A Way with Words: Paradox,

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Silence, and Samuel Beckett
N o CRITIC HAS YET ADDRESSED HIMSELF fully to the t w o questions
worth asking with respect to the work of Mr Samuel Beckett,
namely, whether that work is philosophically sound, and whether,
even if it is, it matters. All praise then to Mr J. R. Harvey ('La
Vieille Voix Faible', The Cambridge Quarterly, I, 4) for suggesting
the questions that need to be asked, and connecting the failure to
answer these questions with the undoubtedly true assertion that Mr
Beckett's art, despite the good work of Kenner, Cohn, Fletcher and
others, has yet to be judged. Mr Harvey writes that Mr Beckett, as
an artist, 'seems decidedly on the side of expression, and to succeed
in expressing all there is in him to express', whilst pointing out at
the same time that Mr Beckett, as an artist, is convinced that the
creative act is futile and language totally inadequate as the tool
of the trade :
There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain
to say may be tried in vain to be said.
(Proust, and Three Dialogues With Georges Duthuit)

Mr Harvey comments, 'One cannot have it both ways.'

Early in his career, in the discussions with Georges Duthuit on
the three artists Tal Coat, Andre' Masson and Bram van Velde,
originally published in Transition, M r Beckett showed himself to be
well aware of this seeming contradiction, and of its central impor-
tance, for it is the soil in which all his work is rooted :

B.—The only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse

and Tal Coat is a certain order on the plane of the feasible.
D.—What other plane can there be for the maker?
B.—Logically none. Yet I speak of an art turning from it in
disgust, weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be
able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old
250 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.

D.—And preferring what?
B.—The expression that 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. (Three Dialogues)

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This then is the first and philosophical question, upon the answer
to which depends any evaluation of Mr Beckett's art: How
do you say that there is nothing to say? How say it without break-
ing the silence that all Mr Beckett's characters loathe yet long for?

If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing? . . . But

it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think
you have succeeded, but you always overlook something, a
little yes, a little no, enough to exterminate a regiment of
dragoons. (The Unnamable)

Even to state the problem is to violate logic, for how can one
prefer "The expression that there is nothing to express...' ? That
cannot be expressed.

If this anguish of helplessneess is never stated as such, on its

own merits and for its own s a k e . . . the reason is doubtless,
among others, that it seems to contain in itself the impossibility
of statement. (Three Dialogues)

Mr Beckett then seems imprisoned in self-contradiction. In formal

logic this would be a disaster. Elsewhere, especially when seen in its
proper clothes, those of paradox, self-contradiction can lead to
discovery. (For a discussion of the enormous importance of paradox,
especially in philosophy, see John Wisdom's Philosophy and Psycho-
analysis, Other Minds, Paradox and Discovery. Wisdom's work
signposts the road to the end of philosophy.) But in what way?

What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my

situation, how proceed ? (The Unnamable)

Paradoxes work by exaggerating a truth to the point where it

becomes a lie. Often a similarity is asserted to be an identity. In
order to correct the distortions of paradox, we need platitude. The
truth in the paradox 'She has her mother's face' is revealed by the
platitude 'She looks like her mother1; the truth in the paradox
 SAMUEL BECKETT 251

'Aren't we all mad really?' is revealed by the platitude 'The sane

are more like the mad than we care to think.' The reason for this
kind of verbal conjuring is that a paradox stops us short and forces
us to think, forces us to see that to which we were previously
blind. The danger is that we will be taken in by the apparel, that
we will fall for the words and not realise what is being said. But

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once we are on our guard, awake to the pretence in every paradox,
we will see in a flash what we may have been struggling to under-
stand for months.
The statement of Mr Beckett's which led us into this brief dis-
cussion of paradox was:

The expression that 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.

We said that paradoxes make of truth a lie by exaggeration. Here

the exaggeration is in the word 'nothing': the expression that there
is nothing to express. Like all paradoxes, this one is literally false,
for even if there were nothing to express, there is one thing to
express, that there is nothing to express. And that one statement
makes the statement that there is nothing to express self-contradic-
tory. But to dismiss it as that would be quite to miss its value. Once
we have allowed ourselves this one statement, that there is nothing
to express, we can logically permit ourselves to talk, to elaborate
this and other points, that there is 'nothing with which to ex-
press . . . ' and so on. The question is whether or not beneath the
literal falsehood of Mr Beckett's paradox lies an insight that can be
exploited by art. The platitude that would correct the distortions
of Mr Beckett's paradox would be something to the effect that
when we think we have something to communicate we haven't, that
even if we had it couldn't be communicated, that what we think is
worthwhile is in fact futile. We have seen that Mr Beckett can say,
without being logically inconsistent, that there is nothing to say,
but how can this one point be built into a grand design ?
Mr Beckett himself seems to be unsure here. After the trilogy
(MoUoy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, One volume, Calder and
Boyars, 1966) came the Textes POUT Rien. Perhaps he realised that,
for an artist in his position, he had said far too much in the trilogy,
given away how much he knew and how well he could put it
across:
252 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

No denying it, I'm confoundedly well informed. (The Un-

namable)

At one time Mr Beckett admits that he is, unlike Joyce, working

with 'impotence, ignorance', arguing in Molloy: 'truly it little
matters what I say..." so long as 'the whole ghastly business looks

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like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery'. And then he
goes on to contradict himself in The Unnamable : 'In the frenzy
of utterance the concern with truth'. I don't think one can skirt the
difficulty by saying that the 'truth' just is the 'senseless, speechless,
issueless misery' for the problem goes too deep for this kind of neat
subtlety. At another time Mr Beckett argues that 'there is nothing
to paint and nothing to paint with' but goes on to say that this
results in 'art of a new order1, drawing a blind over the whole
question as to whether or not this is all inconsistent by glibly saying
'I don't think impotence has been exploited in the past.' (Hugh
Kenner, Samuel Beckett). The question is whether impotence can be
exploited, whether to say nothing can give rise to art of a new
order. There is no Yes/No answer to these questions and so no
Yes/No answer to the question whether or not Mr Beckett is a
great artist. A detailed discussion is the only way to evaluate, and
once that discussion is complete the need for the Yes/No type of
answer should have disappeared.
There is certainly a grand design in Mr Beckett's work, stretching
from Murphy to How It Is, and presumably inclusive of all the
drama. We can be sure that Mr Beckett is saying something, and
obsessively saying it again and again throughout his work. But how
does all this flow from the paradox? Why so many works when
there is supposedly nothing to say?
Mr Kenner offers a specious solution to the problem. He remarks
that Mr Beckett's 'one certain principle is that every work is wrested
from the domain of the impossible' and suggests that the impasse
"hands over all discourse to the domain of Style; terms have sounds
but not referents, sentences shape but not purport'. Mr Beckett
seems to fancy the solution himself:

I take no sides. I am interested in the shape of ideas. There is

a wonderful sentence in Augustine: T)o not despair; one of
the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was
damned.' That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape
that matters. (Samuel Beckett to Harold Hobson)

Quite obviously the shape of the Beckett sentence matters a great

 SAMUEL BECKETT 253

deal, but it is not only the shape that matters. Even if he pretends
otherwise, Mr Beckett is very concerned with the sense too:

In the frenzy of utterance the concern with truth.

No more than Mr Nabokov does Mr Beckett escape into aesthetics.

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I think that what Augustine's sentence says could very well stand
as a summary to Mr Beckett's entire oeuvre.
It seems to me that Mr Beckett is aligning himself against all
those who suppose that there are depths to the personality which
the artist, like the psychoanalyst, can plumb. Like Nathalie Sarraute
(The Age of Suspicion), Mr Beckett would deny that there are these
depths, and that therefore the analysis displayed by a Freud on the
one hand, and a Proust on the other, is chimerical. A fact is, and
that is all. There are no interpretations to be made, no depths in
which lie concealed truths about the personality. In Art Mr Beckett
would align himself with those who deny that a poem has a hidden
meaning which it is the job of the critic to reveal. And, more im-
portant, he feels that, so far from the intellect being fertile, and
conversation full of the glories of communication at the highest
level, most of us are emptyheaded most of the time, our conversa-
tion quite empty of meaning, just words in fact, language on holi-
day. (In this Mr Beckett is very close to the work of Mr William
Burroughs, especially the T)o you love me?' chapter of The Ticket
That Exploded.) The strength of the paradox lies in reminding
those who see personahty as complex and conversation as one way
of communicating that complexity, that for more than most of the
time this isn't so :

Dish and pot, these are the poles. (Murphy)

One must not forget, however, that this view itself is paradoxical,
and that therefore it is not a question of whether it is right or
wrong, whether or not we can accept it as the final truth, any more
than we can sensibly give a straight Yes or No to the question
'Aren't we all mad really?' We are like a judge listening to evidence
from prosecution and defence, only here there can be no judgment,
for to decide in favour of one is to rule out the truths of the other.
And on this other side the intricate and subtle analyses of a Freud
or Proust, certainly not chimerical, should serve to remind Mr
Beckett that there is more to the personality than its erotogenic
zones, more to conversation than Molloy's code of bangs on his
mother's head, or Bom's scratches on the back of Pirn. We feel that
254 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

one side or the other must be right, that there either are depths to
the personality or there are not, that we either meaningfully com-
municate or we don't. But this attitude is quite incorrect, and is due
to the unconscious influence of the logical axiom that a thing
cannot be both p and not-p. In logic it can't, but in life it can. A
man can be both humble and proud, stupid and intelligent. And

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the truth here is that both sides are right: Freud and Proust on
the one hand, Beckett and Sarraute on the other. By presenting
his views as paradox, saying we never communicate, that nothing
matters, and because of the skill with which he puts them, Mr
Beckett forces us to see and feel that to which we would rather be
blind, that much of human life is meaningless, much of what we
say and do inconsequential and futile. Mr Beckett is not the first to
view life like this, but he is the first to include in that vision his
own work and his own medium. This honesty is his originality, and
it is upon this foundation that the claim that Mr Beckett creates
'art of a new order' rests.
Many critics have seen the influence that Descartes has had on
Mr Beckett, but they have missed the most obvious and important
parallel. More important to Descartes than the mind/body split
was his Method, for it is from his method that his epistemological
views on the nature of the mind/body connection follow, and not
the other way round. It is not for nothing that the Discourse On
Method is so called. Descartes set out to doubt everything until he
could find something which he knew for certain, and upon which
he could build a philosophy that would support all he had formerly
doubted. What the Cogito ergo sum was for Descartes, 'the expres-
sion that there is nothing to express' is for Beckett. This is his one
certain principle. Like Descartes, Mr Beckeett has doubted every-
thing. He is die passionate sceptic who has reduced his own con-
siderable learning, and indirectly Western culture, to ashes. The
difference between Descartes and Mr Beckett is that whereas Des-
cartes was systematic in his doubting, Mr Beckett is not: the
absurdity of it all is portrayed at the same time as the point of it
all; hope is held out in one hand, despair in the other, just as with
Augustine's dictum. There is no Yes/No answer. For this reason
the Beckett characters wait patiently for the silence and darkness
of death; for the same reason no Beckett character does more than
toy with suicide.
This then is the vein of truth that the literal falsehood of the
paradox opens into, and it leads us straight to the second question :
Is Samuel Beckett a great artist? Do his works matter? Does he
as a phoenix from ashes? For the fact that we have seen that,
 SAMUEL BECKETT 255

philosophically, Mr Beckett's works can matter, is no proof that

they do. Many critics approach Mr Samuel Beckett as though he
were the Holy Ghost, and the only correct response genuflection.
The very idea that some of his works may be better than others,
and that some are not very good at all (Lessness, his latest prose
offering, seems to me at the best to add nothing to the oeuvre, and

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at the worst to be a disaster), is anathema to them. But this all-
embracing worship stifles true discernment and judgment Critics
must be acute: since they cannot create themselves, it is the least
they can do.
The critic arguing that Mr Beckett is a competent writer, furious
that he has nothing to say other than that there is nothing to say,
would agree with Mr Harvey that the serious, if not absurd, physical
diseases of the characters suggests a 'crudity in the art, a sensationa-
lism' not present in Kafka, whose language, by contrast with
Beckett's, is 'clean, tight' and resourceful, Kafka having the 'more
original' creative mind. Whereas I think it fruitless to try and decide
whether Kafka has a more original mind than Mr Beckett or vice
versa, the charge of crudity and sensationalism must be admitted to
have some force, and must be met. There are the gross physical
diseases; Moran spares us no details when giving his son an enema;
How It Is is full of stabs with tin openers, fingers in the anus; the
arse and genitals appear even in the twentyfour paragraphs of
Lessness. Why is this?
The answer to this question takes us to the heart of the matter. I
will now be provocative and argue that one characteristic which
distinguishes writing that matters from writing that doesn't, is that
writing which matters is writing which attempts to give some sort
of answer to the only philosophical question worth considering:
whether or not life has any meaning. Novels which are no more than
stories, however well written, poems which are no more than
descriptions of objects in the real world or emotions, however
accurate and technically proficient, however moving and beautiful,
in the end don't matter. They are trivia to pass the time, advertise-
ments for the author. But work which addresses itself to the question
as to whether any of it makes any sense is immediately on a higher
plane : the concern is serious, the answer matters.
One of the reasons I would put forward to justify my claim that
Mr Beckett matters is that his entire output is devoted to just this
question : Does it add up to anything? If we take the novel Molloy
we can see that it does in miniature what Beckett's work as a whole
does. It attempts to answer this question, and the answer is a
resounding No, it doesn't matter, mean anything.
256 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

At the beginning of the novel Molloy is found in his mother's

room; the first section of the book relates his last journey before
arriving there. At the end of the section Molloy is back where he
began. At the end of life we are back where we began : in the
eternal darkness which precedes birth and which succeeds death.

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All journeys lead nowhere because there is only the one journey,
from womb to tomb. The novel is an allegory: Molloy's mother's
room stands for both womb and tomb, and his last journey there
for life.

I like to fancy that it was in mother's entrails I spent the last

days of my long voyage.

The second section describes Moran's search for Molloy, whose

discovery would give his own life meaning. He fails to find Molloy;
the search, like his life, like life, is futile. At the end of the book he
too is back where he began, only in worse shape, and strangely
resembling Molloy.
Molloy is the extraordinary man : he is aware of the question and
the chasm failure to answer it creates. He is continually wondering
where he is, what he is doing, and why. Moran is the ordinary
man, the other side of the same coin as it were. He is endeavouring
to ignore the question by surrounding himself with the normal con-
cerns of life which keeps the question as to whether the normal
concerns matter safely concealed : his spiritual problems are dealt
with by the church, he has a duty to his employer, to his son, to
his garden, et cetera. But slowly the rot sets in : his legs begin to
give him trouble, his son deserts him, he begins to question the
point of his search for Molloy, his employer calls him off the job,
he returns to find his garden overgrown. At the end of the book
he is facing the question Molloy has been hounded by all his life.
We are all either like Molloy or Moran, more or less honest in
our attempts to face up to the question whether we matter, whether
it matters. And whether we are like Molloy or Moran, Mr Beckett
is telling us that our lives don't matter, that in the end it comes to
the same anyway, which is why Moran grows like Molloy. We are
crippled.
This I would offer as the reason for the gross physical defects
which assail the Beckett characters, and which grow steadily worse,
until in the end the protagonist of The Unnamable is without
identifiable shape. We are crippled, crippled by life. It is no acci-
dent that it is the legs which are always the first to go in Mr
Beckett, which gradually stiffen until movement becomes impossible :
 SAMUEL BECJtETT 257

For it (the old bad leg) was shortening, don't forget, whereas
the other, though stiffening, was not yet shortening, or so far
behind its fellow that to all intents and purposes, intents and
purposes, I'm lost, no matter.

And one should notice the connection between the stiffening of the

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legs and the loss of language: the disease spreads. Molloy is on
crutches, Malone is in bed, The Unnamable is stuck in a pot and is
left with nothing but the voice inside his head. And this voice will
gradually seize up, but not until Mr Beckett ceases.
The element of farce i* closely connected with the feeling of
futility. It is for this reason, together with the fact that the comic
grotesque is a central part of the Irish tradition (and one should
never forget that Mr Beckett is Irish, in spite of the fact that for
years he has written in French) that the farcical elements appear in
Mr Beckett The physical ailments are laughable, and are meant
to be. Since none of it matters, you may as well play a game with
bowler hats, or with words.
It is this violent awareness of the futility that most of us would
rather not recognise that leads Mr Beckett to pull the carpet from
under eveything. The four main props with which we support our-
selves - the physical beauty of others, love, communication and the
intellect - are effectively removed. Physical beauty is mocked
through the crippling diseases and the intolerable personal habits of
many of the characters; children are not spared the wrath :

I would have crushed him gladly, I loathe children, and it

would have been doing him a service, but I was afraid of
reprisals. Everyone is a parent, that is what keeps you from
hoping. One should reserve, on busy streets, special tracks for
these nasty little creatures... {The Expelled, No's Knife)

Love is reduced to sex, and sex to the meaningless manipulation of

obscene bodies:

She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had
always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put,
my so-called virile member, not without difficulty, and I
toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was
begged by her to stop. A mug's game in my opinion and tiring
on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a
good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me
so. {Molloy)
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Conversation gradually changes from the fairly normal exchanges

of Murphy, to the nonverbal bangs of Molloy on his mother's head,
to the jabs with a tin opener in How It Is. Finally, what the intel-
lectual prizes above all, his mind, ceases to be a place to retire into
and enjoy, as Murphy does, and becomes, first of all a useless

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apparatus for meaningless calculations (the sucking stones incident),
and then a hell where a voice goes on speaking worthless words.
Since life is meaningless it little matters whether we are alive or
dead, but since we are alive we may as well stay alive (perhaps the
best argument against suicide), wait to see if we find meaning, if
Godot arrives, if the voice will speak at last the magic words. In the
meantime all we can do is wait, and pass the time by telling stories.
And the wait and the stories are in themselves a story. Molloy
refers to it as a 'nursery tale'.

We live our lives like a tale that ia told.

The second reason I would offer for suggesting that Mr Beckett

is important is that he is the only writer in this position to have had
the courage and honesty to see that, if nothing matters, then the
saying of this doesn't matter either. Here again we are back with
the paradox. The unique fact about Mr. Beckett is that he includes
himself and his work in his own condemnation. This incredible and
implacable honesty I find totally admirable, even ennobling. That
Mr Beckett can go on, which philosophically he has every right to
('... the obligation to express...') yet at the same time believing
that it is all 'senseless, speechless, issueless misery' I find awe-inspir-
ing. I think this courage conveys itself to the reader, and encourages
him to continue, peculiarly gives him hope, even though he is being
told it is all hopeless. Can one deny that that matters? It is unique,
and its effect on the mind and emotions unparalleled.
Bearing in mind the peculiar trap in which Mr Beckett is caught,
we may wonder why he writes with such obvious care. His pensum
is to write :
Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to
be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to
stop staying... that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the
heat of composition.
and
There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than
what they peddle.
 SAMUEL BECKETT 259

But why write with such obvious concern for style? Can it be
excused, for a man in his position ? Mr Harvey comments : 'What
are these pretty decorations doing here?' Just as one can logically
argue that, although life is meaningless, nonetheless one may as well
make the best of it, so one can logically argue that, although literary

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creation is a waste of time, nonetheless if one has to write, one may
as well write as well as one can. And Mr Beckett writes very well
indeed.
It seems to me that it is the novels which demonstrate best Mr
Beckett's genius, particularly the trilogy, and particularly The
Unnamable. The poems are unlikely to survive the test of time, nor
may the drama. With the exception of Breath, and we will see why
this is the one exception soon, one could argue that the plays are
parasitical upon the prose, or at best a kind of counterpoint to it.
It is the prose which is fundamental.
In the novels we are ceaselessly confronted with the agony of an
existence that knows no reason for its existence, with a literature
that tirelessly accepts its own futility along with the meaningless-
ness of everything else. Three of the most important skeins running
through the tapestry of Mr Beckett's work are present in the first
sentence of Murphy:

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

Here present is the style, die wit and the despair. On almost every
page of Beckett these three make their appearance. They are
present on the last page of How It Is :

so things may change no answer end no answer I may choke

no answer sink no answer sully the mud no more no answer the
dark no answer trouble the peace no more no answer the silence
no answer die no answer DIE screams I MAY DIE screams
I SHALL DIE screams good

It is a travesty of the truth to reduce Mr Beckett's prose to

'Pretty decorations' as does Mr Harvey. There is the poetry, diank
God:

She sat on till it was nearly dark and all the flyers, except the
child, had gone. At last he also began to wind in and Celia
watched for the kites to appear. When diey did dieir contor-
tions surprised her, she could hardly believe it was the same
pair that had ridden so serenely on a full line. The child was
260 THE CAMBRIDOE QUARTERLY

expert, he played them with a finesse worthy of Mr Kelly

himself. In the end they came quietly, hung low in the murk
almost directly overhead, then settled gently. The child knelt
down in the rain, dismantled them, wrapped the tails and
sticks in the sails and went away, singing. As he passed the

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shelter, Celia called good night. He did not hear her, he was
singing. (Murphy)
And this arises from the almost finicky concern for the stress and
cadence of the syllables, the placing of the comma, the pattern of
the prose. There is preciosity in the early work, particularly More
Pricks Than Kicks, but to see the concern for fine detail in the
later works as 'archness* seems to me insensitive.
I must also disagree with Mr Harvey's comments about Mr
Beckett's humour. It does not belong 'particularly with the early
work' for it is present in every work he has written and in much
the same degree. I do find Mr Beckett devastatingly funny. Nor is
his humour just there for effect; it is perhaps the only time when
Mr Beckett shakes a fist at the despair he portrays so convincingly.
On almost every page there is a justified occasion for audible
laughter. One that comes to mind from Molloy is the scene with the
social worker :
But suddenly a woman rose up before me a big fat woman
dressed in black, or rather in mauve. I still wonder today if it
wasn't the social worker. She was holding out to me, on an odd
saucer, a mug full of a greyish concoction which must have
been green tea with saccharine and powdered milk. Nor was
that all, for between mug and saucer a thick slab of dry bread
was precariously lodged, so that I began to say, in a kind of
anguish, It's going to fall, it's going to fall, as if it mattered
whether it fell or not. A moment later I myself was holding, in
my trembling hands, this little pile of tottering disparates, in
which the hard, the liquid and the soft were joined, without
understanding how the transfer had been effected. Let me tell
you this, when social workers offer you, free, gratis and for
nothing, something to hinder you from swooning, which with
them is an obsession, it is useless to recoil, they will pursue
you to the ends of the earth, the vomitory in their hands. The
Salvation Army is no better. Against the charitable gesture
there is no defence, that I know of. You sink your head, you
put out your hands all trembling and twined together and you
say, Thank you, thank you lady, thank you kind lady. To him
who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth. (Molloy)
 SAMUEL BECKETT 261

As for the despair, the horror at the bleakness and loneliness of

life, the passionate concern with suffering, the will to survive, to
go on, to go on writing knowing that writing has no more point than
anything else, what can one say of all this? I can only say that I
find it impressive, even inspiring. Like the psychoanalyst, Beckett
forces one to accept what one would rather not, but after all the

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pain, the insights are comforting. One is glad to know there is
someone who understands, and the understanding of die self forced
upon one in the end makes one more whole, a better man.
The last thing in my mind which singles Mr Beckett out as a
writer who matters is something which has gone largely unnoticed.
All those who have closely followed Mr Beckett's literary career will
agree that his works have an enormous sense of movement, that
each new book represents an advance upon the one before, a
further step down a strange road. This is not the case with most
writers, who seem to circle die same point writing aimless novels.
And if one stops to ask where Mr Beckett is going, die answer that
first presents itself is that he is edging nearer and nearer the silence.
What has passed unnoticed is the nature of this silence. It is the
silence which precedes language, not that which succeeds it. It is
not the silence of a Rimbaud, nor is it yet die silence diat Mr
William Burroughs desires. (There is an important parallel to be
drawn between die work of Mr Beckett and Mr Burroughs. Bur-
roughs die philosopher has been overlooked in all die nonsense
talked about Burroughs die pomographer or even in some of die
sense talked about Burroughs die satirist.) Mr Beckett's silence is die
silence of die infant, even the child in die womb, which die Beckett
characters regret leaving.
The dominant emotion in Mr Beckett's work is futility, die main
idea expressed diat life is meaningless. It might be helpful here to
consider briefly die work of die psychoanalysts Fairbairn (Psycho-
analytic Studies of the Personality), Guntrip (Schizoid Phenomena,
Object Relations and the Self) and Winnicott (The Maturational
Processes and the Facilitating Environment) who show diat futility
is die dominant emotion of die schizoid individual. The schizoid
position U die original position of the psyche, and die one which
underlies all other positions. A complete analysis would take die
patient, after several years exploring die surface problems of sex and
aggression, dien die underlying Oedipal problems, tiirough die
depressive position to die schizoid foundations laid in die first few
months of life. Balint (The Basic Fault) has realised die major
difficulty: psychoanalysis is a dierapy of disease conducted in
words, but the root of all neuroses is pre-verbal. Apart from futility
262 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

being the main emotion of the seriously schizoid patient, his outlook
on life and on himself is one he finds terrifying. Guntrip has pointed
out that we all prefer to think of ourselves as Bad Somebodies (the
depressive position) rather than the truth, that we are Weak Non-
entities (the schizoid position). Indeed, we adopt the former as a
defence against the latter. To take the patient back to where he

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realises he is a weak dependent infant still, is to take him into
terror, into a deliberate collapse of his adult personality. And this
is exactly where Beckett is taking us. He too is concerned to show
us that all is futile, that the truth is we are Weak Nonentities. And
that truth is extremely disturbing. Rather than fully recognise it,
and all it implies, we would do anything. Just as patients often try
to turn their analysis into an intellectual debate to avoid facing
their emotions, so the critics either argue that Mr Beckett doesn't
matter without fully appreciating him, or turn a discussion of him
into a sterile intellectual exercise; anything to escape the full emo-
tional realisation of what is being said, that we are as nothing. But
there is no doubt that this is what Mr Beckett is saying, and there
is no doubt that, in the midst of life, we should listen to him, and
that it matters.
Look at Mr Beckett's work chronologically and you will see that
his steady progression is a steady regression. He is going back in
time, back from the reasonably mature and normal personal
relationships of Murphy to the epistemological insecurity of Watt
to the isolation of Molloy, still recognisable as a person, to the bed-
ridden Malone telling his tale, to the Unnamable, no longer recog-
nisable as a person. In psychoanalytic terms we have gone from
genitality and reasonably adult relationships to pregenital wholly
immature anality. It comes as no surprise to learn that the protago-
nist of The Unnamable is no longer sure whether he has a sex, and
that he is just words, themselves anal:

I'm in words, made of words, others' words

With How It Is comes a further regression, the last that can be

made. The Unnamable's concern with words is anal; in How It Is
the concern is oral. The words are no longer written, as with
Malone, they are spoken :

I say it as I hear it

There is no wonder there has only been a dribble of prose after

How It Is, for in fact the author can go back no further. The last
 SAMUEL BECKETT 263

prose pieces are about as near as you can get to nothing, to the
silence that precedes birth, at least on paper. But there is also a
progression, for while the language of the characters is dying by
being taken back to a preverbal past, bodies are also progressing
towards a real physical death. In other words, the Beckett char-
acters are going both ways to the silence. The mind/body split is

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absolute. The mind is going back to birth, the body forwards to
death. This is why Molloy's mother's room represents both womb
and tomb. The progression-regression movement is even more evi-
dent in Mr Beckett's plays, where again we go from the reasonably
mature personal relations of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for
Godot, the first published play, to the collapse into little more than
words of Krapp (who parallels The Unnamable and whose very
name expresses the anality involved) to what must be seen as the
ultimate: the preverbal, brief and breathtaking last play, appro-
priately entitled Breath. In this play, Mr Beckett succeeds in
conveying his main concerns at the same time as returning to the
preverbal Weak Nonentity that is the schizoid infant, that is us.
The curtains open in darkness and there is silence. A baby cries. As
the lights come up we hear an amplified intake of breath. We see
on stage a junkyard. As the lights dim we hear an amplified exhala-
tion of breath. The baby cries. There is silence and in darkness the
curtains close. The play takes approximately thirty seconds to
perform.

A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is

past, and as a watch in the night
Breath is quintessential Beckett. It is the only play to go further
than the prose, and for obvious reasons.
Those critics who reply to the charge that Mr Beckett is limited,
that he covers a very small area of human experience, by saying
that his characters symbolise the human condition and that there-
fore his works extend into a universal statement, are both on and
off the point It must be admitted that Mr Beckett limits himself-
he has deliberately limited himself to areas of narrower and nar-
rower concern - Breath would seem trivial unless one had read the
rest of Beckett, which is why the prose is fundamental - but what he
has limited himself to is a universal experience, our weakness, our
utter nonentity, and in this way he achieves an overall picture. The
emptiness at the centre of our souls, which we would do anything
rather than accept, Mr Beckett reveals. All that we do with our
minds and bodies to disguise this inner emptiness, to take our
minds off our selves, is ruthlessly mocked. Sexuality has often been
 264 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

derided, and rightly; not so often the intellect, the pride of Western
man, and rarely by an intellect as powerful as Mr Beckett's. But it
is right that the intellect should be mocked, for that too is as
pathetic as the rest Nothing is funnier than astrophysics. Our
pretensions of love, intellect, emotion, conversation, the trivial
deeds and duties with which we cloak the futility of our every day

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existence, are one by one removed, until we are faced with our
inescapable infancy. Aren't we all babies really? Mr Beckett's work
is important because it acts as a perpetual question mark; it is
always there, in the background, as a disquieting reminder. And it
is unique because it is honest enough to question itself. Yet Beckett's
relentlessness carries him and his work on. Can it be denied there
is tragic dignity, incredible courage, in the last few lines of The
Unnamable :

I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on, you must say words,
as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me,
strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done
already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have
carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that
opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will
be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll
never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on,
I can't go on, I'll go on.
C. J. Bradbury Robinson

An Apology
IN HIS ARTICLE ON LEAVIS AND WINTERS in our Spring/Summer
1970 number (Volume V, Number 1, p. 41) Mr John Fraser wrote

Winters, we are told by Patrick Cruttwell, for example, was

being bad-mannered in Forms of Discovery when he animad-
verted on Thomas H. Johnson's editing of Emily Dickinson's
poems.

Mr Cruttwell has pointed out that he wrote nothing concerning