely those characteristics of human perception, which it is the function of imagination (by modifying perception) to overcome [. . .] The mind is in thrall to the lethargy of custom, when it feeds solely on images which itself has taken no active part in producing. But there is more to it than this. For the debasement of active fancy carries this process further. Where the mind deliberately chooses to feed only upon such images, there you have the debasement of active fancy [. . .] at which Coleridge never tired of pointing his warning finger. (86-7)

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This passage helps clarify not only Coleridges theory but also the speakers predicament in All Strange Away, a text in which the speaker, like a vulture with its carrion, receives and voyeuristically feeds on repetitive images that it has taken little if any active part in producing, as the constant phrase that again implies. Indeed, the connection to Becketts The Vulture may not be unapt. The ravenous eye in that revealing poem of 1935, a poem that takes its inspiration (as Beckett himself noted) from the first stanza of Goethes poem Harzreise im Winter, preys on images that have become carrion. Unlike the speaker of Goethes poem, who is optimistic about turning the external world into digestible food for the creative act, the speaker of Becketts poem is mocked by a tissue that may not serve / till hunger earth and sky be offal (9), the implication being that this eye of prey is scared off, like any vulture would be, by the least sign of life (tissue signals life, just as offal signals death). The living tissue (the potentially dynamic image, perhaps) mocks the speaker, in other words, because it is autonomous and beyond the speakers ability to control or devour it. Beckett echoes the theme of this poem in Text 1 where the already indeterminate narrators subjectivity literally splits in two, thus forcing him to see himself with a vultures eye of prey: Eye ravening patient in the haggard vulture face, perhaps its carrion time. Im up there and Im down here, under my gaze, foundered, eyes closed (102). In The Vulture the external world becomes wholly internalizedthe vulture is dragging his hunger through the sky / of my skull shell of sky and earthbut the speaker of Text 1 pushes this theme even further and becomes his own prey under his own ravening gaze, a skull within a skull. This is the self-devouring gaze, the repetitive redoubling of vision that spins out of control in pieces like All Strange Away and Ping. The repetitive nature of the images, in fact, suggests a debasement of active Fancy and, for Graham Fraser, a pornographic imagination: All Strange Away is not a failure because it is pornographic, but rather it fails pornographically, reverting to the non-culminating energies of Fanciful repetition in conjunction with the pornographic conventions of fragmentation, a (minimal) eroticism, and the voyeuristic gaze (528). Coleridge may have pointed his warning finger at such debasement, but it seems that Beckett was likewise well aware of its dangers. The setting of All Strange Away, if setting is the word, is sparse. An indeterminate narrator seems to be experiencing the slow decline of inner vision, for all that remains after a

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lifetime of seeing (170) is the skeletal structure, almost the carrion, of what may once have been a vibrant imaging faculty. The narrator first imagines a cube, Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there (169), and then he imagines someone in it, that again (169). It is not clear why the narrator feels compelled to imagine so wearily, or why he feels compelled to imagine at all, but there is clearly a compulsion to imagine on, however feebly. After imagining the figure in various mechanical postures, the narrator further reduces the size of the cube, presumably to make All that most clear (172), that is, to sharpen the image: Tighten it round him, three foot square, five high, no stool, no sitting, no kneeling, no lying, just room to stand and revolve (170-1). Just when the narrator thinks he has fixed the image, however, it fades into oblivion without a trace: hes not here (170). The phrase all white when light at full (170) highlights the nothingness into which the figure vanishes, and it anticipates Ping, a text that Beckett was to translate into English two years later. In the later text, everything is awash with white: Bare white body fixed white on white invisible (193). As in All Strange Away, an utterly indeterminate narrator in Ping struggles to imagine sounds, colors, images, only to find that an autonomous imagination is actually preying upon him, for the reader learns that the narrator himself is being sewn together from the first: All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn (193). The imaginations own existence is itself being imagined, perhaps within the fiction-making sphere of the readers own mind. As Ackerley and Gontarski note about this bizarre text, The reader focuses not only on a figure in a closed space, but on another figure and a narrator imagining them. There is not just the psychologically complex image of a self imagining itself, but a self imagining itself imagining itself, often suspecting that it, too, is being imagined (Ackerley and Gontarski 438-9). Such imaginative impasses are latent within Romantic aesthetics, and they infect All Strange Away and Ping with a kind of imaginative paralysis from which those texts never fully recover. Apparently bored with the static image of a figure with jointed segments variously disposed (172), the narrator of All Strange Away conjures the image of a fly, only to obliterate it immediately: Imagination dead imagine to lodge a second in that glare a dying common house or dying window fly, then fall the five feet to the dust and die or die and fall. No, no image, no fly here, no life or dying here but his, a speck of dirt (172). The next set of images, of Emma

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and Emmo, are projected onto the walls and become exceptionally difficult to paraphrase as the images flow into one another, thus producing No real image but say like red no grey say like something grey and when again squeeze firm down five seconds say faint hiss then silence then back loose two seconds and say faint pop and so arrive though no true image [. . .] (178). Curiously, at one point Memories of past felicity [. . .] of a lying side by side rise to the surface of the narrators consciousness, but he dismisses them with a phrase that recurs throughout the text: look at this closer later (179). Shortly thereafter, he further subverts his memories of past felicity: No memories of felicity save with faint ripple of sorrow of a lying side by side and of misfortune none, look closer later (180). The narrative becomes infernal until nightmarish images inundate the imaginative domain and produce a conclusion that is straight out of Francisco de Goyas The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters: Within apart from fancy dead and with faint sorrow faint memory of a lying side by side and in sleep demons not yet imagined all dark unappeasable turmoil no sound and so exhaled only for the moment with faint sound (181). At this point, as Cohn writes, fancy is unquotedly and uncapitalizedly murmured dead, and the long final sentence is its strange sighing requiem (289). It is important to note, however, that no matter how much Fancy, and particularly its passive aspect, predominates in All Strange Away, the dynamic function of the imagination is never absent. At the beginning of the text, the narrator asserts that he will drag it, the vague pronoun presumably referring to the imagination, to a place to die in (169), but the text obviously does not end there; it begins there. The verb drag reminds us of the gerund dragging that opens The Vulture, thus highlighting the narrators hunger for the image to be dead on arrival, to be carrion. This text endures, however, and is in fact a mysterious, bizarre product of the creative imagination, indeterminate and autonomous though this imagination is, that in turn generates further texts in an organic process of development and refinement. Imagination Dead Imagination, after all, grows directly out of the imaginative shards of All Strange Away, its legitimate parent piece. In these compelling imaginative creations, the imagination, which becomes the protagonist of the Closed Space novels, is itself put to the test, what Davies calls a trial (137), and despite the predominance of Fancy, the mere fact of these texts dogged existence frustrates what was originally a plan to prove that imagination is dead

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and gone (Davies 146). With All Strange Away and its offspring, then, Beckett is still demonstrating the corrupt nature of Fancy particularly when it is unallied, as in the characters of Murphy and Watt, to what Coleridge in the Biographia calls the living Power of imagination (I, 304). What prevents the miracle, as the Unnamable remarks in a rare moment of clarity, is the spirit of method to which I have perhaps been a little too addicted (344). Text 9 from Texts for Nothing is another case in point. The rationalism of the text, as Pilling observes, threatens to throttle the flow of the prose (54), which, as the speaker affirms, is mechanical (136). Paradoxically, however, the speaker is dead and getting born (138) precisely because he imagines a way out through re-imagining the myths of Dante: Theres a way out there, theres a way out somewhere, the rest would come, the other words, sooner or later, and the power to get there, and the way to get there, and pass out, and see the beauties of the skies, and see the stars again (140). The power to get there, as the speaker intimates in the last clause, is in imaginative journeys, in this case of epic proportion, for his desire to see the stars again, a clear reference to the ascent of the soul after its dark night at the conclusion of Dantes Inferno, suggests sublime and imaginative possibilities that are never absent in Becketts Purgatorial cosmos of flux and vitality. The absurd calculations in Part III of How It Isthe speaker relates that we are regulated and that its mathematical (112)are similar, but again, the imagination is not, of course, as spent as the speaker would have us believe; if it were truly exhausted, there would be no formulation whatever, present or otherwise (Pilling 75). At the conclusion of How It Is, indeed, there is actually a merging of narrator and narrated, an acknowledgement on the speakers part that the voice is mine yes not anothers (160), as opposed to the initial evasion, which is a variant of the theme of Not I, to describe it as in me not mine (9). There is no such merging in All Strange Away, but the hope of such a union, as the narrator says, might well be imagined (176). In fact, the attempt in All Strange Away to render all strange awaySo little by little all strange [is being taken] away (178)to render the text fixed, dry, hard, and most clear (172), is a veritable demonstration of the bareness of Hulmes neo-classical clarion call in Romanticism and Classicism for an accurate, precise and a definite description that has nothing to do with infinity, with mystery or with emotions (68).

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The definite description is exemplified in the recurring geometrical descriptions of the figure and the rotunda: Call floor angles deasil a, b, c and d and ceiling likewise e, f, g, and h, say Jolly at b and Draeger at d, lean him for rest with feet at a and head at g, in dark and light, eyes glaring, murmuring, Hes not here, no sound, Fancy is his only hope. (171) Throughout the Biographia, Coleridge defines Fancy as the aggregative and associative power (I, 293), an idea that is aligned with and clearly indebted to William Duffs own definition of Fancy in his Essay on Original Genius (1767). The speaker of All Strange Away consistently attempts to aggregate or combine only what it has received, a hallmark of Fancy according to Coleridge. The speakermathematically speaking (176)consistently combines memories but rarely fuses them to form new wholes: Mother mother, Mother in heaven, Mother of God, God in heaven, combinations with Christ and Jesus, other proper names in great numbers say of loved ones for the most part and cherished haunts (175). The speaker echoes these aggregates later in the text: All gone now and never been never stilled never voiced all black when never sundered unstillable turmoil no sound, Shes not here, Fancy is her only, Mother mother, Mother in heaven and of God, God in heaven, Christ and Jesus all combinations, loved ones and places, philosophers and all mere cries [. . .] (1801) Again, though, one of the paradoxes of All Strange Away is that all strange is never fully away, that although Fancy does predominate, there are frequent attempts to imagine and shape dynamic scenes into existence: Imagine lifetimes, gems, evenings with Emma and the flights by night [. . .] (171). Even the central paradox of the text, to imagine the death of imagination, never dissipates precisely because the imagined death supplants the death itself; the death of imagination is the imagined scene. There is, if anything, a movement in the text toward the dissipation of Fancy, for it is Fancy, at least its passive or mechanical aspect, that is on the wane in the final sentence: [. . .] at faint memory of a lying side by side and fancy murmured dead (181). Becketts linking of memory with Fancy here highlights the mechanical function of the latter, for as we have seen, Coleridge theorizes that passive Fancy, like ordinary memory,

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must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. The source text of both All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine, which may be helpful to keep in mind, is Faux Dparts, a work in four sections (three in French and one in English) that was originally published in Kursbuch in June of 1965. This text represents Becketts attempt in the early 1960s to reshape yet again the remains of an aborted longer piece of fiction, a work tentatively titled Fancy Dead, the recurring phrase, of course, in All Strange Away and the note on which it ends. But the consciousness in All Strange Away, despite its desire for the flow or ebb (174) of imaginative coalescence, remains stuck and isolated in the solipsistic rotunda that is fixed (179) and, ultimately, dead or dying. With Imagination Dead Imagine, as the next chapter will demonstrate, Beckett reveals the undeniable and enduring presence, even the efficaciousness, of the living Power of imagination, which is still under scrutiny but never (even remotely) abandoned. Whereas All Strange Away ends in a self-enclosed cycle of permutation, Imagination Dead Imagine marks the beginning of a movement away from the solipsistic mind toward the possible coalescence of the self with the sylvan scene of the external world. Such is the dialectical movement of soulmaking, a movement that the RomanticsNovalis, Blake, Shelley, and Keats not least among themconsidered vital to the possibility and experience of life itself.

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CHAPTER THREE IN THE MAGIC THE HOMER DUSK: DYNAMIC IMAGINATION, THE SURREALIST NIGHT-MIND, AND THE AESTHETICS OF INCOHERENCE

Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality. Andr Bretons 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism What kind of imagination is this so reason-ridden? A kind of its own. Becketts Company

In the second part of the Biographia, Coleridge writes that the rules of the
IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and production (84). With the

publication of Imagination Dead Imagine in 1965, Beckett seems to have agreed. The shaping powers of imagination, as the narrator demonstrates in the creative surge or lan vital of the opening line, were apparently not dead on arrival, or if they were, their beginning was in their end: No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine (182). This paradoxical burst of creativity, which grows organically out of the heap of broken images in the earlier All Strange Away, establishes the imaginations undeniable presence, even its efficaciousness, just when Beckett may have considered defunct and irredeemable his own Kraft. So much for the art and craft, quips the narrator of Enough (186), who then goes on, apparently without having had enough after all, to mix memory and desire while stirring dull roots with spring rain, for despite the trampled flowers (188) that dot the landscape, the narrator relates that Sudden pelting downpours overtook us (191). Beckett himself used the organic metaphor, which was central to the Romantics, to describe the self-generation of his own writing. Throughout Proust, for instance, he uses the botanical metaphor to express our organic sensibility (28), which he sees operating as a strict inner determination in Joyces Work in Progress (Disjecta 26-7). In an interview with Gabriel DAubarde in 1961, furthermore, Beckett stated that Three Novels was organic in its conception: Malone grew out of Molloy, The Unnamable out of Malone (qtd. in Graver and Federman 216). In The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Becketts Dramatic Texts 111

(1985), S.E. Gontarski rightly notes that in an echo of Coleridges organic metaphors for art, Beckett is searching for a form not imposed on the writing from without, but one that grows out of the writing (17). This would certainly account for the internal, spontaneous production of Imagination Dead Imagine, the title of which had constituted the first three words of the earlier All Strange Away, thus confirming Coleridges suggestion in his Miscellaneous Criticism that All is growth, evolution, genesiseach line, each word almost, begets the following [. . .] (89). The creative enterprise, once set in motion, becomes at least partly autonomous. Beckett was well aware of the autonomous aspect of the dynamic imagination. Andr Bretons declaration in the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism would have been instructional: We really live by our fantasies when we give free reign to them (18). The second proclamation of Eugene Jolass Revolution of the Word manifesto would also have signaled to Beckett the necessity of imaginative autonomy; the manifesto, first published along with Becketts Dante . . . Bruno and Assumption in number 16/17 of transition, declared that THE IMAGINATION IN
SEARCH OF A FABULOUS WORLD IS AUTONOMOUS AND UNCONFINED, an aphorism that may

also be the seed for Becketts invocation of the mobility and autonomy of the imagined in his review of Jack B. Yeatss The Amaranthers (Disjecta 89). Along these lines, Drew Milne writes in an essay that Becketts late fiction is a sustained articulation of the dissident imagination (93), and H. Porter Abbott likewise notes the resurgence of a creative dynamism in Becketts fiction: In the first lines of Imagination Dead Imagine, we have the imagination literally welling up out of the whiteness of the page (45). With this text, indeed, there is a movement, perhaps not complete but at least begun, from the self-consciousness of All Strange Away to the realm of the living imagination. Geoffrey Hartman writes that this shift was crucial for Romanticism: To explore the transition from self-consciousness to imagination, and to achieve that transition while exploring it (and so to prove it still possible) is the Romantic purpose I find most crucial. The precariousness of that transition naturally evokes the idea of a journey; and in some later poets, like Rimbaud and Hart Crane, the motif of the journey has actually become a sustained metaphor for the experience of the artist during creation. (53-4)

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Similarly, Imagination Dead Imagine explores such a transition through a precarious artistic journey that reinforces the imaginations indestructibility. Gontarski has noted on more than one occasion the imaginations achieved presence in Becketts fiction. In The Conjuring of Something out of Nothing, for instance, Gontarski detects in Becketts minimalist works the imaginations persistence even in the face of the death of imagination. [. . .] Even when the imagination is dead, a perverse consciousness struggles to imagine its death, which paradox seems to have launched Beckett on the enterprise of the late, closed space fiction (xvii). Becketts subject in the late tales, Gontarski goes on to argue, is the human imagination (xxix), and it is on these grounds that Gontarski can assert that the late work may have more in common with that of American poet Wallace Stevens than with any of the writers of short fiction (xxix). For Beckett, as for Stevens, imagination was the necessary angel, and it endures even in the face of extinction. Richard Kearney, in The Wake of Imagination: Ideas of Creativity in Western Culture (1988), argues to the contrary. Kearney has a deepening suspicion that we may well be assisting at the wake of imagination (3), and he appropriates many key postmodern theorists to buttress his thesis that postmodernists explode the sacramental status of the humanist imagination and jubilantly proclaim the end of art. The postmodernist dances on the grave of modern idealism. He is as far removed from the Sartrean cult of the self-creating consciousness (pour soi) as from the romantic cult of the transcendental Einbildungskraft (5). Kearney lists Borges, Pynchon, Burroughs, and Beckett as artists who abolished the humanist imagination. The heterogeneous nature of the subject in postmodern theory and art, argues Kearney, marks a radical rupture with the humanist notion of autonomous selfhood. [. . .] Now the model of the productive inventor is replaced by that of the bricoleur: someone who plays around with fragments of meaning which he himself has not created (11-13). Kearney links this postmodern rupture with the general announcement of the contemporary Disappearance of Man (13), and he specifically cites Becketts Imagination Dead Imagine as a work that impressively confronts the postmodern dilemma of the deconstruction of imagination. Beckett would appear to be endorsing the postmodern call for a disassembling of the humanistic imagination (307). It is a work, according to Kearney, that expresses the failure of imagination:

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Becketts writings may be read accordingly as repeated attempts to bring imagination to an end. [. . .] We are presented [in Imagination Dead Imagine] with a mathematical emblem of colourless, expressionless, zero degree writing Becketts metaphor, it would seem, for the postmodern imagination. All that is left of western humanist culture is an impersonalized space where the very distinction between the imaginary and the real has collapsed. Imagination has self-destructed into a void. It has ceased to function as a human agency of expression, will and creativity have become instead a mechanical drift towards sameness. [. . .] Imagination is thus reduced to a skeleton of itselfimagining, as it were, its own posthumous existence, its life after death. No longer able to represent the transcendental sun in imitational copies (as in Platonism) or to project the suns light from within itself (as in romantic idealism), the postmodern imagination of Becketts text is the seemingly inconsolable manipulandum of an electronically computerized worlda world where an artificial light comes and goes according to a logic of mathematical precision and technical reversibility which it is beyond the powers of human subjectivity to comprehend. (308-11) Kearneys remarks are understandable given the state of theory in the contemporary academy, but a close reading of Imagination Dead Imagine, and the texts that follow it, reveals not a selfdestructed imagination but a vibrant one struggling to produce a living, verdurous world. Beckett ruthlessly interrogates the efficacy of imagination, particularly as the Romantics conceived it, and finds that it always already outlives itself, that it endures and, in the end, is indestructible. Immediately after the imagination wells up out of the whiteness of the page in Imagination Dead Imagine, in fact, it attempts a greeting of the spirit until Fancy breaks in and throttles its dynamic effort: Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness of the rotunda. No way in, go in, measure (182). We cannot overestimate the acknowledgement, though brief, of the external world, for no such acknowledgement was possible in the hermetically sealed world of All Strange Away, in which all this clearer later (175). In Imagination Dead Imagine, Enough, Lessness, and Fizzles, Beckett cracks open the rotunda and allows the external world to shine in and mingle with the

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speakers imaginative journeys. Enough, for instance, is rife with a verdurous world, with mountains and constellations that the speaker of Imagination Dead Imagine merely glimpsed. In particular, there are consistent references in Enough to flowers, and although the speaker may subvert the Romantic pastoral tradition and Novaliss blue flower with a reference to the trampled flowers (188), the conclusion of the story suggests that they will endure long after he has wiped out everything else: Now Ill wipe out everything but the flowers. No more rain. No more mounds. Nothing but the two of us dragging through the flowers (192). With Imagination Dead Imagine and much of the short fiction that follows, Beckett returns to the polar logic that he had much earlier espoused in the theory of Purgatories but that had fallen prey to the mechanical workings of fancy in works like All Strange Away. In Imagination Dead Imagine, the temperature, which may seem strange (183), fluctuates with countless variations: But whatever its uncertainties the return sooner or later to a temporary calm seems assured, for the moment, in the black dark or the great whiteness, with attendant temperature, world still proof against enduring tumult (183-4). This fluctuation of temperature produces movement (183), despite the fact that the aggregates from All Strange Away, what the text of Imagination Dead Imagine calls combining in countless rhythms (183), are still present. But as in Enough, the narrator associates the aggregative function of fancy, the compulsion to Subtract and Divide (191), with a curse from some unknown source: The art of combining is not my fault. Its a curse from above. For the rest I would suggest not guilty (187). In Lessness, the speaker moves even further away from the mechanical workings of fancy toward imaginative possibilities that are free from the constraints of the light of reason: Ruins true refuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind. Never but imagined the blue in a wild imagining the blue celeste of poesy. Light white touch close head through calm eye light of reason all gone from mind (201). And despite the reemergence of the anti-pastoral strain in Becketts writing with the ruinstrewn land in Fizzle 3 and a reversion to the closed place of Fizzle 5, the narrator of Fizzle 6 finally admits that the reality of the external world is to be acknowledged and embraced, not refused: Old earth, no more lies, Ive seen you, it was me, with my others ravening eyes, too late. [. . .] Not long now, how I gaze on you, and what refusal, how you refuse me, you so refused (238). The speaker then attempts to see the sky with a

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long gaze (239) and finds in Fizzle 7 that the sun shines out at last and goes down (240), alerting us to the fact that the suns southwest sinking (240) necessitates a cyclic, Polar logic that entails change (though, of course, not culmination). The manuscripts of Imagination Dead Imagine further reveal the extent to which Beckett seems to have been particularly concerned with specific words and phrases that signal change and movement, revealing that he wanted to be clear about this aspect of the story. In MS 1541/3, 25 for instance, he crossed out the word throbs in the line Then all throbs, ground, wall, vault, bodies, [etc.] and substituted it with vibrates. In this draft, he also tinkered with minor variations between the verbs throb versus vibrates and quivers versus pulses. From MS 1541/1 onward, too, Beckett inaugurated and preserved the texts theme of variation, as in the line, from MS 1541/2, In such confusion of rises and falls, succeeding one another in incalculable rhythms, which he changed with a marginal note to Such variations of rise and fall, combining in countless rhythms. We seem, in other words, to be in a Purgatorial rotunda that tempers mechanical fancy with dynamic imagination, a rotunda that is filled with uncertainties (183) and is consequently proof against enduring tumult precisely because the dynamic function of imagination produces flux, vitality, and movement: never twice the same storm (184). The mechanical workings of fancyDiameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA (182)are balanced with a convulsive light: Between their absolute stillness and the convulsive light the contrast is striking, in the beginning, for one who still remembers being struck by the contrary (185). The phrase convulsive light echoes Andr Bretons Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937). In MS 1541/2, Beckett originally wrote still proof against convulsion without end but scratched out convulsion without end and replaced it with unbroken tumult. The phrase convulsive light, however, remains in the final draft and is suggestive of the Surrealist enterprise that attracted Beckett in his youth. In Nadja, Breton famously declares, Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all (160), and in the first chapter of Mad Love, he similarly writes, Convulsive beauty will be erotic-veiled, fixed-

25

Reading Archive.

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explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be (19). In The Ghosts of Modernity (1996), Jean-Michel Rabat neatly summarizes the significance of these oxymoronic adjectives: The statement condenses several theses that can be formulated as Bretons complete aesthetic in the early 1930s. Three pairs of adjectives function as oxymorons in order to suggest the following ideas: (1) Beauty will at the same time eroticize and veil the body; it will disclose and hide in imitation of the hysterical gesture. (2) Beauty will be both vertiginous and static; it will radiate as Arthur Rimbauds concept of defining vertigos. (3) Finally, beauty will keep a magical component that should never be cut off from its immediate context of production and consumption. (53-4) The polar logic that Breton conveys through the paradoxical compound adjectives eroticveiled, fixed-explosive, and magic-circumstantial adds an extra layer of polar logic to Becketts own text that is equally fixed-explosive and, hence, magical in its imaginative dynamism. What is clear, in other words, is that Imagination Dead Imagine does not merely present, as Kearney suggests, a mathematical emblem of colourless, expressionless, zero degree writing. What Beckett seems to be presenting is a consciousness, indeterminate though it may be, in the dynamic act of composition. Hence the imperatives (e.g., omit) that resurface to a striking degree in Ill Seen Ill Said. In Imagination Dead Imagine, Beckett is looking steadily at his subjectthe creative imaginationin order to get at its essence, be it something or nothing, and what he finds is that the nought, the absolute absence of imagination, is a logical impossibility for a writer, that even as the imagination declines, an imagination is required to witness the declinead infinitum. Henri Bergsons Creative Evolution (1907), particularly the chapter on The Idea of Nothing, may have been formative in this regard. We know from Becketts Trinity lectures and from various correspondence that he thought highly of Bergsons vitalist philosophy that stressed intuition and critiqued pure logic and mechanism in morals, art, and religion. Bergson was a Romantic whose philosophy had its roots in Rousseau and in the German Romantic tradition, particularly in the work of Schelling and Fichte. Furthermore, his conception of lan vital, the vital force responsible for all organic evolution, is essentially

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Dionysian and appropriately comes out of the Greek mysteries and has affinities with the modern aesthetic ideas of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Artaud, and Beckett himself. In Creative Evolution, Bergson writes that his philosophy sees in duration the very stuff of reality (296) and the foundation for the true evolution, the radical becoming (297). In his chapter Form and Becoming, he further stresses the centrality of duration in order to show that a self-sufficient reality is not necessarily a reality foreign to duration (324), that the image or idea of the void or the nought ends up stripping being of its organic duration: If we pass (consciously or unconsciously) through the idea of the nought in order to reach that of being, the being to which we come is a logical or mathematical essence, therefore, non-temporal. And, consequently, a static conception of the real is forced on us: everything appears given once and for all, in eternity. But we must accustom ourselves to think being directly, without making a detour, without first appealing to the phantom of the nought which interposes itself between it and us. We must strive to see in order to see, and no longer to see in order to act. Then the Absolute is revealed very near us and, in a certain measure, in us. It is of psychological and not of mathematical nor logical essence. It lives with us. Like us, but in certain aspects infinitely more concentrated and more gathered up in itself, it endures. (324) Such is the conclusion of Bergsons extraordinary demonstration that the problem of the nought is a pseudo-problem that dissipates upon close examination. In a kind of bracketing out that anticipates the phenomenological reduction, with an ironic hint of Descartes methode, Bergson interrogates the image of Nothing in order to expose its impossibility as image: I am going to close my eyes, stop my ears, extinguish one by one the sensations that come to me from the outer world. Now it is done; all my perceptions vanish, the material universe sinks into silence and the night.I subsist, however, and cannot help myself subsisting. I am still there, with the organic sensations which come to me from the surface and from the interior of my body, with the recollections which my past perceptions have left behind themnay, with the impression, most positive and full, of the void I have just made about me. How

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can I suppress all this? How eliminate myself? I can even, it may be, blot out and forget my recollections up to my immediate past; but at least I keep the consciousness of my present reduced to its extreme poverty, that is to say, of the actual state of my body. (302) Bergson finds that, despite the extreme poverty of sensory input, there still exists faint sensory impressions and a consciousness, however reduced, that persists even after he has suppressed all memory up to the immediate past. He then endeavors to shut out even these minimal sensations and this reduced consciousness: I will try, however, to do away even with this consciousness itself. I will reduce more and more the sensations my body sends in to me: now they are almost gone; now they are gone. They have disappeared in the night where all things else have already died away. But no! At the very instant that my consciousness is extinguished, another consciousness lights upor rather, it was already alight: it had arisen the instant before, in order to witness the extinction of the first; for the first could disappear only for another and in the presence of another. I see myself annihilated only if I have already resuscitated myself by an act which is positive, however involuntary and unconscious. So, do what I will, I am always perceiving something, either from without or from within. When I no longer know anything of external objects, it is because I have taken refuge in the consciousness that I have of myself. If I abolish this inner self, its very abolition becomes an object for an imaginary self which now perceives as an external object the self that is dying away. Be it external or internal, some object there always is that my imagination is representing. My imagination, it is true, can go from one to the other, I can by turns imagine a nought of external perception or a nought of internal perception, but not both at once, for the absence of one consists, at bottom, in the exclusive presence of the other. But, from the fact that two relative noughts are imaginable in turn, we wrongly conclude that they are imaginable together: a conclusion the absurdity of which must be obvious, for we cannot imagine a nought without perceiving, at least confusedly, that we are imagining it,

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consequently that we are acting, that we are thinking, and therefore that something still subsists. (302-3) This extraordinary passage foreshadows Becketts characters equally futile attempts to bracket out the big blooming buzzing confusion (Murphy 4) of the external world only to find that selfperception, or apperception, endures. Indeed, in addition to Berkeleys Esse est percipi, almost any line from the above passage could well serve as the epigraph to Becketts Film, a screenplay that virtually dramatizes Bergsons futile attempts to suppress external and internal perception. 26 In Film, Os suppression of all external perceptionpassers-by, a mirror, a dog and cat, a parrot and goldfish, the face of God the Father whose eyes are staring at him severely, old picturesbreaks down at the end when the image reveals Os face staring back at him with an acute intentness that confirms Becketts introductory note: Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception (323). Bergsons question, therefore, of How eliminate myself? may further serve as the foundation for Becketts own tales of vanishing, including Imagination Dead Imagine, a text that demonstrates how the imagination lights up, to use Bergsons words that recall the Romantic emphasis on the lamp of imagination as opposed to the neo-classical mirror of mimesis, 27 an instant before its own extinction, thus resuscitating itself by an act that is positive, however involuntary and unconscious. Although Beckett would be suspicious and cautious about claiming, as Bergson does, that I am still therethe exact nature of this I would have been indeterminate for Becketthe was clearly attracted to the idea that imagination, a psychological rather than mathematical or logical essence, always already endures prior to its own extinction, which it could not witness if it were merely dead on arrival. Bergson writes that there is no absolute void in nature (305). And the vital imagination, itself part and parcel of nature, is no exception.

Becketts original title for Film was The Eye, thus highlighting the centrality of perception to the pieces overall thematic structure. 27 Becketts rejection of mimetic art is asserted in his short essay Les Deux Besoins (Disjecta 55), in which he writes that Il y a des jours, surtout en Europe, o la route rflte mieux que le mirroir [There are some days, especially in Europe, where the road reflects better than the mirror]. The allusion is to Stendhals famous image from Le Rouge et le noir of the novel as a mirror strolling along a highway.

26

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As Pilling observes of Imagination Dead Imagine, Beckett contents himself [. . .] with one imaginative projection only: the rotunda of the last part of All Strange Away, now populated by two figures lying back to back. This concentration on a single object enables Beckett to avoid the diffuseness of the earlier text and allows him to present a more considered view of the workings of the imagination than was ever possible in the turbulent flurry of All Strange Away (145). The active-passive implications of the imagination, the creative will versus the passive receptor, is a crucial aspect of Coleridges distinction in the Biographia between differing degrees of imagination. Coleridge does famously equate the secondary imagination with conscious will: The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation (I, 304). His remarks in Chapter 7 of Part I, however, further complicate his already complex distinction, for his polar logic necessitates both active and passive powers: Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small waterinsect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternating pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the minds self-experience in the act of thinking. 28 There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION. [. . .] (I, 124-5)

Compare Becketts contention in Recent Irish Poetry that it is the act and not the object of perception that matters (Disjecta 74).

28

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Coleridge was not alone in his stress on the active-passive quality of the imagination; Kant, Tetens, Fichte, and Schelling had each theorized as much by 1815. For Coleridge, as for Schelling, Tetens, and Gerard, inspired genius necessitates the unification of the conscious and the unconscious, the spontaneous and the willfulin short, the whole soul of man. As he wrote in the Biographia, The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity (II, 15-16). In Concerning the Plastic Arts (1807), Schelling had also written that Art brings the whole man [. . .] to a knowledge of the highest, and in this rests the everlasting distinction and wonder of art (III, 629). Similarly, Beckett writes in his review of Denis Devlins Intercessions that Art is the sun, moon and stars of the mind, the whole mind (Disjecta 94). As we saw in the last chapter regarding the dangers of the imagination, the whole soul of man necessarily includes dark, unconscious powers, an idea that underlies much Romantic theory and poetry and one that Beckett was to seize and make into a fetish. In the 1850 version of The Prelude, Wordsworth deftly wove three kinds of journeysthe literal tour he is describing, the process of the poems composition, and the related psychological journey that the poem dramatizesand became stunned by the terrifying, unwieldy power of the imagination: That awful power rose from the minds abyss Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps. At once, some lonely traveler. I was lost; Halted without an effort to break through. (VI, 594-7) The idea of imagination as an unfathered vapour is crucial in that it gives voice to the possibility that it is autonomous and, like Akensides dark abyss that Pours out her births unknown in The Pleasures of the Imagination, lacks origin (an unfathered vapour), an idea that plagues the majority of Becketts narrators and characters whose own mental abysses likewise become inundated by imaginative vapours that have no discernable points of origin, or destination, and consequently enwrap them often against their feeble wills. [T]hese voices are not mine, cries the Unnamable, nor these thoughts, but the voices and thoughts of the devils who beset me (397). One of Hazlitts contributions to the expressive theory of art was

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his sometimes macabre insistence that unconscious impulses, over which one has little or no control, impel human motivation and the creation of poetry. Throughout many of Hazlitts essays, in fact, there are a number of pre-Freudian (and proto-Surrealist) insights into the nature of the secret motives and hidden desires that often motivate ones action. In his essay On Dreams, which was originally published in The Plain Speaker in 1826, Hazlitt writes, We are not hypocrites in our sleep. The curb in taken off from our passions, and our imagination wanders at will. [. . .] in sleep we reveal the secret to ourselves (XII, 23). Later in The Plain Speaker, in a rather decadent essay entitled On the Pleasure of Hating, Hazlitt analyzes why there is a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind [that] takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction (XII, 128). And in On Depth and Superficiality, he writes, The griefs we suffer are for the most part of our own seeking and making; or we incur or inflict them [cf. the Unnamables Its I who am doing this to me (452)], not to avert other impending evils, but to drive off ennui. There must be a spice of mischief and willfulness thrown into the cup of our existence to give it its sharp taste and sparkling colour. [. . .] I laugh at those who deny that we ever wantonly or unnecessarily inflict pain upon others, when I see how fond we are of ingeniously tormenting ourselves. (XII, 349) Similarly, in Mind and Motive, originally published in The Examiner on February 26, 1815, Hazlitt wrote a paragraph that one could easily mistake for Freuds own writing: We waste our regrets on what cannot be recalled [cf. Krapp?], or fix our desires on what we know cannot be attained. Every hour is the slave of the last [cf. Proust: There is no escape from the hours and the days (13)]; and we are seldom masters either of our thoughts or of our actions. We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest (XX, 43). Becketts own sense that he was a creature of the imagination, seized by a creative impulse, is well documented. I didnt choose to write a play, he once quipped, it just happened like that (qtd. in Reid 65). In Proust, Beckett had written, in a passage reminiscent of Jung, that The work of art is neither created nor chosen but discovered, uncovered, excavated, pre-existing within the artist, a law of his nature (64). This idea, with its haunting implications,

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is a leitmotif throughout The Unnamable: I havent much choice, I dont choose, the word came (460). As Daniel Albright notes in Beckett and Aesthetics (2003), From Watt on, Becketts artist-figures have tried in vain to understand the provenance of images and voices, the mechanisms by which material comes into ones head and is elaborated and transcribed (15). As we shall see, it is largely the indeterminate nature of images and voices that circumscribes Becketts particular strain of Romanticism. Coleridge himself was well aware of the part that the unconscious played in the production of his own visionary poetry. Perhaps the most famous example of his unconscious, passive reception of poetic material resides in his preface to Kubla Khan, a poem that he claimed was more a psychological curiosity than one of any supposed poetic merits: The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. Imagination Dead Imagine, like so many of Becketts works, similarly represents the poet in the dynamic act of creation, which paradoxically includes passively noting images and often phantasmagoric visions that rise up before him as things. In Imagination Dead Imagine, the narrators imperative to wait seems to indicate that, in order to say how it is, he may be trying to record the images as he sees them, as though he hasnt much choice about their appearing. His imaginative visions spontaneously grow out of an emptiness and silence that is fundamentally unknowable: Emptiness, silence, heat, whiteness, wait, the light goes down, all grows dark together, ground, wall, vault, bodies, say twenty seconds, all the greys, the light goes out, all vanishes. At the same time the temperature goes down, to reach its minimum, say freezing-point, at the same instant that the black is reached, which may seem strange. Wait, more or less long, light and heat come back, all grows

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white and hot together, ground, wall, vault, bodies, say twenty seconds, all the greys, till the initial level is reached whence the fall began. (182-3) Pilling notes this passive aspect of Becketts creative process: Imagining has become, for Beckett, less and less a matter of exercising the will, and more and more a matter of waiting for the mercies vouchsafed by inspiration (147). The irony, of course, is that Imagination Dead Imagine is much better crafted than its parent piece, All Strange Away. Gone from Imagination Dead Imagine, for instance, is the sprawling, often incoherent narrative that comprises the majority of the previous text, and a close study of the manuscripts of these pieces reveals the astonishing extent to which Beckett shaped the visions that organically came to him from he knew not where. The fusion of passive and active levels of imagination plays a central role in the unpublished pieces Verbatim, from the so-called Sottisier Notebook that is primarily aphoristic in nature, and The Voice, 29 both of which constitute fragments of what would later become Company. Becketts notes for Verbatim clearly indicate that he was concerned from the outset with the usual themes of perception and imagination. Early in the Notebook, he cites Schopenhauers famous tags that served as the foundation for Becketts Proust: Die welt ist meine Vorstellung Wille

The question of How to apprehend the real, as he said in his Trinity lectures (Burrows 15), of how to perceive the object without the haze of conceptionpreconception (Proust 23), constitutes one of the most enduring Romantic themes in Becketts oeuvre. It is a theme, of course, that is directly connected to the esemplastic power of imagination, and Beckett clearly saw the two themes as intimately related. In a section of the Notebook dated Ussy 26/2/77, he wrote two short stanzas that give voice to the imaginations persistence and function as the kernel for what would later become Companys obsessive concern with imagining something out of nothing: Imagine si un jour ceci un beau jour
Both the Sottisier Notebook, which contains notes towards Verbatim, and The Voice are in the Reading Archive (MS 2901 and MS 2910, respectively).
29

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imagine si un beau jour ceci pouvait sattnuer imagine

imagine si ceci un jour ceci un beau jour imagine si un jour un beau jour ceci si ceci cessait imagine By January of 1977, in his notes towards The Voice/VERBATIM, Beckett pushed the theme of active imagination even further, indicating that we are witnessing the mind at work in the shaping process of imaginative creation. In the middle of his notes, Beckett writes the imperative, Now that silence imagine. Begin to imagine. These are, perhaps not so incidentally, the same words that Beckett quotes in his review of Jack B. Yeatss The Amaranthers, an early review that is entirely preoccupied with the point in Yeatss work where imagination is not banned (90), where the reality of the imagined effects a coalescence (89) of the subject and object in a single series of imaginative transactions (90). Beckett makes the obvious connection with Proust, though Beckett remarks that Yeatss is a world of the same order if not so intense as the ideal real of Prowst [sic] (89). In the conclusion of his review, Beckett quotes a passage from The Amaranthers where the radiance and dynamism of the landscape become an imaginative fact:

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The landscape is superb, radiant and alive, with its own life 30 [. . . .] The end, the beginning, is among the hills, where imagination is not banned, and Gilfoyle saying to the Amaranthers, their cowering skyscraper days over: You begin to stop emptying your heads, every time they begin to fill with thoughts, and then you will begin to think, and then you will stop thinking and begin to talk. . . . And then you will stop talking and begin to fancy, and then you will stop fancying and begin to imagine. And by that time it will be morning. He has been through it, and so he knows [italics mine]. (90) The phrase stop fancying and begin to imagine, the latter part of which Beckett recalls verbatim in The Voice, becomes the leitmotif in The Voice and forms the basis for Company. Company is a complex fugue between memory and imagination (both willed and unwilled), the former of which, memory, is explicitly linked to mechanical fancy. This is a point at which Beckett and Coleridge converge, though there are also some crucial departures. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, trust in externally given forms led Descartes to consider imaginatio a faculty inferior to intellectio, which does not require images. In Leviathan, too, Hobbes equated imagination with memory and emphasized the supremacy of Reason:
IMAGINATION [. . .] is nothing but decaying sense [. . .] This decaying sense,

when we would express the thing itselfI mean fancy itselfwe call imagination, as I said before; but when we would express the decay and signify that the sense is fading, old, and past, it is called memory. So that imagination and memory are but one thing [. . . .] (27-8) The great Romantic shift to an emphasis on external nature, however, coincided with a renewed interest in imaginatio, and in the Biographia, Coleridge divided the imaginative function into imagination and fancy, but he equated the latter with Hobbess conflation of imagination and memory: The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space (I, 305). He later calls Fancy the ape, and too often the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory (II, 235). Company oscillates between the spontaneous eruption of memories that vanish of their own accord and willed scenes of imaginative creation, the former
30

Cf. Company: The dazzling land. You at a standstill in the midst (27).

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being equivalent to Hobbess definition of imagination as decaying sense and Coleridges definition of fancy as a mechanical mode of memory, the latter corresponding to Coleridges definition of secondary imagination as vital and, when it cannot re-create, a faculty of idealization and unification (Biographia I, 304). As opposed to Schelling, who conceived of imagination as constitutive of reality, Coleridges view, as Thomas McFarland writes in Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969), mediates between a nature of real objects and a real I am, creates poetry, not the world, and maintains the priority of the I am over the it is. Coleridge was closer to Kant than he was to Schelling, and closer to Kant than Schelling was to Kant [. . .] (308). This is why Coleridge described The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a poem of pure imagination, that is, a poem that does not rely upon memory or the reproduction of actual scenes or objects experienced in the external world; it is, rather, a poem that was a willed creation by the primacy of the I am. And this would account for Coleridges derisive comment in the Biographia about Wordsworths poetic method, which was still slavishly tied to mimesis and consequently led Wordsworth to mistake the co-presence of fancy with imagination for the operation of the latter singly (I, 194). Becketts relationship to all this is complex, but Verbatim, The Voice, and Company suggest that he was quite closely aligned with Coleridge up to a point. Beckett would certainly have questioned the primacy of this so-called I am, and indeed, Company largely presents a spiral of devisers with no discernable points of origin or destination, but a willful deviser nevertheless imaginatively shapes dynamic scenes that are given to it from an unknown source. On the penultimate page of The Voice, Beckett writes, Fuck it it says as though referring to another enough there for the time being. Enough imagined there. The willful aspect of the poets creative process seems to be intact here, as it is on the last page of the manuscript: Fuck it it says as if referring to another enough there for the time being. Enough imagined there. Add more at some future time. When continuance perhaps a problem. Or subtract. And back to none. Pause to recollect what said of itself so far. As [if] of another. It. Mind voice. Old. Toneless. Breathless. Faint. Faltering. Minutely. Tidal. At a loss for words. For matter. Unfixed in space. Whereas hearer fixed.

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The poets ability to inaugurate or suspend imaginative creation (e.g., Begin to imagine, Enough imagined there, etc.) is also fused with the poets (Becketts) passive remembrance (Biographia II, 54) of Keatss Ode to a Nightingale, as two striking allusions to the poem testify. Coleridge thought that an imitation, which is the work of secondary imagination, was far superior to a copy, which is the work of the primary imagination (Biographia II, 72). Most anyone could memorize and re-produce, say, Ode to a Nightingale, but the secondary imagination dissolves, diffuses, [and] dissipates the stuff of memory in order to re-create (Biographia I, 304), thus producing an original creation and, at its highest level, a work of genius. In The Voice Beckett writes, Silent! The very word it says brings tears to its eyes here mentioned for the first time, an allusion to the last stanza of the Nightingale Ode in which the speaker is wrenched out of his dreamlike reverie back to his sole self. After the second allusion to Keats, Dark! The very word etc., the speaker queries, Where then does memory appear? He replies, With silence sent. In his study of the manuscript of The Voice, P.J. Murphy notes that Beckett is remembering Keats at the same time as he is rewriting him (75). This would correspond to Coleridges higher function of imitation, which forms the basis for a large number of Becketts most original works of genius, as in his imitation of Hamlet and King Lear in Endgame. The passive memories of Keatss Ode, then, are trans-formed into the original imaginative creation that is The Voice and, later, Company, the latter of which is similarly balanced by a crawling creator (38) who also has an active-passive imagination. Company, in fact, presents us with Coleridges three major distinctions: Fancy, which is associated with mechanical memory that in Hobbess distinction is tantamount to decaying sense; primary imagination, which is the involuntary, passive Agent of all human Perception (Biographia I, 304); and secondary imagination, which is the willful creation of new images and symbols with the picture (i.e., re-presentation) of the world that the primary imagination involuntarily provides. The secondary imagination, for Coleridge, must rely on the raw materials, the unformed clay, of the primary imagination, and it is for this reason that the secondary imagination is an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation (Biographia I, 304). Again, Becketts logic in Company necessitates the

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workings of the whole mind (Disjecta 94). As we have seen, there is even an artistic, shaping mind at work in a text like Imagination Dead Imagine where the imaginative creations are more controlled than they were in All Strange Away and, according to the narrator of Imagination Dead Imagine, quite as much a matter of chance (184). Also, in Long Observation of the Ray, Becketts mathematical calculations in the first draft (MS 2909/1) are tempered by what appears to be a note indicating randomness; he projects a thematic structure (as his careful, meticulous mathematical calculations demonstrate) with equivalent increments and diminishments in a predictable, rigid sequence, but he also notes that chance will partly constitute the text, for he includes an asterisk next to some of the sequences to indicate, as he wrote, any order. Coleridge consistently used the analogy of the self-generation of plants to explain the difference between two modes of poetry, that of fancy and empirical choice, which he saw exemplified in the poetry of Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and Pope, and that of the organic, which involves the higher faculties, the genius, of imagination, which he took to be operative in the poetry of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. In Shakespearean Criticism, for instance, Coleridge wrote that in Shakespeare we find Growth as in a plant (I, 233). The plant, Coleridge further wrote in the Statesmans Manual, effectuates its own secret growth (77) and organizes itself into its proper form. But Coleridges polar logic necessitated that he include the poets will in the shaping of the work of art, for he further claimed in Shakespearean Criticism that a poet like Shakespeare never wrote anything without design (II, 192). The initial impetus, though, is organic and innate: The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form [. . .] as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form (I, 223-4). Beckett likewise stresses in Imagination Dead Imagine that the workings of imagination are both given to and controlled by the only point of view possible, the poets: Rediscovered miraculously after what absence in perfect voids it is no longer quite the same, from this point of view, but there is no other (184). The phrase rediscovered miraculously has both active and passive aspects, and it confirms the necessity of both organic inspiration and Kraft. As Gontarski argues, Becketts creative synthesis involves

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passive and active functions: Embracing the aleatory, he also insists on maintaining considerable control. [. . .] Herein lies the Beckettian creative synthesis: the writer shapes, forms, adds another tropological dimension to the artists subconscious inspiration; the rational further mediates the irrational (The Intent 18). In Company, the distinction-without-separation of Coleridges primary and secondary imagination is evident in the opening line: A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine (3). The voice, that is, is given to a passive hearer, who then takes that given voice and imaginatively weaves it, as the imperative Imagine suggests, into a series of dynamic scenes, all of which he devises (a recurring word in the text, along with creator, that indicates conscious control) for company: Devising figments to temper his nothingness (33). In between the unbidden (27) eruption and fading of (romantically nostalgic) childhood memories, 31 then, the deviser willfully imagines scenes with the voices that come to him from a silent source: Imagine closer the place where he lies. Within reason. To its form and dimensions a clue is given by the voice afar (23). Later, the narrator wonders whether or not the crawling creator crawling in the same create dark as his creature create while crawling (38). His response to this query indicates that the choice, at least in part, is his: And many crawls were necessary and the like number of prostrations before he could finally make up his imagination on this score. [. . .] So while in the same breath deploring a fancy so reason-ridden and observing how revocable its flights he could not but answer finally no he could not. Could not conceivably create while crawling in the same create dark as his creature. (38-9) The narrators reason-ridden fancy, then, inhibits his imaginative possibilities. But as we have seen, the major qualification is that Coleridge privileges the poets absolute self (Biographia I, 114), presumably a coherent entity, through his exercise of the secondary imagination since that faculty channels the creative activity of art. Recent scholarship about the function of dreams in Coleridges work, however, has yielded new insights into the problematic nature of subjectivity for Coleridge himself. In Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination (1998), for instance, Jennifer Ford argues that Coleridge was well aware of the
As the narrator reports at the outset, That then is the proposition. To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past (3-4).
31

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disruption of unified subjectivity in somnial states and that this disruption posed significant philosophical problems for Coleridge: The nature and capabilities of the I in somnial spaces posed crucial, indeterminate philosophical questions for Coleridge. For years, he struggled with his opinions on the nature of the I, and whether the mind which contained this I was its own object or whether it was a subject. What the I could be subjected to was yet another problematic, and at times frightening, speculation. The processes of poetic creativity and of dreaming frequently challenged his wellread opinions on the constitution of this I, particularly as he grew older and still continued to experience frightening dreams. [. . .] That dreams and the processes of dreaming threaten a coherent notion of the self was an idea of which he was always dimly conscious, and gradually came to accept in later life. The mind is perceived as split, not only in a positive sense so that there are magical and mysterious regions awaiting exploration, but also in a negative, destructive sense. (49-51) The disruption of unified subjectivity of which Coleridge was always dimly conscious is just one small step away from Rimbauds systematic dispersal of the unified self in a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses, as he wrote to Demeny (qtd. in Ellmann and Feidelson 204). Coleridge, of course, would have been wary of this program, but it probably wouldnt have surprised him. For Beckett, the unity of subjectivity is not only fractured in somnial spaces, as it is with Coleridge, but it is fractured once and for all. So although there is a willful deviser at work in Company, the exact nature of that deviser is ultimately incoherent and indeterminate. The eighth proclamation of the neo-Romantic Poetry Is Vertical manifesto may offer a clue to Becketts direction here: The final disintegration of the I in the creative act is made possible by the use of a language which is a mantic instrument, and which does not hesitate to adopt a revolutionary attitude toward word and syntax, going even so far as to invent a hermetic language, if necessary (transition no. 21, 1932, 148). Perhaps Company, with its final disintegration of the I in the creative act, is Coleridges Rime filtered through Rimbauds Le Bateau Ivre or

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Apollinaires Zone, the latter of which, a proto-Surrealist poem that anticipates the montage technique of Surrealist painting and Eliots The Waste Land and even Company itself, presents a splintered subject who appears and vanishes in that liminal zone of being that Beckett praised time and again. As early as Proust, for instance, Beckett had detected the many Is of Albertine (60). It is the passive, autonomous aspect of the poets creative process, rather than the primacy of the Coleridgean I am, that Beckett highlighted since, for him, the artist is unknowable because he is in a constant state of flux, of dure. In Company, we learn that the deviser is devising himselfDeviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company (18); and Devising it all himself included for company (31)and that he himself is being devised by a deviser who is yet to be imagined (18), a clue indicating that the readers imagination is yet another (perhaps the ultimate) deviser who wills the speaker into existence within the fiction-making sphere of his own dark mind. In speaking of the the shadowy light, the speaker invites the reader to close the eyes in the dark and try to imagine that (13). Coleridges primacy of the I am, therefore, would have been suspect to Beckett, who found the most creative potential in the clair-obscur zone that fuses light and dark into the reality of the imagined, an inexplicable single series of imaginative transactions (Disjecta 89-90). The autonomy of imagination and the ultimate incoherence of self, then, are the cornerstones of Becketts Romanticism of contraction and evaporation. Once again, he inherited this vision of unfathered voice from the darker, more sinister aspects of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Keatsaspects that Lautramont, Huysmans, Rimbaud, and the Surrealists teased out and made into an aesthetics of fracture, dislocation, and de-construction. In his poem The Pains of Sleep, for instance, Coleridge expresses an anguished vision of imaginative seizure that tramples his personal will: But yester-night I prayed aloud In anguish and in agony, Up-starting from the fiendish crowd Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me: A lurid night, a trampling throng,

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Sense of intolerable wrong, And whom I scorned, those only strong! Thirst of revenge, the powerless will Still baffled, and yet burning still! Desire with loathing strangely mixed On wild or hateful objects fixed. Fantastic passions! maddening brawl! And shame and terror over all! Surrealism merely pushed the logic of the powerless will even further into an aesthetics of automatism. In his youth, Beckett experimented with Surrealisms auto-dictation (the I say it as I hear it of How It Is) but, partly because of political reasons, was unable to embrace Surrealism fully, despite his possible signing of the Surrealist-influenced Poetry is Vertical manifesto in transition. The artistic experimentation of 1930s Paris deeply influenced Beckett, and the Surrealist enterprise was no exception. Becketts translations of a large number of Surrealist texts is a case in point. In 1932, for instance, Edward W. Titus, after much persuasion (5), received Andr Bretons consent to guest edit the extraordinary Surrealist Number of This Quarter (5.1), an avant-garde literary magazine much like transition. Breton spoke no English, though, and was consequently forced to rely on finding translators for the material that he published, and Beckett ended up translating twenty-two of them, which Titus duly acknowledged in the preface: We shall not speak of the difficulties experienced in putting this material placed at our disposal into English, but we cannot refrain from singling out Mr. Samuel Becketts work for special acknowledgment. His rendering of the luard and Breton poems in particular is characterizable only in superlatives (6). Perhaps most interestingly, some of Becketts translations included essays by Breton and luard that simulated, up to a point, 32 mental illness, as in Simulation of Mental Debility Essayed, Simulation of General Paralysis Essayed, and Simulation of the Delirium of Interpretation Essayed. These translations may have been the seed for Watts (or Sams) breakdown of linguistic intelligibility with the random inversion of letters, words, and
32

Cf. Company: The lower the order of mental activity the better for company. Up to a point (7).

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sentences, a breakdown, indeed, that forces Watt into the asylum. So many of Becketts characters search out, reside or belong in mental institutions; Beckett himself, not incidentally, visited his friend Geoffrey Thompson in the mid-1930s at the Bethlem Royal Hospital in South London, where Thompson worked as a psychiatrist. Beckett took extensive notes in his Whoroscope Notebook about his experiences in that mental hospital, one of the most significant being his tour on 23 September 1935 of the wards. It would not be surprising, then, that Beckett would be so attracted to Surrealism, a movement dedicated to learning the secrets of the insane. All these experiences, in fact, directly influenced Becketts conception of Murphy, a character, not Becketts only, who utterly romanticizes the asylum, that is, the nuthouse that is both refuge and release from the societal (and Enlightenment) constraints of rationalism: All this was duly revolting to Murphy, whose experience as a physical and rational being obliged him to call sanctuary what the psychiatrics called exile and to think of the patients not as banished from a system of benefits but as escaped from a colossal fiasco (177-8). A passage from Bretons 1924 Manifesto, too, may have at least partly been the impetus for this: I am willing to admit that [the insane] are, to some degree, victims of their imagination, in that it induces them not to pay attention to certain rulesoutside of which the species feels itself threatenedwhich we are all supposed to know and respect. But their profound indifference to the way in which we judge them, and even to the various punishments meted out to them, allows us to suppose that they derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination, that they enjoy their madness sufficiently to endure the thought that its validity does not extend beyond themselves. And, indeed, hallucinations, illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure. (5) Bretons line from Surrealism and Madness in the special issue of This Quarter that I could devote my life to persuading lunatics to confide in me (101), which echoes his earlier line from the 1924 Manifesto that I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane (5), is virtually a leitmotif in Murphy. Psychological illness intrigued Beckett as early as Dream and Proust. In the former, for instance, he makes reference to the reality of insane areas of silence (102), and in Proust he links Prousts non-linear chronology with a kind of insanity: Prousts

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chronology is extremely difficult to follow, the succession of events spasmodic, and his characters and themes, although they seem to obey an almost insane inward necessity, are presented and developed with a fine Dostoievskian contempt for the vulgarity of a plausible concatenation (62). In a line that foreshadows both Murphy and Watt, too, Beckett suggests that we may recover the best of our many selves [. . .] when we escape into the spacious annexe of mental alienation, in sleep or the rare dispensation of waking madness (31-2). It is from this deep source, Beckett concludes, that Proust hoisted his world (32). Connected to this elision of rationalism, this waking madness, is the Surrealist emphasis on automatism. In the 1924 Manifesto, Breton defined Surrealism within this automatist context:
SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its purest state, by which one proposes to

expressverbally, by means of the written word, or in any other mannerthe actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. (26) Later, in the 1932 special issue of This Quarter, Breton reiterated the centrality of automatism in the creative process: we continue to hold surrealist expression to be definitely committed to the automatism I have stressed (43). Becketts 1938 essay Les Deux Besoins, a deliberately disjunctive, expressionistic essay about the necessity of irrational art, may be a throwback to his early association with Surrealist automatism (Disjecta 55-7). Albright even suggests that Becketts early translations of the Surrealists were, I believe, as important to his artistic development as his critical studies of Proust and Joyce were (10). Albright goes on to write poignantly about the influence on Becketts work of Surrealist exercises in simulated mental illness: Beckett, possessing the most remarkable literary equipment of his age, spent a lifetime learning how to write like a mental defective, in a toothless, broken-jawed, goggling idiom, maniacal and compulsive, what someone might say as he pounded a puppet with a hammer. In its way, this style is a triumph of diction. It is a kind of verbal gravel (17). Becketts early poetry was expressly concerned with exploring the liberating artistic possibilities that psychic automatism afforded, thereby betraying the influence, from which Beckett never wholly recovered, of the sixth proclamation of the Poetry Is Vertical manifesto:

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The reality of depth can be conquered by a voluntary mediumistic conjuration, by a stupor which proceeds from the irrational to a world beyond a world. Eugene Jolas, in fact, published Becketts Surrealist poems Malacoda, Enueg II, and Dortmunder in transition no. 24, 1936, under the suggestive VERTIGRAL heading, a pun on integral and the German word for grail. Earlier, in 1932, Jolass own quest for a revolution of the soul, as he wrote with Coleridgean flair in the Preface to no. 21, necessitated an entry into the healing powers of the living imagination (no. 21, 1932, 6), which for Beckett at least initially takes place, as Dortmunder puts it with a Surrealistic language of night, In the magic the Homer dusk, that is, in the magical twilight realm of imaginative creation before the bawd / puts her lute away. Jolas further declared that transition had little faith in Reason and Science as ultimate methods because of their emphasis on the concept (no. 21, 1932, 6), which presages Becketts own critiques of pure and practical reason in Murphy and, especially, in Watt. But again, this theme is already evident in Dortmunder, a poemmuch like Coleridges laudanum-induced Kubla Khan, De Quinceys opium-induced confessions, and Rimbauds arch-alcohol of song that yields a series of phantasmagoric visionsin which the poet drinks Dortmunder, a German beer, in order to write under its liberating influence; in this sedated state, the poets Will is no longer operative, as the explicit reference to Schopenhauer suggests, thus prompting the drunk poet-seer to write it as he hears it. I null, declares the speaker of the poem in a self-canceling gesture of suspension, a gesture that reminds us of Becketts self-confessed Dionysian sensibility. In Nietzsches The Dionysiac World View, an essay that he wrote in 1870 and one that remained unpublished during his lifetime, he sets out to distinguish Dionysiac from Apolline art, a distinction, of course, that would constitute the central thematic concern of The Birth of Tragedy two years later: Dionysiac art [. . .] is based on play with intoxication, with the state of ecstasy. There are two principal forces which bring nave, natural man to the self-oblivion of intense intoxication: the drive of spring and narcotic drink. Their effects are symbolized in the figure of Dionysos. In both states the principium individuationis is disrupted, subjectivity disappears entirely before the erupting

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force of the general element in human life, indeed of the general element in nature. (120) Becketts self-oblivion or long night phrase under the influence of a narcotic drink disrupts the principium individuationis, for the glory of the bawds dissolution enlarged / in him to such an extent that he merges with the prophet Habbakuk, mard of all sinners. In the 1924 Manifesto, Breton similarly equates the spontaneous eruption of images with the use of a narcotic and quotes Baudelaire to drive his point home: It is true of Surrealist images as it is of opium images that man does not evoke them; rather they come to him spontaneously, despotically. He cannot chase them away; for the will is powerless now and no longer controls the faculties (36). Similarly, Beckett seems to be suggesting in Dortmunder, as he had stated in his Trinity lectures and in Proust, that the poets task is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent (65)taking place, one might say, at a threshold that divides the world in two, in the will-less second or third zones of Murphys mind, in the twilight realms of consciousness where the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, as Coleridge writes in the Biographia (II, 147). These twilight realms of consciousness are precisely what Beckett courts in For Future Reference, a dream poem that Jolas published in transition nos. 19-20, 1930, under the heading REALITY AND BEYOND. Throughout the nineteenth century, dreams were a source of fascination for many poets, scientists, and philosophers. Just to name but several examples of the pervasiveness of dreams and of the blurring of dream and reality in nineteenth century thought, Hazlitts interpretation of dreams in various essays, as we have seen, positively anticipated Freud, Coleridge (author of The Pains of Sleep in which he laments the powerless will) at least claimed to have written the fragmentary poem Kubla Khan (a Vision in a Dream) within the twilight realms of consciousness, De Quincey expressed his anxiety about dreams in the Confessions, 33 Byron explored the liminal nature of dreams in Darkness (I had a dream, which was not all a dream), and Keats explored sleeping states and the confusion between dream and reality in poems like Ode to a Nightingale, Endymion, and Sleep and
I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever re-ascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had re-ascended (68).
33

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Poetry. Becketts term for Coleridges twilight realms of consciousness was liminal consciousness, a state that he was quick to distinguish from the subconscious: [. . .] Sam loved finding little bits of what he called liminal consciousness, rather than the subconscious, within Racine. Little innuendoes. He made Racine seem very modern by picking out these things, and he used the words liminal consciousness all the time because, he said, if you talk about the pure subconscious, you cant really use that in literature. The pure subconscious would destroy the integrity of the real, whereas liminal consciousness, the half of consciousness, that was the thing he really wanted. (6) This is analogous to the second zone of Murphys mind, the half light (111), to what Beckett himself referred in his Trinity lectures as the clair-obscur, a French term for the Italian chiaroscuro, literally light-dark, that characterizes the artistic device, which Rembrandt and Caravaggio mastered and Beckett inherited largely through Dostoevski, of boldly contrasting light and shade in order to strengthen an illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface and, perhaps more suggestively for Beckett, of defining an object not with a contouring line but by the contrast between the colors of the object and its background. This blurring of sharp contours corresponds to the anti-Hulmian liminality that Beckett stressed in his lectures, and it would account for his insistence that the integrity of the real, a phrase that is tantamount to what Beckett also called the integrity of incoherence since (as he said) the psychologically real cant be stated (Burrows 15), was preserved in writers like Dostoevski, Stendhal, and Gide. The Romanticism that Beckett rejects, the coherent and pre-patterned, is not necessarily the most representative strain of Romanticism. As we have seen time and again, there exists a deep ambiguity in even the most mainstream Romantics like Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, an ambiguity that later Romantics like Rimbaud, Strindberg, Bergson, Breton, Lawrence, Faulkner, and Woolf would seize upon and make central to an aesthetics of the unforeseen and indeterminate. Romantic ambiguity, indeed, would influence the formation of what one could call the many post-Romanticisms that constitute the history of late nineteenth and twentieth century literature: Symbolism, Decadence, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Post-Modernism. At least one of these movements, Surrealism,

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consciously defined itself as the offspring of Romanticism, and certain aspects of Surrealism most certainly filtered into Becketts theory of the clair-obscur. In transition nos. 19-20, 1930, Jolas argued in his quasi-Surrealist essay The Dream that he was following in the footsteps of Coleridge and Novalis by encouraging an examination of the night-mind, which refers back to his insistence in Notes on Reality that the dream is pure imagination (no. 18, 1929, 18), an idea that may anticipate the imaginative vision of the Dreamers dreamt self in Becketts deeply moving nocturne, Nacht und Trume. In The Dream, Jolas follows a similar line of argument about the night-mind: The study of the dream, which was canonized by Coleridge and Novalis more than a hundred years ago, seemed of particular interest in an age that is striving to make poetry didactic and descriptive. I wanted to encourage an examination of the night-mind. Somehow I felt that the nocturnal realities should be studied and incorporated in the poetic scheme in order to wrench apart such logical facts as seemed to be stumbling blocks for a visionary feeling for life. I was not interested in Freudian symbols, but in symbolism tout court. I regarded the dream and everything pre-logical as an integral function in the struggle for a comprehensive attitude toward life. Without having known the nether worlds of the chthonian any discipline of the intellect is likely to be problematical. The creative mind fuses the irrational and the rational. (nos. 19-20, 1930, 47) Becketts For Future Reference is clearly in tune with this nocturnal agenda. The opening lines are a call for a Surrealistic plunge into the basement, the night-mind that effects what Breton in the 1924 Manifesto called a surreality (14). This somnial state is consequently free of the rationalism of the Aufklrung, as Jolas wrote in The Language of Night (45), and it acknowledges the reality of depth that can be conquered by a voluntary mediumistic conjuration, by a stupor which proceeds from the irrational to a world beyond a world, as the Poetry Is Vertical manifesto articulated it: My cherished chemist friend lured me aloofly down from the cornice

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into the basement and there: drew bottles of acid and alkali out of his breast to a colourscale accompaniment (mad dumbells spare me!) fiddling deft and expert with the doubled jointed nutcrackers of the hens ovaries But I stilled my cringing and smote him yes oh my strength! smashed mashed (peace my incisors!) flayed and crushed him with a ready are you steady cuff-discharge. But did I? The final questionBut did I?undercuts the scene and reminds us that the images are indeterminate, unreliable. The speakers cherished chemist friend has about him an eeriness that borders on nightmare or madness (mad dumbells spare me!), an eeriness that later in the poem materializes in the figure of the Mutilator. Lawrence Harvey notes, indeed, that The terror of dreaming is a leitmotif that runs through Becketts writing as a kind of subterranean analogue to the misery of living. The reality of the subconscious life of the mind probably has a bearing on the notion that all life does not immediately cease upon death [. . .] (299). The surreality of For Future Reference is also reminiscent of another maritime dream poem that Beckett deeply admired, Rimbauds Le Bateau Ivre, for the speakers enforced buoyancy in Becketts poem reflects Rimbauds buoyant subject who tosses about like a cork on the billows. Subjectivity in both poems is disoriented, disorienting, and profoundly indeterminate. And it flows far beneath the broad board, as the speaker of For Future

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Reference puts it, or as the opening words of Le Bateau Ivre suggest, Downstream on impassive rivers. In the 1924 Manifesto, Breton had stressed the necessity of letting oneself be carried downstream along these impassive rivers of unconsciousness: Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless (13). As early as 1744, in Mark Akensides The Pleasures of Imagination, this theme of automatism, what Akenside refers to as the loveliest frenzy (III, ii, 383), was already evident, though it was by no means courted as with the Surrealists. Becketts famous siege in the room has clear affinities with this frenzy in which, as Akenside writes, ten thousand shapes / Like spectres trooping to the wizards call / Flit swift before him (III, ii, 385-7). As Gontarski shrewdly notes, Essence rarely precedes existence in Becketts work (The Intent 3). In the same issue in which Becketts dream poem For Future Reference appeared, Jolas personally translated and published C.G. Jungs Psychology and Poetry, an essay that is strikingly germane to Becketts own burgeoning theory of artistic creation as immersive, nocturnal, and trans-personal, as the evaporation of personal will and identity in poems like Dortmunder and For Future Reference makes evident. In his essay, Jung distinguishes between two types of poetry, the psychological and the visionary. While the psychological type of artistic creation takes place in the region of transparent psychology (28), the visionary type has a fundamentally opaque and somewhat sinister foundation: Here everything is reversed: the material or the experience which becomes the substance of the composition, is something unknown, it is of foreign essence, partaking of the background itself, and emerging, as it were, from abysses of prehistoric epochs or from light-worlds and dark-worlds, of super-human nature, a primal experience to which human nature almost threatens to succumb through weakness and incomprehension. (nos. 19-20, 1930, 28) Jung goes on to write about a profound darkness that resides over the visionary material (30), a darkness that cannot be reduced to, and explained away by, the biographical contents of the poets personal unconscious, thus anticipating a work like Company in which Beckett consistently elides the autobiographical conceit of accounting for present behavior in terms of past experiences. Freud, according to Jung, does not account for the secret of the creative, that

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is, the freedom of the will, a transcendental problem which psychology cannot explain, but only describe (39). Freuds psychology, Jung further argues, tries to unlock the work of art through the artists personal experience, but this attempt does not acknowledge the impersonal aspect of the creative process: The reduction of the visionary experience to a personal one makes the former something figurative, a mere substitute. With this the visionary contents lose their primal character, the primal vision becomes a symptom, and the chaos degenerates into a psychic disturbance (32). Like the Surrealists, Jung even found that the people who suffered from mental illnesses, such as schizophrenics, were especially close to the collective unconscious and often used archetypal symbols to convey their experiences, thoughts, and visions: in eclipses of consciousness, as for instance in the dream, in narcosis, in mental aberration etc., psychic products or contents float up to the surface bearing all the characteristics of the primal psychic condition; even the imaginative contents are primitive in character, as if they were fragments of an ancient secret science (37). We may assume that Beckett was thinking along these lines when he said to Tom Driver that the new artist must find a form that will accommodate the mess of human experience: What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now. (qtd. in Graver and Federman 219) Beckett would no doubt have appreciated what Jung calls the abyss that opens up between Faust I and Faust II, an abyss that separates also the psychological and visionary types of artistic creation (28). Becketts own words for this abyss are incoherence, chaos, and mess, but they are equally inexplicable and, because of their opacity, create a splintered subject who is no longer in complete control of his art. Beckett, of course, had tremendous admiration for Joyces

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Apollonian ability to manipulate his material consciously, but as Beckett told Israel Shenker in 1956, he did not feel the same sense of control in the artistic process: With Joyce the difference is that Joyce is a superb manipulator of material perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isnt a syllable thats superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which Im not master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. Hes tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. Im working with impotence, ignorance. (qtd. in Graver and Federman 148) The zone of being that Beckett explores, then, is the zone of indeterminacy, of innuendo, of halflightin short, of the night-world. Similarly, it should come as no surprise that Jolas, who was so intent on publishing Joyces book of the dark in transition, would be particularly interested in Jungs suggestion that the visionary artist works from within the nocturnal sphere (35) and betrays the artists essential duality: Every creative man is a duality or a synthesis of paradoxical qualities. On the one hand he is human-personal, on the other hand, an impersonalcreative process (41). This may have directly influenced Jolas, who went on to publish in the next issue a fascinating essay he wrote entitled The Interior Duologue. Jolas argues that interior monologue is no longer an adequate term for the kind of technique that writers like Joyce had been employing: Ever since the appearance of James Joyces ULYSSES, one of the processes used by him is consistently called interior monologue. It seems to me this designation is wrong. The inner mechanism of Work in Progress is the dialogue. A close study of the technique shows that the converse is always between the unconscious I and the unconscious you. Friedrich Schlegel, the critic of the German romanticists, called attention to the fact more than a hundred years ago that there is an inner dualism not only in our dreams, but also in our waking state so that we really think in twos.

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I think it is about time to pension off the term interior monologue and give the process its proper designation: interior duologue. (transition, no. 22, 1933, 126) This is a restatement of Jolass earlier argument in The Language of Night (1932) where he quotes M. Jean Paulhans contention that the interior dialogue has not only a dual character, but is also multiple in movement. There is a simultaneity of stratified dialogues (53). Krapps Last Tape is nothing if not a duologue with a simultaneity of stratified dialogues between his various selves from disparate points in time. And in his notes towards Verbatim in the Sottisier Notebook, Beckett writes, Tone: Speech by A overheard by B described to C, i.e. recta converted to obliqua. A, B, C, one and the same (Reading Archive), suggesting that he pushed the duologue even furtherinto the realm of triologue. Beckett, therefore, was well aware that the space that intervenes between [the artist] and the world of objects, as he wrote in Recent Irish Poetry (70), also refers to a rupture within the self. Beckett brought the schism between subject and object indoors, thereby transferring the rupture of the lines of communication (70) to the subjects alienation from itself. This is a theme that would resurface throughout his career, from his obsessive concern with pseudo-couples to his conscious appropriation of the doppelganger image that he imported wholesale from Schuberts haunting lied, Der Doppelgnger, for pieces like Film and Ohio Impromptu. In the manuscript of Film (MS 1227/7/6/1), for instance, Beckett noted, If music unavoidable Schuberts / Doppelganger / with perhaps Ich bin nicht wild, komme nicht zu / strafen? (Reading Archive). The German phrase is from Schuberts Der Tod und Das Mdchen (D531), based on Matthias Claudiuss poem that describes Death advancing to a frightened young girl, and the reference to Schuberts Der Doppelgnger, the thirteenth piece in Schwanengesang (D957), confirms that Beckett had the image of the double in mind as he penned the scene in which O witnesses his split self, his shadowy Other. The words in Schuberts lied are from a poem by Heinrich Heine that describes a lonely man who sees his spectral double when he revisits the house of his former love: Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen, In diesem Hause wohnte mein Schatz; Sie hat schon lngst die Stadt verlassen,

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Doch steht noch das Haus auf demselben Platz.

Da steht auch ein Mensch und start in die Hhe, Und ringt die Hnde vor Schmerzensgewalt; Mir graust es, wenn ich sein Antlitz sehe Der Mond zeigt mir meine eigne Gestalt.

Du Doppelgnger, du bleicher Geselle! Was ffst du nach mein Liebesleid, Das mich geqult auf dieser Stelle So manche Nacht, in alter Zeit?

[Still is the night, the streets are resting; In that house lived my beloved. She left the township a long time ago; The house, however, still stands, has not moved.

There stands a man, too, staring upward, Wringing his hands in the grips of pain. It sickens me when I behold his face; The moon reveals me my own shape!

You, double of mine, palest old fellow, Why are you mocking my lovers anguish, That tortured me on that spot, For so many nights in times past?] The man staring upward at himself in the grips of pain foreshadows Os self-recognition at the conclusion of Film. Similarly, Ohio Impromptu calls for two actors who are As alike in appearance as possible (445). Textually, the images of union in Ohio are ubiquitous and find

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expression not only in the line With never a word exchanged they grew to be as one, but perhaps most poignantly with the islet along which the bereaved man paces: At the tip he would always pause to dwell on the receding stream. How in joyous eddies its two arms conflowed and flowed united on. Then turn and his slow steps retrace (446). The mirror image is most evident at the end of the text where Reader and Listener, equally submerged in Profounds of mind (448), may unite like the unified river arms, for their stony image is such that they look at each other Unblinking. Expressionless (448). As we have seen, the strand of Romanticism that Beckett embracedof indeterminacy, of incoherence, of spectral doubleswas filtered through the Romantic and the related Surrealist enterprises with which he engaged from an early stage. Significantly, Breton consciously associated Surrealism with Romanticism and argued in Surrealism Yesterday, To-Day and ToMorrow, an essay that he included in the special Surrealist issue of This Quarter, that the ultimate aims of Romanticism were only now being realized in its progeny, Surrealism: But at this moment, when the public authorities in France are preparing a grotesque celebration of the centenary of Romanticism, we for our part say that this Romanticismof which we are quite ready to appear historically to-day as the tail, though in that case an excessively prehensile tailthis Romanticism is, we say, in its very essence in 1930 the negation of these authorities and this celebration; we say, that for Romanticism to be a hundred years old is for it to be young and that what has been wrongly called its heroic period can no longer pass for anything but the pulings of a being who is only now beginning to make known its wants through us; and finally we say, that if it should be held that all that was thought before this infantall that was thought classicallywas good, then incontestably he is out for the whole of evil. (32-3) Becketts anti-classical sensibility would have identified with what Breton calls the unhealthiness of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans, and Lautramont: Let us not be afraid of making a law unto ourselves of this unhealthiness (32). In the 1924 Manifesto, Breton further declared, contra Hulmes neo-classicism, that logic was a faculty that the artist should avoid at all costs: We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving

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at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest (9). Watt seconds this notion. Beckett patently rejected what in his Trinity lectures he called artificial Romanticism, that is, the Romantic temperament that works from a fabricated or preconceived model toward an unchanging, coherent individual with a predictable psychology: He saw Gide and Proust as the successors to Dostoevski because they dared to preserve the complexity of the real, the inexplicable, unforeseeable quality of the human being. He rejected the naturalistic novels of writers like Balzac, which only depict the surface which he said had been peeled off by Proust (Burrows 8). The clair-obscur or the inexplicable, unforeseeable quality of human psychology that Beckett saw as endemic to modern life resurfaces throughout his career in his attempts to blend the opposites (Murphy 4) of light and dark in his dramaturgy, the idea for which he may initially have gleaned from his interest in Gnostic and Manichean dualism, the primary structural device, as his own production notes demonstrate, for Krapps Last Tape, a play, as James Knowlson has aptly demonstrated in Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett (1972), in which Beckett consistently juxtaposes light and darkness. In Becketts notes, for instance, he writes of the separation of light from darkness and further notes, with Augustinian undertones, that Krapp decrees physical (ethical) incompatibility of light (spiritual) and dark (sensual) only when he intuits possibility of their reconciliation intellectually as rational-irrational. In his interview with Tom Driver three years after he wrote Krapps Last Tape, Beckett echoed his early Trinity lectures and his production notes for Krapps Last Tape by stating that, since we are worlds apart from the ancient Greek stage, in which characters fates are sealed from the beginning, we live fundamentally inscrutable, inexplicable lives: If life and death did not both present themselves to us, there would be no inscrutability. If there were only darkness, all would be clear. It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable (qtd. in Graver and Federman 220). As Beckett further notes in his production notebook regarding the black ball that Krapp gives to the white dog, if the giving of the black ball to the white dog represents the sacrifice of sense to spirit the form here too is that of a mingling. This mingling, which in the play is symbolized by the equinox, represents Krapps frustrated attempts to blend the opposites in his heart. For the Surrealists, there exists in the mind a certain point at which

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opposites are reconciled. In the 1930 Second Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton defined this point as the goal toward which the Surrealist strived: Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, ceased to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point. From this it becomes obvious how absurd it would be to define Surrealism solely as constructive or destructive: the point to which we are referring is a fortiori that point where construction and destruction can no longer be brandished one against the other. (123-4) This is a highly Romantic idea that Breton adopted and adapted from the likes of Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Coleridge. In the Biographia, Coleridge uses the term tertium aliquid (what Kant had called the tertium medium) to denote this point of imaginative coalescence of opposite or discordant qualities: Now this tertium aliquid can be no other than an interpenetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both (I, 300). Yeatss interpenetrating gyres in A Vision, to which Beckett may allude with his triangular movements of the players in Quad, are a further manifestation of this Romantic ideal. This Romantic enterprise may have influenced Becketts burgeoning sense of the Proustian apprehension of the ideal real, a solution that Beckett, in his Trinity lectures, seems to have rejected in favor of Stendhals approach: Incoherent entity of the two components. One abolishes the other. They coexist in a state of incoherence (Burrows 15). The only question was how to find a way to accommodate this incoherence without denying its integrity as incoherence. Such would be the major aesthetic concern of Becketts writing life. In addition to Gnostic and Manichean dualism, German Idealism, and Surrealist aesthetics, Bergsons highly Romantic, vitalist philosophy of propulsive life may once again have influenced Becketts conception of the integrity of the real. In his Trinity lectures, Beckett explicitly cited Bergson in the context of the integrity of incoherenceBeckett stated that, like Bergson, the artist always remains half unconscious of himself (Burrows 14)and

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considered Bergsons philosophy an antidote to the artificial, fabricated Romanticism that Beckett rejected so vehemently. In particular, Bergsons well-known concepts of lan vital and dure seem to have had a lasting influence on Becketts sense that the artist and his material are unknowable because they are both in a constant state of flux. Bergson rebelled against the fixities and rigidities that logicians and materialists had ascribed to reality. Knowledge, argued Bergson, was not to be found in special formulas but in intuition, in the visionary insights of the poet, artist, and saint. Beckett actually mentioned Bergson in an early letter, dated 14 October 1930, to Charles Prentice in regards to the conclusion of Proust, which Beckett proposed to lengthen with a further analysis of Prousts and Bergsons understanding of intuitivism: I was greatly encouraged and reassured by the nice things you said about the book, because I really had no idea at all what kind of impression it would make. I wrote the conclusion in a hurry. Would you let me add 5 or 6 pages to the last 9? Or would that make it too long? I would like to develop the parallel with Dostoievski and separate Prousts intuitivism from Bergsons. In a letter dated 15 October 1930, Prentice consented to the changeDo by all means add five or six pages at the end, if you would like tobut Beckett, probably because he was tired of the monograph by that point, did not end up making the proposed changes after all, for as he wrote to Prentice on 3 December 1930, I have added nothing to Proust. I cant do anything here neither read nor think nor write. [. . .] Tom [McGreevy] wrote from Venice of a lush of Giorgones. Here nothing but fog [. . . .] It would be an interesting, though purely speculative, exercise to imagine what Beckett might have added to the end of Proust given his comments to Prentice, but as a letter to MacGreevy dated 31 January 1938 further suggests, Beckett was particularly attracted to Bergsons notion of dure. In the letter, Beckett compliments MacGreevy on the first part of his essay on Jack Yeats and goes on to indict those who try to fix that which is inherently flowing: I understand your anxiety to clarify his pre and post 1916 painting politically and socially, and especially in what concerns the last pictures I think you have provided a clue that will be of great help to a lot of people, to the kind of people who in the phrase of Bergson cant be happy till they have solidified the flowing, i.e. to most people (TCD Archive). Becketts distaste for those who attempt to solidify the flowing anticipates the

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many disastrous attempts in Watt to understand the dynamic workings of Mr. Knotts protean household in spatial and mathematical terms. In Creative Evolution, Bergson speaks of our inherent mobility as a continuous duration that one cannot separate without disrupting this natural flow: True, our psychic life is full of the unforeseen. A thousand incidents arise, which seem to be cut off from those which precede them, and to be disconnected from those which follow. [. . .] Now, states thus defined cannot be regarded as distinct elements. They continue each other in an endless flow. But, as our attention has distinguished and separated them artificially, it is obliged next to reunite them by an artificial bond. It imagines, therefore, a formless ego, indifferent and unchangeable, on which it threads the psychic states which it has set up as independent entities. Instead of a flux of fleeting shades merging into each other, it perceives distinct and, so to speak, solid colors, set side by side like the beads of a necklace; it must perforce then suppose a thread, also itself solid, to hold the beads together. But if [. . .] our existence were composed of separate states with an impassive ego to unite them, for us there would be no duration. For an ego which does not change does not endure, and a psychic state which remains the same so long as it is not replaced by the following state does not endure either. Vain, therefore, is the attempt to range such states beside each other on the ego supposed to sustain them: never can these solids strung upon a solid make up that duration which flows. What we actually obtain in this way is an artificial imitation of the internal life, a static equivalent which will lend itself better to the requirements of logic and language, just because we have eliminated from it the element of real time. [. . .] For our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the presentno prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. Memory [. . .] is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a

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drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. (5-7) This passage illuminates many of Becketts works, particularly a play like Krapps Last Tape, to a surprising degree. The endless flow of subjectivity, the ceaseless duration of ego, must have signaled to Beckett an alternative to the predictable coherence of self that he rejected in the characters of Balzac, whose duality, Beckett taught, is not organic (Burrows 14). Krapp artificially, inorganically separates time and memory into discrete units, thus disrupting their continuous duration with the mechanized register of the tape recorder. He tries in vain to understand himself by re-membering things past, but the recorder merely renders frozen his current predicament, as opposed to the fire and passion that were once in him. The Proustian grace of involuntary memory offers no relief to Krapp, who voluntarily searches for his memories, memories that are still-born and preserved on separate spools for future reference. In his production notes, Beckett writes that Krapp is guilty of an intellectual transgression, that is, of trying to unite sense and spirit through reason, the duty of which is not to join but to separate. Beckett further writes, For this sin he is punished as shown by the aeons. Like Murphy, Krapp is not a seamless whole but an irrevocable duality, as Beckett taught about Balzac, who consists of two separate things which dont interfere (Burrows 14). Krapp does not endure because he has constructed an artificial ego that threads the psychic states and memories that it has set up as independent entities. Krapp constipates the flow of timein short, he solidifies the flowing. The play does not actualize the clair-obscur that Beckett embraced, as Krapp ultimately dichotomizes, rather than fuses, the alternating light and dark in which the play is steeped. Krapp is a modern anti-hero who attempts to separate the light from the dark rather than coalesce the two into a coherent whole. Jolass Jungian essay Night-Mind and DayMind (transition, no. 21, 1932) is germane within the context of this play: Weary of the struggle which gnostic duality imposed on him, modern man relegated the principles of both darkness and light to a neurosis, or to a fairy tale suitable for children. This latter conception has worn itself out [. . . .] We have today means for investigating the night-mind and day-mind that

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never existed before. We must use them and probe as far as human possibilities will permit (222-3). Krapp, like Murphy, remains a duologue, a victim of the Cartesian sickness unto death. The integrity of incoherence that stands at the center of Becketts aesthetics, perhaps ironically, is neo-Romantic in that the indeterminate self destroys the dam of the unified self and allows for a flowing between subject and object. There is, then, a spiritual dimension to incoherence, what mystical theologians have long referred to as unknowing, with which Beckett is engagedsometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. This dimension is clear in Romantics like Novalis, Schelling, and Coleridge, and it permeates a series of late Romanticisms that appeared throughout the twentieth century. One of the most significant circles with which Beckett was associated was the one gathered around the neo-Romantic transition and headed up by Eugene Jolas, who had a vision of Romantic-Mystic ascent that often converged with Becketts aesthetic sensibility in interesting, sometimes unexpected ways. An examination of Becketts complex relationship to this circle, particularly within a context of what Jolas called pan-Romanticism, will constitute the bulk of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER FOUR

A FLIGHT OF THE ALONE TO THE ALONE: BECKETT AND THE RO(MANTIC) RHETORIC OF MYSTICAL THEOLOGY

and Dante and the Logos and all strata and mysteries Becketts Alba We shall go in search of the language of God. [. . .] We dream a new race visionary with the logos of God Eugene Jolass The Third Eye

A cursory glance through Becketts various notebooks reveals the astonishing extent to which he was fascinated with the world of Christian (particularly mystical) theology. In the Dream Notebook, for instance, he took some ten pages of notes from E.B. Puseys classic translation of Augustines Confessions, writing to MacGreevy in a letter dated 25 January 1931 that he was phrase-hunting in St. Augustine (TCD Archive). Also appearing in the notebook are quotations from Thomas Kempiss The Imitation of Christ, which he peppered with snippets from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, and approximately five detailed pages of notes from W.R. Inges Christian Mysticism (1899), the last of which provides an extraordinary compliment to Becketts mature fiction, particularly, though by no means exclusively, to Three Novels. In his notes for Verbatim in the unpublished Sottisier Notebook (Reading Archive), Beckett quotes a verse from Job 5:7moaning that the sparks fly upward, which echoes his much earlier jotting in the Dream Notebook of Eckhardts Fnkelein [divine spark]: organ by which the personality communicates with God & knows him (100)and later, in The Voice, develops his lasting concern with the Book of Job, particularly as it relates to the ubiquity of

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human distress, 34 with a series of direct quotations that he struggled to incorporate into the fabric of his text: interrog. affirm. neg. inter. opt. imp. imprec. Why die I not? My life is wind. I shall not be. Oh that I were. Perish the day. Let me be. Have pity on me. (Reading Archive)

A theological language of distress permeates Becketts writing, a language that he appropriated from his deep reading of key spiritual texts and, what is more, from their translation into nineteenth and twentieth century Romantic aesthetics. Despite the fact that Beckett sometimes couched mystical theological concerns in pastiche, particularly in the early work like Dream where Belacqua defines himself to Mr. Beckett as a dud mystic (186), his extraordinary German Letter of 1937, the earliest document that outlined the aesthetic concerns that would preoccupy him for the remainder of his life, and his mature fiction, particularly Three Novels, was filtered through a highly Romantic vocabulary that he may at least partly have absorbed through his association with Eugene Jolas and the Romantic rhetoric of transition. In other words, Becketts artistic path, and the ontological and epistemological concerns associated therewith, were largely formed through his engagement with certain key mystical theologians and through his association with an avant-garde milieu that imported mystical theology into their modernist aesthetics. Becketts association with Eugene Jolas, as general thematic and specific verbal echoes testify in many of their writings, seems to have been an influential one for both of them. In Jolass autobiography, Man from Babel, he writes a short but appreciative paragraph about the circumstances surrounding his friendship with Beckett:

When Tom Driver asked Beckett later in the interview whether or not his plays deal with the same facets of experience religion must also deal with, Beckett replied, Yes, for they deal with distress. [. . .] One does not have to look for distress. It is screaming at you even in the taxis of London (221).

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Joyce took a great liking to Beckett and through him we became friends. He was Anglo-Irish and in gesture and spirit resembled Joyce sometimes to such an extent that we were astonished. He was a young man of genuine talent, very original and creatively alive. Both as a poet and as a prose writer his personality imposed itself in all of us, and I enjoyed his brilliant albeit dour mind. He had an extraordinary verbal facility and inventiveness, and in that respect was, like his great countryman, un beau tnbreux, a Celtic visionary who was in love with France. Unlike Joyce, however, he wanted to simplify the English language rather than enrich it. For this reason he began to write in French exclusively shortly before World War II in order to retain simplicity by writing deliberately in a language he did not know as well as his native tongue. His French writings strike one as dpouills and yet richly suggestive of his island background. (174) It was perhaps because of Becketts extraordinary verbal facility and inventiveness that Jolas was so keen on publishing Becketts work in transition, for much of the little magazines central agenda revolved around revolutionizing vocabulary, syntax, and style by dislocating language into a new meaning. It is necessary, wrote Jolas in Transition Stories (1929), to break up the word, to construct an organic world of the imagination, and to give life a changed and spontaneous reality (xii). Jolas thought highly enough about Becketts writing, at any rate, to quote from Dante . . . Bruno in The Language of Night (1932), a short albeit rich book in which Jolas sought to defend the revolution of the word within what he called a pan-Romantic context, a context that he hoped would not merely represent a looking-back into the middleages, but a use of more modern elements of development (46). Although this may sound Futurist in tone, and although Jolas was initially sympathetic to F.T. Marinettis own Futurist manifestoes, Jolas ultimately sought to distance his agenda from Marinettis. Jolas had published Marinettis Futurist Standards of Measurement in transition no. 4, 1927, but by issue no. 11, 1928, Jolas admitted that he had no use for Marinetti, who did not contribute to Jolass revolution of the word agenda: Very little can be said for the futuristic theory of words in liberty. It did not solve the problem of words, since it ignored the psychic contents of poetry. Because a work of art is a vision expressed through rhythm, Marinettis idea, insisting on

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movement as the sole basis of expression, remains abortive (112). As opposed to Marinettis attempts to reject everything of the past and to focus instead on the dynamism of the machine age, Jolas wrote in Crisis of Man, which he included in transition no. 21, that the individual is about to revolt against the machine: The human personality long suppressed by the machine is ready to rebel against the uniformisation which grimaces in the offing (106). In his Preface to the same issue, he wrote even more scathingly about the face of a nave optimism of progress and of the face of machine-mammonism (6). So by the time Beckett started to publish in transitionhis first contributions, Dante . . . Bruno and Assumption, appeared in the double issue 16/17 (1929)Jolas had firmly established the pan-Romantic tone that would characterize it for the duration of its run, especially the pre-war series, and although Becketts correspondence with MacGreevy suggests that Beckett kept Jolas and the manifestoes of transition at a safe distance, often denigrating Jolas and indicating that Becketts contributions to the periodical were essentially fiscal in nature, 35 a close reading of his criticism, poetry, and fiction suggests that his relationship to them was at the very least complex and one to which critics have paid inadequate attention. His correspondence with MacGreevy further suggests that he may not always have immediately received copies of transition, even the issues in which his own pieces appeared, 36 but again, the general thematic and specific verbal echoes in his work indicate that his aesthetic sensibility was strikingly similar, though by no means identical, to Jolass in general and to transitions in particular. Jolas, who attended seminary in 1908-9 with the idea of becoming a priest, was a deeply spiritual man, which, as he stated time and again throughout the pages of transition, coincided with his equally unwavering commitment to the arts. Throughout his life, he read the mystics and the German Romantics with relish (Novalis remained one of his favorite Romantics), and as
In an undated early letter to MacGreevy (the reference to Proust suggests June 1930), Beckett writes, I have made up my mind to write to transition for the money they owe me, but have lost their address. If you are writing I would be grateful to have it (TCD Archive), and similarly, on 7 August 1936, he wrote from Foxrock that I have not seen the transition in which my poems appeared, nor heard what poems they used, nor received the payment guaranteed by Mme Jolas (TCD). By 8 March 1938, Becketts patience seems to have waned even more: Have seen nothing of the Jolases + dont know if transition is out + dont care [. . .] (TCD). 36 On 8 November 1931, Beckett wrote to MacGreevy, I suppose you have no news of the new transition. They have stuff of mine (TCD), and again, in an undated letter (the references suggest July of 1932), he wrote to MacGreevy asking for a copy of the issue in which For Future Reference appeared: If you can find For Future Reference in that transition you might send it along (TCD).
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Dougald McMillan writes in transition: the History of a Literary Era: 1927-1938, Jolas saw transition as a modern day continuation of the search for transcendent experience which had marked the early romantics (10). Jolass Romantic temperament found full expression in transition, which he designed specifically as a vehicle for orphic creation: 37 From its very inception, in 1927, I conceived the review transition as a neoromantic organism. Under an approximately collective ideology I tried to gather into it the leading pan-romantic writerssurrealist, dadaist, expressionistwho were striving to expand human consciousness. James Joyce, leaving behind him his naturalistic-expressionist period, which stretches from the Portrait to Ulysses, was entering upon a pan-romantic period with his Work in Progress, in which the night-world was to be explored once more by a poet of genius who, in addition, was able to invent the linguistic instrument that would permit him to give expression to these irrational concepts. (qtd. in McMillan 32) In the Introduction to the first issue of transition, Jolas romantically stated his thirst for beauty (no. 1, 1927, 135), 38 and by the third issue, he had published his Suggestions for a New Magic, in which his mystical sensibility became more pronounced: The rushing of new springs, wrote Jolas paradoxically, can be heard only in silence. He went on to speak of a vertical urge, which would later fully materialize in the Poetry Is Vertical manifesto, and of the new hieroglyphics, a word that Beckett adopted, as we saw in Chapter One, for Proust. At the end of Suggestions, Jolas affirmed, with a language of unrest that presages Becketts theory of the Purgatories, that transition was on an eccentric path that excludes the static nature of culmination: Perhaps we are seeking God. Perhaps not. It matters little one way or the other. What really matters is that we are on the quest. Piety or savagery have both the same bases. Without unrest we have stagnation and impotence (no. 3, 1927, 178-9). In the fifth issue, Jolas advances, in an article on Gottfried Benn, who was himself a contributor to transition, that the empire of the imagination had the capacity to heal the scission between the I and you, which set the foundation for transitions decidedly Romantic
When transition appeared in March of 1932 after a hiatus, Jolas replaced the previous subtitle, An International Quarterly for Creative Experiment, with the subtitle An International Workshop for Orphic Creation. 38 Compare Becketts program for literature, as he romantically stated it in the German Letter of 1937: An assault against words in the name of beauty (Disjecta 173).
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preoccupation with the reconciliation of subject and object (no. 5, 1927, 146). Later, in his essay Romanticism in the Atomic Age, which he included in his Transition Workshop, Jolas similarly wrote that Romanticism was presented in transition as early as 1928, by translations of Novalis, Jean Paul, Hlderlin and others of this epoch in order to demonstrate how the real and the transcendental worlds interpenetrate and, perhaps most importantly for Jolas and for Beckett, to demolish the dualism of spirit and nature, of the I and the non-I (394). Jolas is clearly borrowing Fichtes language of reconciliation here, for Fichte had written that the main task was to unify the Ich and the Nicht-Ich through the creative imagination, which was the only faculty that could, in what he called a hovering or oscillating, reconcile the self and the outside world. Similarly, in Recent Irish Poetry, Beckett scathingly attacked our leading twilighters (71) for refusing to acknowledge the rupture of the lines of communication (70). In his essay Enter the Imagination, Jolas further claims that poetry is the revolt of the heart, and he goes on to exalt Lautramont for allowing the miracle to occur: Only through poetry which is not afraid to glorify the shadows, the sinister aspects, the macabre, the grotesque, can life remain a magical adventure. [. . .] Lautramont has liberated the imagination and dispelled our fear to enter into darkness. Like Blake, he has given us again a belief in the duality and simultaneity of two forces. He lets us see into the occult beyond, where new and demoniac people our solitude (no. 7, 1927, 158-60). In On the Quest, Jolas refers back to the simultaneity of two forces but this time uses the vitalist language of Schelling to invoke a new mythos that will coalesce subject and object: The relationship between the I and the dynamic totality needs to be definitely analyzed, in order to elucidate the process of evasion from the disquietude in which we live. This new mythos, claims Jolas, will effect the universal supremacy of the spirit and a new sense of the vertical that has silence as its foundation: That vision [. . .] can be found only in silence (no. 9, 1927, 191-6). Becketts publication of Dante . . . Bruno and Assumption in number 16/17 coincided with Jolass Revolution of the Word manifesto, to which Stuart Gilbert added aphorisms from Blake for effect. At this point, Becketts aesthetic sensibility seems to have had affinities with Jolass, for much of the language of the proclamation is similar to the language that Beckett uses in Dante . . . Bruno regarding the difficulty, and the necessity of difficulty, of

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Joyces Work in Progress. Here are the twelve proclamations (without the added quotations from Blake) that Beckett would later absorb into the fabric of his German Letter:
1. THE REVOLUTION IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IS AN ACCOMPLISHED FACT. 2. THE IMAGINATION IN SEARCH OF A FABULOUS WORLD IS AUTONOMOUS AND UNCONFINED. 3. PURE POETRY IS A LYRICAL ABSOLUTE THAT SEEKS AN A PRIORI REALITY WITHIN OURSELVES ALONE. 4. NARRATIVE IS NOT MERE ANECDOTE, BUT THE PROJECTION OF A METAMORPHOSIS OF REALITY. 5. THE EXPRESSION OF THESE CONCEPTS CAN BE ACHIEVED ONLY THROUGH THE RHYTHMIC. 6. THE LITERARY CREATOR HAS THE RIGHT TO DISINTEGRATE THE PRIMAL MATTER OF WORDS IMPOSED ON HIM BY TEXT-BOOKS AND DICTIONARIES. 7. HE HAS THE RIGHT TO USE WORDS OF HIS OWN FASHIONING AND TO DISREGARD EXISTING GRAMMATICAL AND SYNTACTICAL LAWS. 8. THE LITANY OF WORDS IS ADMITTED AS AN INDEPENDENT UNIT. 9. WE ARE NOT CONCERNED WITH THE PROPAGATION OF SOCIOLOGICAL IDEAS, EXCEPT TO EMANCIPATE THE CREATIVE ELEMENTS FROM THE PRESENT IDEOLOGY. 10. TIME IS A TYRANNY TO BE ABOLISHED. 11. THE WRITER EXPRESSES. HE DOES NOT COMMUNICATE. 12. THE PLAIN READER BE DAMNED. 39 (no. 16/17, 1929,13)

Jolas echoes the spirit of these proclamations in the Poetry Is Vertical manifesto, which appeared in the momentous 21st issue along with Becketts story Sedendo et Quiesciendo. Beckett, perhaps surprisingly given his general reticence about such things, may actually have signed the manifesto along with eight other artists (among them, Hans Arp, Thomas McGreevy, and Jolas himself), and although there is speculation that Beckett may not have been aware that his name was added to the list, the extent to which the manifesto remains central to Becketts
Compare numbers 11 and 12 in particular with Becketts pretentious language in Dante . . . Bruno: Here is direct expressionpages and pages of it. And if you dont understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. The rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation (26). As for the twelfth proclamation in particular, Beckett wrote in his review (in transition number 27, published as late as 1938) of Denis Devlins Intercessions that The time is perhaps not altogether green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear [. . .] (94).
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own aesthetic development is astonishing. Beckett, if he did actually sign the document out of (partial) acceptance of its artistic proclamations, signed it as a young man who at this stage wanted to fit in with an extraordinary circle of artists that included Joyce, his artistic hero. Becketts first biographer, Deirdre Bair, cites an interview with Beckett from April 13, 1972, forty years later, in which he dismissed his signature as not worth talking about (141), but the fact remains that regardless of his endorsement (however apprehensive) of the Poetry Is Vertical manifesto, Beckett was for quite some time consciously associated with a literary periodical that was, as the Poetry Is Vertical manifesto made plain, a supremely Romantic publication with an overtly mystical and German idealist foundation. Many of the pieces that Beckett published in the periodical, in fact, were in tune with, or reminiscent of, this foundation. In his foreword to Vertical: A Yearbook for Romantic-Mystic Ascensions, Jolas defines vertical as a romantic, cosmological and mystic theory of ascent, and in his retrospective essay Transition: An Occidental Workshop, which he included in Transition Workshop, he wrote that he had drafted the manifesto in order to find a nexus with cosmic and mystic forces (16). The central concern of the Poetry Is Vertical manifesto, once again, is the coalescence of subject and object through the reconciling power of imagination. Poetry, asserted the manifesto, builds a nexus between the I and the you by leading the emotions of the sunken, telluric depths upward toward the illumination of a collective reality and a totalistic universe. The manifesto exalts the orphic forces and proclaims the autonomy of the poetic vision, the hegemony of the inner life over the outer life, an enduring tenet for Becketts Romanticism of contraction and evaporation, and in a statement that establishes the anti-classical, anti-Hulmian direction of transition, Jolas invokes the spirit of Romanticism as a guiding force: We are against the renewal of the classical ideal, because it inevitably leads to a decorative reactionary conformity, to a factitious sense of harmony, to the sterilization of the living imagination. The phrase living imagination, of course, alludes to Schelling and explicitly refers to Coleridge, and the later invocation of the transcendental I with its multiple stratifications reaching back millions of years most certainly refers to the German idealists who had such a profound impact on the young, impressionable Jolas.

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Jolass deep reading of the mystics is particularly evident in issue no. 22: The Vertigral [sic] Age wants to give voice to the ineffable silence of the heart. The Vertigral Age wants to create a primitive grammar, the stammering that approaches the language of God [cf. Is. 28:11] (no. 22, 1933, 6). In this issue, Jolas changed the term vertical to vertigral, which puns on the word integral and, most interestingly, on the German word Graal (i.e., grail) as a powerful symbol of mans eternal upward quest for mystical union. In fact, Jolas published Becketts poems Malacoda, Enueg II, and Dortmunder in transition no. 24, 1936, just one year before Beckett drafted the German Letter, under the VERTIGRAL heading. Later, in 1941, Jolas published the Yearbook, in which he included, under the heading The Mystic Experience, snippets from John of the Cross, Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing, Jacob Boehme, and Blake (among others). He also included Romanticism Is Not Dead, an essay that summarizes many of the key themes that he had struggled to incorporate as the foundation for transition. As opposed to Hulmes neo-classical clarion call, Jolas argued that Romanticism was the only hope for healing the schism of the positivist-mechanistic age that had run its course: Now we are again in the midst of a romantic revolution in the artsand in life which is sweeping across continents with the force of a tidal wave. It is part of the apocalyptic sensation which we all experience in the present social convulsions accompanying the war, and it is also the expression of vast creative forces that are preparing the way for a spiritual resurrection. (157) He goes on to invoke several key Romantics as an inspiration for the mythos of ascension: We can only hope that the new romanticism will be an ascending one. We can only hope that the creative spirit may follow the transcendental idealism of Novalis, Coleridge, Troxler, Baader, or even Brentano. We can only hope that the new orientation will be directed towards metaphysical ascensions and celestial perspectives. This direction, containing possibilities of universal and cosmic relations, may then expand our consciousness into a super-consciousness in search of an absolute reality. (161) The presumption of an absolute reality would have struck Beckett as problematic, but Jolass hope for metaphysical ascensions and celestial perspectives may recall the title and theme of

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Becketts Assumption, a story for which Jolas clearly had admiration, publishing it not only in issue 16/17 of transition, but also anthologizing it much later in his Transition Workshop under the heading Paramyths, a term that Jolas defined with explicitly Jungian terminology as a kind of epic wonder tale giving an organic synthesis of the individual and universal unconsciousthe dream, the daydream, the mystic vision. In its final form it might be a phantasmagoric mixture of the poem in prose, the popular tale of folklore, the psychograph, the essay, the myth, the saga, the humoresque (29). In Pan-Romanticism in the Atomic Age, Jolass language of ascent recalls quite explicitly the central theme of Assumption, a title that most certainly invokes, at least in part, the Virgin Marys vertical ascent, of both body and soul, into Heaven after the end of her earthly life: Harking back to Novalis and Jean Pauls symbolism of the flying dream, verticalism revolted against the nightmare quality of its predecessors and inaugurated an attempt to liberate the human personality from the possession of nihilism. It stressed the creative urge towards a liturgical renascence by reconstructing the myth of voyage, migration, flight, and particularly ascent, in all its romantic-mystic manifestations. It sought the marvelous of the skies in the poetry of aeronautical flight, in the conquest of the law of gravitation, and in an aspiration towards aerial perspectives. It also developed the poetry of cosmic or sidereal flight, tried to sing of the stellar spaces, and accentuated the vision of the third eye. In the poetry of mystic flight it sought a transcendental reality. This new poetry of ascent wanted to express its vision in a language that would make possible a hymnic vocabulary. (395) Becketts Assumption appealed to Jolas for obvious reasons, for the storys hymnic vocabulary, though it is shadowed by irony and frustration, attempts to sing of the stellar spaces that are, according to Jolas, characteristic of the kind of verticalism that he sought to romanticize. Becketts language in regards to Beauty, as opposed to mere Prettiness, is aligned with Jolass language of ascent: We are taken up bodily and pitched breathless on the peak of a sheer crag: which is the pain of Beauty (4). Later in the story, Beckett writes, he was released, achieved, the blue flower, Vega, GOD. . . . After a timeless parenthesis he found himself alone in his room,

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spent with ecstasy [. . .] Thus each night he died and was God, each night revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness, so that he hungered to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfillment (67). The blue flower, of course, refers to Novalis, one of Jolass favorite Romantics whose work he frequently translated and published in transition, and the timeless parenthesis alludes, at least in part, to the tenth proclamation in The Revolution of the Word manifesto: TIME IS A
TYRANNY TO BE ABOLISHED. Despite the extravagance and subversion that does characterize

Assumption, then, Jolas at least took the story seriously enough to publish it in transition and later to anthologize it, under the paramyths section of Transition Workshop, along with an extraordinary group of stories by artists like Ren Crevel, Hemingway, Joyce, Kafka, Katherine Anne Porter, Philippe Soupault, Stein, Italo Svevo, Dylan Thomas, and William Carlos Williams. The table of contents for Transition Workshop, indeed, reads like a whos who list of twentieth century writers. As a young man who was looking for a way to fit in, then, Beckett, who had nothing to say but the itch to make, was clearly in tune with the specific language and themes that were central to Jolas and to the creative, pan-Romantic direction of transition, and despite his frequent use of pastiche and irony, Beckett did consistently use a Romantic-Mystic vocabulary at the beginning of his career that resulted in a lasting stain upon the silence. In Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (1998), Mary Bryden argues that the linkage between Becketts writing and that of mystical theologians is clearly a fruitful one, but she is quick to add a caveat to this affinity: the danger is that his work may be forced into a reactive dialogue with mysticism, such that it is assessed insofar as it is perceived as using, adopting, or rejecting certain aspects of mystical belief or tradition (183-4). There can be no doubt that one should heed Brydens warning, but despite what one interprets as his adoption or rejection of mystical theology, Beckett clearly formulates his own aesthetics with the vocabulary that the mystical theologians inaugurated and the Romantics, even belated Romantics such as Jolas, reformulated for their own orphic purposes. Within the past five years, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui has devoted an entire issue to Beckett and Religion, and at least two of the essays are explicitly about Beckett and mystical theology. Marius Buning, for instance, writes in The Via Negativa and Its First Stirrings in Eleutheria that we can say with reasonable

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certitude [. . .] that Becketts plays, and by extension his whole oeuvre [. . .] is neither absurdist nor nihilistic but, if anything, it belongs to that mode of meditative discourse that attempts to articulate the unsayable [. . .] (49). In Beckett and the Apophatic in Selected Shorter Texts, too, Birgitta Johansson similarly argues that Becketts way of employing the apophatic approach adds a new dimension to mysticism in that it acknowledges and articulates the failures and the limitations of the human mind in the endless search for the mystical Other (55). Critics, in other words, are beginning to take seriously the theological dimension of Becketts texts, which C.J. Ackerley, in Samuel Beckett and the Bible: A Guide, has recently acknowledged as being a supremely important body of religious literature: the five great mid-century texts, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable and Waiting for Godot (a series extending to Endgame and How It Is), each replete with biblical allusion, constitute perhaps the most important body of religious literature of the past century (53). The German Letter to Axel Kaun establishes Beckett as an artist with an intense desire to strip away language, what Wordsworth in the 1850 edition of The Prelude calls the sad incompetence of human speech (VI, 593), in order to reveal the ineffable silence towards which Molloy, Malone, and the Unnamable strive with an infinite longing. In the words of Jolass Revolution of the Word manifesto, Beckett sought to disintegrate the primal matter of words, though Beckett does depart from Jolas in his (Becketts) rejection of Joyces apotheosis of the word, a rejection that was not without its difficulty: It must have been fascinating for him to see Joyces inventiveness, his intoxication with words and his working methods at such close quarters. And it is hardly surprising if, after such an experience, he should have found it a Herculean task to rid himself of a Joycean approach (Knowlson 105). The mystical theologians who seem to have exerted the most lasting influence on Becketts burgeoning aesthetics, particularly in relation to his path of unwording or unknowing, were Plotinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, Thomas Kempis, and John of the Cross, all of whom Inge discusses at length in Christian Mysticism, which Beckett read intently and from which he took several pages of typically idiosyncratic notes. The language of each of these mystical theologians is reflected in the German Letter and, in addition to Fritz Mauthners Beitrge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions towards a Critique of Language) (1902 & 1923) and

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certain key essays and manifestoes in transition, forms the basis for (i.e., is not merely similar to) Becketts lifelong preoccupations in regards to his own craft. Plotinus, of whose theology Beckett was clearly aware as his notebooks indicate, marks the transition between Plato and the Church Fathers, and his language, though entirely indebted to Plato, presages the words and works of later Patristic theologians. He exerted a profound influence on many later thinkerse.g., Augustine, Dante, Eckhart, Coleridge, Bergson, and Eliotand he had a deeply original philosophy that gave voice to the souls desire to return to the purest and most ineffable unified state from which it came, the One, which is beyond the realm of Intelligence and, as such, beyond any duality whatsoever, including being and nonbeing: Generative of all, the Unity is none of all; neither thing nor quality nor quantity nor intellect nor soul; not in motion, not at rest, not in place, not in time; it is self-defined, unique in form, or better, formless [. . .] (VI.9.3). Since the One is beyond being, nothing can be affirmed of it through the vehicle of language: we must be patient with language; we are forced for reasons of exposition to apply to the Supreme terms which strictly are ruled out; everywhere we must read so to speak (VI.8.13). Out of utter simplicity, argued Plotinus, emanates the multiplicity of forms, which is further broken up at the level of discursive understanding, and this Emanation and Return produce equilibrium in the cosmos. The process of return requires intense desire to return to the Fatherland, and this desire marks the beginning of Plotinuss deeply introspective conception of the self, for self-knowledge and knowledge of the One are bound so that withdrawing into the recesses of the self is identical to the ascent to the One: This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land [. . .] you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birth-right of all, which few turn to use. [. . .] Withdraw into yourself and look (I.6.8-9). Plotinus says that, because we are dwellers in the Place of Unlikeliness, we have fallen from all resemblance to the Divine and that we consequently lie in gloom and mud (I.8.13), which may form the basis, in addition to Leopardis the world is mud, for Becketts How It Is. Our task, concludes Plotinus, is to recover the souls simplicity and natural kinship with the Divine by stripping away, or negating, the constraints of self-consciousness. In a passage that looks ahead to the concluding lines of Becketts Company, Plotinus states that the soul, in ecstasy, must pass out of

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itself to find its true self, which is naturally fused with the One: There is thus a converse in virtue of which the essential man outgrows Being, becomes identical with the Transcendence of Being. The self thus lifted, we are in the likeness of the Supreme; if from that heightened self we pass still higherimage to archetypewe have won the Term of all our journeying. [. . .] This is the life of gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth, a flight of the alone to the Alone (VI.9.11). 40 Plotinuss is a solitary way, a flight that leads ever higher to the ineffable One. Plotinuss language is most certainly reflected in Becketts own work, but it is with Gregory of Nyssa, whose theology was deeply Nicene (the central tenet being creatio ex nihilo as opposed to the Platonic theory of Emanation), that we find a mystical sensibility that was even closer to Becketts. It is precisely Gregorys radical doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, in fact, that effects an ontological gulf between God and creatures, for God is radically unknowable and incomprehensible because separate and other. Becketts Company, a self-reflexive fiction that enacts the conjuring of something out of nothing (39), plays on this idea. Gregorys sense that we must contemplate God in a divine darkness looks ahead to Pseudo-Dionysius and to St. John of the Crosss Dark Night; Gregorys Life of Moses speaks of an infinite abyss of contemplation that we can never exhaust, which presages Fichtes Strebensphilosophie and Becketts own theory of the Purgatories. Since God is infinitely unknowable, writes Gregory in the Life, Moses request to see God face to face is infinitely frustrated: In refusing Moses request, the voice of God in a sense grants it, by pointing out in a few words an infinite abyss of contemplation. For God in his bounty granted that his desire would be fulfilled; but He did not promise that his desire would ever cease or be fully satisfied. [. . .] for the true vision of God consists rather in this, that the soul that looks up to God never ceases to desire Him. [. . .] We can conceive then of no limitation in an infinite nature: and that which is limitless
Eugene Jolas explicitly quotes from this last line in The Language of Night: The poetic method then, aims at the creation of myths. [. . .] The inner world is brought to the surface with blinding suddenness. The highly sensitized individual sinks into himself, he tries to penetrate to the unutterable, he lives for a flight of the alone to the alone, as Plotinus says. He then seeks a sublime individuation which encompasses all the world. When this goal has been reached, he feels the irruption of a higher power. Mystic cognition sets in. The frontiers between man and man fall. Ancient mythologies emerge. He comprehends the contents of humanitys consciousness. Not only the living races, but the dead races appear to him. His psychical and mental faculties are enormously heightened (50-1).
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cannot by its nature be understood. And so every desire for the Beautiful which draws us on in this ascent is intensified by the souls very progress towards it. And this is the real meaning of seeing God: never to have this desire satisfied. (II. 231-9) For Gregory, the soul continually longs for God and is subsequently drawn deeper and deeper into divine darkness, and the impelling agent is the ecstatic nature of love, which continually seeks to draw the soul out of itself to union with God as He is in Himself. The key, though, is that desire for God leads to an infinitely deeper desire, and the soul continually reaches after God in a darkness that refuses to offer a final vision since there is no possibility of sight in darkness. The anguished Augustine, who so deeply appealed to Beckett and who is present in one way or another throughout Becketts work, forged a radically original style of autobiographical writing that combined Plotinuss idea of self-knowledge with Gregorys idea of the souls restless longing for God. Becketts phrase-hunting in Augustines Confessions is welldocumented in the Dream Notebook, and as Knowlson testifies, before writing Dream, Beckett immersed himself deeply in the Confessions of St Augustine (109), traces of which are evident not only in Dream itself but also in his best-known work, Godot, a source for which, claimed Beckett, was the wonderful shape of Augustines phrase that expressed a fifty-fifty chance of salvation: Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved; do not presume, one of the thieves was damned. The image of homecoming is central to the Confessions, as it is to Three Novels, and the compulsion, helplessness, desire, confusion, and general agony that characterizes the Confessions serve as the foundation for Three Novels, Becketts own version of Augustines Confessions, for the radical stripping of self that Augustine painfully relates directly corresponds to the central dilemma of Three Novels. What Malone seeks, to use his own words, is the relapse to darkness, to nothingness, to earnestness, to home (221). The Unnamables strange pain, strange sin (476) also recalls both Augustines own tortured psyche and a quotation from the Confessions that Beckett included in the Dream Notebook, The soul idly goaded & racked (18), which initially surfaced as an explicit reference in his unpublished story Echos Bones: My soul begins to be idly goaded and racked (2). Another quotation from the Dream Notebook, once again from the Confessions, also looks ahead to the Unnamables occasional

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experience of the Void that he seeks so restlessly: A void place, a spacious nothing, noted Beckett (18). Similarly, towards the end of Three Novels, the Unnamable longs to open on the void, open on the nothing (471). The longing for the Void, the spacious nothing, is what serves as catalyst for the unfolding of the quest that is central to Three Novels. Along with the radical stripping that forms the basis for Augustines Confessions, the apophaticism of Pseudo-Dionysius (also known as Denys), Eckhart, and John of the Cross is central to Becketts aesthetics in general and to the thematic foundation of Three Novels in particular. As the Dream Notebook indicates, Beckett had a fondness for Denyss method. He noted, Dionysius the Areopagite prefers circular (meditative) movement of the mind to oblique (rational) and direct (affective sensuous) (99). He took this from one of Inges footnotes: Dionysius distinguishes three movements of the human mindthe circular, wherein the soul returns in upon itself; the oblique, which includes all knowledge acquired by reasoning, research, etc.; and the direct, in which we rise to higher truths by using outward things as symbols. The last two he regards as inferior to the circular movement [. . .] (108). This footnote may be the seed for Becketts theory of the Purgatories, which, as we have seen, rests on the circular, atemporal, meditative movement in Joyces Terrestrial Paradise, a movement that is nondirectionalor multi-directional, and a step forward is, by definition, a step back (33). Denyss apophaticism, as is clear from his comments to Juliet, attracted Becketts minimalist sensibility that privileged what he called the integrity of incoherence (Burrows 14). Denys actually talks about three kinds of theologysymbolic (e.g., the Holy Trinity), cataphatic (i.e., positive affirmations about the nature of God, such as the statement God is love), and apophatic (i.e., the strategy of unknowing by way of denial, and of the denial of the denial)but ultimately privileges apophaticism, which subsumes the other two types of theology, as the most effective way of talking about God, of doing theology. In The Divine Names, for instance, Denys writes in praise of apophaticism in a passage that, along with certain portions of Inges Christian Mysticism, is perhaps the single best primer to the German Letter and to Three Novels: If God cannot be grasped by mind or sense-perception, if he is not a particular being, how do we know him? This is something we must inquire into. It might be more accurate to say that we cannot know God in his nature, since this is

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unknowable and is beyond the reach of mind or of reason. [. . .] We therefore approach that which is beyond all as far as our capacities allow us and we pass by way of the denial and the transcendence of all things and by way of the cause of all things. God is therefore known in all things and as distinct from all things. He is known through knowledge and through unknowing. Of him there is conception, reason, understanding, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name, and many other things. On the other hand he cannot be understood, words cannot contain him, and no name can lay hold of him. He is not one of the things that are and he cannot be known in any of them. He is all things in all things and he is no thing among things. He is known to all from all things and he is known to no one from anything. This is the sort of language we must use about God [. . .] But again, the most divine knowledge of God, that which comes through unknowing, is achieved in a union far beyond mind, when mind turns away from all things, even from itself, and when it is made one with the dazzling rays, being then and there enlightened by the inscrutable depth of Wisdom. (VII 3:869C-872B) The knowledge that comes through unknowing anticipates The Cloud of Unknowing, the anonymous 14th century mystical text. In The Mystical Theology, Denys, like Gregory of Nyssa, further uses Moses ascent of the holy mount to speak about the souls ascent into the knowledge of unknowing. Also, the dazzling rays may anticipate Becketts Long Observation of the Ray, an unpublished text that Beckett began to write, as he indicated in the manuscript (MS 2909/1), on 27 October 1975 before abandoning it several unsuccessful drafts later (Reading Archive). The text is essentially a close examination of the ontology of a ray of light within and without a closed space, which the early drafts refer to as a cubic chamber and, in the third draft, as a spherical chamber that is, as one of his marginal notes indicates in MS 2909/4, Hermetic inasmuch as no trace of inlet and/or outlet has appeared, thus recalling the large hollow sphere (63) or hermetically sealed structure of Murphys mind. 41 In the second draft of Long Observation, Beckett writes, Ray of constant intensity [. . .] ascribed in his weariness to an inexhaustible source. In this second draft, he also refers to the hidden spring from which
For a particularly illuminating gloss on Becketts use of the monad in Murphy, see C.J. Ackerleys Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (103).
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images emerge, the inexhaustibility and unknowability of which has close links with Denyss dazzling ray of contemplation. Furthermore, in The Divine Names, the darkness imagery, which is synonymous with the ineffability of God, is central: The good cause of all is [. . .] wordless. It has neither word not act of understanding, since it is on a plane above all this, and it is made manifest only to those who travel through foul and fair, who pass beyond the summit of every holy ascent, who leave behind them every divine light, every voice, every word from heaven, and who plunge into the darkness where [. . .] dwells the One who is beyond all things. It is not for nothing that the blessed Moses is commanded to submit first to purification and then to depart from those who have not undergone this. [. . .] Then, standing apart from the crowds and accompanied by chosen priests, he pushes ahead to the summit of the divine ascents. [. . .] But then he [. . .] plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing. Here, renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible, he belongs completely to him who is beyond everything. Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing. (I.3.1000C-1001A) In the second chapter of The Mystical Theology, Denys likens the way of denial to a sculptor carving a statue, and it is with this metaphor that we begin to discern the basis for Becketts themes and terminology in the German Letter and, by extension, in Three Novels: I pray we could come to this darkness so far above light! If only we lacked sight and knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing, that which lies beyond all vision and knowledge. For this would be really to see and to know: to praise the Transcendent One in a transcending way, namely through the denial of all beings. We would be like sculptors who set out to carve a statue. They remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image, and simply by

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this act of clearing aside [aphaeresis, which also means denial] they show up the beauty which is hidden. (1025A-1025B) For Denys, then, all symbols and images of God are to be denied since God is beyond being and, as Denys writes once again in The Mystical Theology with the characteristic language of aporia pure and simple, ever abides in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence (I.997B). The method of denial that Denys uses, however, is more complex than simply negative denial. In his study entitled The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (1995), Denys Turner characterizes Denyss method as the self-subverting; utterance, the utterance which first says something and then, in the same image, unsays it (21). Turner goes on to clarify that the aporetic utterances are not merely artful: They are, for Denys, the natural linguistic medium of his negative, apophatic theology; or, more strictly speaking, they are the natural medium of a theological language which is subjected to the twin pressures of affirmation and negation, of the cataphatic and the apophatic. We must both affirm and deny all things of God; and then we must negate the contradiction between the affirmed and the denied. [. . .] For the negation of the negation is not a third utterance, additional to the affirmative and the negative, in good linguistic order; it is not some intelligible synthesis of affirmation and negation; it is rather the collapse of our affirmation and denials into disorder, which we can only express, a fortiori, in bits of collapsed, disordered language, like the babble of a Jeremiah. (22) We may call Denyss method, then, a theology of unsaying, for the phrase apophatic theology is itself a paradox that captures the ambiguity in its etymology. The word theology literally means speech about God, and the Greek neologism apophasis means the breakdown of speech in the unknowable face of God. The phrase apophatic theology, therefore, means something like speech about God that reveals the failure of speech. This method, of course, is vital to Becketts entire aesthetic agenda. Denyss theology of unsaying is clear, for instance, in the opening prayer to The Mystical Theology, in which he writes that God resides in the brilliant darkness, which collapses the affirmation (God is a dazzling light) with the denial (God is darkness) into a linguistic suspension. This technique is ubiquitous in Becketts writing. In

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Watt, for instance, Beckett consistently uses language to negate its signifying properties in order to describe what isand what is Knott. Consider the beginning of the novel, in which the narrator both affirms and denies vacancy (cf. the Nothingness in his German Letter) in the same sentence: Yes, it was not vacant (7). Similarly, the speaker of Company, in a reference to Miltons Paradise Lost, acknowledges the darkness visible that surrounds his splintered sense of self (12). Beckett confessed to Charles Juliet, who explicitly asked Beckett about John of the Cross, Eckhart, and Ruysbroeck, that he appreciated how cette oeuvre naffirme pas, mais procde par la ngation, puis la ngation de la ngation, faisant fuser dans lentre-deux ce quil importe de saisir, mais que jamais les mots ne russissent capter [this writing does not affirm, but proceeds by negation, then by negation of the negation, fusing in the middle what needs to be understood, but which words can never capture] (33). Four years later, he expressed to Juliet his natural affinity with the flame of the mystical spirit that consume cette saloperie de logique [burns up the filth of logic] (51). Beckett further reported to Juliet that he identified with une mme faon de subir linintelligible [the same method of submitting to the unintelligible] (38) and that Lcriture ma conduit au silence [Writing has led me to silence] (18)a silence in which rien nest dicible [nothing is sayable] (48). In the German Letter, too, Beckett seems to have had Denyss apophaticism in mind when he asserted the necessity of undoing language from the inside (i.e., through words [172]) rather than simply negating it outright, for as Turner writes, We can only know the inadequacy of our language from within it (39). Beckett, as the Letter indicates, clearly agreed: Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its disrepute. To bore one hole after another into it, until what lurks behind itbe it something or nothingbegins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. (172) Beckett is stating here, and in his later comments to Juliet, Denyss strategy of negating the propositional rather than providing merely negative propositionsof the negation of imagery rather than providing merely negative imagery. Turner refers to this process as the dialectics of

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the cataphatic (39). Beckett told Juliet, with the implicit use of Denyss apophaticism, that La negation nest pas possible. Pas plus que laffirmation. [. . .] Il faut se tenir l o il ny a ni pronom, ni solution, ni reaction, ni prise de position possibles [Negation isnt possible. Any more than affirmation. [. . .] Its necessary to stand in a place where there is no possible pronoun, solution, reaction, or stance] (49). Beckett initially contrasts this apophatic literature of the unword (173) with Joyces apotheosis of the word in what was to become the Wake, but Beckett is quick to note the possibility that Joyce, despite a difference in direction, may have been striving toward the same destination: With such a program, in my opinion, the latest work of Joyce has nothing whatever to do. There it seems to be a matter of an apotheosis of the word. Unless perhaps Ascension to Heaven and Descent to Hell are somehow one and the same. How beautiful it would be to be able to believe that that indeed was the case. (172) In The Celestial Hierarchy, Denys actually suggests that the apophatic and the cataphatic are intimately bound in a network of mutuality (we cant, after all, eliminate language all at once), for he writes that one may be tempted to consider pious vocabulary, or appropriate names about God, a successful encapsulation of divine reality in some ultimately adequate way. For this reason, Denys actually prefers a profusion of vulgar images that culminate, because they are obviously inappropriate, in a linguistic collapse. Indeed, writes Denys, the sheer crassness of the signs is a goad so that even the materially inclined cannot accept that it could be permitted or true that the celestial and divine sights could be conveyed by such shameful things (141B, 150). Despite the similarities in direction, linguistically speaking, between the Ascent to Heaven and the Descent to Hell, Beckett ultimately saw himself as following a path that differed from Joyces, one in which language has become porous (172) through a program of radical erasure, stripping, detachment. The conclusion of Malone Dies, in fact, is reminiscent of the apophatic as Lemuel hacks away the word surface until the black marks disintegrate into the emptiness of the page:

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Lemuel is in charge, he raises his hatchet on which the blood will never dry, but not to hit anyone, he will not hit anyone, he will not hit anyone any more, he will not touch anyone any more, either with it or with it or with it or with or or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will never or with his pencil or with his stick or or light light I mean never there he will never never anything there any more (328) In this extraordinary passage of stripping and erasure, we may discern the origin of Becketts radical program of what Carla Locatelli in the title of her book calls Unwording the World, a program of erasure to which Beckett had alluded in the German Letter some twenty years earlier. Central to Eckharts teaching, which Beckett studied throughout his life, 42 is a profound detachment that parallels, and is indebted to, Denyss apophaticism. He writes in one of his sermons, for instance, that if you want to be perfect, you must be naked of what is nothing (183). We must be willing, Eckhart goes on to say in a later work, to remain free of things (254). Eckhart speaks of a kenosis that requires this nakedness or stripping so that God may infuse the (necessarily passive) soul: If a man were able and knew how to make a goblet quite empty, and to keep it empty of everything that could fill it, even of air, doubtless the goblet would forego and forget all its nature, and its emptiness would lift it up into the sky. And so to be naked, poor, empty of all created things lifts the soul up to God. (221) The terminology that Eckhart is using echoes, quite deliberately, Pauls language in Philippians regarding Christs own kenosis:

Marius Buning writes that John Calder remarked in a private communication with him that Calder found Beckett immersed in Eckhart only half a year before his death (49).

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Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. [. . .] Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name [. . .] (Phil. 2:3-9) Three Novels is firmly rooted in this kenotic tradition, for the numinous act of self-emptying that Christ exhibits, which ensures that God extend to him the name that is above every name, is the paradigm of divine transparency that each successive character in Three Novels at least attempts to actualize through a radical denial, stripping, and detachment of self. Eckharts treatise On Detachment, his most poignant commentary on the subject, utilizes the unmistakable language of apophatic theology and praises perfect detachment above all things since the highest form of knowing, as Denys claims, is unknowing. One must detach oneself from every-thing, argues Eckhart, even prayer and interested love. Becketts theme in the German Letter, and the language that he uses to express it, is strikingly similar. Eckhart writes, And if the heart is to be willing for that highest place, it must repose in a naked nothingness; and in this there is the greatest potentiality that can be. And when the heart that has detachment attains to the highest place, that must be nothingness, for in this is the greatest receptivity. See an analogy of this in nature. If I want to write on a wax tablet, it does not matter how fine the words may be that are written on the tablet, they still hinder me from writing on it. If I really want to write something, I must erase and eliminate everything that is already there; and the tablet is never so good for me to write on as when there is nothing on it at all. In the same way, if God is to write on my heart up in the highest place, everything that can be called this or that must come out of my heart, and in that way my heart will have won detachment. [. . .] And this is why the heart in its detachment has no this or that as its object. [. . .] And as the soul attains this [detachment], it loses its name and it draws God into itself, so that it

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itself it becomes nothing, as the sun draws up the red dawn into itself so that it becomes nothing. Nothing else will bring man to this except pure detachment. [. . .] And when this detachment ascends to the highest place, it knows nothing of knowing, it loves nothing of loving, and from light it becomes dark. (292) Eckharts language of erasure and negation is central to Becketts entire aesthetic agenda, and it forms the basis for his attempts in the German Letter and Three Novels to clear away the writing on the tablet of subjectivity in order to allow the blank page, which was for Beckett the goal of his striving, to reveal Nothing in particular. As Molloy states, using a language that recalls Eckharts language of erasure, you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery (10). In the German Letter, an unambiguously apophatic document, Beckett consolidates Denyss apophaticism and Eckharts language of erasure with a Romantic vocabulary that he may have appropriated from his association with the manifestoes of transition and, as his notebooks clearly testify, to Felix Meiners Leipzig edition of Fritz Mauthners Contributions towards a Critique of Language (1923). About midway through the Whoroscope Notebook, Beckett quotes (verbatim in the original German) a long passage from Mauthners critique, to which Beckett would later allude in the German Letter, particularly in relation to the Nominalist irony that his literature of the unword might require at some stage (Disjecta 173). The pages that Beckett quotes in this section of the Notebook are from Volume III, 615-16, and an English translation follows: The pure and logically consistent nominalism, which was never articulated by the nominalists, which was probably put into their mouth only by malicious opponents, the teaching that all concepts or words of human thought are only exhalations of the human voice, logical consistent nominalism, according to which the recognition of reality is just as much denied to the human brain as the make-up of a surface of a stone, this pure nominalism, which despite all of the natural sciences still as easily despairs of understanding a fall or colour or electricity as an understanding of consciousness, this epistemological nominalism

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is not a provable philosophy. It would not be nominalism if it wanted itself to pretend that it was more than a feeling, than the opinion [also mood or frame of mind] of the human individual facing the world. And in this frame of mind we are denied even a thinking through to a conclusion ofindeed even a satisfactory submersion of oneself intothis teaching, because all thinking takes place in the words of the language and thinking dissolves into itself when the nebulous nature of words has become clear to us. A submersion of oneself into mere opinion [the underscoring is Becketts] is surely possible for a while; but then the brooder seeks time and againjust like a lyricistto capture the mood through an inadequate word and must reach into the void, when he no longer believes in the word. Pure nominalism puts an end to thinking and beyond that, with a new shudder of humanity, that colour or tone, the remnants of its view of the world, are a toy for children, that the chance thoughts has placed humans into the cradle. With words one can only really argue, not create; only combat old belief, not prove new belief. To refute universally valid opinions is possible; to substantiate universally valid opinions is impossible (S. Philipp, Four Sceptical Theses). This rich passage is endlessly suggestive, particularly in relation to Becketts mocking attitude towards the word, through words (Disjecta 172), though this line from the German Letter suggests, as did his Three Dialogues approximately a decade later, that he tempered his obvious enthusiasm for Mauthners skepticism with an acknowledgement that language, though empty of universal or transcendental signification, is nevertheless obligatory: there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express (103). What is even more suggestive, perhaps, is the fact that in the Whoroscope Notebook, Beckett inserted a beautifully hand-drafted copy of Schuberts An die Musik (To Music) into the middle of the above Mauthner quotation. 43 Throughout his life, Beckett unambiguously
Becketts appreciation of Schuberts An die Musik is apparent as early as More Pricks. At the end of Walking Out, for instance, Belacqua marries Lucy, and they sit up to all hours playing the gramophone, An die Musik is a great favourite with them both [. . .] (113).
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privileged music over language as a means of pure expression, and in the margin of his personal copy of Proust, when Swann hears the pure immanence of the sonata for the second time, Beckett drew a vertical line alongside the passage and wrote a single word, Salvation, in the margin: Mme cet amour pour une phrase musicale sembla un instant devoir amorcer chez Swann la possibilit dune sorte de rajeunissement. Depuis si longtemps il avait renonc appliquer sa vie un but ideal et la bornait la poursuite de satisfactions quotidiennes, quil croyait, sans jamais se le dire formellement, que cela ne changerait plus jusqu sa mort; bien plus, ne se sentant plus dides leves dans lespirit, il avait cess de croire leur ralit, sans pouvoir non plus la nier tout fait. (II, 302) How, then, was Beckett to find la possibilit dune sorte de rajeunissement? He was, after all, a writer, and his obligation to express something through words, as we saw both in the German Letter and in his famous confession in Three Dialogues, suggests that the kind of literature for which he was striving was the kind that aspired toward the condition of music. Becketts invocation in the German Letter of Beethovens seventh Symphony within the context of dissolving the word surface further confirms this Paterian notion. This, perhaps, is Beckett at his most overtly romantic. His late prose is especially musical and actually has a rhythm and cadence, suggesting that words and music, when properly aligned, may possibly express the inexpressible. In Company, for instance, Beckett tucks a perfectly constructed line of iambic pentameter into the fabric of the text: I know this doomed to fail and yet persist (45). 44 Increasingly in the eighteenth century, music began to replace painting as the art with the closest affinity with poetry, a shift in artistic paradigms that was consistent with the movement from mimetic to more expressive modes of art. By the 1790s, many German writers regarded music, given its disembodied nature, as the most immediately expressive of spirit and emotion, and of course by the nineteenth century, the English Romantics had fully absorbed the impact of this aesthetic shift. In On Poetry in General (1818), Hazlitt wrote, There is a near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. Mad people sing (V, 12), thus foreshadowing the
Cf. the following consecutive lines of iambic pentameter from Worstward Ho: Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand (93).
44

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Surrealist flirtation with their essays and poetry of simulated madness, many of which Beckett, as we saw in the last chapter, translated for the special Surrealist issue of This Quarter. Another possible analogue here is Jolass argument in The Revolution of Language and James Joyce, an essay that he included in transition no. 11, 1928: While Mr. Joyce, beginning with Ulysses, and in his still unnamed novel, was occupied in exploding the antique logic of words, analogous experiments were being made in other countries. In order to give language a more modern elasticity, to give words a more compressed meaning through dissociation from their accustomed connections, and to liberate the imagination with primitivistic conceptions of verbs and nouns, a few scattered poets deliberately worked in the laboratories of their various languages along new lines. [. . .] Miss Gertrude Stein attempts to find a mysticism of the word by the process of thought thinking itself. In structurally spontaneous compositions in which words are grouped rhythmically she succeeds in giving us her mathematics of the word, clear primitive and beautiful. In her latest work this compression is of the utmost power. (110-1) Four years later, in The Language of Night, Jolas makes a similar claim about Steins use of rhythmic language, claiming that her rhythmograms proceed by repetition, thus producing a kind of hypnosis (36). Beckett may have had this or something like it in mind when he wrote in the German Letter that Perhaps the logographs of Gertrude Stein are nearer to what I have in mind. At least the texture of language has become porous [. . .] (172). But in the end, Beckett dismisses Steins method because the unfortunate lady is doubtlessly still in love with her vehicle, albeit only in the way in which a mathematician is in love with his figures; a mathematician for whom the solution of the problem is of entirely secondary interest, indeed to whom must the death of his figures appear quite dreadful. 45 To bring this method into relation with that of Joyce, as is the fashion, strikes me as senseless [. . .] (172-3). This is at least one point on which Beckett diverges from Jolas, for instead of what Jolas calls Steins mysticism of the word (111), Beckett seeks a mysticism of the unword that may require some form of
45

Cf. Jolass The Language of Night: Gertrude Stein presents mathematical abstractions in her work [. . .] (36).

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Nominalist irony (173). The emphasis on rhythmic language, though, would have struck Beckett as a path worth pursuing. The fifth proclamation of the Revolution of the Word manifesto would also have been formative in this regard: THE EXPRESSION OF THESE CONCEPTS
CAN BE ACHIEVED ONLY THROUGH THE RHYTHMIC.

The Frhromantiker pushed the Romantic emphasis on music to its extreme, often writing about music as the very disembodiment of pure feeling and spiritthe unword that Beckett invokes in his Letter. In Germany, writers like Tieck, Wackenroder, and E.T.A. Hoffmann lauded symphonic music because it lacked the stain of the mimetic and, therefore, was infinitely suggestive and expressive. Poets even began to mimic musical expression in poetry, substituting plot, argument, or exposition with symphonic form, which would later influence Symbolist aesthetics. Becketts juxtaposition in the Whoroscope Notebook of Schuberts An die Musik with the Mauthner critique of language, therefore, suggests that Beckett inherited this aesthetic ideal from the Frhromantiker and, by extension, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He seemed to be suggesting that if the writer could properly align words and music, he might be able to approximate, or possibly reach, that final music or that silence that underlies All, a phrase that is itself reminiscent of the choral Echo [that] is the Universe to which Coleridge refers in the sublime conclusion of his Biographia (II, 248). The words and music of Schuberts An die Musik, which Beckett copied so skillfully in the Notebook that the reproduction remains a work of art in itself, is revealing in this context: Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden, Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt, Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden, Hast mich in eine bessre Welt entrckt!

Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf entflossen, Ein ser, heilinger Akkord von dir Den Himmel bessrer Zeiten mir erschlossen, Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafr!

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[O blessed art, how often in dark hours, when the savage ring of life tightens round me, have you kindled warm love in my heart, have transported me to a better world!

Often a sigh has escaped from your harp, a sweet, sacred harmony of yours has opened up the heavens to better times for me, O blessed art, I thank you for that!] Beckett clearly saw in Schuberts music a sublimity of spirit that soared far beyond the constraints of the mimetic. Later in his life, indeed, Beckett is even reported to have said to his cousin, John Beckett, I think that the opening of Schuberts String Quartet in A minor [. . .] is more nearly pure spirit than any other music (qtd. in Bryden 42). Contrary to a popular misconception of Beckett, then, finding the means of accessing spirit preoccupied him throughout his life. In How to Fail: Notes on Talks with Samuel Beckett, Patrick Bowles, who translated Molloy with Beckett, reiterates this preoccupation in relation to what Beckett called the contemporary malaise: Talking of the contemporary malaise, It has been the malaise of all time, Beckett said. People are not in touch with their spirit. What counts is the spirit, he said with great emphasis. [. . .] Ninety-nine per cent of people are out of touch with their spirit, he said. History, for me, its a black-out. And he added, All the rest is frills. (28) Beckett pushed the aesthetics of the Frhromantiker to its extreme, often focusing on the rhythm and shape of his sentences to such an extent that he would blur the distinction between artistic genres, particularly between fiction, music, and poetry. In works like Words and Music, Cascando, and Nacht und Trume, in fact, he explicitly aligns words and music in increasingly fugue-like compositions, thus betraying the lasting influence of Lieder, particularly Schuberts, upon his own work. In Words and Music, the two main characters of the title compete at Croaks request to develop two themes, sloth and love, the latter functioning as the most powerful

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passion (288) and one that facilitates a glimpse / Of that wellhead (293-4). Words first attempt to write good poetry is entirely unsuccessful because his poem remains far removed from the thing in itself: What? [Pause. Very rhetorical.] Is love the word? [. . .] Is soul the word? [. . .] Do we mean love when we say love? [. . .] Soul, when we say soul? (289). At Croaks and Musics prompting, Words begins anew and adjusts his two poems to Musics tempo, thus creating, with their poetic tone (293), significantly more suggestive pieces. His first poem is about love lost, the second about plunging down ever deeper into the source of creativity: Then down a little way Through the trash Towards where All dark no begging No giving no words No sense no need Through the scum Down a little way To whence one glimpse Of that wellhead. (293-4) Musics non-mimetic, purely expressive sounds, however, ultimately win the competition and force Words to let out a Deep sigh (294). Cascando, a related radio play that Beckett wrote one month after Words and Music, pushes this theme even further and may suggest a more productive synthesis of words (this time Voice) and music that was not possible in the earlier piece. The radio play opens with a familiar Beckettian theme, the search to put an end to language: story . . . if you could finish it . . . you could rest . . . sleep . . . not before (297). The story that Voice devises for company is about a man called Woburn who struggles through the stones to a boat on the shore and then pushes it out into the oblivion of the sea. Throughout Cascando, though, Voice and Music are in concert rather than competition with one another, and the conclusion of the play suggests not an end to the Voice and Music, perhaps the oblivion toward which Woburn gropes, but a symbiosis of genres that points toward future artistic possibilities. The late Nacht und Trume, which echoes Becketts juxtaposition many years

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earlier in the Whoroscope Notebook of Schuberts An die Musik and the Mauthner quotation, offers a further extension of this Romantic ideal, for in this play, dream and reality merge into one another as a male voice softly hums the last seven bars of Schuberts lied from which the play takes its title, thereby creating a nocturnal atmosphere of serenity, of night and dreams, and, as the chalice suggests, a spiritual solace that only the crucifix of art could afford. Becketts German Letter, then, foreshadows all these themes to a striking degree. In the Letter, as we have seen, he economizes Denyss teaching (that one must, like a sculptor with a statue, deny all things, including denial itself, in order to reveal the hidden silence), the seventh proclamation of the Revolution of the Word manifesto (i.e., HE HAS THE RIGHT TO USE
WORDS OF HIS OWN FASHIONING AND TO DISREGARD EXISTING GRAMMATICAL AND SYNTACTICAL LAWS), and Mauthners clearly influential critique of language. For Beckett, of

course, language is obligatory and, if left to its own devices, a persistent obstacle to the unknowable, unnamable, ineffable reality that resides just beneath the veil of the word surface, a reality that music can apprehend and language can approximate depending on the degree to which the writer filters his language through a Nominalist irony and a musical expressiveness that renders it exponentially less mimetic: And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil [Schleier] that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. (171) In addition to the Revolution of the Word manifesto, Mauthners critique, and Frhromantiker aesthetics, Becketts language at this point in the German Letter also alludes to Shelleys frequent use of the veil metaphor in the Defense and, quite explicitly actually, to Inges discussion in Christian Mysticism of Denys. Shelley inaugurates the theme early in the treatise, claiming that Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar (131). Later in the Defense, however, he pushes the theme further and, in a kind of infinite poetic striving that has about it an echo of Denys and an 184

anticipation of Beckett, writes that the inexhaustibility of high poetry renders infinite the unveiling: All high poetry is infinite; [. . .] Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed (147-8). Perhaps this is not so far from Becketts own aesthetics of failure. In a passage that could well serve as an epigraph to the German Letter and to Three Novels, Inge summarizes the Dionysian apophatic tradition with a similar focus on the infinite nature of that which one strives to unveil: Since God is the Infinite, and the Infinite is the antithesis of the finite, every attribute which can be affirmed of a finite being may be safely denied of God. Hence God can only be described by negatives; He can only be discovered by stripping off all the qualities and attributes which veil Him; He can only be reached by divesting ourselves of all the distinctions of personality, and sinking or rising into our uncreated nothingness; and He can only be imitated by aiming at an abstract spirituality, the passionless apathy of an universal which is nothing in particular. [. . .] To know God, one must first know ones own spirit in its purity, unspotted by thought. The soul is hidden behind the veil of thought, and only when thought is worn off, becomes visible to itself. This stage is called knowledge of the soul. Next is realized knowledge of God, who rises from the bosom of the soul. This is the end of progress; differentiation between self and others has ceased. All the world of thought and senses is melted into an ocean without waves or current. This dissolution of the world is also known as the death of the sinful or worldly I, which veils the true Ego. Then the formless Being of the Deity is seen in the regions of pure consciousness beyond the veil of thought. (111-13) Becketts desire for a trembling of the veil, his insistence that language is a veil that he must tear asunder, echoes both Shelleys and Inges frequent use of the veil metaphor, for the soul, as Inge writes of Denyss apophaticism, is hidden behind the veil of thought, a veil that must be worn off in order to (re)discover what lies beneath, be it something or Nothing. Interestingly, too, Beckett famously refers in Proust to the ideal core of the onion (29), the search for which forms the basis of Three Novels, and Beckett may be referring here to one of Inges footnotes in

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precisely this section of the study where he cites the philosophy of the Vedanta Sara, which is the Eastern equivalent of Denyss apophaticism: Brahma is called the universal soul, of which all human souls are a part. These are likened to a succession of sheaths, which envelop each other like the coats of an onion. The human soul frees itself by knowledge from the sheath. But what is this knowledge? To know that the human intellect and all its faculties are ignorance and delusion. This is to take away the sheath, and to find that God is all. Whatever is not Brahma is nothing. So long as a man perceives himself to be anything, he is nothing. When he discovers that his supposed individuality is no individuality, then he has knowledge. Man must strive to rid himself of himself as an object of thought. He must be only a subject. As subject he is Brahma, while the objective world is mere phenomenon [italics mine]. (113) The peeling away of the coats of an onion, in order to get at the Nothingness (or what-knot) within it, serves as the central leitmotif in Three Novels, which is a Chinese box, a succession of sheaths, whose innermost box contains no-thing. One of the first indications that some indefinable, indescribable (no)thing witnesses the various stories and narrators that constitute Three Novels occurs in the second part of Molloy, in which Moran has an intuition that he may have invented the object of his quest: Molloy, or Mollose, was no stranger to me. [. . .] Perhaps I had invented him, I mean found him ready-made in my head (125). As the stories progress and we get closer to the ideal core by peeling away the successive sheaths of subjectivity, the I that invents the stories becomes even more protean, more phantasmal, more empty of any definable, locatable thing. By the time we get to Malone Dies, it becomes increasingly clear that Malone has been devising all the previous stories, including those stretching far before Molloy, for company: But let us leave these morbid matters and get on with that of my demise, in two or three days if I remember rightly. Then it will be all over with the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and Malones, unless it goes beyond the grave (268). Who, then, is devising Malone for company? The Unnamable claims responsibility for all that has gone before: All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop

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speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone. [. . .] And Basil and his gang? Inexistent, invented to explain I forget what (345-6). Later, the Unnamable reiterates the fact that I invented it all (357), that all these stories [. . .] are mine (474), that he has been a clumsy ventriloquist who gave away the trick (398). As for Mahood, It is I invented him, him and so many others [. . .] I invented my memories, not knowing what I was doing, not one is of me (454). In a letter to Richard Woodhouse, dated 27 October 1818, John Keats mused about his own shape-shifting subjectivity and, like the Unnamable, his own malleable sense of identity. The letter gets at the heart of the Unnamables quest for no-thing: As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the [W]ordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itselfit has no selfit is every thing and nothingIt has no character [. . .] A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identityhe is continually [. . .] filling some other BodyThe Sun, The Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attributethe poet has none; no identityhe is certainly the most umpoetical of all Gods creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the Characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical naturehow can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated. (228) This annihilation of self, this systematic liquidation of the egotistical sublime, may initially appear threatening, but writers like Novalis, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Keats, Rimbaud, and Beckett himself consistently sought to destabilize the fixed, illusory daemon of subjectivity in favor of a

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porous self that, through what Keats called a greeting of the spirit, is in dialogic relationship with the external world. In the Biographia, in fact, Coleridge, like Hazlitt before and Keats after him, compares Shakespeare, the imaginative genius par excellence, with Proteus, the sea god who could turn himself into any shape, for Shakespeare darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood [. . .]
SHAKESPEARE becomes all things, yet forever remaining himself (II, 27-8). Individual

subjectivity, then, explodes into the splintered language of multiplicity and indeterminacy. In his New Fragments, Novalis wrote that the true philosophical act is the slaying of the self (54), that I am you (55), and as we have seen over and over again, Rimbaud picks up on this Romantic theme and pushes it even further with his famous disruption of verb tenses. Je est un autre [I is an-other], declared Rimbaud with an ungrammatical eloquence that recalls Gods self-disclosure as I AM WHO I AM in Exodus 3:14 and Jesuss concomitant disruption of grammar, tense, and syntax in John 8:58: before Abraham was, I am. Rimbaud, in this one confused and confusing statement, went beyond the egotistical sublime into the realm of a limitless plurality that knew no bounds. The Unnamable is clearly on the same quest for nonidentity. I almost took myself, says the Unnamable in an allusion to Rimbaud, for the other (359). Inge, in Christian Mysticism, quotes Fnelon to this effect, thus recalling the undeniably mystical foundation for much Romantic theory: A mans self, quotes Inge, is his own greatest cross. [. . .] We must therefore become strangers to this self, this moi (241). But what exactly constitutes this I, this moi, of which the Unnamable speaks, and for what exactly is the Unnamable searching? He uses the first person singular pronoun, after all, without putting much stock in it: I say I, knowing its not I (464). Since he does not believe in the eye (429), which puns on the illusory nature of subjectivity, the I, and since the cursed first person [. . .] is really too red a herring (391), he switches to the third person point of view in order to gain an objective perspective of self, only to find that doing so is equally illusory: I shall not say I again, ever again, its too farcical. I shall put in its place, whenever I hear it, the third person, if I think of it. Anything to please them. It will make no difference. Where I am there is no one but me, who am not (405-6). Later still, the Unnamable declares that its the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for me (463). Beckett may be

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playing here on Jolass critique in The Language of Night of static conceptions of subjectivity. Jolas Romantically argues that Modern life has succeeded in relegating his ancient capacity for vision to a condition of passivity, and he asks, consequently, What methods should be used to re-discover the lost vision? His answer is that We need to seek the hidden depths of the I. The absolute is not a mere static product of the past. It has to be conquered again and again through an activistic idealism. [. . .] Like Plotinus, he [the poet] shuns discursive thinking in an attempt to find the great identity (49). Nothing could better summarize the Unnamables own quest, as he endeavors to slough off his mortal coil in favor of the great identity, what he himself equates with the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity (386). But Beckett may also be borrowing from Hlderlins Judgment and Being (1795), a brief essay in which the Swabian writer argued, contra Fichte, that subjectivity cannot function as the first principle of philosophy since it cannot be understood in its own terms. The I is essentially incapable of judging and hence always already defined in relation to an object of judgment distinct from it. Since all judgment necessitates an arche-separation (37) between subject and object, the I cannot serve as a foundation of knowledge in the way that the absolute ego, supposedly definable in advance of any cognitive relation to the world, was meant to do. We cannot understand a mental state as our own, Hlderlin argues, without judging it to be ours, but in doing so we must distinguish ourselves as the object of judgment from ourselves as judging. Hlderlin, with language that the Unnamable echoes to a striking degree, distinguishes between Being proper and identity (Identitt), which, he writes, one should not confuse: Yet this Being [proper] must not be confused with identity. If I say: I am I, the subject (I) and the object (I) are not united in such a way that no separation could be performed without violating the essence of what is to be separated; on the contrary, the I is only possible by means of this separation of the I from the I. How can I say: I! without self-consciousness? Yet how is self-consciousness possible? In opposing myself to myself, separating myself from myself, yet in recognizing myself as the same in the opposed regardless of this separation. Yet to what extent as the same? I can, I must ask in this manner; for in another

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respect it [the I] is opposed to itself. Hence identity is not a union of object and subject which simply occurred, hence identity is not = to absolute Being. (37-8) Hlderlin is arguing that self-consciousness assumes that we are most deeply united (37) with that of which we are conscious, but he is stressing that this unity cannot be explicated in terms of the I alone because self-consciousness, being an act of the I, entails an inescapable division between subject and object. To grasp the unity of subject and object as one in selfconsciousness, we must postulate a unity, or absolute Being, that is antecedent to the standpoint of the judging I. Furthermore, this absolute Being must underlie the distinction between subject and object inherent in every cognitive attitude, including our cognition of things in the world, for any sense we have of being unified with ourselves, arising as it does from some basis other than the I itself, must necessarily embody a sense of being unified with everything else. Subjectivity arises as a disruption of this unity and remains essentially incomprehensible without it. Hlderlins Hyperion, which Beckett read closely and annotated liberally, as his own personal copy of Hlderlins Samtliche Werke testifies, 46 dramatizes this disruption with a Romantic excess of emotion that is not so different from the Unnamables: To be one with allthis is the life divine, this is mans heaven. To be one with all that lives, to return in blessed self-forgetfulness into the All of Naturethis is the pinnacle of thoughts and joys, this the sacred mountain peak, the place of eternal rest [. . .] To be one with all that lives! [. . .] On this height I often stand, my Bellarmin! But an instant of reflection hurls me down. I reflect, and find myself as I was beforealone, with all the griefs of mortality, and my hearts refuge, the world in its eternal oneness, is gone; Nature closes her arms, and I stand like an alien before her and do not understand her. (3-4) Hyperions desire to become reabsorbed into the All of Nature or to reach the sacred mountain peak anticipates Becketts journey from Foot to peak in the late prose-poem The Way, foregrounds the protagonists fusion into the breath of the forest in Assumption (7),

46

Becketts copy of Hlderlins Werke, with its suggestive marginalia, is preserved in the Reading Archive.

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and may have influenced the Unnamables romantic desire to find himself in the mountains: you look for yourself in the mountains and the plains, its only natural (459). In Judgment and Being, Hlderlin asks how we are to understand Being proper, and he answers that we may assume that it unites subject and object to such an extent that no separation can be performed without violating the essence of what is to be separated (37). The exact constitution of this Being, however, is unknowable, which is exactly what Hlderlin wanted to establish, for Being cannot be an object of knowledge since that would necessitate a division between a knowing subject instead of embracing subject and object in a prior unity. Being, in other words, can only be a postulate that we adopt as a ground in order to make sense of the possibility of reflection. The Unnamable echoes all these ideas in his own attempts to restore the disruption of the incomprehensible prior unity from which he has been exiled. Like Hyperion, who feels himself an outcast from the garden of Nature (4), the Unnamable feels as though he has been expelled from a prior unity: just a reminder, to make me regret what I have lost, long to be again in the place I was banished from (467). The place from which the Unnamable was banished is a place of totality that is prior to assertion and denial. Beckett carefully recorded the word Pleroma in the Dream Notebook, the definition of which he took almost verbatim from Inge: the totality of the Divine attributes (81). In The Unnamable, he refers to this prior totality as the calm that precedes life (417). The categories being and non-being do not apply to this totality since, as Denys argues in The Mystical Theology, such totality abides prior to this epistemological distinction. This totality is what Denys calls the Nameless One (596A, 54), which may be a seed for Becketts Unnamable, his own named nameless one. But Denys does go on to admit that many theologians have named the Nameless One, who is ultimately no thing (596C, 56), but that this is a natural and necessary procedure since God, who transcends all, pervades all: And so it is that as the Cause of all and as transcending all, he is rightly nameless and yet has the names of everything that is. Truly he has dominion over all and all things revolve around him, for he is their cause, their source, and their destiny (596C, 56). Denys goes on to write,

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Thus, regarding the divine unity beyond being [. . .] the indivisible Trinity holds within a shared undifferentiated unity its supra-essential subsistence, its supradivine divinity, its supra-excellent goodness, its supremely individual identity beyond all that is, its oneness beyond the source of oneness, its ineffability, its many names, its unknowability, its wholly belonging to the conceptual realm, the assertion of all things, the denial of all things, that which is beyond every assertion and denial, and finally, if one may put it so, the abiding and foundation of the divine persons who are the source of oneness as a unity which is totally undifferentiated and transcendent. (641A, 61) The echo of Hlderlins Being proper is clear, and Denys later stresses the fact that we should not conclude that the negations are simply the opposites of the affirmations, but rather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this, beyond privations, beyond every denial, beyond every assertion [italics mine] (1000B, 136). Again, this is the negation of the propositional rather than merely negative propositions, a method that clearly attracted Beckett, as he confessed to Juliet, and it demonstrates the undeniable link between post-structuralism and negative theology. In Writing and Difference (1978), for instance, Jacques Derrida deconstructs Being as presence and argues instead for a limitless play of language that one must conceive of prior to assertion and denial: Play is the disruption of presence. [. . .] Play is always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence. Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other war around (292). The theologian and philosopher Jean-Luc Marion has adopted Derridas critique of Being as presence, and in God without Being (1982 & 1991), Marion challenges the fundamental premise of both metaphysics and neo-Thomist theology, the idea that God, before all else, must be. Marion deconstructs traditional metaphysics, based as it is on the constraints of onto-theo-logy (xxi), and seeks instead to bring out the absolute freedom of God with regard to all determinations, including, first of all, the basic condition that renders all other conditions possible and even necessaryfor us, humansthe fact of Being (xx). In his essay In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of Negative Theology (1997), which features a fascinating response from Derrida himself, Marion further argues for the fruitful

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dialogue between theology and Deconstruction. According to Marion, negative theology like Denyss does not privilege presence, for as Marion demonstrates with a series of impressive linguistic examples from the apophatic tradition, God, who is prior to assertion and denial, has No ground, no essence, no presence (37). This is the tradition in which Beckett is steeped. To answer the Unnamables central conundrums of subjectivity and of Being proper, to peel back further sheaths of the onion in order to lay bare the Nameless One, we must return to the German Letter, a document, once again, that elegantly consolidates a number of mystical theological and Romantic themes such as Mauthners critique of language; Jolass pan-Romantic injunctions to break up the word and to listen to the rushing of new springs [. . .] in silence; the giddy heights of Beethovens seventh Symphony that link unfathomable abysses of silence; Hlderlins postulate of absolute Being; Baudelaires forest of symbols (which Beckett rejects); Denyss apophaticism; and Eckharts language of erasure: Is there something paralyzingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethovens seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? [. . .] I know there are people, sensitive and intelligent people, for whom there is no lack of silence. I cannot but assume that they are hard of hearing. For in the forest of symbols, which arent any, the little birds of interpretation, which isnt any, are never silent. [. . .] At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words. In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All. (172) The search for that silence that underlies Allnote the romantic extravagance of the desire to feel a whisper of that final musicis precisely the motivating desire in Three Novels, particularly in the last of the series where the Unnamable tries desperately to link unfathomable

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abysses of silence, though he can connect nothing with nothing. The Unnamable desperately tries to make a step towards silence (369), toward what he later calls the true silence (451) with which he longs to be reunited: Id be the silence, Id be back in the silence, wed be reunited (474). He is, in fact, in search of a little calm and something of the silence of old (409), but he is well aware that this search necessarily involves the via negativa, for the silence that he seeks is unknowable as such: So it will never be known, Worm will never know, let the silence be black, or let is be grey, it can never be known, as long as it lasts, whether it is final, or whether it is a mere lull, and what a lull, when he must listen, strain his ears for the murmurs of olden silences [. . .] (418). This does not mean, however, that the search is futile, only that, paradoxically, the knowledge of silence consists in the knowledge that silence as such is unknowable. In his Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa explicates the apophatic implications of Exodus 19-20 in which Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was (20:21), thus explaining the epistemological paradoxes involved in knowing the unknowable, a central paradox, of course, in Becketts aesthetics: For leaving behind everything that is observed, not only what sense comprehends but also what the intelligence thinks it sees, it keeps on penetrating deeper until by the intelligences yearning for understanding it gains access to the invisible and the incomprehensible, and there it sees God. This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness. [. . .] When, therefore, Moses grew in knowledge, he declared that he had seen God in the darkness, that is, that he had then come to know that what is divine is beyond all knowledge and comprehension [. . .] (95) This extraordinary passage foregrounds much of Becketts work, beginning perhaps most obviously with his characterization of Murphy, who endeavors, albeit in vain, to leave behind everything that is observed and to reach the thick darkness in the third zone of his mind: The third [zone], the dark, was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms. The light contained the docile elements of a new

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manifold, the world of the body broken up into the pieces of a toy; the half light, states of peace. But the dark neither elements nor states, nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming, without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change. Here there was nothing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion. Here he was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom. (112) The language here refers quite explicitly to the third of a series of concentric circles about which Jung spoke in his third Tavistock lecture that Beckett attended with his analyst, Wilfred Bion, in London in 1935. But the darkness imagery and the language of incomprehension, which Three Novels pushes even further, owes as much to the tradition of the via negativa. As the Unnamable says, Dear incomprehension, its thanks to you Ill be myself, in the end (370), this language of incomprehension recalling Gregory of Nyssas description of Moses as being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness (95), as well as Hlderlins Hyperion, who claims that knowledge has corrupted everything for me (4). The specific darkness imagery that the Unnamable employs, furthermore, is strikingly reminiscent of Gregory of Nyssas descriptions of Moses own ascent into the cloud of unknowing. The Unnamable longs to be let loose, alone, in the unthinkable unspeakable (382), a line that is reminiscent of Plotinuss flight from the alone to the Alone and of Jolass Plotinian language in The Language of Night: The poetic method then, aims at the creation of myths. [. . .] The inner world is brought to the surface with blinding suddenness. The highly sensitized individual sinks into himself, he tries to penetrate to the unutterable, he lives for a flight of the alone to the alone, as Plotinus says (50-1). Similarly, the Unnamable later declares that he resides in a place that is unimaginable, unspeakable (474), a description that Beckett later echoes with the unspeakable home in neither (258). Molloy, with a specific reference to the negative theology that Beckett himself lauded to Charles Juliet, sets the stage for the apophaticism that will characterize his journey toward the unthinkable unspeakable silence that underlies All:

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What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, its relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God, in terms of what he is not. (41) The Unnamable later reiterates his penchant for the negative way, stating that First Ill say what Im not (371) and that he is, consequently, present only in absentia: Where I am there is no one but me, who am not (406). The Unnamable is well aware that he shall have to banish them in the end, the beings, things, shapes, sounds and lights with which my haste to speak has encumbered this place (341). It is, as he says quite simply, a question of elimination (418). In a statement that alludes to Shelleys Prometheus Unbound in which the deep truth is imageless (II, iv, 116), the Unnamable likewise acknowledges these nameless images I have, these imageless names (468) that are wrapped in a thick darkness, what the Unnamable refers to as an impenetrable veil of darkness (341). Malones story about Sapo is likewise dominated by a thick darkness in which silence and stillness ever abide: And at the last abatement of the inflow the room grew darker and darker until nothing in it was visible any more. For the dark had triumphed. And Sapo, his face turned towards an earth so resplendent that it hurt his eyes, felt at his back and all about him the unconquerable dark, and it licked the light on his face. Sometimes abruptly he turned to face it, letting it envelop and pervade him, with a kind of relief. [. . .] But silence was in the heart of the dark, the silence of dust and the things that would never stir, if left alone. And the ticking of the invisible alarm-clock was as the voice of that silence which, like the dark, would one day triumph too. And then all would be still and dark and all things at rest for ever at last. (230) This language echoes Moses own ascent into the cloud of unknowing, as well as Jolass The Language of Night: The poet whose psychic life is identical with that of the mystic and other mantically gifted persons, creates his own language of night (58). Jolass language of verticalism and flight, indeed, plays a central role in Three Novels, in which the Unnamable, who desires a flight from self (420), has a decidedly vertical urge that is often disorienting: But in the other direction, I mean of course vertically, I have nothing to guide me (235). Molloy had

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already presaged this urge when he admits that even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate (31), this language recalling, once again, Jolass orphic attempt to penetrate to the unutterable. Years earlier, Beckett had explored the possibility of a contemplative life, one of silence and stillness in which all things were at rest for ever at last, through his deep reading of Thomas Kempiss The Imitation of Christ and Arnold Geulincxs Ethica. Jolass The Language of Night may also have been formative in this regard. Jolas links the mystic with the poet in what he calls the quietistic state: His [the poets] mind is related to the minds that practiced alchemy, the Kabballa, neo-Platonism, and other mantic states. Master Eckhart, Jan van Ruysbroeck, St. John of the Cross, Eastern mysticisms, and the gnostic systems are identical with it. The messages of telluric images emerging from the primordial background are transmitted through ecstasies, the dream-state and psychiatric conditions. In the quietistic state, the poet becomes aware of the eternal relationships. (49-50) Beckett may have had this in mind when he conceived of the psychiatric conditions to which Murphy aspires. But an even more evident antecedent to Murphys quest for the quietistic state is Kempiss Imitation, which Beckett first read, as his Dream Notebook indicates, in the earliest English translation, edited by John K. Ingram from a manuscript in the Trinity College Library. Ingram offers three translations, but the notebook indicates that Beckett read Books I-III in what Ingram calls the Old Version, Book IV in Lady Margarets translation, and an unidentified Latin original from which he took several citations. In the notebook, Beckett boxed two consecutive citations that would serve as the foundation for Sedendo et Quiesc[i]endo (seated and in quiet), which Beckett wrote over the summer of 1931, subsequently published in transition 21, and later included within the larger framework of pastiche in Dream. The boxed citations would also underlay Murphys own quest for what Kempis calls the solytary lyfe & sylence (I. xx, 168). The two citations run as follows: Qui melius scit pati majorem tenebris pacem. Iste est vistor sui et dominus mundi, amicus Xti et haeres coeli [He who knows the secret of enduring will enjoy the greatest peace. Such a one is master of himself and of the world, a friend of Christ and an heir of heaven] (85); Nolle consolari ab aliqua creatura magnae puritatis signum est [To

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desire no comfort from any creature is a sign of great purity] (85). Beckett quoted the latter citation in an extraordinary letter to MacGreevy dated 10 March 1935, what Knowlson calls one of the half-dozen most important of his letters to survive (179). Murphy, who hates the part of himself that craves Celia (8), embodies this very pursuit for detached contemplation; Beckett himself was struggling at this point, as his letter to MacGreevy indicates, with the strife of opposites between the flesh and the spirit, between solitude and community. As a young man, though, Beckett, like Murphy, seems to have misunderstood the Imitation and used Kempiss State of everlasting quiet, as Beckett noted in the Dream Notebook (85), as an excuse for solitude, apathy, and arrogance. Beckett, though he most certainly rejected the Christian dogmatism behind Kempiss Imitation, seems to have learned that humility must underlay quietism lest it lapse into an unhealthy obsession with, and immersion in, self. Once again, Murphy offers a severe critique of this unhealthy alternative, of the egotistical sublime. In his introduction to Christian Mysticism, Inge writes that as the tendency towards quietism and introspection increased among them [the Neoplatonists], another derivation for Mysticism was foundit was explained to mean deliberately shutting the eyes to all external things (4). This clearly presages Mr. Endon (Greek for within), a windowless monad (181) whom Murphy acknowledges as having escaped from a colossal fiasco (178). But Murphys attempts to become like Mr. Endon end tragically, and he is no more able to bracket out the external world than he is able to separate his mind from his body. Without humility, Beckett seems to have been suggesting, quietism lapses into mere solipsism. Arnold Geulincxs Ethica, the core of which is the necessity of humility, may have offered Beckett an alternative to the hermetically sealed life of a monad. In Murphy, Beckett refers to the beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil veils (178), later stating that this phraseWhere you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing was central to his aesthetics. This is the core of Geulincxs Ethica and rests upon humilitas since, in looking into the self, one necessarily realizes ones essential lack of worth. In his essay Samuel Beckett and Thomas Kempis: The Roots of Quietism, C.J. Ackerley surmises that the fundamental unheroic offered Beckett a way of accommodating the ethic of Kempis and Geulincx to the exigencies of the contingent world. The aesthetic is one with the ethic (89).

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This is a fair assessment. In 1934, Beckett had published a review of MacGreevys Poems entitled Humanistic Quietism, an oxymoronic title that betrays his recognition that the two, aesthetics and ethics, must coexist is order for the radiance to occur. His language in this essay is applied Aquinas and, of course, nods to Stephens own Thomistic language about aesthetics in Joyces A Portrait. Beckett was clearly doing a good turn for a friend with this review, but his theme is commensurate with his aesthetic preoccupations at the time. He opens by stating that All poetry [. . .] is prayer (Disjecta 68) and then goes on to state the centrality of humility in prayer: To the mind that has raised itself to the grace of humility foundedto quote Mr McGreevys [sic] T.S. Eliotnot on misanthropy but on hope, prayer is no more (no less) than an act of recognition (68). Beckett, as if he were under the influence of some kind of transcendental aphrodisiac (Zurbrugg 183), praises MacGreevys poetry for emerging from a nucleus of endopsychic clarity, which is a blaze of prayer creating its object and, as such, a prayer that is a spasm of awareness (69), a radiance without counterpart in the work of contemporary poets writing in English (68). Although the lines from MacGreevys Poems that Beckett quotes do not particularly suggest such a reading, the essay remains of interest for what it reveals about Becketts own mindset at the time regarding transcendental validation. Ackerley maintains that Beckett parts company from Thomas [ Kempis], as he had from Augustine, Descartes and Geulincx, [. . .] at this point of transcendental validation. Yet that departure is not a simple affair (90). This, again, is a fair assessment, particularly in its allowance for ambiguity, for as Beckett writes in Dante . . . Bruno, Joyces work is purgatorial in the absolute absence of the Absolute (33), but of course it is precisely this absolute absence that provides the condition for movement. Departures for Beckett, indeed, are rarely simple affairs. The question of whether or not transcendental validation is present in Three Novels is a central one. The Unnamable, after all, often complains of suffering in an endless cycle of issueless misery, of being pawed and pummeled endlessly in vain by the devils who beset him (397). Beckett had much earlier explored the prickly theme of theodicy in Ooftish, a poem that he originally published in Transitions Tenth Anniversary Edition (no. 27, 1938, 33). In this poem, the speaker is skeptical about the senseless accumulation of pain and, consequently, severely critiques Christian piety for its complacency about human suffering.

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After listing a series of shocking ailmentscancer angina it is all one to us / cough up your T.B. dont be stingythe speaker sardonically concludes that evil and pain in the context of a divine plan are offensive and unacceptable: so parcel up the whole issue and send it along the whole misery diagnosed undiagnosed misdiagnosed get your friends to do the same well make use of it well make sense of it well put it in the pot with the rest it all boils down to the blood of the lamb Beckett repudiates the pietistic claim that human beings must contribute to the kitty in the wake of the crucifixion, as a preacher once put it in sermon that he had heard in Ireland, and most of his work is a sustained attack of this simple-minded assertion. The misery that characterizes the Unnamables search for the ideal core of the onion, however, may have more to do with John of the Crosss theology of radical stripping in The Dark Night of the Soul than with suffering for its own sake. Curiously, critics have paid scant attention to the importance of The Dark Night in Becketts writing, but John of the Cross clearly interested Beckett as he made his way through Inges account of the Spanish mystics deeply compelling theology. Despite the fact that Beckett seems to have become impatient at this point in his reading of Inge, noting with characteristic humor in the Dream Notebook The Dark Shite of the Hole and the Ueberstench (101), he made a special effort to sketch Johns tripartite structure of the souls dark night as it passively contemplates God: Dark Night of the Soul: (1) Night of Sense (2) (3) Mind Will & Memory (100)

What may have interested Beckett most about John is the interior, nocturnal, psychological nature of his theology. It would not be too much to suggest that Johns verticalism was appealing to a man who had spent many years associating and publishing with transition, a journal, as we have seen, that stressed the necessity of this inward movement. Even Becketts The Way, an as yet unpublished prose-poem that he wrote in the final decade of his life, is

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reminiscent of the vertical movement that he never quite abandoned, for the way, which itself may recall the salvation that Beckett detected in Swanns Way, enigmatically describes an infinite journey, as the explicit use of an infinity sign indicates, from Foot to peak, a movement that is also reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrichs Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818): The way wound up from foot to top and thence on down another way. On back down. The way crossed midway more and less. A little more and less than midway up and down. The ways were one-way. No retracing the way up back down nor back up the way down. Neither in whole from top or foot nor in part from on the way. The one way back was on and on was always back. Freedom once at foot and top to pause or not. Before on back up and down. Briefly once at the extremes the will set free. (HRHRC) The Friedrich allusion is strengthened by the fact that Beckett substituted top for what was in previous drafts peak, which may also recall his first story, the quasi-mystic Assumption in which the direction is similarly a vertical ascent: We are taken up bodily and pitched breathless on the peak of a sheer crag: which is the pain of Beauty (4). The will set free, with its implicit invocation of Schopenhauer, echoes the main theme of Proust that he had examined some fifty years earlier and the way of privation by a John of the Cross. As for the question of transcendental validation, Inge writes in his section on John that he follows to the end the negative road of Dionysius, without troubling himself at all with the transcendental metaphysics of Neoplatonism. His nihilism or acosmism is not the result of abstracting from the notion of Being or of unity; its basis is psychological. It is subjective religion carried almost to its logical conclusion. [. . .] He does not escape from the quietistic attitude of passive expectancy [. . .] (229). The psychological nature of Johns theology is crucial. Johns commentary on The Dark Night, which was originally a poem, actually forms part of a larger composition that includes The Ascent of Mount Carmel, in which John first promises to treat of the passive nights of contemplation. The Dark Night, then, furnishes a necessary complement to the Ascent, a work that calls the path to the summit nada since this narrow way demands extreme psychological privation. For John, privation entails feeling the profound absence of consolation, the sense of

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God as distant and even hostile. Inge quotes Johns line Faith is midnight, immediately commenting that it is the deepest darkness that we have to pass (225), a darkness that at least partly forms the basis for Morans It is midnight (102), the felt sense, as in Johns nada, of the absence of faith. The sufferings of Jesus are naturally central to Johns theology of privation that makes it clear from the outset that this night is an identification with Jesus and a carrying of his cross: First, have habitual desire to imitate Christ in all your deeds by bringing your life into conformity with his (148). The Unnamables own privation mirrors Jesuss to such an extent that he specifically identifies with the pain of being crowned with thorns: The thorns theyll have to come and stick into me, as into their unfortunate Jesus (400). Immediately after this identification, he uses Jolass mystical language of flight, stating that some day I feel myself soaring above my condition (400). Even his ancient tears (429) that stream down his cheeks (333) recall Jesuss own tears of lamentation in the Garden of Gethsemane on the eve of his execution in Matt 26:36ff, Mark 14:32, and Luke 22:43-4. The mystery of the Paschal event, to be sure, is central to Becketts own theory of the Purgatories. The privation of which John writes has two aspects, the purgation of senses and the purgation of spirit. Ironically, then, it is through the felt sense of Gods remoteness that God is most present, working in the soul and purging it of its base impurities. The negation (poverty, nakedness, void, death, etc.) is in fact theological communion; the emptying of self is transformed into the fullness of God. But the soul experiences this negation as abandonment, as nada or a dark night. As he explains in The Ascent, John calls this purgation night for three reasons: We can offer three reasons for calling this journey toward union with God a night. The first has to do with the point of departure, because individuals must deprive themselves of their appetites for worldly possessions. This denial and privation is like a night for all ones senses. The second reason refers to the means or the road along which a person travels to this union. Now this road is faith, and for the intellect faith is also like a dark night.

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The third reason pertains to the point of arrival, namely God. And God is also a dark night to the soul in this life. These three nights pass through a soul, or better, the soul passes through them in order to reach union with God. (120) John goes on to explain that it is not the external world that is problematic, as Murphy had believed, so much as the will and appetites: Since the things of the world cannot enter the soul, they are not in themselves an encumbrance or harm to it; rather, it is the will and appetite dwelling within that cause the damage when set on these things (123). Beckett would have appreciated this notion vis--vis his reading of Schopenhauer, who stressed the ablation of desire through transcendence of the Will. The more one looks inward, John says, the more he is aware of his own impurity, which dovetails with Geulincxs central tenet in the Ethica (humilitas) that made such a deep impression on Beckett. John writes that God humbles the soul greatly in order to exalt it greatly afterward (405). But the dread-filled experience of feeling abandoned by God produces in the person undergoing the dark night a painful lack or privation that consists, as John fully explains later in The Dark Night, of darkness in the intellect, aridity in the will regarding the exercise of love, emptiness of all possessions in the memory, and a general affliction and torment as a consequence. More specifically, there are two reasons this divine wisdom is not only night and darkness for the soul but also affliction and torment. First, because of the height of the divine wisdom that exceeds the abilities of the soul. Second, because of the souls baseness and impurity; and on this account the wisdom is painful, afflictive, and also dark for the soul (401). Such persons therefore have a heightened awareness of their own misery and imperfections. Similarly, the Unnamable, during his own purgation of will and appetites so that he may become silence in the midst of silence (445), is made aware through this purification of my sins (472), which he later identifies, quite confusedly, as a strange pain, strange sin (476). John remarks in The Dark Night that such persons feel as though they will never escape this feeling of abandonment and imprisonment: They resemble one who is imprisoned in a dark dungeon, bound hands and feet, and able neither to move nor see nor feel any favor from heaven or earth (407-8). The Unnamable similarly feels as though he is bound in a dungeon from which he will never emerge: Im in a dungeon, Ive always been in a dungeon (422). Later he says that hell never know peace (436) because he is forever imprisoned: Im in something,

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Im shut up (471). John even says that the agony is so great that the soul might consider death a relief: Both the sense and the spirit, as though under an immense and dark load, undergo such agony and pain that the soul would consider death a relief (403). The soul, writes John, becomes a battlefield (402) in its search for annihilation of self, a notion not alien to Three Novels, a psychomachia in which the pain of contemplation is almost unbearable, both for the Unnamable and for the reader. John takes great pains, often literally as he wrote some of his most anguished work in solitary confinement, to reiterate the profound depth of torment that is involved in passively suffering the purgation within the souls very substance, for the soul, when stripped of the old self (413), undergoes indescribable spiritual anguish (415): This night is a painful disturbance involving many fears, imaginings, and struggles within these persons. On account of the apprehension and feeling of their miseries, they suspect that they are lost and their blessings are gone forever. The sorrow and moaning of their spirits is so deep that it turns into vehement spiritual roars and clamoring and sometimes they pronounce them vocally and dissolve in tears (if they have the strength and power to do so), although such relief is less frequent. (415) The stripping of self that the novel actualizes likewise racks and assails the Unnamable: It [this voice] issues from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I cant stop it, I cant prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me (349). He is consequently truly bathed in tears (346), for there is no light here (345). His place is black, and empty (345), recalling the nada of which John speaks in regards to the privation of sense and spirit. As Beckett writes in Proust, The old ego dies hard (21). It is essential to acknowledge, once again, that for John this indescribable spiritual anguish is purposive in that it is preparation for the stillness and silence that awaits the properly purged soul: This war or combat is profound because the peace awaiting the soul must be exceedingly profound; and the spiritual suffering is intimate and penetrating because the love to be possessed by the soul will also be intimate and refined. [. . .] Because in the state of perfection toward which it journeys by means of this

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purgative night the soul must reach the possession and enjoyment of innumerable blessings of gifts and virtues in both its substance and its faculties, it must first in a general way feel a withdrawal, deprivation, emptiness, and poverty regarding these blessings. (415) John is quick to admit, however, that this night of sense and spirit may last for some years, though there are periods in which the soul glimpses the illumination of silence toward which it strives so painfully: But if it [the purgation] is to be truly efficacious, it will last for some years, no matter how intense it may be; although there are intervals in which, through Gods dispensation, this dark contemplation ceases to assail the soul in a purgative mode and shines upon it illuminatively and lovingly. [. . .] Such poverty of spirit deserves this blessedness (40812). Yet the question remains of whether or not Beckett accepts transcendental validation or the discovery of essential values, for he seems time and again to have rejected anything resembling them, preferring, instead, to acknowledge the chaos that characterizes a world in which the lines of communication have been irreparably severed. But it might be more accurate to say, or at least to suggest, that Becketts approach to this epistemological crisis makes sense in light of Jungs psychology of the collective unconscious. In transition no. 21, the issue in which Beckett published Sedendo, Jolas included some fragments from Jungs essay in The Secret of the Golden Flower where Jung rails against the critiques of so-called psychologism and argues that although he may restrict himself only to what he can experience psychically, the contents of which are often autonomous and uncontrollable, he does not necessarily fall into the trap of skepticism or agnosticism: The fact that I restrict myself to what can be psychically [i.e., psychologically] experienced, and repudiate the metaphysical, does not mean, as anyone with insight can understand, a gesture of skepticism or agnosticism pointed against faith of trust in higher powers, but what I intend to say is approximately the same thing Kant meant when he called das Ding an sich [. . .] a purely negative, border-line concept. Every statement about the transcendental ought to be avoided because it is invariably a laughable presumption on the part of the human mind, unconscious of its limitations. Therefore, when God or Tao is spoken of as

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a stirring of, or a condition of, the soul, something has been said about the knowable only, but nothing about the unknowable. Of the latter, nothing can be determined. (no. 21, 1932, 127) Becketts characters, even in Three Novels, seem never to abandon faith of trust in higher powers, though they are equally clear that, by definition, they can determine nothing about the unknowable as such, thus keeping intact the integrity of incoherence that attracted Beckett from his early years as a lecturer at Trinity (Burrows 14). Hlderlins postulate of absolute Being is also germane in this context. As we have seen with Becketts central theory of the Purgatories, glimpses of infinitude, though inexplicable insofar as they are fusions of both light and dark, are never absent. Even the Unnamable, who often feels bereft of all reason to exist, senses that even he is fundamentally related to the unthinkable ancestor of whom nothing can be said. But perhaps I shall speak of him some day, and of the impenetrable age when I was he [. . .] before being restored to him (403). In the Dream Notebook, Beckett jotted down St. Bonaventuras famous definition of God, center everywhere, circumference nowhere (97), which Wylie echoes in Murphy when he exclaims, All center and no circumference! (60). Similarly, the Unnamable, given his own inherent spark of divinity, claims that I am certainly not at the circumference (335). He even compares himself to the preexistent Johannine Logos (he is, after all, in words, made of words [443]): I am Matthew and I am the angel, I who came before the cross, before the sinning, came into the world, came here (342). Malone, in a passage that is shadowed by the Romantic excess that Beckett never quite purged from his art, says that it is such a night as Kaspar David Friedrich loved, tempestuous and bright (225), but that he can sense the silence just beneath this tempestuousness with which he has a natural affinity: Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again (225). Just prior to this, Malone admits that his journey was but a wandering to find home: What I sought, when I struggled out of my hole, then aloft through the stinging air towards an inaccessible boon, was the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the relapse to darkness, to nothingness, to earnestness, to home, to him

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waiting for me always, who needed me and whom I needed, who took me in his arms and told me to stay with him always, who gave me his place and watched over me, who suffered every time I left him, whom I have often made suffer and seldom contented, whom I have never seen. There I am forgetting myself again. My concern is not with me, but with another, far beneath me and whom I try to envy, of whose crass adventures I can now tell at last, I dont know how. (221-2) Malones concern with the one far beneath him, as opposed to a concern with the egotistical sublime, is the apex of the mind, as Beckett noted in the Dream Notebook, the infinite I AM of which Coleridge speaks in the Biographia (I, 304). The Wordsworth of Tintern Abbey writes that in certain blessed moods the eye (i.e., both the corporeal eye and the I) is quieted enough for the revelation of the peace that passeth understanding, and of course in The Prelude this translates into his famous spots of time in which the light of sense, and consequently all sense of distinction, is extinguished. From the Sixth Book of the 1850 edition: [. . .] when the light of sense Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed The invisible world, doth greatness make abode, There harbours; whether we be young or old, Our destiny, our beings heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there [. . . .] (600-5) Many years earlier, in 1824, Wordsworth had written that the only poetry that powerfully affects him is the poetry that turns upon infinity [. . .] where things are lost in each other, and limits vanish, and aspirations are raised (Letters I, 34-5). In the Dream Notebook, Beckett responded quite readily to this mystical potentiality as filtered through Eckhardts conception of Fnkelein (divine spark), which Beckett was careful to record: Eckhardts Fnkelein: organ by which the personality communicates with God & knows him (100). As Malone begin to vanish into the disembodied UnnamableMalone is, as he says, on the point of vanishing (222)he becomes stripped of self through the painful, almost unbearable process of purgation about which John writes in The Dark Night, and it presages the Unnamables continuation of the

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quest to be nowhere in particular (403), during which his soul is momentarily granted access, through an infinite plurality, to the ineffable silence that underlies All: [. . .] the whole world is here with me, Im the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, Im all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray [. . .] Im something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place [. . .] if I could describe this place, portray it, Ive tried, I feel no place, no place round me, theres no end to me, I dont know what it is, it isnt flesh, it doesnt end, its like air [. . .] (443-58) The breakdown of epistemology and the concomitant entrance into the cloud of unknowing (I dont know what it is) allow him to be nothing and nowhere (424) in what Malone calls the blessedness of absence (252). One thinks, too, of Morans pure contemplation, vis--vis the Plotinian nous that Beckett recorded in his Dream Notebook (98), of the honey-bees dance (155-6). Even Molloy was not entirely cut off from the blessing of pure contemplation: Yes, there were times when I forgot to be (46). All of these blessed moments of self-annihilation look forward to the liminality of the old woman in Ill Seen, in which The silence merges into music infinitely far and as unbroken as silence. Ceaseless celestial winds in unison (74). Coleridges choral Echo [that] is the Universe, again, is not far away here (Biographia II, 248). Becketts remarks to Tom Driver about the necessity of finding a form that accommodates the mess and of accommodating the chaos without saying that the chaos is really something else lead him in the late work to push the logic of Romanticism that he had inherited primarily from the Frhromantiker, Dostoevski, Rimbaud, and the aesthetics of transition to its furthest possible conclusion, and he found that the creative imagination, far from being dead on arrival, is indestructible and, when wedded to the empirical eye, has the power to render the self transparent to the realities of the contingent world in an endless oscillation between eye and mind. In the late work, particularly in Ill Seen Ill Said, Beckett effects the reality of the imagined, the ideal real, by utilizing a hieroglyphic language that is interstitial and, hence, essentially inscrutable. And the rest is silence.

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CHAPTER FIVE

THE REALITY OF THE IMAGINED: BECKETTS IDEAL REAL AND THE COALESCENCE OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT

People who try to free themselves from what is vague in order to state precisely whatever is going on in their minds are producing rubbish. Antonin Artauds The Theatre and Its Double Such the confusion now between real andhow say its contrary? Becketts Ill Seen Ill Said

Rather than ending up in an imaginative and linguistic stalemate, Becketts late work concentrates, intensifies, and deepens the Romantic themes with which he had always been engaged. More specifically, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho represent the apotheosis of Becketts lifelong struggle to express the ontological relationship of human perception (and the related imaginative faculty) to the nature of reality itself. These pieces are Becketts most epistemologically sophisticated and, arguably, his most successful attempts to preserve the integrity of the real within an artistic statement that acknowledges, as he taught at Trinity, the struggle between the artist who is moving, and the moving material (Burrows 15). While The Lost Ones remains largely (though by no means entirely) static because of its obsessive reliance upon the corporeal eye and Long Observation of the Ray 47 remains an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the subtleties of inner and outer perception, Ill Seen and Worstward Ho actualize, through an unparalleled imaginative and linguistic agility, the dynamism of the artist and his material. The world of Ill Seen and Worstward Ho is hieroglyphic, and it reveals the flux of the artist and what he calls in the Whoroscope Notebook, with a nod to Schellings Naturphilosophie
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Reading Archive, MS 2909/1-6.

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and Bergsons lan vital, the unseen vicissitudes of matter. In short, this is the realm of the ideal real. In addition to Becketts early statements in his Trinity lectures, Proust, Dante . . . Bruno, and Three Dialogues offer an important theoretical foundation for his radical experiments with the nature and function of perception in the artistic apprehension of the real. In his Trinity lectures, Beckett stated that the ideal real for Proust consisted of an extra-temporal apprehension that necessitates a confluence of both empiricism and imagination: Proust says that the real material, whether approached empirically or imaginatively, remains hermetic. Because when approached imaginatively it is absent, it lacks actual reality; when approached empirically (direct perception) the surface is also hermetic. Therefore, a screen of self-consciousness established by the subject between himself and the object. [. . .] Whole problemHow to apprehend the real. In a sense of grace which depends on the repudiation of past sensation in the present: ideal realnot merely function of the present or the past, but extra-temporal. [. . .] Participation between the real and the idealentire Proustian solution. (Burrows 14-15) Beckett reformulated and extended these suggestive statements in Proust, stating that the Proustian experience is at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extra-temporal (75). Beckett detects in this conception Prousts romantic strain, that is, his rejection of the Concept in favour of the Idea (80-1), a Platonic notion of which Beckett was never entirely able to divest himself. Despite what appears to be Becketts rejection of the Proustian solutionhe apparently preferred Stendhals approach, though the epistemological distinction between the two is far from clear: Incoherent entity of the two components [real and ideal]. One abolishes the other. They coexist in a state of incoherence (Burrows 15)it may be more accurate to say that Beckett reconciles the Proustian solution and the Stendhalian anti-solution into his own (albeit no less Romantic) approach that fuses elements from each but ultimately rests on neither.

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Becketts concept of nature is key here. Nature for Beckett is experiential; it is, in other words, non-logical (Proust 86) in that it occurs instinctively (83) before it has been distorted into intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of cause and effect (86). Since the artist and his material are always in a state of flux, are always mobile (17), this experience is not a posteriori but constitutive of reality as one actually experiences it before he has reflected upon it (non-logical), thus necessitating a fusion of subject and object in an active dialectic, or a relational apprehension, between the two: the work of art [is] neither created nor chosen, but discovered, uncovered, excavated, pre-existing within the artist, a law of his nature. The only reality is provided by the hieroglyphics traced by inspired perception (identification of subject and object) [italics mine] (84). Again, since the artist doesnt fully know himself and knows that he is changing [. . .] from moment to moment of his life, as he stated in his lectures (Burrows 14), the law of his nature is necessarily dynamism, an ever-shifting coalescence of the ideal and the real that cannot be stated so much as apprehended through a hieroglyphic art that fuses subject and object as well as form and content: For Proust the quality of language is more important than any system of ethics or aesthetics. Indeed he makes no attempt to dissociate form from content. The one is a concretion of the other, the revelation of a world. The Proustian world is expressed metaphorically by the artisan because it is apprehended metaphorically by the artist: the indirect and comparative expression of indirect and comparative perception. (88) In Dante . . . Bruno, of course, Beckett lauds this fusion of form and content in Joyces Work in Progress: Here form is content, content is form. [. . .] Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics. Here words [. . .] are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and face and disappear (transition no. 16-17, 1929, 248-9). This language echoes Eugene Jolass The New Vocabulary, an essay that he published in transition no. 15, 1929, just one issue prior to the one in which Dante . . . Bruno appeared. In The New Vocabulary, Jolas sought to defend Joyces Work in Progress, as Beckett does in Dante . . . Bruno, against the charge of violating the immobile laws of speech: The most cursory glance at the evolution of English, or other languages, shows that speech is not static. It is in a constant state of becoming

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(171). Jolas may have been drawing on Friedrich Schlegels Athenaeum Fragments (1798), particularly on the most famous one in the collection, fragment 116: The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. [. . .] It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free (175). Becketts theory of hieroglyphic language, at any rate, had clear affinities with Jolass view, and Aquinass ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur, integritas, consonantia, claritas [Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance], a line that Stephen quotes in Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (479), is not far away either. 48 Beckett may also have been thinking along these lines when he used the word apprehension in Dante . . . Bruno to denote the kind of approach that is required for an adequate understanding of Work in Progress: Perhaps apprehension is the most satisfactory English word. [. . .] There is one point to make clear: the Beauty of Work in Progress is not presented in space alone, since its adequate apprehension depends as much on its visibility as on its audibility. There is a temporal as well as a spatial unity to be apprehended (28). This may help clarify the aesthetic principle of Ill Seen. In A Portrait Stephen says to Lynch, Aquinas [. . .] says that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases. [. . .] This word [apprehension], though it is vague, is clear enough to keep away good and evil which excite desire and loathing. [. . .] The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension (474-5). This is also a Coleridgean notion. In the Biographia, Coleridge writes, contra Wordsworths poetic theory of rustic language, that The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of imagination [. . .] (II, 54). This theory of reflecting on the acts of the mind itselfto which Beckett alludes in Recent Irish Poetry with the claim that it is the act and not the object of perception that matters (Disjecta 74)may actually anticipate the threat of solipsism that permeates Romantic poetry as well as Becketts work, for the inevitable result of such a self-reflection may
In The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Becketts Dramatic Texts (1985), S.E. Gontarski notes that Becketts primary artistic struggle [. . .] has been to develop patterns, rhythms, cadences that shape his art. His means are to assault the viewers or readers expectations, to estrange and defamiliarize being in order to show forth its essence, to break down the traditional mimetic notion of art, to move his art to higher and higher levels of abstraction, and to shape his fragments harmoniously (15).
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be an epistemological impasse that has the potential to spin out of control and lock the reflector in an endless cycle of self-consciousness, the Blakean state of Ulro. Even in Worstward Ho, this threat is still present: On back better worse to fail the head said seat of all. Germ of all. All? If of all of it too? (97). In The Conjuring of Something out of Nothing, Gontarski glosses the aporias involved in this line of questioning: Can it then perceive itself if there is, to adapt Jacques Derrida, no outside the skull. From what perspective, from what grounding could it then be perceived? If All happens inside the skull, is skull inside skull as well? Such paradoxes shift the narrative focus from image to language and the latters complicity in the act of representation. (xxv) These are the same kinds of aporias that stalled and ultimately thwarted Becketts Long Observation, aporias that are unavoidable when such profound questions of self-consciousness are involved. The point here is that, as we have seen, Beckett pushes the logic of Romanticism to its furthest possible end, which sometimes ends in solipsism but in a work like Ill Seen transcends this threat by apprehending a composite of both the real and the imagined. In Three Dialogues, Beckett works out his theory of apprehension more fully, particularly as it relates to his own aesthetics. In response to Duthuits question about the relationship between a painting and a real landscapeWhat relationship between one of these paintings and a landscape seen at a certain age, a certain season, a certain hour? (101)Beckett replies, By nature I mean here [. . .] a composite of perceiver and perceived, not a datum, an experience (101-2). This composite-as-experience is hieroglyphic and, consequently, cannot be derived, as a datum could, from measurement or calculation. What is required of the artist and the reader is a total apprehension, what J.G. von Herder refers to as Besonnenheit (total awareness of the whole undivided human soul) and what Hazlitt calls gusto. Becketts consistent use of the term hieroglyphic to denote the kind of language where words are alive and glow and blaze is noteworthy; as Engell writes, hieroglyphic in the Romantic era became a word representing a medium of pure imagination, of pure images [. . .] Not only Coleridge but Woolf, Hazlitt, Keats, Goethe, and Schelling used hieroglyphic as an image for the concrete power of imagination carried into a symbolic world where man and nature are

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united in poetic language (357). Despite the fact that Beckett later distanced himself from Joyces apotheosis of the word, Becketts minimalist direction simply compressed his language into a new form of what he referred to as Joyces savage economy of hieroglyphics. Particularly in Ill Seen, Beckett fuses form and contentand, hence, subject and object through a liminal language that actualizes an imaginative becoming, what the great Romantics like Schelling and Coleridge called natura naturans (naturing or creative nature), an inexplicable dialectic of the ideal real that the artist and reader must apprehend intuitively through what Schelling called produktive Anschauung, that is, a productive intuition that connects the senses, understanding, and reason. This dialectic, because of its inexplicability and inscrutability, does not compromise the integrity of the real or the integrity of incoherence that Beckett praised in Stendhal, and it allows Beckett to elide the mimetic, the trap of re-presentation, that he denigrates time and again in pieces like Dream, Dante . . . Bruno, Les Deux Besoins, and Three Dialogues. As M.H. Abrams writes in Natural Supernaturalism, the epistemological and ontological implications of perception, in conjunction with the reconciling function of imagination, stand at the center of Romanticism: Whether a man shall live his old life or a new one, in a universe of death or of life, cut off and alien or affiliated and at home, in a state of servitude or of genuine freedomto the Romantic poet, all depends on his mind as it engages with the world in the act of perceiving. Hence the extraordinary emphasis throughout this era on the eye and the object and the relation between them. (375) As opposed to the slavish dependence on the physical eye, the Romantic poets privileged the inner eye, the eye of imaginationor at least a balance between sense perception and imaginative vision rather than the merely physical, material faculty of sight. Blake, for instance, was particularly concerned with how liberty and servitude applied to the domain of sight and vision. In The Four Zoas, the reason-ridden Urizen says to Los, Lo these starry hosts / They are thy servants if thou wilt obey my awful law, to which Los, the fallen imaginative power, defiantly replies, If you are such Lo! I am also such. / One must be master. Try thy Arts I also will try mine (XII, 16-20). In Jerusalem, Blake calls this expansive freedom of mind the New

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Jerusalem or a Divine Vision. Similarly, in Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth writes that he sees into the life of things only in a state of suspension in which the physical eye is quieted or brought into harmony with the inner eye of imaginative revelation: [. . .] with an eye made quiet by the power / of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things. One of Wordsworths most sublime meditations on the dangers involved in relying solely upon the bodily eye occurs in Book XII of The Prelude where he contemplates a time when his own physical eye dominated his soul at the expense of his liberty and power: I speak in recollection of a time When the bodily eye, in every stage of life The most despotic of our senses, gained Such strength in me as often held my mind In absolute dominion. Gladly here, Entering upon abstruser argument, Could I endeavour to unfold the means Which Nature studiously employs to thwart This tyranny, summons all the senses each To counteract the other, and themselves, And makes them all, and the objects with which all Are conversant, subservient in their turn To the great ends of Liberty and Power. (128-40) By the end of Book XIII, however, Wordsworth writes that in order for him to have gained clear sight / Of a new world, he had to effect a perceptual ideal, a kind of ideal real, that balanced both the physical and imaginative eyes with the object seen: A balance, an ennobling interchange Of action from without and from within; The excellence, pure function, and best power Both of the object seen, and the eye that sees. (370-9) Coleridge likewise writes in the Biographia that the poet must be freed from the errors of postLockean sensationalist philosophy by sloughing off the minds slavish dependence on what

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Coleridge calls the strong sensuous influence of that despotism of the eye (I, 107). A few pages later, he reiterates the necessity of freeing the soul of man from the despotism of outward impressions (I, 111). Many of Becketts works turn on optical imagery, and he invariably equates the physical, outward eye (when it dominates) with a constriction of imaginative freedom. In All Strange Away, the narrators gaping eyes (171) are largely corporeal and pornographic: Imagine him kissing, caressing, licking, sucking, fucking and buggering all this stuff, no sound (171). In Imagination Dead Imagine, too, the predatory eye of prey (185) finds a thousand little signs too long to imagine (185) and is consequently diametrically opposed to the imaginative eye that struggles in the opening lines to produce Islands, waters, azure, verdure (182), all of which the reason-ridden Fancy, slavishly dependent as it is on the geometry of the rotunda, endlessly omits. The narrator of The Lost Ones, like the one in All Strange Away, coldly reports the goings-on of the flattened cylinder (202) with a searching eye (202) or an eye of flesh (216) that divides (rather than fuses) the images into clear-cut mental or imaginary frontiers (216), which is essentially an indictment, as is all of Becketts work, of Hulmes neo-classical privileging of what he refers to in his Preface to Sorels Reflections on Violence (1914) as the clear outlines of human relationswhether in political thought or in the treatment of sex in literature (250). As the title of All Strange Away suggests, the attempt to render the text dry and hard and most clear (172) So little by little all strange [is being taken] away (178)ends in an imaginative impasse that confirms Becketts argument in his review of Yeatss The Amaranthers, a review that is entirely concerned with imaginative autonomy as opposed to the banning of imaginative vision: An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as a reportage (Disjecta 89-90). The implication here is that imaginative creation, which requires that artists take the thing to pieces and make a new thing, new things (Disjecta 89), is exceptionally more difficult than merely reporting what the eye of flesh sees with its empirical strictures, its corsets. The eye of flesh so enslaves the narrator of The Lost Ones, in fact, that Paul Davies shrewdly remarks that the narrator could just as well be regulating and reporting on the social life of ants (206).

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The devouring (210) eye in The Lost Ones almost psychopathically describes an abode, no pleasure-dome to be sure, in which lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one (202). His devouring eye recalls the ravenous eye in The Vulture, Becketts revealing poem of 1935, that preys on images that have become carrion. Le Dpeupleur, the original French title of The Lost Ones, is an allusion to Lamartines poem LIsolement and consequently heightens the lifelessness and coldness of the narration. Lamartine was one of the first French Romantic poets, whom Verlaine and the Symbolists acknowledged as an important influence. In the poem, the speaker ruminates on his intense feelings of loneliness, and of his coldness toward the beauties of the world, after the death of his loved one. With her passing, the world no longer seems populated: Un seul tre vous manqu, et tout est dpeupl! [You miss one being, and all is depopulated!] Perhaps the speakers vacillation between his intense feelings of loneliness and his coldness toward the world is reflected in the temperature in the largely inhumane cylinder of The Lost Ones: The temperature. It oscillates with more measured beat between hot and cold. And although the temperature also has its moments of stillness more or less hot or cold, its effects on the lost ones are severe: Consequences of this climate for the skin. It shrivels. The bodies brush together with a rustle of dry leaves. The mucous membrane itself is affected (202). The only objects are the ladders, the purpose of which is to convey the searchers to the niches, that is, to cavities sunk in that part of the wall which lies above an imaginary line running midway between floor and ceiling and features therefore of its upper half alone (203). As rumour has it, there may be two ways out of the abode, possibly through a secret passage that leads in the words of the poet to natures sanctuaries (206), an allusion to the strain of Romantic nature poetry that begins with Rousseaus noble savage, his concept of the natural essence of the unfettered person. The other possible way out is through a trapdoor hidden in the hub of the ceiling giving access to a flue at the end of which the sun and other stars would still be shining (206). The allusion here is to the conclusion of Dantes Inferno, to the possibility of seeing the shining stars again, and it echoes the end of Text 9: Theres a way out there, theres a way out somewhere, the rest would come, the other words, sooner or later, and the power to get there, and the way to get there, and pass out, and see the beauties of the skies, and see the stars again (140).

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But the fact remains that to perceive which of these options is correct, one must be in the secret of the gods (206-7), a position in which none of the inhabitants can claim to be, precisely because each of them (like the narrator) is experiencing a slow deterioration of [imaginative] vision (214) so that it becomes Idle to imagine (208). The problem, as the narrator reports, is that None looks within himself (211); none looks, in other words, with the Divine Vision, say, that Blake privileges in Jerusalem. The one possible exception to this, and what may save this otherwise doomed world in which the inhabitants search in vain, occurs in the concluding paragraph where a last body of all by feeble fits and starts (222) actually gazes into the eyes of a redheaded woman, the first vanquished, who is described as the north (221), a guide or fixed point of orientation for the searchers and climbers. Previously, no recognition was possible, but now something has shifted: There he opens then his eyes this last of all if a man and some time later threads his way to that first among the vanquished so often taken for a guide. On his knees he parts the heavy hair and raises the unresisting head. Once devoured the face thus laid bare the eyes at a touch of the thumbs open without demur. In those calm wastes he lets his wander till they are the first to close and the head relinquished falls back into its place. (223) Though brief, this is a significant gesture of synchronization that is somewhat reminiscent of what Murphy was unable to accomplish with Mr. Endon and what Krapp was unable to experience with the girl in the punt. 49 It also foreshadows the scene in Company where the narrator recalls having had a similar experience: Within the tent of hair your faces are hidden from view. She murmurs, Listen to the leaves. Eyes in each others eyes you listen to the leaves. In their trembling shade (35). The moment of synchronization in The Lost Ones offers the possibility of an imaginative (double?) vision that is altogether different from the one that the eye of flesh offers. Davies goes so far as to suggest that their optical exchange is a profound vision and, crucially, an
In his manuscript notebook for his production of Damals (Reading Archive, MS 1976), the German production of That Time at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt, Berlin, was from Hlderlins Hyperion-Fragment, and it is particularly revealing in the context of what Murphy and Krapp are unable to achieve, thus highlighting the synchronization of visions at the end of The Lost Ones: Alles war nun Stille. Wir sprachen kein Wort, / Wir beruehrten uns nicht, wir sahen uns nicht an (All was now still. We did not speak a word. We did not touch or look at each another).
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anagnorisis of recognition (156), thus concluding, perhaps rightly, that The Lost Ones is more of a purgatorio than an inferno (157). Davies, in fact, detects in Becketts use of the north the most extraordinary example of Becketts recondite tributes to William Blake (242). Davies argues that the north is probably an allusion to Blakes Enitharmon (156). In the Appendix, Becketts Blake Riddle, Davies provides further clues that strengthen the connection: The first clue is that this extract from The Lost Ones, the paragraphs centering on the redheaded woman described as the North, was published by the Enitharmon Press. [. . .] If this were not sufficient evidence, the Enitharmon Presss logo [three crisscrossed lines with a perpendicular line acting as an arrow pointing upward, or northward] and Becketts title The North reflect one another unambiguously, almost as if the Press were devised for the occasion, not the occasion for the Press. The presentation of the textin a small circulation on handmade paper, with Arikhas drawings of a female figure we can only take to be Enitharmonresembles so closely Blakes own method of presenting his poems and prophesies that the link between them comes to seem less and less fortuitous and more and more intentional. (242-3) Davies connections are indeed compelling, if not outright convincing, but he does not indicate the exact text from which Beckett may be drawing. In addition to Platos Symposium where Aristophanes recounts the myth of Zeus punishing humans by bisecting each of them, Beckett may also be alluding to The Book of Urizen (1794), Blakes most important illuminated book before The Four Zoas (1797). The prelude to Urizen indicates the extent to which the Spectre of solipsism will pervade the work: Of the primeval Priests assumd power, When Eternals spurnd back his religion; And gave him a place in the north, Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.

Eternals I hear your call gladly, Dictate swift winged words, & fear not

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To unfold your dark visions of torment. Urizen is one of the Eternals or Four Zoas, and he is associated with the intellect and with various forms of rationalism, literalism, and materialism. The name suggests the Greek god of the heavens, Uranus, and puns on Your Reason and Horizon, the imaginative and perceptual limit that ones fancy so reason-ridden (Company 39) imposes on the world. Urizen is Blakes mythological version of the Fall of Man, and he may have anticipated this work in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), his manifesto of spiritual independence, where he promises The Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no. For some unknown reason, Urizen rises from the depths of dark solitude and becomes divided against himself until, by extension, his division creates the phenomenal world of Experience, the world of Newtonian physics. In his poem My Spectre Around Me Night & Day (1863), Blake writes poignantly about the threat of self-consciousness and, hence, of internal division: My Spectre around me night & day Like a Wild beast guards my way My Emanation far within Weeps incessantly for my Sin Blakes Spectre is the solipsistic potentiality of any given self. The Emanation has failed to emanate and, because the Spectre guards the way, is imprisoned deep within the psyche, the Sin being the Selfs failure to create and to love. Similarly, in Urizen, Los becomes separated from the abstracted Urizen and represents the imaginative potential. He subsequently becomes separated from his Emanation, the first female now separate and his own divided image, a division that frightens the Eternals who are still joined to their Emanations. Enitharmon flees, Los chases her, and sexual procreation begins. The moment of synchronization between the north and the last searcher in The Lost Ones, therefore, takes on another level of meaning within Blakes psychological cosmology, for the north, perhaps the last searchers lost Emanation, offers release in an otherwise futile abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one (202). The redheaded woman, to appropriate Blooms interpretation in The Visionary Company (1961) of the Emanation, is a confronted other with whom reality is shared, without self-appropriation (68). The slow deterioration of vision (214) that the narrator of The Lost

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Ones experiences is momentarily, though significantly, reconciled through a profound vision of imaginative coalescence. It is, in fact, this profound vision, and the ontological implications thereof, that Beckett preliminarily explores in Long Observation and actualizes most impressively in Ill Seen. In Long Observation, Beckett is particularly concerned with the usual suspects: the gulf between subject and object, constancy versus variation (both calculable and incalculable variation), and the Spectre of solipsism, what Blake also calls the state of Ulro or the world of egomania. The text closely examines the movements of an erratic ray of light in and around a closed chamber, which is closely related to the Closed Space fiction and more specifically to Murphys mind as hermetically closed to the universe without (107), for in MS 2909/4, Beckett notes in the margin, Hermetic inasmuch as no trace of inlet and/or outlet has appeared. But Long Observation is also concerned with questions of perception and the possibility of bridging the gulf between the object seen and the eye that sees, though he is not able to reconcile this fundamental dichotomy in this particular text. In his study of the Long Observation manuscript, Steven Connor writes that, in both Long Observation and Ill Seen, the interior eye always has to project its relationship to what it sees in terms of physical space and positioning. This means that it is at times subject to precisely the same limitations of vision as the outer eye [. . .] (94). Connor goes on to suggest that If the eye of the mind can never escape the physicality of the eye of flesh [. . .], then that physical eye is equally subject to interference by the imagining eye (95). Connors assessment of Long Observation is convincing, as Beckett is essentially forced in that text to imagine the inner eye as extended space, thereby infecting, as it were, the incorporeal nature of the imaginative faculty with (and as) the filthy eye of flesh, but in Ill Seen Beckett arguably reconciles this dilemma, the subtle aporias of which seem to have thwarted Becketts attempts to finish Long Observation, by fusing the inner and outer eyes into the reality of the imagined (Disjecta 89). Connor rightly concludes that it is not clear in Ill Seen whether the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the interior of the old womans cabin is actually seen or merely conjectured, since it is seen with the fluidity of conjecture, and conjectured with the solidity of sight (95), but it is precisely this fluidity that effects a process that is at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perception, real

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without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extra-temporal [italics mine] (Proust 75). Although Long Observation remains constrained by its mind-forged manacles, Beckett at least suggests in MS 2909/5 that outer or corporeal perception and inner or imaginative vision may be bound in some hyphenated, inscrutable way, for in this draft he replaces the theme of observation with that of EYE-MIND. In conjunction with the EYE-MIND theme that concerns later drafts, Becketts association in the first draft of the ray (or beam) of light with a lantern that has (as he writes in MS 2909/3) an imaginary slide or shutter suggests that he was moving away from the corporeal eye towards the inner eye of imaginative vision, not as extension but as a productive and reconciling faculty with the potential to solve some of the technical problems that clearly stalled his writing at various points. The lantern motif certainly suggests, too, the Romantic lamp of inspiration and expression as opposed to the neo-classic emphasis on the mirror of mimesis, reliant as it is upon the corporeal eye, which Beckett derides time and again. In MS 2909/2, Beckett writes, To the tired mind [the] image comes of a hidden spring [. . .] to be found and released. This hidden spring suggests the waters of inspiration and, perhaps, Coleridges primary imagination that the secondary imagination must then shape into a coherent and original whole. MS 2909/6 is even more concerned with the eye and the observed: Long observation that is [. . .] sum of countless brief observations separated by spells of uneasy rest. Uneasy being itself disrupted by brief struggles of the mind with the observed

No rest by change of scene or simply looking away but solely by closure of the eye set once and for all

[. . .] most arduous of all with where they are the straining eye the struggling mind and how communicate The second note, particularly its emphasis on a closure of the eye set once and for all, looks ahead to his emphasis on the inner eye in Ill Seen. Connor writes, indeed, that we may say that

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Ill Seen Ill Said offers an affectively thickened and particularized version of the drama of the eye first sketched out in Long Observation of the Ray (93). Ill Seen is a nimble text that takes us into the deepest recesses of the creative imagination: Far behind the eye the quest begins (83). But the quest does not end there. The deeper we go, in fact, the more unable we are to discern the distinction between inner and outer, subject and object, fact and fiction, dream and reality. What does seem relatively clear, at times, is that the text privileges the inner or imaginative eye, as opposed to the merely corporeal eye, precisely as the means of blurring the distinctions that strike death, to appropriate Coleridges comment to Wordsworth in a letter of 1815 regarding the dangers of clear-cut images. The text pivots on ambiguity and ultimately refuses exegetic finality. The female protagonist, who defies logic and can traverse space-time in the blink of an eye, ritually brings flowers to a gravesite and then retreats to a cabin that resides At the inexistent center of a formless place (50), an illogical description of an abode that parallels the equally illogical imaginary stranger (53) who inhabits it. The language of the text glitters with paradox after paradox, with oxymoron after oxymoron. Much like Umberto Boccioni was able to accomplish with his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), Beckett is able in Ill Seen and Worstward Ho to give the illusion of movement in an otherwise immobile, static art form. The text, therefore, is non-mimetic in that it is not about something; it is that something itself. The EYE-MIND theme that Long Observation partially explores forms the basis for Ill Seen, in which there is an unending dialectic between the two. There are clearly two very different eyes in the text: one inner (subdivided into passive and active), one outer. The inner eye, of course, is the eye of imaginative vision, the eye that has no need of light to see (60). This eye is exceptionally agile and makes haste (60) to imagine dynamic scenesjust like the imaginative eye in Company: Quick imagine (24). This imaginative eye, furthermore, is the faculty that defies logic, that makes way for unreason (60). As in Company, too, this imagination has both primary (passive) and secondary (active) aspects in the Coleridgean sense. Many of the scenes appear and dissolve of their own accord, and the narrator must often rely upon some unknown source, perhaps the hidden spring of inspiration from Long Observation, to provide him with the unformed clay that he must then form into what often looks like a Cubist

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painting where space and time do not exist, or at least do not exist as separate, non-relational coordinates. Even the appearance of the old woman is often beyond the narrators control: As hope expires of her ever reappearing she reappears (61). After her reappearance, the narrator can then actively imagine her in various scenes, and in fact he forces himself, albeit gingerly, to imagine on, as the constant imperatives suggest: Gently gently. On. Careful (58). He (both Beckett and the narrator of Ill Seen) is shaping the images as he sees them. The other eye, however, is the outer or corporeal eye, and when this eye operates in isolation from the imaginative eye, it becomes restricted and restrictive. In a reference to The Lost Ones, Beckett refers to the corporeal eye as the eye of flesh (56) and, in a more explicit condemnation of this faculty, as this filthy eye of flesh (65). Beckett highlights the corporeality of this faculty even further with a reference to the vile jelly (81), a phrase that invokes Cornwalls draconian persecution of Gloucester in King Lear: Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly! / Where is thy luster now? (III, vii, 93-4). This is the eye that fills with tears (56), and it is precisely when the narrator uses this corporeal faculty in isolation, when it is riveted to some merely physical detail, that the imaginative eye becomes exponentially less powerful: Riveted to some detail [. . .] the eye fills with tears. Imagination at wits end spreads its sad wings (56). This is analogous to Coleridges strong sensuous influence of that despotism of the eye (Biographia I, 107), the despotism of outward impressions (I, 111), what Wordsworth likewise calls the bodily eye that at one point gained absolute dominion over him because it is the most despotic of our senses. At a few points in Ill Seen, the narrator wishes that he could close the filthy eye of flesh and focus exclusively on the inner eye, within the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else, since that eye is capable of creating a pure figment without relation to the external world: If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. (58)

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Later, the narrator reiterates his desire to close the eye for good and see her. [. . .] Close it for good this filthy eye of flesh (65). His interest in the pure figment of imagination that is Unalloyed (i.e., unmixed) with verisimilitude recalls Coleridges description of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a work of pure imagination, that is, a poem that does not rely upon memory or the reproduction of actual scenes or objects experienced in the external world. Again, as we saw in the third chapter, this would account for Coleridges derisive comment in the Biographia about Wordsworths poetic method, which was still slavishly tied to mimesis and consequently led Wordsworth to mistake the co-presence of fancy with imagination for the operation of the latter singly (I, 194). The narrators periodic search for the pure figment within the minds eye also alludes to the third proclamation of the Revolution of the Word manifesto: PURE POETRY IS A LYRICAL ABSOLUTE THAT SEEKS AN A PRIORI REALITY WITHIN OURSELVES
ALONE. In Worstward Ho, a text in which Becketts desire to worsen language and its images

generates an expansion of imaginative activity in its attempt to order experience (Ackerley and Gontarski 653), the narrator clenches his eyes and consequently suggests that the imaginative eye, with its source unknown (91) that has about it an echo of the hidden spring in Long Observation, is the Germ of all: Another. Say another. Head sunk on crippled hands. Vertex vertical. Eyes clenched. Seat of all. Germ of all (91). The phrase Vertex vertical, a recurring one in the text, recalls Jolass verticalism, and it suggests that imaginative vision, the Skull and lidless stare (103), entails an inward movement toward that selfsame dim (101). The narrator, in fact, repeatedly underscores the necessity of seeing with the inner eye, with the eye of pure imagination, as he clenches his outer eye to stare with the inner one: It stands. See in the dim void how at last it stands. In the dim light source unknown. Before the downcast eyes. Clenched eyes. Staring eyes. Clenched staring eyes (92). And again: Head sunk on crippled hands. Clenched staring eyes. At in the dim void shades. One astand at rest. One old man and child. At rest plodding on (94). Ultimately, though, Beckett seeks to fuse the ideal and the real, the inner and the outer eyes, into a new reality that sees into the life of Things and imaginings (58). With the dialectic between the eye of flesh and the imaginative eye (more particularly still in the imaginations passive and active aspects) we come to the heart of Becketts own

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creative process, a process that Ill Seen actualizes in its spontaneous eruption of images and the subsequent shaping of them before the readers eye. Beckett is here demonstrating on a narrative level his aesthetic and (re)visionary process, for as Gontarski has firmly established, Becketts work develops dialectically in a paradoxical creative process that is both passive and active, unconscious and conscious: The central compositional problem for Beckett is strikingly related to romantic particularly Coleridgeanaesthetics: to create, develop, discover intrinsic forms (or at least some intrinsic clues to form), some alternate pattern or internal relation to replace logic, causality, and verisimilitude. Theoretically, at any rate, in an echo of Coleridges organic metaphors for art, Beckett is searching for a form not imposed on the writing from without, but one that grows out of the writing. Becketts search is for patterns to replace the conventions of realistic fiction or the formal use of mythic patterns, or even to replace that other favorite unifying element, the coherent ego. (The Intent 16) Becketts aesthetic process, Gontarski goes on to argue, entails a meticulous process of revision that shapes what the unconscious spontaneously supplies: Becketts process of composition usually follows broadly predictable lines, simultaneously: after the initial image or incident is recorded (often straight from memory or the unconscious) what follows is a shaping process that includes: (1) deleting detail, explanation, and often connection, that is, the creation of absences; (2) rejecting, consciously destroying the systems of chronology and causality; and (3) creating an alternative arrangement or internal relationship that will emphasize pattern if not order. This outline of Becketts creative process accounts for one of the salient characteristics of Becketts manuscripts: the core material (central situation and dominant images) is often present from the earliest draft, culled from memory or nightmare (and hence already subjected to condensation and displacement), and yet meticulous revision follows meticulous revision. On the one hand Beckett furthers the tropological thrust of creation; on the other, he carefully forms those tropes into harmonious wholes, a process

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Freud would call secondary revision. Such a view explains Becketts fundamental ambivalence toward the unconscious. Beckett shares with Artaud and Brecht a suspicion of the unconscious, at least its unmediated flow, even as it is his originary impulse, and so Beckett further shares with Artaud a distrust of surrealism and its method, automatic writing. (16-17) Becketts tempering of the Surrealist enterprise, which at least theoretically relied solely upon what Breton in the 1924 Manifesto called Psychic automatism [. . .] in the absence of any control exercised by reason (26), 50 is essential to Becketts creative solution, a solution, as Gontarski further maintains, that may finally only be a difference of degree from romantic aesthetics: a turbulent content within a harmonizing form (12). Becketts organicism is perhaps best understood within the context of Coleridges distinction in Shakespearean Criticism between mechanic and organic forms: The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material, as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such is the life, such the form. (I, 224) Becketts marked distaste for artificial Romanticismthat is, Romanticism that works from a fabricated model that precedes the artist (Burrows 14)seems indeed to point toward Coleridges organicist conception of innate inner development. And with this difference of degree we come to yet another irony in Becketts aesthetics. Becketts partial embracing of psychic automatism, or of imaginative autonomy, situates him in the poststructuralist camp of the modern scriptor that Roland Barthes describes so memorably in his influential essay The Death of the Author. For Barthes, when the author enters into his
Cf. Praz: The Romantic exalts the artist who does not give a material form to his dreamsthe poet ecstatic in front of a forever blank page, the musician who listens to the prodigious concerts of his soul without attempting to translate them into notes. It is romantic to consider concrete expression as a decadence, a contamination. [. . .] But these are extreme cases, in which the romantic tends to merge in the mystical. The normal is that of suggestive expression, which evokes much more than it states (14-15). Compare, too, Becketts laudatory comment in his review of Denis Devlins Intercessions about Devlins extraordinary evocation of the unsaid by the said (Disjecta 94).
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own death, writing begins (142), and Barthes, who acknowledges his debt to Surrealist automatic writing, goes on to evacuate the site of authorial presence and to replace it with a performative series of texts with no discernable center: [. . .] the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors. Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance of writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a subject, not a person, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language hold together, suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it. (145) For Barthes, the author is absent and becomes instead a modern scriptor who is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate (145). Interestingly, Barthes invokes several Romantics to buttress his argument, Thomas de Quincey, for instance, and Mallarm. Curiously, he makes no explicit mention of Rimbaud, but his contention that I is nothing other than the instance saying I clearly echoes Rimbauds famous letter to Paul Demeny of 1871: For I is someone else. [. . .] To me this is obvious: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it [. . .] If the old fools had not discovered only the false significance of the Ego, we should not now be having to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, since time immemorial, have been piling up the fruits of their one-eyed intellects, and claiming themselves to be the authors of them! (qtd. in Ellmann and Feidelson 203) Beckett is a modern scriptor in Barthes sense of the term, but Beckett is equally unwilling or unable fully to divest himself of a Romantic authorial presence, for he still manipulates his material in a process that, rather than erasing it, merely re-inscribes his authorial presence: The erasure of authorial presence creates an authorial presence erasing (Gontarski 17). In his compositional process, then, Beckett blurs the distinctions between Romantic, Modernist, and Postmodernist theories of artistic creation. We may appropriate Jean-Michel Rabats analysis of the modernist writing subject for our understanding of Becketts paradoxical creative process:

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The writing and surviving subject becomes a penultimate, less a center of consciousness than a decentered agency of writing, never quite able to stress either primarity or secondarity, never either the first or the last, but always waiting for a repetition of the almost same (8). In Ill Seen, Beckett largely reconciles the tensions in his creative process, and in the concomitant tensions within the text itself, through a hieroglyphic language that conveys, vis-vis Bergsons dure, a single series of imaginative transactions (Disjecta 90) without resting on any one of them exclusively. The moments are not separate, argues Beckett about Yeatss The Amaranthers, but concur in a single process: analytical imagination (Disjecta 89). The single series of imaginative transactions, the single process of analytical imagination, and what Beckett also calls the directly related stages of an image (Disjecta 90) all correspond to Coleridges contention in Shakespearean Criticism that the gift of true Imagination is to modify series of thoughts into one predominant thought or feeling (II, 91). Breaking up the series with an either-or logic would end in an imaginative impasse. As Beckett wrote to MacGreevy on 31 January 1938, Beckett was not interested in the kind of people who in the phrase of Bergson cant be happy till they have solidified the flowing (TCD). In Three Dialogues, Duthuit echoes this sentiment: The tyranny of the discreet overthrown. The world a flux of movements partaking of living time, that of effort, creation, liberation, the painting, the painter. The fleeting instant of sensation given back, given forth, with context of the continuum it nourished (101). The world of Ill Seen, Becketts most dynamic eye-piece, is a flux of movements and partakes of living time. In a miraculous flash of inspiration that recalls both Becketts statement that MacGreevy knows how to wait for the thing to happen (Disjecta 74) as well as the conclusion of Proust, the narrator is able to fuse the ideal and the real, and consequently, the texts hieroglyphic language begins to glow and blaze by producing an imaginary stranger (53) who is simultaneously static and in motion, neither of which the narrator privileges to the exclusion of the other: A flash. The suddenness of all! She still without stopping. On her way without starting. Gone without going. Back without returning (58). In Worstward Ho, there are similar paradoxical descriptions of being At rest plodding on (94) and of forward movement without recession into the distance, of unreceding on (100), as

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when the narrator fuses father and child into a composite, not as a datum, once again, but as an experience: Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free handsno. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go [note iambic pentameter]. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand [iambic pentameter]. Holding the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade. (93) This is much more than mere verbal gymnastics for the sake of Worsening words (104). The coalescence (Disjecta 89) of the ideal and the real, and the subtle imaginative dynamics associated with it, form the core of these texts most complex ontological and epistemological implications: There is no symbol. The cream horse that carries Gilfoyle and the cream coach that carries Gilfoyle are related, not by rule of three, as two values to a third, but directly, as stages of an image (Disjecta 90). The clair-obscur that Beckett praised in his Trinity lectures is central to the ideal real that Ill Seen and Worstward Ho actualize: Clash of black and white that far from muting the last rays amplify (70). Again, the French term, for the Italian chiaroscuro (literally light-dark), refers to the artistic device of defining an object not with a contouring line but by the contrast between the colors of the object and its background. Rather than Hulmes neo-classical call for sharp edges and clear presentation, Ill Seen is most alive in those moments when subject and object merge into one another and blur the dividing lines between the two. This blurring corresponds to a concomitant merging of form and content, of the empirical and the imaginary. In Company, too, the most dynamic scenes take place (as Dortmunder suggests with its emphasis on dusk) within the twilight realms of consciousness: A strand. Evening. Light Dying. Soon none left to die. No. No such thing then as no light. Died on to dawn and never died. You stand with your back to the wash. No sound but its. Ever fainter as it slowly ebbs. Till it slowly flows again. [. . .] Moonless starless night. Were your eyes to open dark would lighten. (40)

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The emphasis here is on the inner eye of imaginative vision, for the narrator suggests that the dynamic images (note the strong verbs) would cease, would lighten, were he to open his physical eyes. This, again, is the inner world of Coleridges pure imagination. The narrators clair-obscur vision in Company looks ahead to the old womans liminality in Ill Seen; in Company the narrator often fuses darkness and light into what is indeed pure figment, unalloyed: In dark and silence to close as if to light the eyes and hear a sound. Some object moving from its place to its last place. Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more. To darkness visible to close the eyes and hear if only that. Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more. [. . .] Had the eyes been open then they would have marked a change. Whence the shadowy light? What company in the dark! To close the eyes and try to imagine that. Whence once the shadowy light. No source. As if faintly luminous all his little void. What can he have seen then above his upturned face. To close the eyes in the dark and try to imagine that. (12-13) There is, as we have seen, a similar movement in Ill Seen toward the clair-obscur, toward the inner eye that is capable of creating pure figment, but there is greater stress in Ill Seen on fusing the subject who perceives and the object perceived, on mingling the sensual and the spiritual. Ultimately, in fact, nothing has sharp contours in Ill Seen: Close-up then. In which in defiance of reason the nail prevails. Long this image till suddenly it blurs (57). In Worstward Ho, too, the setting is Dim clear (114-15). Again, this is diametrically opposed to Hulmes neoclassical aesthetics, which hinges, as he wrote in Romanticism and Classicism, on poetry that is all dry and hard, poetry that recognizes that man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant (61). Bergsons dure has no place in Hulmes static world of certainty. The dry and hard poem that isnt damp (66), however, is utterly alien to Becketts Dionysian aesthetics, for the world of Ill Seen and Worstward Ho is soft, fluid, damp: What words for what then? How almost they still ring. As somehow from some soft of mind they ooze. From it in it ooze (107). Later still, the narrator of Worstward Ho remarks, Nothing but ooze how nothing and yet (115). Hulme goes on in Romanticism and Classicism to champion poetry that is accurate and precise in its definite description of

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objects. The classical artist, Hulme suggests, is the man who simply cant bear the idea of [. . .] approximately. He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. [. . .] I can now get at that positive fundamental quality of verse which constitutes excellence, which has nothing to do with infinity, with mystery or with emotions (68). Nothing could be more contradictory to Becketts aesthetics of liminality, of indeterminacy, of the clairobscur, of the ill seen. As Beckett told Tom Driver in 1961, The key word in my plays is perhaps (220). The old woman in Ill Seen, in fact, may be the most Romanticanyway, certainly the least neo-classicalcharacter that Beckett could have devised for company. And what an addition to company she is. 51 The old womans logic-defying movements are especially suggestive of her dwelling on the threshold (54), that is, on a liminal space of neither: All in black she comes and goes. [. . .] In the dark day and night (59). The old woman, as the back and forth prevails (78), almost fluctuates like Mr. Knott before the readers eye: She too vacillates (78). Her dynamic being and dialectical movement Hither and thither toward the stones (70) in the dim light (59), in the semigloom (59), parallel the narrators own back and forth movement between images: Let her but go and stand still by the other stone [note the suggestion of choice here, of Coleridges secondary imagination]. It white from afar in the pastures. And the eye go from one to the other. Back and forth. What calm then. And what storm [italics mine]. (65) This back and forth movement is central to Becketts most Romantic vision of imaginative dynamism, and with this movement we come to the apotheosis of the ideal real, an ever-shifting, open-ended linguistic, ontological, and epistemological state of being that, by definition, elides understanding. In the Biographia, Coleridge stresses that too much precision or matter-of-fact in character and incidents (II, 129), which Hulme would privalege above all else, throttles the vicissitudes of mind and matter and of imaginative creation. In Shakespearean Criticism, furthermore, Coleridge writes that the poetic mind necessitates curiosity and wonder in a state of imaginative suspension that is unfixed and wavering:
The foundational Poetry Is Vertical manifesto is germane here and perhaps demonstrates how Beckett never really abandoned its neo-Romantic principles: We are against the renewal of the classical ideal, because it inevitably leads to a decorative reactionary conformity, to [. . .] the sterilization of the living imagination (transition, no. 21, 1932, 148).
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As soon as it [the mind] is fixed on one image, it becomes understanding; but while it is unfixed and wavering between them, attaching itself permanently to none, it is imagination [. . .] The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind, still offering what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected; the result being what the poet wishes to impress, namely, the substitution of a sublime feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image. (II, 138) Coleridge also writes that the function of imagination is to reconcile opposites and qualify contradictions, leaving a middle state of mind more strictly appropriate to the imagination than any other, when it is, as it were, hovering between images (II, 138). His connection between imaginative dynamism and the sublime echoes Schillers essays On Nave and Sentimental Poetry (1795) and On the Sublime (1801), but Schiller and Coleridge are both drawing on Kants distinction in The Critique of Judgment (1790) between the beautiful and the sublime. In Part I, Kant differentiates between the two and characterizes the latter as infinite or unbounded: The beautiful in nature is a question of the form of the object, and this consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness [. . . .] (I, ii, 23, 90) Kant goes on to argue that the feeling of the sublime involves as its characteristic feature a mental movement combined with the estimate of the object, whereas taste in respect of the beautiful presupposes that the mind is in restful contemplation, and preserves it in this state (I, ii, 24, 94). In Ill Seen, similarly, the narrators unfixed and wavering imaginatione.g., And the eye go from one [image] to the other. Back and forth (65)elides interpretive closure and effects what Engell, in a discussion of Coleridgean aesthetics, calls an agility of perception that entails a slight haziness or incompleteness of the images (353), an idea that is strikingly related to Becketts clair-obscur and one that looks ahead to the postmodern sublime. In The Postmodern Condition (1984), The Inhuman (1991), and The Postmodern Explained (1992), Jean-Franois Lyotard is consistently engaged in a dialogue with the Kantian sublime, and in What is the Postmodern? from his groundbreaking The Postmodern Condition,

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he distinguishes between the modern and postmodern sublime with Proust and Joyce as representative examples of the differences between the two categories. Prousts, contends Lyotard, is a nostalgic sublime that allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace or pleasure (81). By contrast, Lyotard goes on to argue, Joyces sublime is postmodern because it refuses the nostalgic by putting forward the unpresentable in presentation itself and by denying the solace of good forms (81). Joyce, in other words, allows the unpresentable to become perceptible in his writing itself, in the signifier. [. . .] The grammar and vocabulary of literary language are no longer accepted as given; rather, they appear as academic forms, as rituals originating in piety (as Nietzsche said) which prevent the unpresentable from being put forward (80-1). Beckett explores similar territory, for he allows the unpresentable to become perceptible in the writing itself through the haziness that exists at every level of Ill Seen and Worstward Ho. Many years earlier, in Dante . . . Bruno, Beckett had essentially theorized about what Lyotard was to call the postmodern sublime by arguing that Joyces form and content were inseparable, that his fusion of form and content denies the solace of good forms by allowing the unpresentable to become perceptible in the signifier. Dante . . . Bruno, of course, coincided with the Revolution of the Word manifesto in transition number 16/17, and the sixth and seventh proclamations intimate Becketts own path: THE LITERARY CREATOR HAS THE RIGHT TO DISINTEGRATE THE PRIMAL MATTER OF
WORDS IMPOSED ON HIM BY TEXT-BOOKS AND DICTIONARIES and HE HAS THE RIGHT TO USE WORDS OF HIS OWN FASHIONING AND TO DISREGARD EXISTING GRAMMATICAL AND SYNTACTICAL LAWS. The blurring between form and content on Ill Seen and Worstward Ho,

despite Becketts rejection of Joyces apotheosis of the word (Disjecta 172), similarly puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself, but the point here is that the so-called postmodern sublime is nothing other than a neo-Romantic gesture that, as Lyotard stresses about the postmodern artist, is not in principle governed by preestablished rules and cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work (81). The blurring of sharp contours in Ill Seen, particularly between form and content, captures the dynamic subtleties of liminality that characterize both the old woman and her 234

landscape, both of which have about them a Shroud of radiant haze (64), what the text later refers to as a Dazzling haze (78). The only certainty in the text, in fact, is the presence of haze: Haze sole certitude (78). In his Notebooks Coleridge further expresses the centrality of agility in artistic creation, in Passion & Imagination, by suggesting that the blurring of images keeps the continuous minds of the highest order in a state of uncertainty and prevents them from lapsing into a merely passive state (II, 2112). Bergsons dure, what Coleridge refers to in Shakespearean Criticism as an endless activity of thought (I, 217), is clearly in tune with Coleridges idea of continuous minds, an idea that he renders tangible in Kubla Khan with the sacred river that runs Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea. In his Notebooks, in fact, Coleridge anticipates Bergson to a striking degree by specifically linking the continuous river of the mind to Duration: Who ever felt a single sensation? Is not every one at the same moment conscious that there co-exist a thousand others in a darker shade, or less light [. . . .] And what is a moment? Succession with interspace? Absurdity! It is evidently on the Licht-punct, the Sparkle in the indivisible undivided Duration. (II, 2370) In The Prelude, too, Wordsworth makes explicit reference to the river of my mind (II, 214), thus presaging what remains perhaps the single most famous metaphor in William Jamess monumental The Principles of Psychology (1890): Consciousness [. . .] does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as chain or train do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A river or a stream are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, or consciousness, or of subjective life. (219) James, like his Romantic predecessors, was reacting against the clarity and distinction of Locke and Descartes, favoring, instead, what he called the vague: It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on our attention (246). James goes on to deride the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no images but of perfectly definite things. [. . .] What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest parts of our minds as they actually live [italics

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mine] (246). Similarly, Beckett states his characters without explaining them, for the mind, as it actually lives, does not function like a well-oiled machine, like a Pythagorean chain-chant solo of cause and effect, a one-figured teleophony that would be a pleasure to hear (Dream 10). Rather, ones mind is not a note at all but the most regrettable simultaneity of notes (11). Beckett also calls this the incoherent continuum as expressed by, say, Rimbaud and Beethoven (102). It is as though Beckett were trying to find an analogue in literary characterization to the atonality, or pan-tonality, of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Coleridge identifies the continuousness of mind, and of its consequent indeterminacy, as a dynamic energy that produces images of shadowy half-being, of nascent Existence in the Twilight of Imagination, and just on the vestibule of Consciousness (Collected Letters II, 814). In Shakespearean Criticism, he further links this twilight state of consciousness with artistic power and energy: The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to instill that energy into the mind, which compels the imagination to produce the picture (II, 174). Similarly, Beckett praises MacGreevy for his ability to focus on the process of perception, for it is the act and not the object of perception that matters (Disjecta 74). Beckett is a mind aware of its luminaries. These ideas also echo Fichtes description of the active imagination when it binds and unites the self with the outside world, the subjective with the objective, the inner and outer; Fichte calls this dialectical process a Schweben der Einbildungskraft, that is, a floating, hovering, or oscillating of the imagination that fuses the Ich (I) and the Nicht-Ich (NotI) (Werke I, ii, 359-61), an idea, once again, on which Coleridge partly draws for his theory of imagination as hovering between images. In Ill Seen, indeed, the narrator similarly has a hovering eye (76) that fuses the old woman and the stone into an ideal real dynamism that preserves the integrity of incoherence by not remaining fixed on one image to the exclusion of the other. Fixing the eye on one image in a rigid either-or logic, as Coleridge maintains, would merely result in understanding, an inert state or a restful contemplation in Kantian terms that both Ill Seen and Worstward Ho doggedly reject in favor of a limitless interplay between eye and mind: Changed the stone that draws her when revisited alone. Or she who changes it when side by side. Now alone it leans. Backward or forward as the case may be.

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[. . .] Empty-handed she shall go to the tomb. Until she go no more. Or no more return. So much for that. Undistinguishable the twin shadows. (76) This transformative changeUndistinguishable the twin shadowsoccurs through what Coleridge calls the esemplastic power, that is, the power to shape into one (Biographia I, 168). The plasy or plastic part of Coleridges word is partly an attempt to translate the German Bildung. Before Coleridge coined the word esemplastic, Akenside, Gerard, and Tucker used the word plastic or the phrase plastic power in their descriptions of the imagination as a shaping agent. The extent to which the old woman imaginatively transforms the stone, or the stone her, is indeterminate, but an esemplastic transformation has most certainly occurred, the precise nature of which is incoherent because of the unfixed, wavering, hovering eye of imagination that apprehends and transforms them. The language that Beckett uses to express this dynamic series of images is appropriately hieroglyphic, and hence inscrutable (83), so that one can see it glitter afar (75). Similarly, in Worstward Ho, the narrator imagines the old man and child with a hovering or oscillating inner eye that, as Coleridge writes, is unfixed and wavering between them, attaching itself permanently to none: They fade. Now the one. Now the twain. Now both. Fade back. Now the one. Now the twain. Now both. Fade? No. Sudden go. Sudden back. Now the one. Now the twain. Now both. (94) The fading and suddenness of their staggered appearance is yet another dimension of oscillation in the text, thereby confirming, once again, Coleridges theory of imagination quoted above: The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind, still offering what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected. Perhaps Keatss negative capability, a concept that is remarkably similar to Becketts integrity of incoherence, best expresses what Beckett achieves epistemologically with the ideal real in Ill Seen and Worstward Ho. In a letter dated 21 December 1817, Keats famously defines this most Beckettian term: The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth. Examine

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King Lear, and you will find this exemplified throughout [. . .] I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reasonColeridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with halfknowledge. (The Letters 71-2) This is precisely the kind of theory that Hulme would have attacked unsparingly, but Beckett made a career out of approximating negative capability with greater and greater degrees of successone might even say, not without irony, with greater and greater degrees of precision. Becketts patent rejection of the mimetic, an art of surfaces, is connected to his acceptance of negative capability since the artist himself is ignorant of his (and his characters) motivations and impotent to ameliorate this ignorance. In addition to his Trinity lectures, Dream contains Becketts most explicit subversion of mimesis, in this case Balzacs: To read Balzac is to receive the impression of a chloroformed world. He is absolute master of his material, he can do what he likes with it, he can foresee and calculate its least vicissitude, he can write the end of his book before he has finished the first paragraph, because he has turned all his creatures into clockwork cabbages and can rely on their staying put wherever needed or staying going at whatever speed in whatever direction he chooses. The whole thing, from beginning to end, takes place in a spellbound backwash. (120) In Ill Seen and Worstward Ho, we are not in a chloroformed world with clockwork cabbages. Rather, we are in a world of negative capability in which uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts reign supreme, and this is why these texts preserve the integrity of incoherence, the integrity of the real, while ultimately defying interpretation or categorization. Interestingly, Salvador Dalis essay The Stinking Ass, with which Beckett was acquainted since Breton included it in the special Surrealist number of This Quarter, may also be germane here. In this essay, Dali exalts the multiple image that he was to perfect in his own paintings of double vision:

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Nothing can prevent me from recognizing the frequent presence of images in the example of the multiple image, even when one of its forms has the appearance of a stinking ass and, more, that ass is actually and horribly putrefied, covered with thousands of flies and ants; and, since in this case no meaning is attachable to the distinct forms of the image apart from the notion of time, nothing can convince me that this foul putrefaction of the ass is other than the hard and blinding flash of new gems. (52) This is similar to Fichtes Schweben der Einbildungskraft and Coleridges unfixed and wavering imagination. In Ill Seen the hovering eye (76) produces a series of multiple images where no meaning is attachable to the distinct forms of the image apart from the notion of time, to use Dalis words. At one point in Ill Seen, the narrator collapses the distinction between inner and outer when he astonishingly requires the reader to imagine two scenes at oncea multiple imageas he juxtaposes in one short sentence a description of the inner cabin with a description of the woman amid the white stones: All dark in the cabin while she whitens afar (68). This paradoxical description forces the readers imagination into a kind of imaginative suspension that requires an oscillation from one to the other (65), an oscillation that parallels the narrators own hovering eye (the mind, of course, cannot imagine two scenes at once with any sense of coherence or intelligibility). Immediately following this multiple image, the narrator opens his eyes and imagines the murmur of flakes while allowing for these imagined sounds to coalesce with a real creek: Silence but for the imaginary murmur of flakes beating on the roof. And every now and then a real creak. Her company. Here without having to close the eye sees her afar [italics mine] (68). The narrators ability to see the imaginary figure with his eyes open, coupled with the intermittent coalescence of a real creek, signals the old tandem (72) of the ideal realin other words, the fusion of outer and inner vision, of empiricism and imagination, with an imaginative agility that mediates between the contraries not a posteriori but as cognitive experience (as opposed to cognitive reflection upon experience). Interestingly, Pilling notes that in most of Becketts late texts, seeing is imagining (Frescoes 184). This is most certainly the case in Ill Seen, a text in which perception is not a merely passive receptor of an already constituted world but is literally creative and relational. Becketts

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concept of nature, once again, is revealing, for he defines it as experiential, that is, as nonlogical in that it occurs before it has been distorted into intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of cause and effect (Proust 86). Beckett, in other words, is demonstrating (not merely commenting on) nature as we actually experience it, directly: His gaze is no longer the necromancy that sees in each precious object a mirror of the past. The notion of what he should see has not had time to interfere its prism between the eye and its object (Proust 27). Perception is always already a re-presentation of reality, a mirror of the past, because there is a cognitive lag between the thing and the registering of the thing. Beckett elides this cognitive lag. He consistently derides intellectual approaches to art because they reduce literature to artificial, prefabricated ideas of which the artist conceives prior to their organic unfolding. In Proust, by contrast, Beckett praises the great French writers impressionism, his anti-intellectualism, his expression of characters who lack coherence due to their existence in the flow of time. Prousts characters, in short, bristle with alternatives (61). Becketts multiple images also bristle with alternatives. In the last chapters of his System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling describes imaginative agility, a kind of imaginative bristling with alternatives, as the highest level of Einbildungskraft (Imagination). This is also analogous to Blakes Beulah stage, the reconciliation of self and nature. At one point, in fact, Beckett may allude to Keatss Endymion, a poem that culminates not in an escape from the world to a contemplation of Platonic forms, but in the annihilation of the limits of the self in a fellowship of essence that necessitates an escape from selfhood by means of an identification with sensuous objects outside oneself. For Keats, the chief intensity of this experience is love and friendship, the former, love, being the apex of the journey: but at the tip-top, There hangs by unseen film, an orbed drop Of light, and that is love: its influence, Thrown in our eyes, genders a novel sense, At which we start and fret; till in the end, Melting into its radiance, we blend,

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Mingle, and so become a part of it [. . .] (I, 801-811) Beckett may echo the phrases unseen film, an orbed drop / Of light and Melting into its radiance in Ill Seen when the old woman, while headed North, 52 may have an intimation of this apex: At last they appear an instant. North where she passes them always. Shroud of radiant haze. Where to melt into paradise. (64) Keatss Melting into its radiance and Becketts Where to melt into paradise share more than mere verbal similarities. The allusion denotes a certain kind of shared sensibility, a kindred spirit, that enlivens and ennobles even the darkest passages in both their writings. According to Harold Bloom in The Internalization of Quest-Romance, the major phase of the Romantic quest has two main elements, both of which are germane to what Beckett achieves at this stage in Ill Seen: There are two main elements in the major phase of the Romantic quest, the first being the inward overcoming of the Selfhoods temptation, and the second the outward turning of the triumphant Imagination, free of further internalizations though outward and inward become cloven fictions or false conceptual distinctions in this triumph, which must complete a dialectic of love by uniting the Imagination with its bride, who is a transformed ongoing creation of the Imagination rather than a redeemed nature. (17) Nothing, perhaps, could better summarize the triumph of Ill Seen, a text that continues the major phase of the Romantic quest in its destruction of cloven fictions or false conceptual distinctions between inner and outer (as well as subject/object, form/content, seeing/seen, imagination/empiricism, etc.) in what surely amounts to a dialectic of love. In The Prelude, Wordsworth calls this a new world that consists of an interplay between mind and nature in the act of perception itself, in an interchange / Of action from within and from without between the object seen, and the eye that sees (XII, 368-79). The narrator of Ill Seen refers to this unending dialectic as the farrago from eye to mind (72), thus recalling the hyphenated EYE-MIND theme in Long Observation that he only now
52

Compare the redheaded woman, the north, at the end of The Lost Ones.

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is able to express so powerfully. Because of the fluid dynamism between the two, the Idea, inexplicable though it is and will always remain, is no longer imprisoned in matter (Proust 76) since matter is shown to be dynamic, not inert extensionthe unseen vicissitudes of matter from Becketts Whoroscope Notebook. The old woman, like her surroundings, also vacillates: She too vacillates. Till in the end the back and forth prevails. Sends her wavering north and south from wall to wall. In the kindly dark (78). The back and forth movement, indeed, constitutes one the most enduring themes in Becketts art, an art that cannot tolerate the limits of the real. In For Avigdor Arikha, a short paragraph that Beckett wrote to accompany an exhibition of drawings by Arikha in 1967, Beckett conveys his preoccupation with visual and imaginative oscillation. The paragraph opens with a burst of energy, characteristic of so many of Becketts opening lines, that captures the dynamism of the oscillation: Siege laid again to the impregnable without. Eye and hand fevering after the unself. By the hand it unceasingly changes the eye unceasingly changed. Back and forth the gaze beating against unseeable and unmakable. Truce for a space and the marks of what it is to be and be in face of. Those deep marks to show. (Disjecta 152) The word Siege and the phrase fevering after suggest the artists (both Arikhas and Becketts) active apprehension of the impregnable without, but the without is equally unmakable and, hence, inaccessible to the will alone. It is only in the artists Back and forth [. . .] gaze, which is what Ill Seen actualizes in the gaze the mind awake (83), that a Truce between the two can occur. Ten years later, Beckett reiterated this fort/da movement in neither, a prose-poem that he himself acknowledged as a summation of his lifes work: To and fro in shadow from inner to outershadow from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither [. . .] unspeakable home (CSP 258) This to and fro movement is the artists unspeakable home, one might even say the artists unhomely home, because it ultimately elides understanding in its restlessness. Understanding in this oscillation is impossible because, significantly, this process is never fixed; the oscillation is a process that takes place in time, in an unending dialectic that is inextricably linked to dure.

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Carla Locatelli, in what remains one of the most sophisticated examinations of Becketts hermeneutics, calls Becketts an unprecedented art of the penultimates, reproducing life as quintessentially penultimate, not in relation to a conceptual end, but because of the process of phenomena, determinable and terminable only a posteriori (8). Wordsworth, in the 1850 edition of The Prelude, likewise suggests that our beings heart and home, / [is] with infinitude, but he describes this infinitude not as a fixed state, not as an accomplished fact, but as a kind of penultimate potential, deathless because birthless, within the dynamism of the infinite I AM: With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be. (606-8) The imaginative oscillation of Becketts most mature eye-pieces renders intelligibility something evermore about to be. So it is that Locatelli can further argue that Becketts hermeneutics of experience is a continuous unraveling of what constitutes the liminal horizon of our interpretive being (29). One feels how little at home Beckett is in the interpreted world. Finally, then, the epistemological implications of the coalescence of subject and object are key. In the Biographia, Coleridge argues that the ancient phrase KNOW THYSELF! is actually about BEING altogether; that is, since the self is being (in flux) and is constitutive with the laws of nature and eternal mind (the infinite I AM), all knowledge stems from the same postulate. All knowledge, in Coleridges words, rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject (I, 252). The conclusion of Ill Seen alludes to this call for self-knowledge, the classical KNOW THYSELF maxim: Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness (86). Epistemologically, this is complex and inexplicable in any terms other than its own because it requires what Locatelli calls the paradox of cognition: The paradox of cognition is epitomized in these short sentences: for anything to be known it has to be aided by language. However, as soon as language formulates it, it is dissolved as well. Permanence is an effect of language, but language cannot capture the actual duration or presence of things. [. . .] The differentiation between order and immediate Being constitutes one of the important areas of critical investigation in ill seen ill said and develops according

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to distinct complementarities: subjectivity and identification, self-identification and consciousness, mental eye and physical eye, and even left eye and right eye. [. . .] By rejecting the traditional separation of subject and object, and by expressing an idea of nature as a composite of perceiver and perceived, Beckett opts for a new form a representation, one that can portray the becoming of things. (1923) It is perhaps a final irony, one that may not have been lost on Beckett himself, that his late work, in its coalescence of subject and object through a hieroglyphic language of becoming, actually fulfills that most classical of ideals, the Delphic command that Juvenal described as having descended from heaven.

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CONCLUSION ME TO PLAY

If it were only possible to make people understand that it is the same with language as it is with mathematical formulaethey constitute a world in itselftheir play is self-sufficient, they express nothing but their own marvelous nature. Novaliss Monologue Play is the disruption of presence. Jacques Derridas Writing and Difference

Becketts Romanticism is not a limiting one. On the contrary, insofar as he stands at the center of twentieth century literature, reading Beckett as a Romantic renders fluid the topography of Modernist and Postmodernist thought. No longer can we use these terms without suspicion and immediate qualification, for he splinters them so that, when nuanced, they become contrapuntally related in a complex dialectic with no determinate points of origin or destination. Breton was convinced that the Surrealist enterprise was fulfilling the aims of Romanticism, and the Abstract Expressionism of a Pollock, de Kooning, or Rothko may in the end further demonstrate how the Romantic sensibility lives on in countless imaginative ways. Balzac painted like David, Dostoevski like Rembrandt, stated Beckett in his lectures (Burrows 8). Becketts penchant for the liminal, the clair-obscur, the indeterminate, and the incoherent denotes a certain kind of sensibility that, in his own admission, is Dionysian, and it is arguable that his trials and ultimate acquittal of imagination represented the next step in a dialectical process that is still occurring. Yet Beckett, like Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Schelling, does not altogether dispense with the Apollonian approach to artistic creativity, revealing, perhaps, that the Apollonian kind of artist is not as foreign to Beckett as he claims. As we saw in Chapter Three, in fact, he often seems to balance the two in a complex interplay of opposite or discordant qualities. The main proponents of the Storm and Stress tendency, asserted Schlegel and Schelling, had not synthesized the two conflicting sides of a human beings nature,

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the rational and the emotional. Following Kants lead that reason could in fact facilitate ones search for the sublime and inspirationalKant taught, after all, that it was a postulate of reason itself to seek for the eternalthe German Romantics sought to correct the extremity of Hamann and Herder by integrating both Neo-classicism and Storm and Stress in a complex fugue. Similarly, Nietzsche, a Romantic if ever there was one, 53 articulates in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872) the necessity of balancing the Apollonian and the Dionysian if tragedy is to be successful, if modern culture is to be saved from the sickness unto death. Absolute Dionysian music (i.e., purely expressive music with no words), Nietzsche contends, would be too direct an expression of the awfulness of life. We survive a tragedy, or a Wagnerian music-drama, because of the illusion that Apollo creates through the re-presentation (i.e., distancing) of words. Beckett seems to have approached something like this fusion of Apollo and Dionysos in a play like Ghost Trio, a title that echoes Beethovens fifth piano trio, Der Geist (so-called, not by Beethoven, because of the haunting slow movement). Ghost Trio is a play that requires performance in order for one to apprehend its delicate balance of words, music, and raw gesture. Ackerley and Gontarski even go so far as to argue that the play is among Becketts unreadable works, part of a postliterary phenomenon that began with Play in 1963, the beginning of a new approach, closer to total theater or the Wagnerian Gesamptkunstwerk (225). Becketts, to be sure, is not a Dionysian art in the tradition, say, of Artauds Theatre of Cruelty in which the boundaries between life and art dissolve entirely through the creation of a spectacle that will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so (122). Such a spectacle, claims Artaud, will restore to the theater a passionate and convulsive conception of life (122). Rather, as works like Company and Ill Seen Ill Said demonstrate with a fusion of primary and secondary imaginative functions, Beckett admits chaos into his art while at one and the same time exercising a considerable amount of control over the process. His is an art of disjunction and conjunction, of play and purpose, of chance and design, of dispersal and centering. Ihab Hassans schematic chart from The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (1971) is worth revisiting within this context. In the
53

Fourteen years after its initial publication, Nietzsche explicitly acknowledged in his new preface, his Attempt at Self-Criticism, that his youthful book was an example of Romanticism through and through (10).

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Modernism column, Hassan lists the following characteristics (among others): Romanticism/Symbolism, Form (conjunctive, closed), Purpose, Design, Hierarchy, Distance, Synthesis, Presence, Centering, Metaphor, Origin/Cause, Determinacy, Transcendence. In the Postmodernism column, he lists the following (seemingly antithetical) characteristics: Pataphysics/Dadaism, Antiform (disjunctive, open), Play, Chance, Anarchy, Participation, Antithesis, Absence, Dispersal, Metonym, Diffrance/Trace, Indeterminacy, Immanence (91-2). Hassan does admit that the dichotomies this table represents remain insecure, equivocal. For differences shift, defer, even collapse; concepts in any one vertical column are not all equivalent; and inversions and exceptions, in both modernism and postmodernism, abound (92). He remains steadfast, however, in his contention, despite these inversions and exceptions, that rubrics in the right column point to the postmodern tendency, the tendency of indetermanence, and so may bring us closer to its historical and theoretical definition (92). But the chart remains fundamentally unconvincing, as each of these characteristics, in both columns and often both columns at once, is present in virtually every Romantic artist in this dissertation. In a discussion of Becketts aesthetic process, Gontarski notes, The empirical world is decentered, defamiliarized. Logical continuity is destroyed, whereas symmetrical structure offers a pleasing shape (19). Beckett may have relied upon an element of chance in his composition of Lessness, for instance, by writing various sentences on separate pieces of paper and then drawing them out randomly, 54 but he was not without a significant degree of Apollonian control: In Lessness we have a form that approaches but does not imitate natural chaos, for a man, Beckett, has selected the words, the arrangements of words and phrases in the sentences, the number of sentences, the possibilities of paragraph structure, and the motifs around which the fragmented narrative would be arranged; that is, Beckett performed all those operations we traditionally term writing. [. . .] What is finally surprising about the composition of Lessness is less the trick of pulling words out of a hatwhich act may simply be a trope for the recombinatory nature of the imaginationthan how much control Beckett retains over the creative process. (Gontarski 14)
54

For a description of Becketts compositional process for Lessness, see Cohns Back to Beckett (265).

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Ironic reasons like this prompt Gontarski to note the difficulties involved in defining Becketts aesthetics with any degree of certitude: Situating Becketts aesthetics within a critical tradition is finally a problematic enterprise. Beckett shares affinities with romantic, modern and postmodern aesthetics (16). Nevertheless, Gontarski goes on to suggest that the central compositional problem for Beckett is strikingly related to romanticparticularly Coleridgean aesthetics (16). If Becketts artistic sensibility is fundamentally Romantic, as this dissertation claims, then it is also Modernist and Postmodernist at one and the same time, or perhaps more to the point, if his aesthetic sensibility is fundamentally Modernist or Postmodernist, then it is also Romantic at one and the same time. The fugal lines of continuity and discontinuity between the three are far more interesting to trace in a writer as multifaceted and often self-contradictory as Beckett. In an attempt to problematize Hassans schema even further and to illuminate more fully Becketts own problematic relationship to it, let us simply take one example as an object lesson, Coleridges Kubla Khan, a poem that most critics would consider typically Romantic in its structure and content and one that is strikingly similar in many respects to Becketts own dialectical process of creation. Despite the fact that Hassan lists Romanticism/Symbolism under the Modernism column, almost every single characteristic in both columns, and particularly the ones in the Postmodernism column, is reflected in Kubla Khan. Coleridge, that is, calls the poem a fragment, and the theme of fragmentation runs throughout the poem, a theme, not incidentally, that has its roots in the German Romantic tradition of writing fragments to facilitate incomprehensibility (to echo Friedrich Schlegels essay of 1800 entitled On Incomprehensibility). In the preface of 1816, Coleridge claims to have had no control in the creation of this poem. The images were given to him; they rose up before him as things [. . .] without any sensation or consciousness of effort (he famously noted in the manuscript that his supposed sleep was actually an opium-induced reverie). His passive reception of the images, however, was irrevocably compromised by the fact, if we are to believe the story, that a man on business from Porlock dispersed the vision, resulting, upon the mans exit, in Coleridges merely retaining some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision. After the man from Porlock left, in fact, Coleridge could only remember some eight or ten scattered

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lines and images. At this point, the theme of pastiche comes fully into play; Coleridge misquotes a line from Samuel Purchass Purchase His Pilgrimage of 1613, a line that Coleridge claims to have been the imaginative inspiration for the fragment before us. He then quotes a fragment from one of his own poems, from The Picture; or, the Lovers Resolution, a fragment that itself speaks of fragments dim, and the quotation further implies that a stone has been cast into a stream, thereby causing a dispersal or scattering of images before the youths eyes: Then all the charm / Is brokenall that phantom-world so fair / Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread / And each mis-shapes the other. Before we get to the first line of a poem that most critics have interpreted as a perfect expression of organic unity, therefore, we are already in a house of mirrors, a labyrinth of antiform, play, chance, participation, decreation/deconstruction, absence, dispersal, irony, and indeterminacy. Questions abound. Did Coleridge deliberately misquote Purchas? Would the reader approach the poem with different expectations had Coleridge not included the preface retrospectively? Was he really in an opium-induced reverie, or did he want to make an excuse for a poem about which he was embarrassed (he only published it, as he writes in the preface, at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, i.e., Byron)? Is the poem actually a fragment, or is it organically unified? Are fragmentation and organic unification mutually exclusive? If the poem is a fragment, just what were the lines that the man from Porlock dispersed upon his dreadful arrival? (The missing lines, indeed, provoke the imagination almost as much, if not more so, than the actual lines before us.) David Perkins argues that Such deliberate confusions are expected in John Ashbery but impossible to imagine in earlier poets (103), yet this is to dismiss the German Romantic tradition in which Coleridge was working. Coleridges familiarity with Friedrich Schlegel, Jean Paul, and Novalis taught him that all genuine literature must be fragmentary, incomplete, and in some sense incomprehensible because life itself is fragmentary and incomprehensible, for life is in a constant state of becoming, never, that is, complete. Jean Paul, in fact, conceived of preparatives, prefaces and delaying techniques, in order to induce the readers continuous imaginative engagement with the work of art, which became the end in itself. Friedrich Schlegel, in his fragmentary and opaque utterances, deliberately tried to be incomprehensible with the use of irony and paradox, as he

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writes in his treatise On Incomprehensibility, in order to force one to take part in it as a reader (32). He writes in his Critical Fragments (1797), too, that Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is everything simultaneously good and great (42, no. 48). Given his awareness of the inherent finiteness of language, in fact, Schlegel goes on to assert that he has attempted to arouse a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication (43, no. 108). Becketts own ironic expression in Three Dialogues about the impossibility of expression is in fact the descendent, and not a very distant one, of Schlegels contention regarding the impossibility and necessity of communication. Becketts formulation is of course well-known: there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express (103). A century and a half before Derrida, then, the German Romantics conceived of language as play. In his Monologue (uncertain composition date), for instance, Novalis explicitly states that it is the same with language as it is with mathematical formulaethey constitute a world in itselftheir play is self-sufficient, they express nothing but their own marvelous nature [. . .] (93). In Writing and Difference (1978), Derrida similarly states that Play is the disruption of presence (292), and although the German Romantics did not embody in their styles anything quite as subversive as Derrida would later do, Deconstruction is clearly indebted to, if not wholly reliant upon, their emphasis on linguistic play and irony. In Dialogues (1798), Novalis concentrates the irony and play of which he speaks in Monologue by collapsing the difference between form and content in a fragmentary exchange between A and B that strikingly anticipates Becketts own Three Dialogues. Furthermore, Derridas celebration of what Lvi-Strauss seemed to have stumbled upon in works like The Raw and the Cookedthat is, the discovery that there is no unity or absolute source of the [Bororo] myth, that the absence of a center was concomitant with the absence of a subject and the absence of an author (286-7)is something that the German Romantics celebrated with their collections of fragments of mixed and unidentified authorship in order to subvert the accepted notions about creativity stemming from a single, identifiable source. As Kathleen M. Wheeler argues in Coleridge and Modern

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Critical Theory (1989), one is to understand Coleridges organic unity within this context of ambivalence: The concept of organicism has repeatedly been interpreted as expressing a closed structure or a concept of unity that is reactionary, traditional and at odds with the open-ended, uncentred, unstructured non-unity of deconstructionist theory. However, a careful examination of this concept will show that nothing is more foreign to it than such a structuralist interpretation. This misapprehension has arisen from Coleridges emphasis upon unity, but the concept of unity expressed by the organic metaphor (for art) is not static, fixed, or predetermined. Coleridge is not claiming, through the idea of works of art as organic, that they have a single, definable unity discoverable through interpretive acts. Rather, he is saying that works of art are in a constant process of growth and evolution, of self-development, like nature or the mind of man. Their meanings cannot be fixed by the authors intentions and purposes, for they have a life of their own that develops and realizes itself in the context of aesthetic response. They are fundamentally vital, just as mechanical productions are seen as dead metaphors. (99) This is the context, perhaps, in which we may better understand Becketts own dialectical process of artistic creation, a process that at the most basic level is clearly dependent upon the autonomy of the creative imagination. The plant, argues Coleridge in the Statesmans Manual with a metaphor for the artistic process, effectuates its own secret growth (77), thus highlighting the autonomous nature of imagination and the indeterminacy of artistic control, yet Coleridge was also fond of pointing out that a poet like Shakespeare never wrote anything without design (Shakespearean Criticism II, 192). Becketts Dada-inspired composition of a piece like Lessness, therefore, may be organically unified in its conception and designnot Shape as superinduced, as Coleridge significantly writes in his Notebooks, but Form as proceeding (III, 4397 f 53). Cohns assessment in Back to Beckett (1973) of Becketts process for the (de)composition of Lessness is illuminating: Beckett described this process as the only honest thing to do, but I suppose

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that many readers will share my disturbance that random distribution should organize his work. On the other hand, Becketts work through the 1960s does seem to culminate in a piece in which the elements are all known but the organizing principle remains mysterious (265-6). Perhaps the narrators quip about involuntary unity in DreamThe only unity in this story is, please God, an involuntary unity (133)is not a quip, or not merely a quip, after all; perhaps it is a plea for organic self-development in the tradition, say, of Coleridges organically unified Kubla Khan, a poem that was given to him against or in spite of his will, but one that he shaped at the very least with the addition of a highly self-conscious, ironic preface. Many of Becketts texts, after all, seem to grow out of one another from some source unknown, to quote a phrase from Worstward Ho (91). Imagination Dead Imagine, as we have seen, grows directly out of the first three words of the earlier All Strange Away. In Three Novels, there are constant internal echoes of previous and as yet unwritten works; the Colossus of Memnon (258) in Malone Dies, for instance, leans toward the old womans rigid Memnon pose in Ill Seen Ill Said (69); in The Unnamable, furthermore, the line They clothed me and gave me money (355) literally serves as the first line of The End, while the recurrent phrase nothing to be done in The Unnamable (355) recalls verbatim the first line of Waiting for Godot (11). Such examples are innumerable. Becketts work, in other words, has always seemed organic and self-evolving. In the final analysis, he disrupts presence by eliding fixed structure in favor of the fragmentary, the incomprehensible, the radically ambiguous, all of which characterize our lived, cognitive experience of the world. Becketts chief intensity is as apocalyptic as Blakes or Wordsworths or Keatss, and as potentially redemptive.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Michael Angelo Rodriguez earned a Bachelor of Arts in English literature from Saint Leo University, a Master of Philosophy in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College Dublin, and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University. He has given talks on Beckett at various conferences, has worked as assistant editor for the Journal of Beckett Studies, and has published in After Beckett/Daprs Beckett (Amsterdam and New York: Radopi Press, 2004).

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