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    Plan

    Plan détaillé Texte intégral Rule Number One: the Discourse must go onRule Number Two: Moving in that Linguistic Mechanism does not mean AnythingAnd so we get to the Third Rule of the Game: WorseningFourth Rule: Inventing Discontinuous Spaces as Spaces of the SelfFifth Rule: Seeing Something New, Showing Change and Exiting Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Modernism and Unreadability

    Ce livre est recensé par

    Précédent Suivant
    Table des matières

    Say for Missaid: Learning the Rules of Beckett´s Losing Game

    Noura Wedell

    p. 243-251

    Résumés

    Un examen des règles du jeu d’écriture de Beckett révèle une politique du pire comme outil rhétorique qui inaugure et crée l’écriture même. Ce jeu, qui ne se joue pas toujours comme jeu signifiant, peut être décrit comme un processus qui crée du mouvement à travers des espaces divers (celui du texte, du sujet qui le rencontre, de l’espace même), et métaphoriquement, à travers le système nerveux extériorisé du capitalisme cognitif.

    An examination of the rules of Beckett’s writing game discloses a politics of worsening as a rhetorical tool that inaugurates and creates writing itself. This game, which is not always played as a meaning game, can be described as a process which creates movement through different kinds of spaces (of the text, of the subject that encounters it, of “real” space), and metaphorically, through the externalized nervous system of cognitive capital.

    Texte intégral Rule Number One: the Discourse must go onRule Number Two: Moving in that Linguistic Mechanism does not mean AnythingAnd so we get to the Third Rule of the Game: WorseningFourth Rule: Inventing Discontinuous Spaces as Spaces of the SelfFifth Rule: Seeing Something New, Showing Change and Exiting Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    1Let us start with a disclaimer: Given the sheer weight of the existing critical production around Beckett and its rate of growth, this paper in no way claims to state anything that has not yet been stated, or will not come to join the Beckettian critical archives. At best, what we shall propose is a minor rearrangement of established critical moves. The game here is called the legible and the illegible. What follows is an investigation about language as a means of movement through space-time and about what such movement might mean, if it can mean anything. What, we propose, in fact, is to play the game of the legible and the illegible as the game of charting movement through an environment.

    2Let us call the game of the legible and the illegible the game of moving, a model of which appears in Beckett as the classical checkerboard opposition between black and white, darkness and light, storm, wind and lighthouse. A post-war Beckett, after years of doubts as to his writing and repeated attempts to conquer his indebtedness to Joyce’s linguistic model of abundance, is said to have experienced a sudden realization during a trip to Ireland in 1946. It is common to affirm that he might have given a version of this vision in his 1958 play Krapp’s last tape: a way of “seeing the whole thing” that is meant to stand against the day when, as Krapp says, his work will be done. A vision to stand in lieu of process.

    3In the play, Krapp is fumbling with his tape player, listening to a recording of past musings, and getting annoyed by the inanity of his mumblings on the tape when this comes on:

    Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision at last. This fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the miracle that... (hesitates)... for the fire that set it alight. What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely—(At this point he switches the tape off impatiently, winds the tape forward, switches it on again)—great granite rocks the foam flying in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggle to keep under is in reality my most—(He then curses, switches off the tape, winds the tape forward, switches it on again)—unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire.1

    4Placing the situation back in context, it is obvious that Krapp is playing the game of reading. The tape player is a reading device, a perfect, mechanical reader. It is, however, subject to human interference, Krapps’s fast-forwarding, in which his speeding up of the reading process silences the supposed epiphany (the vision, meaning in this case). What the tape player does not read, and which is supposedly revealed in real life to Beckett’s biographer, is the fact that the dark, what Beckett (or Krapp) has always struggled to keep under, is in reality his most precious ally.2 Because of this vision, the rules of Beckett’s writing game have suddenly changed. Illegibility goes from being a hindrance to being an ally in what Beckett will come to understand as the game of writing revealed in Malone Dies: “This time I know where I am going. It is no longer the ancient night, the recent night. Now it is a game, I am going to play. I never knew how to play, till now.”3

    5Please allow us to sidestep the course we are currently following to mention that, parallel to generically defined forms of writing, there exists a form of writing called navigational writing of which William Burroughs, in a letter to Brion Gysin from the lonely Tangiers he is trying to leave in 1964, gives the following terse description: “This is navigational writing. That is we start from present time landmarks and chart a route to space.”4

    6For Burroughs, the purpose of writing is to express human potentials and purposes relevant to the Space Age, or age of control. In effect, in the space age, in which we are now immersed, humanity has experienced a sort of inversion in which “Men’s nerves surround us, they have gone outside as electrical environment.”5 The problem is that this electrical environment has become a means of control; it has hardened into a closed membrane with no way out. Within this membrane, navigational writing constitutes a means of maneuvering a difficult trajectory through the environment of the externalized human nervous system of the age of control, this in order to “point to or arrive at the shut-off button of an active and lethal environmental process” (McLuhan, section 11).

    7Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs are both involved with charting the means of moving within and out of the same global landscape, even though they might never have encountered each other on their routes. Beckett provides a formulation of this navigational problem in his penultimate text entitled Worstward Ho, written in 1982, translated into French as Cap au pire. For Beckett, the way out of the membrane, and out of the externalized nervous system that he describes as the discontinuous linguistic spaces of a Watt, Murphy, Malone, etc., will be to arrive at the end of movement itself. Worstward Ho is the process of the attempt, through movement, to arrive at the end of movement.

    8The first sentence of the text encapsulates its program: “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.”6 Let us backtrack for a second. Why are we so concerned with movement? Why have we called game of the legible and the illegible the game of movement? Because movement is a given, the incessant going on of language is the lot of humanity: “on” is the first word of the text. Acknowledging this, Worstward Ho proposes to write the movement that goes from “On,” through language, “Say on,” through the effect of language, “Be said on,” with the means (or how) of language, “Somehow on,” to the absolute end of movement, “no how on,” till there are no means of moving left. Till nohow on, till nohow on can be said. Said nohow on.

    9According to the critic P. Casanova, Beckett is the inventor of an abstract literature. Rather than expressing senselessness, absurdity, ontological nothingness, as has been often stated about his work, Beckett’s strategy is that of cutting away at all metaphysics, linguistically, that is, at any sense behind the process at hand. The emptying, or exhaustion of language that he enacts can be read as rhetorical processes or linguistic mechanisms. In the case of Worstward Ho, this immanentist mechanism takes the form of a politics of worsening, moving towards the worst, as a rhetorical device. Beckett’s game of darkness, illegibility, is the game of worsening that he calls “saying for missaying.” It is well known that Beckett was a habitual chess player. He is said to have enjoyed an occasional “jeu d’échecs” with Duchamp in Paris in 1937, and his characters indulge in the game as well (Murphy and Mr Endon for example).7 Reading his books might thus provide a number of rules of the game, and perhaps grant us a larger scope of movement.

    Rule Number One: the Discourse must go on

    10According to this rule, Beckettian clarity and obscurity are nothing but rhetorical devices. On this question, The Unnamable is quite explicit, and we read, for example: “Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.” (288). Rather than legibility and illegibility, the appropriate distinction to be made concerns movement: the absolute necessity of going on, the imperative of movement and the need to invent means of locomotion: obscurities. This imperative of movement points to a fundamental linguistic trait: rather than being referential, the main linguistic function is simply to function. This state of affairs is reflected in Beckett’s understanding of the situation of the artist as a pure production machine, for whom expression is reduced to the “meremost minimum” (Worstward Ho, 9) of the following contradiction: “the fact that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power of expression, no desire to express and at the same time, the obligation to do so” (Molloy, 74).8 This is pure and empty expression: the pure form of expression. Language is nothing but the obligatory mechanism of expression, obscurity, nothing but a means for the mechanism to function. The narrator in The Unnamable explains it in the following way: “The only problem for me was how to continue (since I could not do otherwise), to the best of my declining powers, in the motion which had been imparted to me. This obligation (and the quasi-impossibility of fulfilling it) engrossed me in a purely mechanical way (excluding notably the free play of the intelligence and sensibility)” (314). Beckett, with this assertion, belies the illusion that thinking, or the use of language, is the free play of the faculties and the expression of a free subjectivity. The opposite rather appears to be the case. Thinking is something that we cannot escape; it is the unavoidable imperative, the inevitable unrolling of thoughts.

    Rule Number Two: Moving in that Linguistic Mechanism does not mean Anything

    11In Beckett’s losing game, all possibility of interpretation has been voided. Asserting that movement in language notably excludes the free play of intelligence and sensibility implies that both referential and connotative functions are beside the point. This is the situation Molloy finds himself in, living in his mother’s room, speaking about the pages he writes: “they are marked with signs I don’t understand. Anyway I don’t read them” (Molloy, 3). Language is not something to be understood, nor is it something to be read. It is a propulsive mechanism. We are bound by this propulsive mechanism; it is the mechanism of thinking. As such, it is without sense, in the Wittgensteinian meaning of the term “Sinnlos,” sense less, as are mathematics or logic.

    And so we get to the Third Rule of the Game: Worsening

    12Rather than trying to make the linguistic name the real, which means believing in some kind of “truth” quotient of language that would measure its grasp of a supposed non-linguistic reality, Beckett writes as a means to dissolve or circumvent the issue. His writing is not about meaning and referent, although these questions are never completely given up. They remain in Beckett’s acknowledgment of language’s fundamentally flawed character, the fact that it must go on although it has nothing to go on with, nor anything to go on to nor from. This necessity of movement creates the pure rhetorical use of obscurity, the very fact of legibility or illegibility. In a sense, Beckett’s use of language points to misconceptions that arise from this use, although not in the Wittgensteinian mode. By definition, what is said is missaid. What Beckett does is take this intrinsic linguistic error as a tool for writing: missaying, worsening the missaying. Thus Beckett’s politics of worsening is an algorithm, which provides the generative formula with which he produces his text. Worstward Ho, which we can take as a recapitulative manifesto of Beckett’s enterprise as a writer, is the rigorous exposition of the compositional and organizational rules of a writing project of worsening. The ally we spoke of in the beginning, darkness, appears in linguistic form as this worsening algorithm, the logic of which is as follows:

    On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. Say for be said. Missaid. From now say for missaid. Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (7)

    13The process of failing as the mechanics of writing progresses through negation, aporia, contradiction, paradox.9 Casanova gives the following examples of the syntactical use of contradiction, affirmations and negations infirmed as they develop: “I have to speak (whatever that means). Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. No one compels me to (there is no one)” (The Unnamable, 308). In the combinatorial machine thus set in motion, the process of worsening, failing or exhaustion involves going through all of the possible combinations till none remain.10 The languages used by Beckett’s characters are languages wherein the syntactical arrangement enact the exhaustion of all possible permutations of a fixed set of elements (words) in order to arrive at the exhaustion of language itself. Thus The Unnamable ends with: “No “I,” no “have,” no “being.” No nominative, no accusative, no verb. There’s no way to go on.”11

    Fourth Rule: Inventing Discontinuous Spaces as Spaces of the Self

    14In Beckett’s losing game, at issue is the invention of a space absolutely discontinuous with the rest of the world. “In those spaces a Murphy, a Malone or a Watt endlessly and precisely permutes his limited store of ideas and meager belongings.”12 Robert Morris says of Beckett that he invents the artist as one who fashions out space itself as an extension of the self.13 The thing about space is that it is fundamentally incomprehensible. This is because orders and logics, the elements of comprehension, are basically operations that occur in time. This provides a key as to why Beckett’s texts are charts of movement through space. When we see movement in space, we are basically seeing a visible form of time, that is, the form of a transformation. This is what navigational writing is about. Navigational writing is the charting of movement as the visible form of the transformation of a self.

    15What shape does this transformation take? Beckett’s characters inhabit contradictory spaces: a mother’s room, insane asylums, mud through which they must crawl or jars where they are stuck. The beginning of Worstward Ho provides a definition of such spaces: “A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still.” (7). These are spaces in which you can only enter: they are mental spaces. As Robert Morris writes: “Mental space has one striking feature not shared with actual space: it doesn’t exist as space. It has no dimension or no location... it has no location except in time.”14 This gives clarity to the phrase: “A place, where none.” To leave these spaces means to stop thinking, to stop speaking, to stop using language altogether and to arrive at the end of movement. The shape of the transformation is the movement of exiting the space.

    Fifth Rule: Seeing Something New, Showing Change and Exiting

    16This rule is the trickiest of all. We must admit that we have not quite deciphered it adequately. What we do know is that by exhausting all the possibilities of these spaces the self, or mind, will finally be able to exit into stillness. Thought will arrive at its end. We will be able to exit the closed membrane of Burrough’s and McLuhan’s externalized nervous system, what others have called the spectacle, a worsened unstable cognitive zone, and at this juncture extremely debt-ridden.15

    17Let us return to the beginning of Worstward Ho (“On. Say on. Be said on.”) to examine how the “on” proceeds. Beckett states the problem as follows in The Unnamable:

    To try and think of something different, of how to say something different from the same old thing (always the same wrong thing said always wrong). They can find nothing, nothing else to say but the thing that prevents them from finding. They’d do better to think of what they’re saying, in order at least to vary its presentation: that’s what matters. (367)

    18To repeat: what prevents us from finding is what matters. This is the very form of literature considered as the game of failure. The game of literature is trying out all possible plays of these obstructions (to use a word from Francis Ponge), or failings, that will show us something new to think, a possible transformation, because once all of the possible failings have been tried out, movement will stop. Beckett is in this sense a mystic. He thinks that his game of failing will allow us to move through and exit the space. The question is, can we ever exit the model, in which we find the game board, and the set of rules with which we can play? In this sense, we are all like Beckett’s characters, in spaces from which we don’t know if there is a way out. Let me elaborate a possible logical description of these spaces. If we follow Wittgenstein, we can say that in the picture of thought or in this case, in the form of literature, the relations between words are isomorphic to the relations between things in the so-called state of affairs. The form of Beckett’s writing, that is, the combinatorial model of failure as it is deployed in all different instances of its actualization that are Beckett’s books, contains the possibility that this structure is shared with the state of affairs. Exhausting this structure is the hope of getting to the end of movement, getting to the exhaustion of the state of affairs itself, stepping out of the space and out of the game. In which case the obscurity will finally cease, although it will have never been clarified.

    19And yet, in order to play correctly, we must remember the ally, which is of course not listed in the rules. Trying to arrive at a purely crystalline understanding of all this is a sure way of losing. We can consider Beckett a conceptual writer of sorts. In this case, Sol Le Witt’s Sentences on conceptual art might apply:

    1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

    2. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments.

    3. IIlogical judgments lead to new experiences.

    4. Formal art is essentially rational.

    5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.16

    20If we are to attempt a move through space-time that is a transformation, that leads to new experiences and to a change in the state of affairs, we must rely on illogical judgments and obscurity. And I quote The Unnamable: “Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself in the end” (318).

    21As for concluding remarks, we return to the beginning, to Burroughs and navigational writing. The question is, what is the environment, today, that we must travel through and out? In 1964, Marshall McLuhan explains that in the externalized nervous system in which he lived, the university had become a global environment. “The university now contains the commercial world, as well as the military and government establishments.” (Section 10). This is the stuff of dreams or nightmares. We take this to mean a certain “cognitivizing” of our world, and to contain an implicit criticism of rational logic as a form of control. Of course, we find ourselves here at a certain geographical and temporal remove from McLuhan’s university. This is, however, the game that is still being played at this table, and for which, I hope, you might here have gleaned some losing moves.

    Notes de bas de page

    1 Beckett Samuel. Krapp’s last tape. London: Faber and Faber, 1968, 15–16.

    2 This was apparently revealed to his biographer, Knowlson and related in the biography Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press, 1996.

    3 Beckett Samuel. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. York: Grove Press, 2009, 174.

    4 Letter to Gysin from Burroughs, 28 May 1964. Personal transcription from letters displayed in the Paris Subway, 2007.

    5 Mcluhan Marshall. “Notes on Burroughs,” The Nation, 28 December 1964, 517–519. For an online reproduction of the article, see http://realitystudio.org/criticism/notes-on-burroughs/section1.

    6 Beckett Samuel. Worstward Ho. London: John Calder, 1983, 7.

    7 See Durozoi Gérard. Samuel Beckett: irremplaçable. Hermann, 2006, 51.

    8 Beckett’s reflection on art provides the context for the elaboration of an esthetics of failure applied to the painting of Bram and Geer Van Velde. See Beckett Samuel. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: Calder and Boyars, 1965. The possibility of abstraction in literature thus arises out of a fertile confrontation with the non-linguistic arts. This resonates with what Brion Gysin states of literature as belated in regards to painting and art, and with his subsequent invention of the cut-up as a literary mechanism that does not necessarily rely on sense.

    9 For a description of Beckett’s mechanics of writing as worsening, see Casanova Pascale. Beckett l’abstracteur: Anatomie d’une revolution littéraire, Paris: Seuil, 1997.

    10 On the question of exhaustion and how Beckett attempts to exhaust the possible, see Deleuze Gilles. L’épuisé. In Beckett Samuel, Quad: et Trio du fantôme, ... que nuages, ... Nacht und Träume/ translated from the English by Edith Fournier. Followed by L’épuisé/ by Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Les Éd. de Minuit, 1992.

    11 Beckett Samuel. Interview by L. Shenker in the New York Times, 5 May 1956.

    12 Morris Robert. “Aligned with Nazca” in Continuous Projects Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, 160.

    13 On the question of space and artistic practices of the 1970s, see Morris Robert. “Aligned with Nazca” in Continuous Projects Altered Daily. Ibid.

    14 Morris Robert. “The Present Tense of Space,” Continuous Projects Altered Daily. Ibid., 185–186.

    15 This text was written just after the Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 called bailing out Wall Street investment banks.

    16 Le Witt Sol, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” 0 TO 9. Number 5, January 1969, 3–5.

    Auteur

    • Noura Wedell

      E.N.S.-L.S.H.—Lyon
      Noura Wedell is an adjunct professor at École Normale de Lettres et Sciences humaines in Lyon. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her work focuses on literal practices in various media (literature and the arts) and the art-politics interface. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Nioques and of Semiotext (e) in Los Angeles. She is also a translator (Babylone Babies, by Maurice Dantec; La fabrique de porcelaine by Antonio Negri; Coma by Pierre Guyotat). Her first book, Odd Directions, was published in 2009.

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    1 Beckett Samuel. Krapp’s last tape. London: Faber and Faber, 1968, 15–16.

    2 This was apparently revealed to his biographer, Knowlson and related in the biography Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press, 1996.

    3 Beckett Samuel. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. York: Grove Press, 2009, 174.

    4 Letter to Gysin from Burroughs, 28 May 1964. Personal transcription from letters displayed in the Paris Subway, 2007.

    5 Mcluhan Marshall. “Notes on Burroughs,” The Nation, 28 December 1964, 517–519. For an online reproduction of the article, see http://realitystudio.org/criticism/notes-on-burroughs/section1.

    6 Beckett Samuel. Worstward Ho. London: John Calder, 1983, 7.

    7 See Durozoi Gérard. Samuel Beckett: irremplaçable. Hermann, 2006, 51.

    8 Beckett’s reflection on art provides the context for the elaboration of an esthetics of failure applied to the painting of Bram and Geer Van Velde. See Beckett Samuel. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: Calder and Boyars, 1965. The possibility of abstraction in literature thus arises out of a fertile confrontation with the non-linguistic arts. This resonates with what Brion Gysin states of literature as belated in regards to painting and art, and with his subsequent invention of the cut-up as a literary mechanism that does not necessarily rely on sense.

    9 For a description of Beckett’s mechanics of writing as worsening, see Casanova Pascale. Beckett l’abstracteur: Anatomie d’une revolution littéraire, Paris: Seuil, 1997.

    10 On the question of exhaustion and how Beckett attempts to exhaust the possible, see Deleuze Gilles. L’épuisé. In Beckett Samuel, Quad: et Trio du fantôme, ... que nuages, ... Nacht und Träume/ translated from the English by Edith Fournier. Followed by L’épuisé/ by Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Les Éd. de Minuit, 1992.

    11 Beckett Samuel. Interview by L. Shenker in the New York Times, 5 May 1956.

    12 Morris Robert. “Aligned with Nazca” in Continuous Projects Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, 160.

    13 On the question of space and artistic practices of the 1970s, see Morris Robert. “Aligned with Nazca” in Continuous Projects Altered Daily. Ibid.

    14 Morris Robert. “The Present Tense of Space,” Continuous Projects Altered Daily. Ibid., 185–186.

    15 This text was written just after the Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 called bailing out Wall Street investment banks.

    16 Le Witt Sol, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” 0 TO 9. Number 5, January 1969, 3–5.

    Modernism and Unreadability

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    Wedell, N. (2011). Say for Missaid: Learning the Rules of Beckett´s Losing Game. In I. Alfandary & A. Nesme (éds.), Modernism and Unreadability. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.13795
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    Wedell, Noura. « Say for Missaid: Learning the Rules of Beckett´s Losing Game ». Modernism and Unreadability, édité par Isabelle Alfandary et Axel Nesme, Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2011, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.13795.

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    Alfandary, Isabelle, et Axel Nesme, éd. Modernism and Unreadability. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2011. doi:10.4000/books.pulm.13580.
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