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MARXISM TODAY , DECEMBER 19 64 381

degree Bohm's philosophy are faced with verydamaging criticism.

But physicists have never been great admirers ofpurely philosophical argument, and rightly so for

they have other criteria for the validity or usefulnessof a particular outlook. Just as a socialist must askwhich philosophy, bourgeois or Marxist, fits thefacts of his life, fulfils what he asks of a philosophyand is of real, practical advantage to him, so a

physicist asks that a philosophy not only fit thefacts of his life, his science, but that it helps him tounderstand more clearly the nature of physicalphenomena and serves him as a guide to action in

the understanding and discovery of what is new.This article then must be followed by another

which puts the various philosophies discussed hereto this test and examines in greater detail their rolewithin physics itself.

S a m u e l B e c k e t t a n d t h e D e c l i n e

of W e s t e r n C i v i l i s a t io nJohn Lewis

An address delivered in the Conway Hall on July 5th, 1964

SOME ten years ago there appeared a new anddisturbing figure in the world of the theatre—Samuel Beckett, an Irishman long domiciled in

France, the author of Waiting for Godot. Today weknow him by a whole series of equally perplexingplays and novels reflecting his own strange universe,permeated by mystery and bounded by darkness .

Plays and novels designed to show how meaning

less life is, that at the root of our being there isnothingness, that the certitudes and basic assumptions of the age have been swept away, have beentested and found wanting, discredited as childishillusions.

As Camus has said :

"In a universe that is suddenly deprived ofillusions and of light, man feels a stranger. He isan irremediable exile, because he is deprived ofmemories of a lost homeland as much as he lacksthe hope of a promised land to come."

Cu t off' from his religious a nd met aphy sicalroo t s , man is lost, and all his actions becomesenseless, absurd , useless.

This is the blurred and angry vision, the picture

of anguish and despair that is presented in the playsand novels of Samuel Beckett.

Anguish and Despair

W hat are we to think of Samuel Beckett 's pr ophe ticvision? What is our attitude to all this? Is it tobe contemptuous derision? Are we to say that thisis merely some eccentric avant garde nonsense ? W ecannot ignore the extent of the intelligent response,the widespread feeling that this does reflect some

thing many of us uneasily feel. It answers to something in the modern world .

Samuel Beckett 's rise to fame is the story ofsingle-minded devotion to the severest of principles,an intense concentration on the one side of the lifein Paris known to him, and the exercise of a uniquetalent for verbal play. Tall, slender and still youthfulin his fifties, Beckett remains shy and unassuming,

though his works are filled with anguish, tormentand the deranged fantasies of human beings drivento the limits of suffering, as he continues his exploration of the human condition, his quest for theanswer to such basic quest ions as "Who am I?""Do other people exis t?" "Is f i fe a bad dream orstill worse, reality?" "Is not death much better thanl ife?" He writes more and more slowly and withgreater difficulty than at any time of his greatcreative period. His last novel. How It Is, t ranslatedby himself from the French, appeared this year;and two of his plays. End Game and Play, are nowbeing performed in London. He himself has produced both Play and Waiting for Godot in London.

The force of his imagination, his mastery oflanguage, his technical brilliance, his command ofthe mirthless laugh, all these are beyond dispute.But what a vision of the world! A torture chamberfor incurables! And look at his face as we see it inthe photograph that s tares out of the programme ofhis current plays—a face at once accusing andaghast, as of a man about to be struck by lightning.This is our modern prophet who cannot help seeingbeyond the complacency of our affluent society tothe engulfing grave and the encircling gloom.

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382 MARXISM TODAY, DECEMBER 19 64

Waiting for Godot

Let us look at his four plays, Waiting for Godot,End Game, Happy Days and Play, and then glancebriefly at his strange, enigmatic novels, especiallythe last— How it is, portraying man in his extremity;a work whose word magic is an advance on anything he has previously written, terrifying in itswilful confusion of ideas and reality.

Waiting for Godot is the story of two tramps whohave come from nowhere in particular and havenowhere in particular to go. Their life is a state offruitless expectation. They receive messages througha little boy that Godot is coming, but he never doescome. They hope for his coming, but they fear himt oo . They seem to represent the state of tension anduncertain ty of the modern mind.

The other two characters in the p lay are themasterful and ridiculous Pozzo and his slave Lucky.Pozzo is the man of power and arrogance with noideas, the worldly man in all his facile and shortsighted optimism and illusory feeling of power.Lucky is his intelligence—the spiritual side of man.But when they appear for the second time Pozzo hasgone blind and his slave Lucky is dumb. In thefirst act Lucky guides Pozzo; in the second Pozzodrives Lucky on a journey without a goal. Pozzodepends on the man of thought for such momentsof insight and knowledge of beauty and truth asoccur in his life. But Lucky is a very bogus philosopher—when he explains what he really has toteach us it is a half-baked pretence of knowledge, anaive belief in what he thinks is science, a muddled

appeal to bogus authorities.The tramps stand for a hope that is utterly

unreasonable and futile. Do they really expect Godotto come? They are too helpless and spineless to doanything but talk endlessly and in a meaningless wayto keep up a semblance of hope.

They end up with nothing more than a habi t now ,of waiting for what will never come. Avoidingthought, the realisation of their emptiness andfutility by jokes and co med ians' cross talk, pastimesto stop them from thinking.

Almost a terrifying play. As Anouilh says of it ,

"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes:

it 's awful."

End Game

In a bare room with two small windows, we finda blind old man, Hamm, paralysed, selfish anddomineering, but burdened by a load of guilt, andhis servant Clov who has to do everything for himand above all see for him, but is desperatelyanxious to escape. Against the wall stand two ash-cans (dust-bins) in which live Hamm's legless oldparents, grotesquely sentimental imbeciles. Outside

the room is a dead, destroyed world. And their ownstore of food is giving out.

At the end Clov, who every now and then peersout of the windows, sees a stranger. Is it a child ? A

potent ial procreator? Someone to s tart a new l i fe?"Go and exterminate h im," cries Hamm. Then "No,don ' t . We've come to the end."

Useless to ask what its meaning is. It is meant tohave no meaning, to have the same absence ofmeaning as life itself with its sense of deadness,leaden heaviness and hopelessness. It confronts uswith a concrete projection of our own deepest fearsand anxieties. Does it help by liberating the subconscious content of the mind ?

Happy Days

In Happy Days the scene contracts to still smaller

dimensions and there are only two characters, oneof whom only appears for a moment.We see in these plays a gradual discarding of

everything that makes a play, plot, character, incident, action. Instead we get symbolic figures andlong monologues. And as for action—nothing isleft but habit; dialogue dries up because of the utterabsence of communication. Beckett as always isobsessed with the inability of men to communicatewith each other on any level other than the mindless chattering of apes. In Happy Days Winnieneeds the illusion that she is talking to her husband,but whether he is there or not doesn't matter.

Winnie is a middle-aged woman buried up to herwaist in a mound of sun-baked earth. Death has

half claimed her, she is being sucked under by "theold extinguisher" inch by inch. By the second actshe is buried up to her neck. We hear an occasionalsneeze or cough or a few gruff words from a husbandout of sight beyond the heap. He appears for amoment trying to crawl up the mound at the veryend. And is she in despair at her situation? Farfrom it, she is a babbling optimist, blind to her ownincurable dilemma. She exhibits man's perniciousand stupid optimism, but her happiness is nothingmore than an unstable veil of self-deception. Theterrible truth about man is not that he is happywhen fighting against tremendous odds, against anirresistible destiny, but that he remains obstinately

and stupidly cheerful because he is being buriedalive. When we look at her and say what does itmean ? She turns to us and looks straight at us fromher mound of earth . "And you," she says , "what isthe idea of you? What are you meant to mean?"And only those who are sure of the answer can scoffat Happy Days. We are only meant to know thatmankind is helplessly locked and barred in the earthand sinking down in the great extinguisher, babblingfoolishly to keep from recognising the human condition.

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MARXISM TODAY , DECEMBER 19 64 383

Th e last of his plays is jus t called Play. Here weare faced with three identical jars from each ofwhich protrudes a head. A light picks them out oneby one bringing them to fitful, gabbling life. They

tell the story of a commonplace adultery-wife-husband - mistress. Each gabbles the story fromone point of view too fast to hear, and when theyhave finished, they start all over again. You see,communication is not really through the meaningof words and sentences but below the level ofconsciousness, by the impression made by phrasesand sounds. Only the jars are definite—not thepeople, not the facts, not even the words.

And of course all this is laughable, ridiculous,perhaps a stupid joke and of course nobod y is takenin—nobody goes to those idiotic capers. On thecontrary everybody goes. The whole thing has ahorrible fascination. It is much too true to l ife—

when you take the lid off—when you stop pretending. No plays on the London stage have had amore unexpected and exciting success in recentyears than Samuel Beckett 's. If i t is nonsense; thencertainly his nonsense suits ou r nonsense. It strikesa chord anyhow that makes something in ou r condition, vibrate tremulously in unison. What is i t?

Beckett ' s Novels

Beckett 's novels will not demand quite the attention of his plays if only because they are still moreindescribable—but they are far from unimportant.

A strange sequence of characters appears in thesenovels: MoUoy, Malone, Watt, Murphy, Pim, Bern

and the Unnameable. They are novels of self-exploration, in which these figures appear to betelling their story, then to be inventing a story, andthen to be themselves figures in an invented story.Each self comes more and more to resemble theobject of the search. MoUoy looking for his motherthinks he is his mother, Mr. Moran looking forMolloy becomes Molloy. Malone dying, may beanother phase of Molloy or perhaps of Molloy andMoran together; or were they both fictions made upby Malone? They are all of them locked up withtheir fictions and can't get out to discover anyreality at all. And this, Beckett implies is hi s condi t ion—and ours.

Gradually the narrative rambles on, expressing anentirely jumbled and inconsequential succession ofmuddled memories, confused and pointless aims,hallucinations, dreams, or perhaps sensations, drifting across the screen of the mind in the closed anddarkened room that is ourselves. Yet Beckett exercises a strange power of language in this vivid andevocative chaos of words.

The novels have the effect of dissolving all theold distinctions between space and time, observerand observed, object and environment, subjective

and object ive , body and mind, thought and bra instorm . An d all meaningful succession of even ts istotally lost.

In what is regarded by the crit ics as the best of

these writings, the new novel How it is, even thesentence breaks down and with it the extraordinaryrhythms and cadences of the earlier books. Beckettwould appear to end his sequence of novels helplessbefore the contents of his own mind. If at the beginning he really set out looking for something, thelaborious search has ended in final bafflement.

In How it is only one consciousness exists. Everybody else appears to be part of an endless dream ornightmare. This is the ultimate reality. We arewallowing in a vast expanse of warm, primevalmud. Here an old man flounders face down with asackful of t ins round his neck. He crawls alongwith painful slowness. Into this mud he murmurs

or hears a voice which could be his own or just adisembodied voice. In front of him crawls anotherold man whom the first one jabs with a t in-opener.But incidents do not matter, nor whether the secondman is not really the first , or whether anything ishappening at all and it is all the psychopathic delusions of a desperate man, perhaps the author.Breathless, gasping meditations pour out, un-punctuated, on " the natura l order more or less mylife last state last version what remains bits escape".

If this seems too fantastic to be an account ofany novel one can actually hear on a record a longextract bril l iantly recited by Patrick Magee whichhas a most horrible fascination. In fact i t works likean incanta t ion on many people . They respond in

every nerve cell of the brain a nd senses, from physicalto metaphysical. They seem to experience a greatrelease of psychological tension.

Personal Misfortune not Phi losophy

Certainly Samuel Beckett succeeds in every playand every book he writes in creating an atmosphereof uncertainty and irreducible confusion; of communicating one thing, quite indisputably, theauthor's sense of bewilderment and anxiety whenconfronted wi th the human condi t ion and hisdespair at being unable to find a meaning in existence.

So what? Why should this be true because it isclever ?

Why should we say—Poor lost , unhappy humanity ?

Why not : Poor Mr. Becket t?

The despair in which he traffics is a personal misfor tune, not a phi losophy. The madness may be notin the universe but in himself. We do most certainlyget a gripping sense of what one sort of psychotic 'sexistence must undoubtedly be like. The sort ofperson who like the poet Emily Dickinson can say

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384 MARXISM TODAY, DECEMBER 19 64

I l ike a look of agonyBecause I know it 's true.

But once again, is i t the truth about l ife? True,

of course, as revealing the psychotic 's troubledmind, but not, for that reason, true as a picture of

the human si tuat ion.

Break-up of an A ge

This is, in fact, the vision of the kind of man whosees the modem world from a peculiar angle; andit appeals to those who are afflicted with the samedistorted vision. But are they not identifying theirown subjective vision with reality i tself? And whatis that vision ?

Living in a world in process of radical change, touse Jul ian H uxley 's phrase—"living in a revolut ion"they try to see the world in terms of the concepts

and principles and values and ideas of the age thatis breaking up. The result is that they see mere confusion.

When one age is dying and a new one is cominginto being, this manifests i tself in the disintegrationof the once fixed order of the present world, butalso in the beginnings of a new and better order,which those wedded to the old cannot see, or ifthey see it , hate. When fundamental change arrivesfor some heaven dawns, for others hell yawns openand the mind passes into hysteria.

What is wanted is a new philosophy and a newperspective. Nineteenth-century rationalism, nineteenth-century optimism, the moral codes of the

Victorian, the Edwardian and the Georgian, a l lthese concepts and principles are fall ing to piecesunder the onslaught of modern phi losophy andmodern science. But as Shaw used to say: "If yourold religion broke down yesterday, spend today inget t ing a new and bet ter one for tomorrow." Weare learning new things every day—but that alwaysfeels at first as if we had lost something.

If one could see not only what is decaying, outworn, but what is coming into being, if one could seenot only the pattern of an individualist society indecline but the perspective of a co-operative commonweal th coming into being, things would lookvery different.

The pessimists see only death and decay becausetheir vision is l imited by their own assumptions andprejudices. T he dilemma is no t tha t of man , i t istheir own. What they call the permanent predicament of m an in relation to his universe, is the presentpredicament of man in relation to his present socialpatter n w hich is obsolete. Refuse to face the necessityfor discarding it and man's condition does seemdepressing.

There are two ways of looking at the world'sevils. If one simply contemplates them, and asks for

an explanation, or asks oneself whether on balancethere is not more unhappiness and misery in theworld than happiness, then one will begin to talk

about the human condition, and a fallen world, andman's hopeless predicament and may well come tothe conclusion that this is the best of all possibleworlds and everything in i t is a necessary evil .

This will almost inevitably be so if one gravitatesto the world of disil lusioned, cynical, defeatedpeople l ike Burroughs of the Naked Lunch, Albeeof Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Henry Millerand his Tropic of Capricorn, and fifty other inhabitants of our contemporary Purgatorio or Inferno—whichever we choose to call i t .

There are people who have not the slightest intention of grappling with these evils, because theevils spring from the very exaggerated individualismwith which they themselves are imbued. To grapplewith the world's evil would instantly demand arepudiation of this intense preoccupation with themselves, this mo rbid in troversion , this colossal egoism.They would ra ther be ruined than changed. The endis in Beckett's hell.

The N ew Within the Old

But do the men and women who are organisingand co-operating to change the world feel l ike this?However great the evils, when one begins to fightthem, when one is prepared to pay the cost inabandoning privilege and irresponsibili ty and egoistic self-centredness, exclusive concern with one's

own inner l ife, when one comes out of one's loneliness to help in the remaking of the world, thenthe whole picture changes.

Philosophers have hitherto only tried to explainand justify the present state of the world, or toreconcile men to i t . The real task is to change it .There is no problem of evil . There are only problemsand evils. And when tackled on the level ofintelligent investigation and resolute endeavour theproblems will not prove insoluble, nor the evilsineradicable.

If the existing system is believed to be the finaland unalterable nature of things, then all the evidences of maladjustment reflect the human con

dition as the pessimist views it .The reply to the prophets of gloom is:

You would ra ther be ruined than changed.You would ra ther die in your dreadThan c l imb the cross of the momentAnd let your i l lusions die.

But see the new perspective, recognise the newforces, the outlines of a new society, the new men,the new philosophy, and we see not Beckett 's nightmare but the dawn of a new age.

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38 5

Discussion Contributions on

Art and Superstructure

Stephen Sedley

CA T H E R I N E B O S W E L L ' S c o n t r i b u t i o n to

the discussion on art and superst ructure(MARXISM TODAY, September 1964) carries

us well away from Ernst Fischer's Necessity ofArt

and Peter Pink 's comments on it, but it raises somemajor issues which ought to be settled and which

do ultimately hark back to Fischer ' s book.Catherine Boswell 's argument about artistic perception does not need to be refuted in detail , becauseit is not really an a rgument at all. I want to ment ionit only because it seems to rely on assumptionswhich no Marxist can afford to nurse .

She jumps on Peter Pink when he a s k s : "Is it

t rue that one who can express himself artisticallyis necessarily more perceptive than one who cannotexpress himself artistically?" and she comment s"Surely it cannot be good Marxism to deny that a

person who spends a large part of his life studying,work ing and fighting as a creative artist , art teacheror crit ic will achieve greater awareness and sensitivity inthis field t han 'the rest of u s ' . " The italics

are mine, and the three italicised words dislocatethe whole argument ; Catherine Boswel l is no d o u b tright, but Peter Pink 's content ion that there are

other equally important fields of percept ion remainsuntouched.

Artists and Communicat ion

But when later on in her piece Catherine Boswellrepeats her pseudo-argument ("nobody but the

artist cani l luminate the world and inspire us in the

'very special way' characteristic of a r t " ) , moredangerous assumptions begin to show through the

c racks . Wha t she says is t rue enough , but it would

be just as t rue to say n o b o d y butthe painter can

i l luminate the world in his specia l way—or the im

pressionist in his—or Cezanne in his. In otherwords both logical ends of this argument simplystress (what Marx also stressed) the diversity and

the universality of people's creative potential .Every individual , "ar t i s t" or not, has his own

unique percept ion of life, though of course eachfacet or group of facets of it will be held in c o m m o nwith anyn u m b e r of other people . It is especiallyimpor t an t t ha t a Marxist should understand the

full interplay between the total social context and

the individual ' s uniqueness wi thin that context .Why then does Catherine Boswell draw her line

a t the category of "ar t i st" when what she says is

equally true of pretty well everybody? The obviousreason would be t ha t an artist , unlike the others,

goes a stage further and communicates w h a t heperceives to whoever is looking or l istening. Eventhis, I think, is a doubtful distinction. A worke r on

a picket line or a rent demonstra tor who punchesa copper is doing in essence the same thing—carrying his own vision of things into some kind of

more concrete and more genera l ised (more symbolic, if you like) action; and he does the same thingon a higher level when he goes on to engage in t r adeun ion or communist organisa t ion.

Likewise both a painter and a house-painter can

respond in reactionary ways to the problem of how

to generalise their own accumulated experiences.The re is not a lot of difference in principle betweena painter who thinks he can solve the problems

that stand between him and his work by r ippingholes in the canvas anda house-painter who thinksh e can solve the problems that stand between him

and his work byexcluding immigrant labour . Bothare plumping for false solutions that only aggravatethe problems.

This argument could well be carried into muchgreater detail . It applies fully of course to the

categories of people whom Catherine Boswell purpor t s to distinguish from artists when it comes to

" i l luminat ing the world around us"—namely physicists, psychologists, polit ical thinkers and fightersetc. We know (e.g. from Koestler 's recent bookTh e Act of Creation and the discussion that pre

ceded and has followed it) tha t remarkable similarities do exist between these apparently un

connected fields of creative thought. HegelianZeitgeist theorists can map out all sorts of parallels,for example, between physics andmusic as historicalprocesses, and Marxist theory once again has to

grasp this important but inverted account of thingsan d set it the right way up. Caudwell gives us a

number of valuable starting points forthis long and

tricky business. Fischer gives us none . (It may be

unfai r to castigate him for this, because The Neces-