Paradox in Beckett

Paradox in BeckettAuthor(s): Rolf BreuerSource: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 88, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), pp. 559-580Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3734926 .

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PARADOX IN BECKETT

The spirit of paradox pervades the art of Samuel Beckett and this fact has not, of course, escaped his many interpreters. Nevertheless there has not been a comprehensive study of paradox in Beckett so far and the many shorter comments on the topic often proceed from a rather loose understanding of the term, including phenomena such as ambivalence, dialectic, contradiction, irony, and so on.1 The following analysis, proceeding from a rather precise definition of paradox, attempts such a comprehensive study. Its results amount not so much to a new understanding of particular details (that would be difficult to achieve after forty years of concentrated Beckett criticism) as to a systematics, almost a classification of paradoxes in Beckett. On the plane of the works themselves, I shall show how tightly coherent Beckett's work is: on the biographical plane, how he first discovered and then developed more and more distinctly the potential of his obsessions.

I

A paradox is a statement that seems absurd at first sight but for which much can be said on second thoughts or when it is seen from a higher perspective. Thus, the contention 'the Earth revolves around the Sun' was considered a paradox until the Copernican system (the higher perspective) became a matter of course.2 Next, a statement is called paradoxical if it is plainly absurd but cannot (yet) be refuted. Examples are sophisms such as the famous paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. From a logical point of view, most of these paradoxes are ultimately harmless. However, there are certain other paradoxes that turn out to be more pernicious the longer one studies them. These so-called antinomies are contradictory statements which can be deduced according to generally accepted syllogisms from apparently true premises. If they are not resolved or, at least, avoided, all would be permissible in reasoning, with the result that reasoning would lose its differentiating function and thus its raison d'etre. The most famous example of an antinomy is the Liar Paradox made up by Eubulides from Miletus: Epimenides, a Cretan, says that all Cretans (always) lie. If he speaks the truth he lies and if he lies he speaks the truth. His statement is only true if it is false. The logical structure of this antinomy is exposed in a particularly clear way in the reformulation by Willard van Orman Quine (one of the several so-called 'stronger versions' of the original paradox):

1 Michael M. Hench's dissertation 'The Use of Paradox as Artistic Technique in Beckett's Plays' (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Massachusetts, 1969) is full of interesting observations but theoretically vague and unsystematic. My own earlier book Die Kunst der Paradoxie: Sinnsuche und Scheiter bei Samuel Beckett (Munich: Fink, 1976) attempts to elaborate the logic of Beckett's artistic development with constant reference to paradox; while the emphasis of the book was on his works as artistic units, this paper focuses on the systematics of paradox in these works. David Watson's Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett's Fiction (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991) came to my attention only after this article had gone to press; however, it has nothing in common with my line of argument.

2 This usage of the word paradox coincides with its etymology: Greek pard ddxan means 'contrary to received wisdom'. From the vast literature on paradox two titles may be selected as especially instructive, the first highly technical, the other of a more introductory character: Franz von Kutschera, DieAntinomien der Logik: Semantische Untersuchungen (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, I964), and R. M. Saintsbury, Paradoxes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).



Paradox in Beckett

'"Yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation" yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation.'3 This structure: 'A'A, or: (A)A, will play an important role in the following pages.

Antinomies belong to the sphere of statements. Analogous to them are certain paradoxes which belong to the sphere of reality and action. On the one hand, these paradoxes must be differentiated from logical paradoxes because there is no 'truth' in the sphere of reality and action and because such paradoxes, if they 'exist', are, by definition, unresolvable and unavoidable; on the other hand, these paradoxes of reality are structurally analogous to the antinomies of logic and have always been termed 'paradoxes'.4 The strategy of nuclear deterrence can serve as an example of a paradox in the sphere of action, or, more precisely, of norms underlying actions. Nuclear weapons are so devastating that they must never be used; in order that they do not have to be used, however, the enemy must be made to believe that one would indeed use them in order to avoid defeat. The ancients had a proverbial formula for such paradoxical behaviour: 'Si vis pacem, para bellum.' Such an instance of two conflicting norms being equally justified is called a 'deontological paradox'.

Paradoxes of reality are yet more broadly defined. The term refers to mundane dilemmas in everyday life as well as to highly abstract aporias in the theory of science or in jurisdiction and to certain mysteries of religion. Karl Popper's 'critical (that is, non-rationalistic) rationalism' is the result of his insight that rationalistic rationalism would be pure positing, sheer dogmatism, and therefore irrational; to give another example: freedom is possible only under certain constraints and thus laws must restrict freedom in order to save the principle of freedom; and to give a third example: in certain situations powerlessness can be more powerful than power, as was shown byJesus or Mahatma Gandhi. In these instances, opposites define each other, in fact generate each other and are, therefore, both 'true'.

I have differentiated the following kinds of paradoxes: I. paradoxes in the broader sense of everyday usage 2. antinomies

3. paradoxes of action and reality Other classifications are of course possible but this one will prove particularly

fruitful for a discussion of the various forms and functions of paradox in Beckett.

II

Paradoxes can manifest themselves linguistically, for instance as oxymora, but this is not always the case. Such is the situation in Beckett: rhetorical paradoxes are often, but not always, used to indicate his paradoxical world view. At the centre of his work are antinomies of logic and paradoxes of reality, but nevertheless I begin with a few remarks about their linguistic manifestation.

3 The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, I976), p. 7. For the subsuming of the Liar Paradox under the paradoxes ofreflexivity in general, see T. S. Champion, Reflexive Paradoxes (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). 4 There are modern logicians who go even further and think that paradoxes of reality are more thanjust 'analogues' of logical antinomies. Neil Tennant, for instance, in his paper 'Proof and Paradox', dialectica, 36 (1982), 265-96, argues that paradoxicality is a property of statements 'relative to models', and models - if they are worthwhile - must relate to 'empirical facts' (p. 282).

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ROLF BREUER

The clearest linguistic or rhetorical indication of Beckett's sense of (logical) antinomies and paradoxes of reality can be found in his much-quoted theoretical statements about art, which were published as highly stylized discussions with Georges Duthuit ('Three Dialogues' (1946-48) ).5 The situation that led Beckett to these paradoxes is perhaps most succinctly described by Brian Finney: If form is to be integral with content, then the modern writer, convinced as Beckett is of the total absence of any form of order in life, is obliged to cultivate the apparently impossible - a formless form, one in which no trace of order can be found, as meaningless as life itself.

This explains why Beckett's art is essentially paradoxical and why, 'in his attempt to describe the indescribable', he resorts, time and again, to paradoxical utterances.6 The most famous of these aphorisms are:

[The task of the artist is:] 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.

[The situation of the artist is:] The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.7

I shall return to the literary presentation of this paradoxical nature of the artist's (and the human) situation.

Apart from these rhetorical paradoxes there is the occasional time-honoured sophism quoted here and there in Beckett's works. An example is the so-called 'Sorites' by Zeno of Elea/Eubulides quoted by Clov in Endgame ( 1954-56): Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. (Pause) Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.8

Or there is Democritus's famous dictum 'Nothing is more real than nothing', quoted by Beckett's first-person narrator Malone in the novel Malone Dies (I948).9 These paradoxes, like all the cultural assets carried along in Beckett's works, have the value of'Kulturmiill' and 'Ladenhfiter (of culture)', to use Theodor W. Adorno's classical formulations.10 In contrast, for instance, to Oscar Wilde's, Beckett's sophisms and aphorisms are strictly functional and have little value as such. What really counts in Beckett is the paradoxical nature of certain problems and situations, and this paradoxicality lies, more often than not, beneath the superstructure of

5 Reprinted in Samuel Beckett, Proust/Three Dialogues (London: Calder, I965). The year given in parenthesis after a work of Beckett's when cited for the first time refers to the date of composition of the original, whether first written in French or in English. However, for the sake of uniformity all works by Beckett are quoted in their English version.

6 Brian Finney, 'Since How It Is': A Study ofSamuel Beckett's Later Fiction (London: Covent Garden Press, I972), pp. 31-32. A discussion of Beckett's auvre up to c. 1950 from the perspective of the world as chaos represented by art as (ordered) chaos ('imitative form') can be found in H. Porter Abbott, The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973).

7 Proust/Three Dialogues, pp. I03, I I9. A comprehensive interpretation of Beckett's prose writings on the basis of this paradox is Eric P. Levy's Beckett and the Voice ofSpecies: A Study of the Prose Fiction (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble; Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1980).

8 'Endgame', a Play in One Act, followed by 'Act Without Words', a Mime for One Player (London: Faber & Faber, 1964; repr. 1976), p. 12. See also p. 45.

9 Molloy- Malone Dies - The Unnamable (London: Calder & Boyars, 1959; repr. 1966), p. 193. 10 'Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen', Noten zur Literatur, 4 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1961;

repr. 1970), II, i88, 19I.

56I



Paradox in Beckett

language and rhetoric. We must, therefore, look at the deep structure of Beckett's works if we want to see what paradox means for him and how it functions artistically.

2

Antinomical paradoxes in Beckett are the result of a confusion, or fusion, of logical levels: more precisely, of a confusion or fusion of the object-level literature and the meta-level literature about literature. In the sphere of logic this type of antinomy is represented by the Liar Paradox. The paradoxical statement 'this statement is false' is meaningless because it is a statement about itself, a statement about its own truth value. However, it is a most interesting meaninglessness, as all logicians know and as I hope to demonstrate in connection with Beckett as well.

One consequence often drawn from this paradox is that in formalized languages it is forbidden to talk about non-linguistic and linguistic objects (the meaning of a sentence and the sentence) in one language. However, this is what we commonly do in natural languages. Indeed, to refrain from speaking in the English language about the English language, to give just one example, seems a high price to pay for the avoidance of contradictions.11 In the case of literature this avoidance principle seems even more inappropriate. After all, literature is characterized by the fact that it speaks about something that is created only by the very act of speaking. It is natural, then, that the confusion or fusion of level and meta-level, the representation of contradictions, ironies, and paradoxes, is the innermost province of literature.

The goal of Beckett's metafiction is, as will emerge, the self-generation of literature. Beckett, probably not knowing at first where the potential of his obsession with circularity, reflexivity, and negativity would lead him, went his way step by step. The two stations on his path to self-generation as an artistic principle are recursion and self-reproduction. Let us now retrace this path.

Recursion The structure of the following types of phenomena is described as 'recursive': stories within stories, pictures within pictures, Chinese boxes, quotations within quotations.12 I take the example of a picture within a picture and adapt it to my purposes. In the case of a television programme being broadcast from a studio in which there is a television set on which a Western film is showing, we can formulize the structure as: A (B). The picture on my screen at home is different from the picture on the screen in the studio, and logically they are to be differentiated anyway. If, however, the screen in the studio is showing the very same programme that is showing on my screen, then I see on my screen (among other things) a screen on which I see (among other things) a screen on which .... From a logical point of view this is no problem. The repeated formula 'among other things' shows that the picture in the studio is a smaller version of itself, and situated on a different level, which we may call 'higher'

11 Peter Suber's impressive book The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Logic, Law, Omnipotence, and Change (New York: Lang, 1990) argues in the same direction. Constitutions, for example, usually contain rules on how to amend constitutions; is it permissible to use these rules to change these rules? (There is an analogy here to the famous paradox of God's omnipotence: can He create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it?) Suber argues convincingly that it is better to put up with paradoxes than with the immutability of law codes and that jurists have always acted accordingly. 12 For a discussion of recursion in connection with circularity, see Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gidel, Escher,

Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980; repr. 1987), pp. I27-52.

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ROLF BREUER 563

or 'lower'.13 The picture and the picture within the picture are partially identical, partially different, and logically they are to be differentiated anyway.

The point of departure for Beckett's road to paradox is provided by the circular structures in his first novel Murphy (I936).14 Circular, for instance, are the love relations in Neary's circle of friends, to which the eponymous anti-hero Murphy had

belonged while living in Dublin: Of such was Neary's love for Miss Dwyer, who loved a Flight-Lieutenant Elliman, who loved a Miss Farren of Ringsakiddy, who loved a Father Fitt of Ballinclashet, who in all sincerity was bound to acknowledge a certain vocation for a Mrs. West of Passage, who loved Neary.

(P. 7)

Reduced to its circular structure, the sequence may be shown thus:

-- A- B C- D-- E- F

But even Murphy's life as a whole is presented as circular; thus, for instance, his death rattle and his vagitus are equated with each other.

There are also recursive structures. The plot of the novel consists of two 'quests'. In the side-plot Neary searches for Murphy, who has fled to London; Neary is

currently in love with a certain Miss Counihan, who is in love with Murphy and is not willing to requite Neary's love as long as she is not certain that Murphy has left her. In the main plot Murphy searches for the freedom that is given by a renunciation of all worldly temptations, such as Celia's (his mistress's) love and the demands of bourgeois society in the form of regular work and employment. Thus the main plot is structured as a linear quest:

A (Neary) -* B (Murphy) -- C (renunciation)

And in the side-plot we have a recursive structure, since Neary's quest is the search for a quester: A (B [C])

Beckett's second novel Watt (I 943-45)16 is recursively structured in its entirety: not on the plane of contents, however, but on the plane of narrative point of view. The report of what happened to Watt in Mr Knott's house and later (in the fictitious

present of the novel) in the asylum is from the pen of a character called Sam, the novel's first-person narrator, who wrote down the report after long walks he and Watt undertook day after day in the garden of the institution where Watt told him of his time in the house of Mr Knott. Both 'media' of communication, Sam and Watt, are afflicted with grave ailments: Sam is hard of hearing and Watt speaks a language of his own invention, inverting first words, then sentences, then whole paragraphs, a

13 There are several points of contact between self-reproduction and the geometry of 'fractals' as developed by Benoit Mandelbrot; see his seminal study Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension (San Francisco, CA: Freeman, 1977). Of particular interest for the literary critic dealing with metafiction and related phenomena are geometrical structures that consist of elements that are smaller copies of the whole; Mandelbrot speaks of'self similarity' (p. 4 ). 14 All quotations are from Murphy (London: Calder & Boyars, 1963; repr. I969). 15 Beckett seems to have been aware of the structural analogy to the vicious circle. Compare the following

sentences from an interview with Rachel Burrows, who attended Beckett's course on Racine held at Trinity College Dublin in 193 : 'One quotation in particular I remember about Andromaque: "A loves B, and B loves C, and C loves D. The great pagan tiger of sexuality chasing its tail"' ('Interview with Rachel Burrows, Dublin, Bloomsday, 1982', published in Journal of Beckett Studies, I /12 (1989), 5-15 (p. 5). Strictly speaking, 'chasing its tail' is not correct because D (= Andromaque) does not in turn love A (= Orest). 16 All quotations are from Watt (London: Calder, 1963).



564 Paradox in Beckett

procedure Sam has to learn to decipher day after day. The situation is a heightened case of the children's game 'Chinese Whispers', where one child whispers a sentence in his neighbour's ear, who, in turn, whispers what he has understood in his neighbour's ear, and so on. The result for Watt is that all may have been totally different.

To frame one narrator (Watt) with another (Sam) is to invite more framing.17 At one point in the novel this tendency of framing towards infinite recursion is made explicit: we are told how a certain Mr Louit once presented a mathematical genius, Mr Nackybal, to a committee of experts; Watt heard this story, which consists chiefly of direct speech between the parties, from Arthur, his successor as servant in the house of Mr Knott (pp. 168-96). Thus, we have the following framing:

Sam (Watt [Arthur < Louit and others { direct speeches of Louit and others } >] )

These narrative levels of Watt are the artistic correlate of the novel's 'message' (that there is no objective reality but only subjective versions),18 and the many parallels between Mr Knott and the Christian Godhead suggest that it is particularly hopeless to attempt knowledge in matters that must elude human perception and cognition. 19

An instance of recursive structures among Beckett's later works is Krapp's Last Tape (1958).20 On stage we see and hear Krapp, whose sixty-ninth birthday it is. In order to get himself in the mood for recording his reflections of today, he listens to a tape he recorded some thirty years ago. To most of his stories and former future plans, recorded in the spirit of optimism and confidence, he listens with growing impatience, even fury. Only one passage seems to move him deeply, for he plays it back several times. This is the report of a day out with a girl in a boat on a lake. This old tape, through which Krapp is implicitly on stage as a middle-aged man, was made thirty years before after listening to a yet earlier tape, again to get himself in the mood, dating back another twelve years and through which young Krapp is present on stage, even if more remotely. We are presented with three 'Krapps': directly with the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp, indirectly with the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp, and implicitly indirectly with the twenty-seven-year-old Krapp.21 Thus, the play is not only the addition of three parts but also the gradation of three levels. One could say that, structurally speaking, the play consists (i) of the events on stage, (2) of a commentary, and (3) of a 'comment commenting comment' (to appropriate a passage from Watt, p. 70).

On the one hand, there is one Krapp who is present in three phases of his life; on the other hand, there are three Krapps. Krapp himself is aware of this conflicting nature of things, for sometimes he speaks of himself in the first person and sometimes

17 John Pilling, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge, 1976), p. 4I, quite correctly speaks of'the Chinese- box structure' of the novel. 18 Curious parallels with Beckett's framing and (con)fusion of levels are to be found in the novels of Brian

O'Nolan (1911-1966), better known under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien; At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1940) are particularly relevant here. (Of course, Beckett could not have known these novels at that time.) 19 Theologians, of course, see this differently; see, for example, B. Felix Alejandro Pastor, La Logica de lo

inefable: Una teoria teoldgica sobre el lenguaje de teismo cristiano (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, 1986). 20 All references are to The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), pp. 2 3-23. 21 See Meinhardt Winkgens, Das Zeitproblem in Samuel Becketts Dramen (Bern and Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1975), pp. 48-58.



ROLF BREUER

in the third person (for example, p. 2 I8). In the one case he understands himself as one Self in three phases, in the other case he understands himself as three Selves.22

Thus, two structures intersect, the chronological structure: Ai,-> A2-> A3, and the recursive structure: A (B[C]).

Self-reproductive Structures I said earlier that, from a logical point of view, recursive structures present no

problem. However, they can be developed in the direction of genuine circularity, self-reference, and paradox. If the camera-man in the studio focuses his camera on the television set in the studio alone so that the screen of the set in the studio

completely fills the screen of my set at home, then my picture of the television picture and the television picture are identical, at least for all practical purposes. Then the

picture on my screen is a version of itself: A (A,[A<A3. . .>]). Here the picture does not only contain itself, the picture is a picture of itself, and so forth in an infine

regress. The picture, as it were, reproduces itself. Admittedly, the screen remains

empty in such a case - the typical loss of reality in all kinds of metafiction and meta-art.

'Self-reproduction'23 exists first of all in nature (in living organisms), but also in

computer programmes, in the case for instance of a programme containing the

explicit direction for copying itself. Particularly interesting are programmes that consist of this direction only. Such a direction resembles a sentence which is followed

by itself as quotation: A'A', or: A (A). One recognizes the structural identity with

Quine's version of the Liar Paradox quoted above. The series of frames is inherently infinite: A (A[A<A.... It is true, however, that even this is not yet paradoxical, because even if picture and picture-within-picture are identical from the point of view of content, they are different from the point of view of logic.

In Beckett the step from the structure: A (B [C]) to the structure: A (A [A]) is the

step from a framing of non-identical elements to a framing of identical elements, and it is interesting to note that Beckett was intellectually aware of this step. In a note

appended to his late prose work Company (1979) he wrote: 'Speech by A overheard

by B described to C: i.e. recta converted to obliqua. A, B, C, one and the same. A describes A to A'.24 The rudiments of such recursion of identical elements is realized in Beckett's first published play, Waitingfor Godot (I 948).25 The structure of the play is both circular and progressive or linear, the one emphasizing the ever-recurring aspects in the play, the other emphasizing change (and in Beckett change is always for the worse). (This intersection of two conflicting structures can be found in almost all his works.) In the context of paradox, the circular structure is of course more relevant. Each day with Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Mr Godot - and thus each act of the play - ends as it began. And the days - respectively the acts - furthermore resemble each other very much. The 'saviour' does not appear, neither in the first nor in the second act, and he would not appear in a possible third act,just as he did not appear in an imaginable earlier act. Since Act I and Act II resemble each 22 See the phrase with which Hench summarizes his interpretation of Krapp in 'The Use of Paradox':

'The past creates the presentjust as the present creates the past' (p. 120). 23 Hofstadter, Gidel, Escher, Bach, pp. 495-558. 24 'Sottisier', MS 290I in the Beckett Archive at Reading. I owe the reference to this note to Werner

Huber (University of Paderborn). 25 All quotations from Waitingfor Godot, if not stated otherwise, refer to the text in The Complete Dramatic Works, pp. 7-87. For a different analysis of paradoxical elements in Waiting for Godot, see Bert 0. States, The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on 'Waiting for Godot' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

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other so much, Beckett can spare us a third act, as he himself said in an interview with Israel Shenker.26

Circularity is here pervaded by recursion. Act ii, almost identical with Act I, is

interesting not so much because of its contents as because of the implicit message resulting from its being almost identical with Act I, the message that there is nothing new under the sun.27 Act ii functions as a commentary on Act I and thus, since text and comment are on two logical levels, the relation between the two acts is that of

picture and frame, or more precisely, since the two acts are almost identical, the relation is that of Chinese boxes: A (A). The overall structure is repeated in nuce (as a smaller version of itself) in the song about the dog quoted by Vladimir at the

beginning of Act ii, that is, placed in a most prominent position, and I quote it in German since it is originally a German children's song:

Ein Hund kam in die Kiiche und stahl dem Koch ein Ei. Da nahm der Koch den Loffel und schlung den Hund zu Brei. Da kamen die anderen Hunde und gruben ihm ein Grab. Und setzten ihm ein'n Grabstein, woraufgeschrieben stand: Ein Hund kam in die Kiche ...28

Since here quotation and quotation-within-quotation are really identical, the structure of the song is even purer than that of the play as a whole.

In the terminology of literary criticism such structures are called 'mise en abime'.29 The phenomenon was already known to medieval heralds. There were blazons in the midst of which the blazon was repeated in a smaller version of itself. The relation between the two blazons is the same as the relation between quotation and quotation-within-quotation in the case of the song in Waitingfor Godot, and the same is true of the relation between the structure of the song and the overall structure of the play. The phrase in nuce used above was, therefore, strictly true: the

song is really an exact but smaller replica of the structure of the play. Beckett's first text with the explicit direction for self-reproduction is the novel

Molloy, written one year before Waitingfor Godot. However, I discuss it after Waiting for Godot because of its much greater complexity. Molloy (I947) was first written without the idea of a continuation, but was later expanded by two novels, Malone Dies (1948) and The Unnamable (I949), and the three novels have since come to be

regarded as a trilogy. Molloy consists of two parts. Part i is the first-person narrative of Molloy, who tells the story of his search for his mother. During this quest he comes 26 'Moody Man of Letters', New York Times, 6 May, 1956, section 2, pp. I, 3 (p. 3). 27 See the first sentence of Murphy. Hench, in The Use of Paradox, defines the meaning of this as

establishing 'difference in sameness' and 'sameness in difference' (p. 52). 28 Quoted from the trilingual edition Warten auf Godot - En attendant Godot - Waiting for Godot (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 197I: repr. 1975), pp. I43, I45. A most interesting discussion of this problem - the transfinite iteration of consciousness - with references to Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling's philosophy of identity, to Cantor's theory of sets, and to Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, can be found in Oscar Becker, Mathematische Existenz: Untersuchungen zurLogik und OntologiemathematischerPhanomene, 2nd edn (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, I973), pp. 96-I i6. The reference to Becker I owe to Peter Probst (University of Giessen). 29 See Lucien Dallenbach, Le Ricit speculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977), who

knows only Watt of Beckett's works. To be recommended for its wealth of material from the i96os, 1970s, and I98os is the chapter 'Chinese-Box Worlds' in Brian McHale's Postmodernist Fiction (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. I I2-30.



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to resemble her more and more, and if she had not died during his search he would have caught up with her, for he writes his report in her room (and a mother's room in Beckett is always the symbol of the womb). Thus, Molloy has almost managed to trace back (that is, to cancel) his life. Part II is the first-person narrative ofMoran, a detective, who, at the command of a certain Youdi, is sent on a search for Molloy. In the course of this quest he undergoes similar experiences, comes to resemble Molloy more and more and would have caught up with him if Molloy had been still where he was when he, Moran, began his quest. Both reports of the tandem-novel Molloy are attempts by the narrators to give themselves an account of the progressive dissolu- tion of their identities.

Moran's quest for the quester Molloy being a metaquest, the relation of the two parts of the novel resembles the relation of main plot and side-plot in Murphy as well as the relation of the two acts in Waitingfor Godot. Even the song about the dog in Waiting for Godot has its equivalent in Molloy. Part ii begins with the following sentences: It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. [...] I get up and go to my desk. I can't sleep. [...] My report will be long. (p. 92)

As the tense indicates, narrative time and narrated time are identical. Then the actual report begins in the preterite. After Moran's return home from his futile quest, he writes the following sentences with which the novel ends: Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining. (p. 176)30

Narrator and reader have reached the beginning again, however on a different level, because the words 'it is midnight' are now a quotation and, therefore, to be differentiated from the words of the beginning although they are identical. For a moment one thinks that the novel will now continue as a quotation of itself and, thus, as a self-reproduced copy of itself, and then perhaps a third time, and so on. Instances of such endless repetition and of explicit direction for self-reproduction are numerous in Beckett's o?uvre, chiefly in his dramatic works. Here I can only summarily refer to Endgame (where the identity of the closing tableau with the

opening tableau indicates with the utmost economy that Hamm and Clov will play the same play tomorrow as they did today and the previous day), to Happy Days ( 1961 ),31 to Play ( 1962), or to Not I (1972).32 The direction for copying itself in Molloy is, however, more complex than in Waitingfor Godot because the last two sentences of the novel ('It was not midnight. It was not raining') emphasize the fictitiousness of

30 For a discussion of paradoxes in Beckett, chiefly in the trilogy, proceeding from the above-quoted passage, see Raymond Federman, 'Beckettian Paradox: Who Is Telling the Truth?', in Samuel Beckett Now, ed. by MelvinJ. Friedman (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1970; repr. 1975), pp. 103-I7. 31 For a differently accentuated discussion of paradox in Happy Days, see K. A. Bliiher, 'Die paradoxe

Sprache der Zeichen in Becketts Glucklichen Tagen. Zur semiotischen Konstitution eines Mythos', in Beckett und die Literatur der Gegenwart, ed. by M. Brunkhorst and others (Heidelberg: Winter, 1988), pp. 108-32.

3As I said earlier, the second acts or the repetition of whole plays in Beckett are never perfect copies of the first acts or of the first run. There are always a few changes (for the worse). In the second act of Waiting for Godot Pozzo is blind and Lucky dumb; in the second act of Happy Days Winnie is no longer embedded in sand up to her waist only but up to her neck; in Not I the gesture of helpless compassion in the Auditor becomes less visible in each 'scene'. For an analysis of Play with regard to the repetition of the same as different, see Hench, The Use ofParadox, pp. I46-57.

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the fictional situation and, thus, the impossibility of catching up with oneself. In strict analogy to the failure of the quests of Molloy for his mother and of Moran for Molloy, the attempt of the artist Beckett at making his work of art catch up with itself also fails or, more precisely, is shown to fail of necessity.33 Reproduction is not identity. This particular Achilles can indeed never catch up with this Tortoise because (to remain with the imagery) it is the act of running that created the Tortoise in the first place.

Self-generating Structures The simplest type of framing is the framing of different elements[ A (B [C] ). The next step is the framing of identical elements where the identity of the elements entails the potential or real infinity of the process: A (A [A.. .] ). 'Self-generating' is what we now call a process where there is no difference of level between the identical elements: in other words, where the causal relation between the elements is abolished. Instead of: A--'A', we get: A ( - A. Naturally enough, self-generation is impossible in nature, that is, in reality,34 but artists often act as if it were possible:

C--> A, -- A-,> A3. .. or: A o- A

'A <- A' is the structure underlying a famous drawing by Maurits Cornelis Escher of 1948, where two hands are drawing each other.35 Of course, Escher's drawing of self-generation is only the drawing of self-generation. Ultimately, even artists cannot surpass nature, and the paradox here is only the analogy to an antinomy. Neverthe- less, throughout the ages mankind has wished for a Being or, in more secular times, for a work of art that could create itself and, thereby, establish an ultimate basis from which to proceed, either in the sphere of matter or in the sphere of reasoning. The notion of'causa sui' in Greek philosophy is one example, as are the words ofJesus, the son of God: 'I and my Father are one' (John I0.30).

Malone Dies (1948), the novel following Molloy, proceeds from the position of the work of art as the epitome of 'as if' and attempts to achieve identity with itself through making the composition of the novel the 'plot' of the novel (at least in parts). It is the attempt (at least in parts) at self-generation. What in Molloy was to be found only in its structure and in its beginning and end, in Malone Dies becomes explicit and fills much more space: namely, the (con)fusion of the levels of representation and represented.

The dying Malone lies in his room in an unidentified institution. Among his few possessions are an exercise-book and a pencil. Like Molloy and Moran he is a writer. What he writes is, logically speaking, on two planes: first, there is a kind of autobiographical report and, secondly, there is a fictional story. (Malone has made it his goal to pass the time until his death with the narration of some stories but he finishes only one story, the story of Saposcat, later called Macmann.) These two

33 An early interpretation of the trilogy along these lines is Wolfgang Iser's relevant chapter (first published in I968) in his book Der implizite Leser (Munich: Fink, 1972), pp. 252-75. 34 Currently, the best theory to explain how living organisms and their faculty of self-reproduction came

into being is Manfred Eigen's theory of the 'hypercycle'; see M. Eigen and P. Schuster, The Hypercycle: A Principle of Natural Self-Organization (Heidelberg: Springer, 1979). For a philosophical discussion of the pre-history of the problem of the 'self-generation of Life', see Champion, Reflexive Paradoxes, pp. 95-1 I I. 5 Reproduced in The World ofM. C. Escher, ed. byJ. L. Locher (New York: Abrams, 197 I), p. 148. In his Textsfor Nothing Beckett makes his narrator say: 'Yes, I was my father and I was my son' (reprinted in the volume No's Knife: Collected Shorter Prose (London: Calder & Boyars, I967), p. 75).



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planes are at first neatly kept apart, even if they alternate constantly. In the course of the novel, however, they get mixed up. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that Malone gets more and more confused in the process of dying; on the other hand, autobiographical report and fictional story become indistinguishable because Malone's story of Macmann resembles more and more Malone's autobiographical report until, finally, both come to an end together with their author. In the hour of his death Malone, the author, makes a warden of the asylum in which Macmann lives kill the inmates, and with their death (first they are killed with a hatchet, later with a pencil) Malone's narrative dies and with it Malone himself. Narrator and main character, Malone ('man alone') and Macmann ('son of man'), have become indistinguishable: that is, for all practical purposes, identical.

The novel as a whole, then, is the attempt to bring to coincidence representation and represented, and this is repeated on a smaller scale in several episodes. There are passages in which Malone writes about himself as a writer, even about the writing of this very passage. These passages are the attempt not only to catch up with himself but to constitute himself: Malone exists only as a writer. Malone creates a text that creates itself and with it, creates Malone: something impossible, of course, as Beckett knew. At one point we read: I fear I must have fallen asleep again. In vain I grope, I cannot find my exercise-book. But I still have the pencil in my hand. I shall have to wait for day to break. God knows what I am going to do till then.

I have just written, I fear I must have fallen, etc. (p. 209)

But this text is an impossibility because it tells us that the exercise-book in which the pencil is supposed to write has been lost and that Malone cannot find it. Writing with a pencil (in an exercise-book) without an exercise-book is as absurd as the sound of clapping with only one hand (an old Buddhist paradox).

At the end of the novel, when Malone dies the autobiographical report dies with him, and on the plane of the author the novel dies. Of course, the fiction of self-creation is only the fiction of self-creation and, thus, only an analogy to God as 'causa sui'. Hence, Malone Dies is only the analogy to an antinomy. Beckett composed a text that seems to create itself as it reports its own composition. Structurally this resembles the attempt to lift oneself out of the morass. Beckett's attempt can never be accomplished because the text presupposes the existence of the text that it describes.36 Thus the novel stands in analogy to the literary work of art in general because the latter is traditionally based on the assumption that something is represented as real that is only created in the act of representing. The novel's failure at creating itself, therefore, once more points to the fictitiousness of the realistic tradition of art.

3 Antinomies are statements that contradict each other but can both be logically derived from accepted premises, in other words, are both 'true'. In the first part of this paper, it was said that to these antinomies (of logic) the paradoxes of reality 36 The earliest discussions of this aspect of the trilogy are Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (London: Calder, 1962), pp. 79-8o, and Wolfgang Iser, 'Ist das Ende hintergehbar? Fiktion bei Beckett' (first published in 1971), in Der implizite Leser, especially pp. 403-09. For the impossibility of self- generation, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3.332 and 3.333 or 4.442 ('Ein Satz kann unm6glich von sich selbst ausagen, daB er wahr ist'); reprinted in Schriften, 4vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, ig6o; repr. i963), I (pp. 23 and 41).



Paradox in Beckett

stand in analogy. Paradoxes of reality are opposites that are bothjustified (in a given world). Rationalism and irrationalism were given as examples and it was said that it was the fact of both being justifiable that led Popper to his 'critical rationalism'. Rationalistic rationalism would take for granted what it wants to advocate.

An example of the paradoxes of reality which is particularly applicable to Beckett is the concept of God by Nicolaus Cusanus ( 140 -64) as developed in his works De docta ignorantia (I440)37 and De coniecturis (prior to 1444) .38 (Beckett had known Nicolaus's

conception of God, via Giovanni Battista Vico and Giordano Bruno, since the I 920s.)39 In De docta ignorantia God is defined as the meeting of opposites (I, 88-89), an idea that has become famous in the phrase 'coincidentia oppositorum' in De coniecturis (pp. 86-87).40 One could object that this God is only a construction, does not really exist, and, thus, cannot serve well as an example of the existence of paradoxes of reality. This may be true, but Nicolaus's conception of God is referred to here only because it is the quintessence of something that does not exist on earth. Nicolaus understood God to be the Other, and his God stands in opposition to the world, but the paradoxical construction of his concept of God has its paradoxical correspondence on earth. A successful act of communication requires that both partners in the communication use the same wave-length: in other words, assume a reciprocal attitude of reception.41 Correspondingly, in Nicolaus- according to his dialectical attitude- the peculiar nature of God requires a corresponding attitude in man if there is to be a successful perception of God. This attitude Nicolaus calls 'docta ignorantia' and is the complement to 'coincidentia oppositorum' as God's essence.

The principle of meeting opposites pervades all Beckett's works and the author was well aware of it.42 As early as I929, when he was twenty-three years of age, he wrote that the world was a 'conjunction' of Heaven and Hell: Purgatory.43 And the principle of his own art, he said, was 'impotence' as its strength.44 As to the dialectic of light and darkness, he said: 'If there were only darkness, all would be clear.'45 The same holds

37 Quotations refer to the Latin-German edition De docta ignorantia/Die belehrte Unwissenheit, 3 vols, ed. by P. Wilpert, H. G. Senger, and R. Klibansky (Hamburg: Meiner, 1977-79). 38 Quotations refer to the Latin-German edition De coniecturis/Mutmaflungen, ed. byJ. Koch and W. Happ (Hamburg: Meiner, 1971). 39 See his essay 'Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce' in the collection of essays by friends of Joyce, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (Paris: Shakespeare, 1929; repr. London: Faber & Faber, I936), pp. 3-22 (pp. 5-6). 40 One of the most important studies of the topic is Kurt Flasche's Die Metaphysik des Einen bei Nikolaus von

Kues: Problemgeschichtliche Stellung und systematische Bedeutung (Leiden: Brill, 1973), especially pp. 158-232. 41 See George Berkeley's 'esse est percipi', often quoted or alluded to by Beckett (a possible motto for

communication theory); for the exact wording, see Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1, 3 (La Salle, IL: Open Court, I963). 42 For an analysis of Beckett's works, especially the novels, within the categories of Hegel's dialectic

opposites, see Hans-Joachim Schulz, This Hell of Stories: A Hegelian Approach to the Novels of Samuel Beckett (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973). See also David H. Helsa, The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation ofthe Art of Samuel Beckett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), pp. 206-30. Methodologically interesting for parts of the following discussion is Rosalie L. Colie's impressive study Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), especially the chapters on negative theology (pp. 145-89) and about being and nothingness (p. 219-72). 43 'Dante... Bruno. Vico . Joyce', p. 22. 44 "Moody Man of Letters', p. 3. 45 In an interview with Tom F. Driver, 'Beckett by the Madeleine', Columbia University Forum, 4.3 (Summer 1961), 2I1-25 (p. 23). See the nocturnal vision of the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp, which takes place at the Spring equinox and which has its autobiographical equivalent in Beckett's own night of conversion when, on a dark stormy night in March 1946 when he himself was thirty-nine years of age, he had a kind of visionary experience and suddenly understood the nature of his calling as an artist; see Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Cape, I978), pp. 350-51. See also Psalm 139.12.

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true of the dialectic of all and nothing. At one point in Endgame, for instance, Clov asks his blind master Hamm where he should direct his eyes while looking out of the window: 'Any particular sector you fancy? Or merely the whole thing?'46 He who wants all, wants nothing. The whole is nothingness.

One cannot always tell on the face of it whether a paradox is profound or just pseudo-profound. This may be due to the psychological aspect of paradox (namely, to surprise), perhaps at the cost of common sense. It is probably due also to the

logical structure of paradox which can be constructed as a combination of a tautology (p is p) and of negation (p is non-p, or rather: p and non-p are both true). The tautology component entails the risk of redundancy, the negation component that of nonsense, and a mixture of both can tend to the profound or to the absurd. Therefore, a few reflections might be helpful on what it can mean when (to quote one of the most famous examples of such a paradox) we hear in Shakespeare's Macbeth: 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair' (ii.ii. I ). If this is taken seriously, then the sentence can mean two things: either the opposition between fair and foul is only seeming, or our

standpoint according to which we call something fair or foul is wrong and things are exactly the other way round. If I say 'right is left, and left is right', then either I mean that the world is round (circular) and continuous and that, if one goes far enough in one direction, one returns ultimately to the place where one started, so that it makes no sense to approach the world with linear and discrete concepts; or I mean that if one goes behind the stage and looks from there onto the stage, then left and right are

exchanged: that all values are revalued,47 that every value-judgement (or deter- mination of geographical position) is a matter of where one stands and from where one looks at things and that there is no criterion according to which one can decide which standpoint is correct or preferable.

End=Beginning The earliest manifestation of'coincidentia oppositorum' in Beckett is the paradoxical identification of end and beginning (and vice versa), and the earliest occurrence of this idea is in his essay 'Dante ... Bruno. Vico . Joyce'. Here Vico's theory of cyclical history is combined with Bruno's theory of the identity of opposites in order to elucidate Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake, then in the process of serial publication under the provisional title Work in Progress. Progression is seen to be identical with retrogression, just as there is no difference between a straight line and a circle of infinite diameter. (Bruno's example, incidentally, comes from Nicolaus Cusanus, who had thus characterized God's nature, as the coincidence of contraries in His infinity.) Indeed, Finnegans Wake ends with the words: 'A way a line a last a loved a

long the', and it begins with the words: 'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's' which must be understood to follow the last words.48 In analogy to Vico's theory of history as cyclical, Joyce has written a circular novel. Circularity is not yet paradox but Beckett, as I shall suggest, develops the identity of progression and retrogression in the direction of the identity of beginning and end.

This topic has already been touched upon earlier in connection with recursion and self-reproduction. In Murphy the death and the birth of the protagonist are

46 The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 128. See Rudolf Kramer-Badoni, 'Die Annihilierung des Nihilismus: Ein Versuch uiber Beckett', Forum, 8 (I96I), I48-52 (p. I50). 47 In Macbeth, one has to remember, it is the witches who utter this diabolical saying: that is, representatives of the world of'diabolus', the Great Confounder. 4 Quoted from Finnegans Wake (London: Faber & Faber, I939; repr. I968), p. 628 and p. 3.

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identified with each other, an idea that recurs, for instance, in Malone Dies. In Waiting for Godot the beginning and end of the two acts are similar and, thus, indicate the immobility of the lives of the two anti-heroes. The same is true of Endgame, except that here the symbolization of stasis is achieved more economically in only one act.49 Since the Beckettian equation 'end = beginning' is so widespread in his works and so well known to his critics, a single example will suffice. Among Beckett's works, How It Is (1960) is perhaps the most distinctly characterized by dialectical structures. The novel ends with the words of its title, 'how it is' (p. I60), and it begins with the words 'how it was' (p. 7).50 The connotations are even richer in the French original, where the title Comment c'est is almost homonymic with both the imperative 'commencez!' and the infinitive 'commencer'.51

Tears and Laughter The whole novel How It Is consists of complementary polarities, which repeat and add to the exchangeability of beginning and end. The story, retold by the first- person narrator according to the dictation of voices, is the report of ajourney. In the first part the narrator crawls through an endless morass until he meets Pim. In the second part he tortures Pim with a kind of educational, or rather conditioning, programme. In the third part Bom appears; he will in turn torture the narrator while Pim disappears. The novel ends with lengthy reflections about one million of such victims and victimizers yoked together in pairs. As in Watt, for every one leaving, a new one appears and vice versa.52 Both victim and victimizer belong together in the world of How It Is, and according to the title this world is ours. Both victim and victimizer are the two sides of a coin, 'ultimately' exchangeable and maybe even identical (for everybody in the novel is both victim and victimizer, although not at the same time). But it is not only in the world of How It Is that opposites are coupled in pairs. In Waitingfor Godot, for instance, Pozzo says: 'The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh' (p. 3 1). It seems as if those laughing were connected to those crying with a system of communicating tubes. Similarly (if somewhat cryp- tically) Wylie in Murphy says: 'The syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every sympton that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary' (p. 43).53 Moreover, the sphere of laughter and the sphere of tears seem to be connected too. It is only at first sight that they appear to be opposites. In reality the comic and the tragic are yoked together in Beckett, and his characters also feel this way: for instance, Arsene in Watt, in a famous passage on the various forms of laughter, 'the laugh of laughs, the risus purus [. . .] the laugh that laughs - silence please - at that which is unhappy' (p. 47), or Nell in Endgame, when she says: 'Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that' (p. 20).

49 For the paradox of a 'temporality of timelessness' in Endgame, see Winkgens, Das Zeitproblem in Samuel Becketts Dramen, pp. 87-88. For the paradox of Endgame beginning with the words 'Finished, it's finished', see Hench, The Use of Paradox, p. 98. 50 Quotations refer to How It Is (London: Calder, I964). 51 Noted by several critics includingJames Knowlson andJohn Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The LaterProse

and Drama ofSamuel Beckett (London: Calder, 1979), p. 61. 52 See especially pp. 121-22. 53 See Proverbs 30.I 5- 6.

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Non-Being and Being In Beckett the identification of non-being and being, or of nothing and something, finds its most distinct expression in the dictum of Democritus previously cited:

'Nothing is more real than nothing.' The novel Watt is one extended exemplification of this equation. Watt, the personified question 'What?', undertakes ajourney to the house of Mr Knott and during his time as a servant there understands that Mr Knott is the personified negation, even disconfirmation, of Watt's question: 'Not!' or

'Naught!' For Mr Knott appears in ever-changing clothes and eludes conceptual fixation, just like the unknowable God of 'negative theology' (stemming from Nicolaus Cusanus).54 In contrast to negative theology where God is the Other but exists as such, Beckett's transcendental Mr Knott does not exist. In a short poem annexed to Watt the problem of the novel is summarized in these questions:

who may tell the tale of the old man? weigh absence in a scale? mete want with a span? the sum assess of the world's woes? nothingness in worlds enclose?

(P 247)

The failure of his questioning drives Watt insane and he ends in some unspecified institution where, in ever newly inverted words, sentences, and paragraphs, he talks about his futile quest to Sam, his fellow inmate, who then passes the report on to us in the rather unsatisfactory version already mentioned.

The rhetorical figure of metonymy is here extended to its extreme: the elements of a situation are illustrated by their opposites, nothing is illustrated by something. From a logical point of view, this reification of nothing is, of course, highly problematical and in the heterological discourse of science the procedure must

appear nonsensical and unnecessary. The paradox has an artistic justification, however, in that the non-existing Mr Knott is, for Watt, a felt absence, not just a

nonentity. Beckett, who is present in the novel through the narrator called Sam, felt the same way, it seems, even if, from an intellectual point of view, he knew better. Nevertheless, it is certainly correct to say that his artistic procedure in Watt is a tour de

force, clearly recognizable as the first attempt at solving a difficult problem: namely, the representation of something non-existent as real. Much more elegant is the solution of the problem in Waitingfor Godot.

54 For Beckett and negative theology, see Richard Kearney, 'Beckett: The Demythologising Intellect', in The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions, ed. by Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, I985), pp. 267-93 (pp. 277-88). Kearney's essay is well informed but takes Beckett for a philosopher instead of an artist. However, it is true that Beckett is widely read in philosophy and theology; one of the first to assess his intellectual background was Pilling in his Samuel Beckett, pp. I o0-3 .




'Absence presente' The oxymoron 'absence presente' was introduced to criticism by the French Symbolists.55 The epitome of'absence presente' is the death of a beloved person. For Beckett, however, it is the death of God.56 The recognition of the fact that Mr Knott eludes him, does not in fact exist, drives Watt insane. Hamm in Endgame - more ironical and paradoxical-- turns his anger about God's non-existence against God Himself; while saying the Lord's Prayer he suddenly exclaims: 'The bastard! He doesn't exist!' (p. I 19).57

A particularly elegant exemplification of 'absence presente' is Waiting for Godot, where it is the main motif.58 Whereas in Watt Beckett used the contradictory method of creating Mr Knott in order to show what does not exist, the procedure in Waiting for Godot is logically more coherent. Twice, Mr Godot does not appear, therefore will never show up, does not even exist 'objectively', since in Beckett 'esse est percipi', and consequently 'non percipi = non esse': what is not perceived does not exist. Rather, Mr Godot is Vladimir's and Estragon's projection, a construction that promises security and shelter, perhaps also intellectual certainty, and justifies their waiting. 'En attendant' they structure their lives and fill them with meaning; however, in order that this self-deception can work, they must again and again forget what they are doing. Admittedly, under such circumstances it is always only tomorrow that Mr Godot will come, but it is everyday certainly tomorrow that he will come.

Such an interpretation risks over-emphasizing the philosophical and theological aspects of the play. Beckett's works are not a dramatized world-view, and if it is true that the contents are existentially moving, then it is in the sense of Hamm, who, in Endgame, once exclaims: 'Ah the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!' (p. I Io). Beckett's originality does not lie in his philosophy, it lies in his art. How does one represent something that does not exist 'objectively' but from which human beings cannot free themselves 'subjectively'? Here Waiting for Godot is a definite step forward compared with the highly artificial structures in Watt.

The paradox of 'absence presente' must be seen in connection with Beckett's tendency towards reduction, concentration, contraction, and condensation, a development noticed by all critics at least since Waiting for Godot. Regarding the plays, this tendency shows itself most obviously in their duration, which became shorter and shorter during the last twenty or thirty years of his career. Among these

55 Beckett was well aware of the matter and the formulation. In his essay Le Monde et le pantalon ( 945), he said about the paintings of the brothers van Velde: 'Pertes et profits se valent dans l'economie de l'art, oi le tu est la lumiere du dit, et toute presence absence' ((Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989), p. 20). Joyce, under whose influence Beckett had come since 1928, thought in similar terms. In a letter to his daughter Lucia, dated 29 May 1935, he wrote 'In certi casi l'assenza e la forma pii alta della prezenza' (quoted from Letters ofJames Joyce, ed. by S. Gilbert and R. Ellmann, 3 vols (New York: Viking Press, 1966), in, 357). The reference toJoyce I owe to Werner Huber. 56 This is in the sense of Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in other instances too, did not overcome what he

fought in himself: for example, his Richard Wagner complex. 57 Jean Onimus has already seen this point clearly: 'Parler de Dieu, dans l'oeuvre de Beckett c'est parler

d'un absent. L'absence est tout autre chose que l'inexistence', Beckett ([n.p.]: Desclee de Brouwer, 1968), p. 75. But even if this is true, Beckett is still no mystical metaphysician as Helene L. Baldwin thinks; see her book Samuel Beckett's Real Silence (University Park and London: Pennsylvannia State University Press, 1981). 58 To my knowledge, the first interpretation of Waitingfor Godot with the terminology of negative theology is Gunther Anders's early essay 'Sein ohne Zeit: Zu Becketts Stuck "En attendant Godot"', in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 2 vols (Munich: Beck, I980), I, 213-3I (pp. 221-23) (first published in Neue Schweizer Rundschau, 9 (January 1954) ).



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shorter plays, Not I is arguably the most substantial and impressive. An interpretation of Not I can demonstrate that the direction towards reduction is not limited to a loss of action or plot, to a reduction of the number of characters or their bodily presence, not even to the tendency away from dialogue towards monologue. Rather, the quintessence of Beckett's development is to say more and more by saying less and less, in the end without saying it. More precisely, he tends more and more not to say something in such a manner that this very something is said. Not I (I972) is the monologue of 'Mouth', an old woman reduced to her mouth, who never spoke a word until, at the age of seventy, she had a kind of vision.59 Since then there has issued from her mouth a torrent of words, which, in disconnected sentences, reports the fragments of the life story of a woman, the story of an old woman.60 Apart from Mouth there is a figure on stage, enveloped in a loose black djellaba, called Auditor. Although we do not hear it, Mouth seems to be in some kind of dialogue with someone and these interior 'auditions' seem to urge her to accept that the story she tells is her own story. Mouth, however, insists with terrible energy that the story is not hers but someone else's. The text of the play is merely a segment of an incessant logorrhoea that will find its end only with the death of Mouth. For all the incoherence of Mouth's monologue, there is a structure recognizable in her torrent of words, the monologue being divided by Auditor, who seems to be responsible for the auditions and who accompanies Mouth's refusal to accept her story as her story with five gestures of helpless compassion. These interventions of Auditor result in six 'parts' of the text, which are very similar but not quite identical. From part to part the situation changes slightly in the direction of an ever-increasing petrification of Mouth's paranoia. This becomes apparent through the fact that Auditor more and more abandons his gesture of helpless compassion. At the third occurrence it is hardly visible, and at the fifth occurrence no longer visible at all, so that really there is no fifth time (and, as a consequence, Beckett here leaves out the earlier stage direction 'movement'; see p. 382).

It may seem exaggerated to load a little gesture - or even its absence - with so much significance. Still, the equation of 'nothing' with 'absence of something' is the main motif of the play; for Mouth 'not saying I' is represented as Mouth 'saying not I'. Mouth acts like someone who covers a certain part of his body with both hands and says he has no bruise: a procedure that enables one to recognize precisely this part as injured. This idea can be rendered more distinct by reflecting on how Not I would function as a radio play: a thought that comes naturally anyway because a woman reduced to her mouth seems to demand the genre of the radio play.61 However, in this case a radio-play version of Not I would not make the absence of Mouth's body visible but rather this body, as a consequence of the genre, would be non-existent, and this would be directly opposed to Beckett's intention. What he wanted to put on stage in Not I is the force of history denied, the

59 The Complete Dramatic Works, pp. 373-83. 60 See Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: 'The experience being recounted is virtually synony-

mous with the experience being observed' (p. 201). 61 The question of what a radio-play version of Not I would be like is discussed, albeit in a different direction, by Armin Geraths, "'Verarmung" und "Bereicherung" literarischer Texte durch Biihne, Funk, Film und Fernsehen', in Literatur in Film und Fernsehen: Von Shakespeare bis Beckett, ed. by H. Grabes (K6nigstein, Taunus: Scriptor, 1980), pp. 147-87 (pp. I68-69).




force of what exists but is denied (whereas in Waitingfor Godot what is put on stage is the force of something imagined that does not 'really' exist).

Silence and Words In discussing the particular manifestation of 'absence presente' in Not I, I have come to Beckett's equation of words and silence. (The easy transition from one point to the next in this section indicates that the various manifestations of paradox of the type of 'coincidentia oppositorum' are not separated by deep gulfs but rather constitute an area without precise boundaries.) The coincidence of silence and words, one of the most widely discussed questions in Beckett,62 is already clearly recognizable in Watt.63 It is at the centre of the trilogy where in the last novel, The Unnamable, it becomes the chief motif, and it retains its importance right into the I96os.64

In the remaining pages I shall discuss the question of silence and words on the basis of two works, first the script for Film and then The Unnamable. The discussion of The Unnamable raises the artistic problem of not saying something by saying not-something, and the discussion of Film raises the question of genre just touched upon while discussing Not I. Film (shot in 1964) is based on a script dating from the year 1963.65 It shows an old man dominated, even terrorized by an irrepressible fear of being looked at. As soon as the eye of the camera, coming from focusing on his back, begins to confront him, he turns away and flees. The film shows this flight-instinct first in the street, then on the staircase of a house, and finally in a room, perhaps the former room of his mother, as Beckett himself says in a footnote. When the man has finally fallen asleep, the camera closes in on him and when he wakes up and, in a movement of terror, clasps his hands before his eyes, the subject-object direction suddenly shifts right round, and we now see the camera eye with his eye and see . . . him again. We realize that the pursuing eye of the camera was his own eye.

Film is a silent film, not in the sense of a film without a sound track but in the sense that the world of this film is silent, although a sound track is present. (One can really speak of being silent only if speaking were possible. Film as a silent film in the normal sense of the word would be like Not I as a radio play: the absence of sound would not be audible.) But how can one recognize that the world of Film is silent and that the absence of sound is not just due to a missing sound track? The clue is given in the street scene, where Beckett makes a passing woman say to her husband 'Sssh!' (p. 325). Beckett interrupts the stillness by a sound, thus identifying the stillness as silence. With customary subtlety he arranges this sound to be an exhortation to silence. One cannot possibly come closer to eloquent silence, one cannot 'realize' silence more precisely.

62 The first essay to emphasize this aspect seems to have been Maurice Nadeau's 'Samuel Beckett ou le droit au silence', Les Temps modernes, 7 (1952) 1273-82; the first book on the problem is Ihab Hassan's The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York: Knopf, 1967). Beckett has more than once acknowledged the coincidence; one example must suffice here: in 1968 he said to CharlesJuliet: 'Writing has led me to silence' ('Meeting Beckett', TriQuarterly, 77 (1989/90), 9-30 (p. 13). 63 See Jennie Skerl, 'Mauthner's "Critique of Language" in Samuel Beckett's Watt', Contemporary

Literature, 15 (1974), 474-87. For further correspondence between Beckett and Mauthner on the question of silence and words, see Linda Ben-Zvi, 'Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language', PMLA, 95 (I980), I83-200. 64 It is often connected with the motif of ending and going on; see, for example, the plays Embers (I959), Words and Music ( 96 ), and Cascando ( 962), or prose texts such as For to End Yet Again ( 960). 65 All references are to The Complete Dramatic Works, pp. 321-34.



ROLF BREUER

The identity of silence and words is even more impressively organized in The Unnamable, because this novel is bolder from an artistic point of view and richer from the point of view of content.66 Since The Unnamable is the last novel of the trilogy, it may be helpful to recapitulate briefly the first two novels. Molloy, in its first part, was the report of the attempts of Molloy to return to his mother, to his beginnings, to undo his life, and, in its second part, it was the report of the attempts of Moran to find Molloy; both quests failed, had to fail because the act of the search changed the searcher and removed, as it were, the goal of the search. This failure was repeated in Malone Dies on the plane of the narrator and the process of writing, where it became clear that a report can never catch up with its composition, that a report can never become identical with itself, can never generate itself. Together with the narrator, Malone, the report dies and on the plane of the artist (Beckett) the genre novel dies as a consequence. What now after the death of the narrator and of the novel? The answer to this question determines the content of The Unnamable, which is not a novel and has no plot and no hero, no concrete narrator. The answer is that out of the corpses new life grows: a new kind of novel, of narrator, of plot. Thus, the posthumous novel The Unnamable is as fundamentally paradoxical as its title: it refuses a name to its non-hero but, on a higher plane, in doing so gives him a name, the name 'The Unnamable'.

In accordance with the statements made by Beckett in the Three Dialogues quoted earlier, The Unnamable is a novel conscious of its impossibility. From a logical point of view, it would make sense to give up writing under such circumstances, as did, for instance, Arthur Rimbaud and as Wittgenstein requested us to do in such a situation: 'Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muB man schweigen.'67 However, Wittgenstein's famous dictum does not allow for Beckett's and his narrators' urge to express themselves. They (and perhaps this is true of many people) have the irrepressible urge to tell other people what they are silent about, and that they are silent. The unnamable consciousness, the 'first-person narrator' of the novel, knows the paradoxical consequence: 'The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.'68 Then follow one hundred and twenty pages of autobiography in the strictest sense of the word, a solipsistic narration almost without reference to the world around, changing after only a few pages into a speech rhythm without paragraphs, the realization of

shapeless logorrhoea without being able to stop or to shape the material. Again and

again the leitmotif of the novel appears expressis verbis, the desire to end and to be silent, most movingly perhaps in this passage: Then, yes, phut, just like that, just like one of the living, then I'll be dead, I think I'll soon be dead, I hope I find it a change. I should have liked to go silent first, there were moments I thought that would be my reward for having spoken so long and so valiantly, to enter living into silence, so as to be able to enjoy it, no, I don't know why, so as to feel myself silent, one with all this quiet air shattered unceasingly by my voice alone, no, it's not real air, I can't say it. (p. 400)

66 The best contribution to the topic of silence and words in The Unnamable is the essay by Bruce Kawin, 'On Not Having the Last Word: Beckett, Wittgenstein, and the Limits of Language', in Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett, ed. by Peter S. Hawkins and Anne H. Schotter (New York: AMS Press, 1984), pp. I89-202. 67 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Schriften, I, 83. 68 Mollo - Malone Dies- The Unnamable, pp. 301-02.

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Towards the end even full stops become fewer and fewer and, ultimately, disappear altogether, the desire to go silent and to end washes wave after wave of words ashore on the inscrutable continent called Self, and when we finally realize that the text will continue like this endlessly because a story can never catch up with its end and a Self can never become a non-Self, Beckett breaks off: 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. (p. 418)

III

In its main parts this study is a discussion of the paradoxes of logic and of reality in Samuel Beckett. To conclude I point out briefly how these two types of paradox are connected and what the analysis has achieved for a more general understanding of Beckett.

I

The types of paradox in Beckett have one thing in common, the question of identity and difference, the question par excellence of rational discourse. The point in the

paradoxes of logic and their two preliminary recursive stages is to recognize sameness in difference and difference in sameness.69 Beckett's path from difference to identity consists of three stages. A metaphor for stage i could be a box containing something (but not a box); for stage II the metaphor would then be a box containing a smaller box, otherwise identical; and for stage in the metaphor would be an ideal Chinese box containing itself. A possible graphic representation is this diagram:

logical levels (= form)

A

K\ 6//- = difference

K\\\' \ :1 = identity

/ elements (= conlituis) 69 See Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, pp. I48-49.



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Beckett's artistic development leads from I via 2 to 3: from the principle of difference of form and content, via the principle of fusion of difference and identity of form and content, to the principle of identity of form and content.

To recognize sameness in difference, even in opposites, is also the main objective in the paradoxes of reality. For if one says 'right is left, and left is right', then either one wants to suggest that there is no absolute perspective but rather that there are different but equally justifiable perspectives from which opposites appear as exchangeable, or one wants to hint at the fact that even opposites are equal in many important points so that 'ultimately' they must be seen as altogether identical (and even more so the further away the two poles are one from the other).

There is a certain correspondence between paradoxes on the one hand and metaphors and metonymies on the other hand. In metaphors such as: 'You are a silly goose', or in metonymies such as: 'Five sails were approaching quickly' (pars pro toto), the point is to recognize sameness in difference. (Another type of metonymy: 'He had read all of Shakespeare' (author for work) will be discussed below.) Obviously, the girl called a goose is not meant to have white feathers or to walk with a certain gait: one must find the right correspondence between goose and girl in the given context. The same holds true, mutatis mutandis, for the five sails. In other words: the point here, as in paradoxes, is the question of sameness in difference, the question of identity and difference. In literature the demands made on our understanding are, of course, much greater than in my simple examples, sometimes something even being replaced by its opposite.

Beckett's interest in paradoxes has common ground with his interest in the relation of change and immutability. Both paradoxes and the relation of change and immutability raise the same question of identity and difference. From his early study Proust ( 93 I) to Krapp's Last Tape (at least) Beckett was interested in such questions as 'How is it that an object can survive change?' or 'How much change can an object undergo without being destroyed?'. These are the very questions raised by the problem of'coincidentia oppositorum' and of Chinese Boxes.

2

Beckett's paradoxes of logic: the (con)fusion of logical levels developed from circular, recursive, and self-reflexive structures, are the correlate of the failure of all attempts at self-foundation in discourse and of self-generation in art. As with recent attempts in chemistry and biology at describing and explaining the origin (autopoiesis) and the self-organization of living systems without assuming a Creator-God, Beckett attempted throughout his career to create works of art that are structured in such a way that they seem to have created themselves.70 It is the reversal of the old metonymy: work for author. Behind these attempts lies the assumption, as it does in chemistry and biology, that he, the artist, can no longer see himself as a creator, can no longer uphold the idea of the artist as god, developed after art had become, in western societies, a substitute for religion. Thus, what the Enlightenment and subsequent scientific developments did to the idea of a Creator- God, Beckett does to the creator-artist: he 'secularizes' the process of art. However, literary works of art are not living organisms and thus the attempt had to fail, and since Beckett (of course) was aware of this, all that mattered was to organize this

70 In chemistry the name of Ilya Prigogine comes to mind, in biology that of Humberto Maturana.



Paradox in Beckett

failure with as much circumspection as possible. This, I think, is the ultimate reason for the importance of logical paradoxes in Beckett's work.

His paradoxes of reality are the manifestation of his insight into the relativity of all attempts at categorization, into the impossibility of differentiation. If left is 'ultimately' right, then obviously all attempts at rational cognition of the world fail, must fail, because the world is not of the kind that one can cope with in a differentiating manner: all is equal.

At the basis of both types of paradox is a world without God, where human beings have to look after themselves without really being able to do so, a world as chaos, which we confront with our reason although we must fail. Thus, Beckett's spirit of paradox is witness to the failure of modernity, to the failure of the autonomy of the individual and his rationality.71 However, being witness (artist) and not doctor (diagnostician), his art is deeply afflicted by this failure. If it is true to say that the sphere of reason and logic is opposed by a sphere of the irrational and of non- differentiation, then the position of the paradoxist is on the borderline between these realms. The failure of the programme of modernity can be no reason for Beckett to go back to pre-modern times, but neither can he look hopefully into the future. His work is, at the same time, rationalistic and irrationalistic, a high-risk tour of the mountain ridge between the two realms.

UNIVERSITY OF PADERBORN ROLF BREUER

71 When Charles Juliet brought up the mystics in his talks with him in 1977, Beckett replied: 'Yes, I admire them. I admire their disregard for logic, their burning illogicality - the flame that consumes the rubbish heap of logic' ('Meeting Beckett', p. 27).

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