THE DISSOLUTION OF MEANING IN SAMUEL BECKETT
Aude Pichon
The quest for insignificance, the will to exhaust linguistic possibilities, the
striving to reach a point of utter transparency in language sum up the work of
the author and dramatist Samuel Beckett and reveal his project to expose
absences in language. In the essay “La peinture des Van Velde ou le monde et le
pantalon”, Beckett states “ My language appears like a veil that must be torn in
order to find the things or the nothing that lie behind it”.
Indeed, Beckett obstinately stretches out language so as to provide glimpses
into its cracks and display its lacks. This linguistic strategy functions as the
author’s incentive to escape sense, and to find a mean to disengage language
from meaning through a process of linguistic exhaustion that drives language
outside its own domain.
Accordingly, the following article examines the process by virtue of which gaps
are created in language to expose the presence of absences in Beckett’s early
fiction Watt. The baffling realisation of the collapse of meaning and the
revelation of its absence will be analysed in relation to the new modes of
perception they engender and interpreted in the light of the philosophy of
Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze relates thought to an image, a representation to capture
the perceptible by a process of selection and exclusion. What is excluded,
however, even if unmediated and chaotic rumbles under language and needs to be
fused within thought so as to perform the metamorphosis of the meaningful into
the expressive, or in the philosopher words: the fusion of the actual and the
virtual.
This operation can only occur once language is detached entirely from meaning.
As signification ceases to hold on matter and thought, one begins to feel one’s
perceptions renewed from a field of neutrality, that is one sees one’s
perceptions shift entirely and can not account for them within any linguistic,
logical or reasoned framework. Seeking a pure form of expression of absence in
its uncorrupted and neutral state is to penetrate the realm of the virtual.
Hardly bearable and intelligible to perceptions, the virtual can only be
glimpsed at succinctly through the cracks and the fissures of the absences of
meanings just revealed.
Already in the early novel Murphy, Beckett presents a character in search
of a zone where language could surpass its usual discursive function, and
progress to another sphere of expression. The protagonist thereby rejects logic
and relies on occult forces to determine his destiny. Nevertheless, even the
occult is subjected to limitations since also based on a logical system. This
explains why Murphy turns to the enclosed world of the schizophrenics, which he
regards as a potential to provide the keys to override rationality. Indeed, cut
out from the world, the schizophrenics only dwell in the self-reflexivity of
their own mind. However, Murphy’s failure to access to this mysterious place,
and his desire to assimilate his own self to the mind of the schizophrenics
reveal itself purposeless since it leads into the fall of the character into
solipsism. His futile quest ironically ends in death as his body is blown up by
a gas exploration. Murphy can only overcome his image and reach a zone of
nothingness by the physical destruction and material dissolution of his own
self.
In the subsequent novel Watt, Watt is presented as a subject no longer
concerned with the exploration of itself, but in the process of overcoming his
formation. Watt already appears as an incomplete representation, and is first
described as being hardly distinguishable from the wall in front of which he is
standing. He may be interpreted as a fiction of the mind, a process of
creation. Watt, for this reason, not only determines the direction of
Beckett’s work, but also points to the avenues, and linguistic strategies
allowing the exposure of absences or holes that release language from sense and
meaning. Being himself the threshold of experience of these lapses, Watt fails
to be given a psychological depth, but becomes a neutral field from where
unmediated perceptions occur, and the unthought is experienced.
The frail resemblance with realism at the beginning of the novel collapses
radically when Watt penetrates Mr Knott’s house. Watt’s world then turns into a
universe of transformations and permutations. The world for Watt is no longer
contained within rationality, but defines itself as procession of logical
possibilities and is exposed by an incessant and exuberant linguistic process.
Facts are no longer fixed and ascertained but replaced by series of hypothesis,
where no possible is left unexplored. The stifling and abounding display of the
serial form, the accumulation and precision of descriptions perform a paradox,
since the will to interpret the world initiates an extensive problematisation of
the world.
Permutations succeed one another as if interlocked or folded into
one another. The central series begins with a description of the meals served to
Mr Knott. The problem raised by the possibility of food remaining from Mr
Knott’s meals opens a series introducing the famished dogs, themselves at the
origin of a new series, that of the Lynch family. The later becomes the
elaboration of a skeleton for the drawing of more series, more variations as a
constant expansion of the possible. Watt is seen in an effort to understand the
functioning of rationality, representation and mediation. Richard Coe explains
the serial in terms of the identification of Watt as “the scientist of
literature” (Coe 1966, 40). Coe argues that the phenomenon perceived by Watt
through the senses is processed into meaning through language. In order to be
certain of expressing a phenomenon meaningfully, Watt needs to run through the
lists of all possibilities. “For Watt: there are material phenomena. There is a
linguistic mechanism called “mind” which manufactures “meaning”” (Coe 1966, 40).
Meaning therefore is that which is expressed in language and cannot be found
outside it.
The interpretation leads Coe, among other critics, to define Watt as
a logical positivist. It reinforces the claim that only what is expressed in
language can be meaningful, whereas what cannot be translated has no existence.
This claim is, however, challenged since linguistic expression despite its
logical structure fails to interpret reality. On the contrary, reality becomes
more and more remote and doubtful as hypotheses proliferate. The failure of the
transformation of the real into the meaningful is demonstrated by the
signifiers’ resistance to their association with their signified. Watt’s sense
of loss and insecurity is apparent when realises he can no longer associate the
word “pot” to the object, and perhaps not accidentally, the world “man” to
himself.
And Watt
was greatly troubled by this tiny little thing, more troubled perhaps than he
had ever been by anything, and Watt had been frequently and exceedingly
troubled, in his time, by this imperceptible, no hardly imperceptible, since he
perceived it, by this indefinable thing that prevented him from saying, with
conviction, and to his relief, of the object that was so like a pot, that it was
a pot, and of the creature that still in spite of everything presented a large
number of human characteristics, that it was a man (Beckett 1976, 79)
The tension incites the character to multiply his attempts to
produce meaning. However, as with the experience of the pot or his own self, he
is forced to the recognition that the nature of the procedure outstrips reason.
The irrational cannot be explained in terms of the rational. The questions
arising then concern the cause of the failure of rationality, the analysis of
the subject and the interpretation of the serial form.
Olga Bernal in “Le Glissement hors du langage“ also considers
Watt as the novel in which Beckett achieves a major breakthrough by means of
a rupture in language, that gives way to a separation of man and things on the
one hand and language on the other. Watt progresses towards a zone where human
life is no longer supported by the semantic scale:
A la place des concepts verbaux, il y
a le silence et dans ce pur rapport entre objets et lumières, les figures
humaines ainsi que les objets perdent leur signification et leur intelligibilité
linguistique.
(Bernal 1976,
220)
Instead of verbal
concepts, there is the silence and in the pure relation between object and
light, the human figures as well as the objects loose their significations and
their linguistic intelligibility.
Watt’s experience in Mr Knott’s house begins with a strange impression
associated with the visit of the Galls, father and son, piano tuners. The
narrator states that his principal incident is analogous to others during Watt’s
stay:
…in a sense that it was not ended,
when it was past, but continued to unfold, in Watt’s head, from beginning to
end, over and over again, the complex connections of its lights and shadows, the
passing from silence to sound and from sound to silence, the stillness before
the movement and the stillness after, the quickenings and retardings, the
approaches and the separations, all the shifting detail of its march and
ordinance, according to the irrevocable caprice taking place. It resembled them
in the vigour with which it developed a purely plastic content, and gradually
lost, in the nice processes of its light, its sound, its impacts and its rhythm,
even the most literal. (Beckett 1976, 69)
The difficulty for Watt to
comprehend the visit of the Galls does not act as a negation of reality. It is
not to be interpreted as the mind’s failure to represent the incident itself
through a logical application of a linguistic structure. On the contrary, the
process by virtue of which the mind apprehends reality is exposed by a
dysfunction of the faculties of the mind. The detailed descriptions of the
movements of Watt’s mind disclose an abstract perception of the world. For
reality to be represented in the mind, the latter has to construct a fiction.
The elaboration of the representative process itself exposes the simultaneous
constitution of the mind through the processing of a world of flux.
The proliferation of
hypotheses should not be understood as a symptom of madness, an expression of
insecurity, a negation of the world but on the contrary a constant process of
creation, an experiment with the different levels of reality reaching the
surface of perception. The absurd logical applications of Watt perform as a
giant calculus, a profession of possibilities as an expression of the surface,
an Event. Such a link between the possible and the Event is explained by Henri
Bergson in La pensée et le Mouvant by the necessity to eliminate the
possible in relation to the real, for the latter distorts the perception of the
real, according to the false assumption that the possible is inferior to the
real and precedes it. Bergson argues that the possible is more than the real
since the real is provided with a surplus and its image as the possible is
rejected in the past each time a realisation occurs.
Au fur et à mesure que la réalité se
crée, imprévisible et neuve, son image se réfléchit derrière elle dans le passé
indéfini ; elle se trouve ainsi avoir été, de tout temps possible, mais c’est à
ce moment précis qu’elle commence à l’avoir toujours été, et voilà pourquoi je
disais que sa possibilité qui ne précède pas sa réalité, l’aura précédé une fois
que la réalité apparue. Le possible est donc le mirage du présent dans le passé.
(Bergson 1959, 1340)
As reality creates itself
unforeseeable and new, its image is reflected behind it in the indefinite past;
reality thus finds itself having been all the time possible, but it is at that
precise moment that it begins to always have been, and this is why I said that
its possibility which does not precede its reality, would have nonetheless
preceded it once reality emerges. The possible is therefore the mirage of the
present in the past.
To Bergson, the real
and the possible must be rejected since they hindered the expression of the
virtual and the experience of duration. Duration is identified as an incessant
variation of state, a fluid passage from one state to another, and differs from
the ordinary conception of time, which is defined by a projection of
consciousness in space. Bergson’s work on duration inspires Deleuze to conceive
of a philosophy of the multiple, which though not exclusive of numericity, gives
voice to the qualitative or intensive multiplicities. Deleuze’s work meets that
of Beckett in a sense that it concerns itself with the exploration of the
complex fusion between quantity and quality, the full expression of the later
not being reduced to the former. Unlike the representative process which
concentrates upon the realisation of the possible, expression depends on the
actualisation of the virtual.
In the essay, “L’Actuel et le
Virtuel”, Deleuze defines philosophy as the theory of multiplicities which
implicates virtual and actual elements.
“Il
n’y a pas d’objet purement actuel. Tout actuel s’entoure d’un brouillard
d’images virtuelles” (Deleuze & Parnet 1996, 179)
“There is no purely actual object. Each actual is surrounded by a fog of
images”.
The virtual would be defined as a
zone of indetermination that is a distribution of imperceptible virtual images.
The actual on the contrary is perceptible, but since surrounded of virtual
images, the actual constantly affected by their imperceptible movement appears
itself in a state of transformation. The actual brings the imperceptible into
perception, materialises the virtual, endows it with an evanescent form.
Bergson’s definition of memory in its relation to perception states that memory
is not an actual image formed after the perception of an object, but a virtual
image that coexists with the perception of the actual. For this reason, the
virtual cannot be approached in terms of a temporal succession and a logical
relation like the possible and the real.
The virtuality of the
real refers to what is not synthesised by the image of thought as well as that
which is synthesised in a representative form, in other words, the real in its
contained and constrained form. The real has to be redefined as the virtual,
since the virtual can never be fully grasped, but can be fused with thought in
becoming actualised. Deleuze turns to Nietzsche so as question the function of
the faculties of the image of thought and their validity in relation to the
real. Difference cannot be expressed so long as it remains subjugated to the
mediation of reality:
Car le propre du nouveau,
c’est-à-dire la différence, est de solliciter dans la pensée des forces qui ne
sont pas celles de la recognition, ni aujourd’hui ni demain mais des puissances
d’un tout autre modèle, dans une terra incognita jamais reconnue ni
reconnaissable (Deleuze 1968, 177)
For the new – in other words,
difference – calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of
recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from
an unrecognised and unrecognisable terra incognita.
A philosophy of
difference should find the means to overcome the image of thought in order to
fuse the unthought with thought, so as to express difference. Deleuze does not
suggest a conception of the unthought in terms of an opposition to thought, nor
a search for a radical form of doubt. The unthought can only be found outside
the subject and cannot be viewed from the position of subjectivity since it
refers to a reality in its virtuality. It requires the subject to surrender, to
overcome the image of thought and the representative. The subject needs to
abandon the process of mediation, the interpretation of reality in terms of
possible significations. The subject needs to find a fissure in its
constitution. Such abandonment is conveyed by the first incident Watt witnesses
in Mr Knott’s house. The scene fails to be explained, to be processed by the
mind. As a consequence, Watt’s mind perceives the scene in terms of affects:
Thus the scene in the music-room,
with the two Galls, ceased very soon to signify for Watt a piano tuned, an
obscure family and professional relation, an exchange of judgements more or less
intelligible, and so on, if indeed it had never signified such things, and
became a mere example of light commenting on bodies, and stillness motion, and
silence sound, and comment comment (Beckett 1976, 69-70)
Here the chaos of the
virtual is not processed, not even fully grasped, but nonetheless actualised,
since le narrator is able to express the series of affections he has
experienced. The narrator has then begun to differentiate. By means of
repetition, he has released thought from its constraints, as the scene
continuously unfolds in his mind. Repetition, for Deleuze, because of its
doubling, initiates a process of differentiation. The actualisation of the
virtual is for this reason none other than a process, which concerns a
transformation of mediation allowing thought to retrieve an original perception
prior to the mind processing of the latter. The mind experiences fatigue as
opposed to tiredness, which permits furtive glances into its inner chaos, but
yet is corrected by intervention of memory. Despite the fact that fatigues
dominates Watt’s mind, he expresses his frustration since his perceptions are
not explained. They have ceased to be related to a deeper meaning in depth.
But he felt the need to think that
such and such thing had happened then, the need to be able to say, when the
scene began to unroll its sequences.” (Beckett, 1976, 71)
Watt’s attempt to understand the
scene fails as the character is shown drifting into a sensorial experience, as
he is able to perceive subtle nuances through processes, the passage from light
to darkness, from silence to sound. Watt questions the collapse of the image of
thought and the occurrence of incidents he cannot explain in relation to system
of signification:
And Watt could not accept them for
what they were, the simple games that time plays with space, now with these
toys, and now with those, but was obliged because of his peculiar character, to
enquire into what they really meant, his character was not so peculiar as all of
that, but into what they might be induced to mean, with the help of a little
patience, a little ingenuity.
But what was his pursuit of
meaning, in this indifference to meaning? (Beckett, 1976, 70-71)
The piano tuner situation is called
an incident because of its failure to be rationalised by the subject.
Rationality can no longer perform as an entity at the origin of thought, the
tool of the mind to understand the world. Deprived of the imposition of
rationality into the object, the mind wanders and is being affected by the
silence, the pause, the noise, the movement. It no longer progresses vertically
in search of depth or height, but horizontally, experiencing the intensity of a
succession of sensations as affections.
The collapse of a system of
relation, the incapacity to synthesise so as to ground the perceptions and
locate them in spatio-temporal structures causes the subject to enact repetition
actively as if to decompose repetition. The two halves of repetition are thereby
doubled. The first repetition, ordinary, static or extensive acts as a
synthesis, that is a doubling, a folding back of forces upon itself thereby
creating a determination. In Différence and Répétition, Deleuze
introduces the question of the for-itself of repetition being :
Est-ce que là le pour-soi de la
répétition, comme une subjectivité originaire qui doit entrer nécessairement
dans sa constitution.(Deleuze 1968, 96)
An originary subjectivity which
necessarily enters into its constitution.
A passive repetition comprises the
two halves necessary for the synthesis of the idea or the folding of forces. The
ability of the mind to contract a multitude of instants is enabled by memory’s
capacity to identify ideas. Because memory proceeds by dividing temporality, it
allows the mind to establish a present, as a temporal field where the idea
encountered is interpreted in terms of other ideas “previously” met.
Fatigue can also be defined
as the second repetition, which unlike the first is distinctive, singular,
dynamic and intensive. Watt’s failure to maintain the illusion of the first
repetition performs a doubling of the real through a second repetition, which
allows a shifting of his perceptions. It presents Watt with a passage from
thinking in extension to thinking intensively in actualising the virtual.
However, how and why a dysfunction of the mind, an incapacity to synthesise, a
repetitive process allows an entirely new conception of space unleashing the
differential process, remains to be determined.
Critics like Di Pierro have interpreted Watt in relation to the
co-existence of rational and irrational systems in mathematics. These analyses
tend to stress the relevance of philosophers like Heraclitus, Bruno and Vico for
Beckett and point to their combination of their view on reality, that is the
ideas of flux, identified contraries and cycles, that are to be found in their
work. With reference to the three ages defined by Vico, Di Pierro distinguishes
three main parts in the novel. The second part of the narrative displays a plot
in crisis, a collapse of a structure and the falling of the character falls into
irrationality. Yet, according to Di Pierro, the direction of the novel shits
again in the third part of the novel. The problem of irrationality is solved by
the reversal of time, space and even language. The constant “shift from chaos to
structure and back to chaos” (Di Pierro 1981, 57) accounts for the
transformation of content into form. The idea of a cycle here is not to be taken
as a process of evolution, but as the exposition of a doubling since half of the
journey is made forward and the other half backward. The division of the two
sides is enabled by a crisis, the presence of the irrational.
This vision of enlightenment is first explained by Arsene, who had preceded Watt
in Mr Knott’s house, as the liberation from the depth of understanding. His
speech anticipates the first incident witnessed by Watt. Arsene’s speech
describes changes, metamorphosis. Its elevated speech prioritises the
experiences of the senses while simultaneously reducing meaning to nothingness.
Not without irony, Arsene refers lyrically to his new perception of the word in
a style of an idyllic pastoral. He stresses the novelty of his apprehension of
the world once the natural elements have been emptied of their symbolism.
Meaning can no longer be imposed on the sky, the grass, the flowers, the light,
the sun, the dawn, since Arsene penetrates Mr Knott’s house as “the being of
nothing” .(Beckett 1976, 38)
Then at
night rest in the quiet house, there are no roads, no streets anymore, you lie
down by a window opening on refuge, the little sounds come that demand nothing,
ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night
is soon ended, and the sky blue again over all the secret places where nobody
ever comes, the secret places never the same, but always simple indifferent,
always mere places, sites of a stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so
light and free that it is as the being of nothing” (Beckett, 1976, 38)
The “being of nothing” reaches enlightenment through dysfunction. Watt
experiences change, but does not know the nature of it. “The change. In what did
it consist? It is hard to say; something slipped.”(Beckett 1976, 41). The change
despite its enormous scale cannot be described but has to be experienced since
it is of the stature of the Event.
I did not, need I add, see the
thing happen, nor hear it, but I perceive it with a perception so sensuous that
in comparison the impressions of a man buried alive in Lisbon’s great day seem a
frigid and artificial construction of the understanding. (Beckett 1976, 42)
Arsene attempts to account for the destabilisation of subjectivity, the movement
of weakness or relaxation allowing a configuration of the whereabouts of the
mind in the mist of the atemporal.
What was
changed if my information is correct, was the sentiment that a change other than
a change in degree, had taken place. What was changed was existence off the
ladder. Do not come down the ladder, Ifor, I haf taken it away. This I am happy
to inform you is the reversed metamorphosis. The Laurel into the daphne.
(Beckett 1976, 42-43).
No sooner had
Arsene conveyed the change, than the serial form is enacted.
For Watt “existence off the ladder” is not explained in terms of a
change or a metamorphosis, but in terms of a musical perception. The relation is
transformed into a non-relation. Reflecting on the significance of the series,
Watt’s mind is drawn onto another series, that of the frog’s song. The frogs’
song unlike other series illustrates the mind’s departure from the search for
meaning, and its desire to be affected by the sound of the song. Watt’s quest
towards understanding leads him a pre-lapsarian world. The path to the
enlightened pursuit of unlearning culminates in the garden symbolically depicted
as the Garden of Eden, where Watt becomes the personification of Christ then
God. Watt and Sam, another resident demystify the power of god through an
analogy with their own omniscience over a pack of rats. The irony is twofold as
Beckett uses a Victorian style of narration; the path of enlightenment is not
simply “the laurel into the Daphne” as “the reversed metamorphosis”, or a
symbolic or ironic inversion of images, but a fluid fusion, a dispersal and
neutralisation of symbols allowing Watt to become Christ, God as well as the
author of a Victorian novel.
But our
particular friends were the rats, that dwelt by the stream. They were long and
black. We bought them such titbits from our ordinary as rinds of cheese, and
morsels of gristle, and we bought them also birds’ eggs, and frogs and
fledglings. Sensible to those attentions, they would come flocking round us at
our approach, with every sign of confidence and affection, and glide up our
trousers, and hang upon our breasts; and then we would sit down in the mist of
them, and give them to eat, out of our hands, of a nice fat frog, or a baby
thrush. Or seizing suddenly a plump young rat, resting in our bosom after its
repast, we would feed it to its mother, or its father, or its brother, or its
sister, or to some less fortunate relative. It was on these occasions, we
agreed, after an exchange of views that we came nearest to God. (Beckett 1976,
153)
The fissure of the image of thought is explored in Watt where series and
combinations of mathematical figures, and permutations achieve a departure from
representation through the exhaustion of the possibility of the real. In
presenting the possible as a dubious form of reality that can be multiplied
indefinitely, Beckett performs a first displacement of the subject and suggests
the presence of the virtual through the paradoxical representation of a universe
devoid of signification. Watt begins to concentrate on affects rather than
signification and rationalisation. His perceptions, even if failing to be
translated nonetheless, emerge from the displacement and neutralisation of the
possible. Watt initiates the series of the dysfunctional voices and disabled
bodies that we are to meet in the theatre and thereby reveals that through the
absences in language, art can access to a higher realm of expression and
creation.
Under immer mehr wie
ein Schleier kommt mir meine Sprache vor, den man zerreissen muss, um an die
dahinterliegen Dinge (oder das dahinterlirgen Nichts); (Beckett 1983, 52)
Bibliography
Bergson, Henri
(1959) Œuvres. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France.
Deleuze, Gilles
(1968) Différence et Répétition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Deleuze, Gilles et
Parnet, Claire (1996) Dialogues.
Paris:
Flammarion.
Beckett, Samuel
(1938) Murphy. London: John Calder.
Beckett, Samuel
(1976) Watt. London: John Calder.
Beckett, Samuel
(1983) Disjecta.
London: John
Calder
Bernal, Olga
(1976) «Le Glissement hors du langage » in L’Herne Beckett Quelques Textes
et Citations.
Ed. by Bishop,
Tom et Raymond Federman.
Paris: Editions de L’Herne.
Coe, Richard
(1964) Beckett. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd Ltd.
Di Pierro, John
(1981) Structures in Beckett’s Watt. South Carolina: French literature
Publications Company York.
© 2005 Aude Pichon
Aude Pichon, titulaire d’un Doctorat de l’Université de Dundee en Ecosse, a
travaillé sur Gilles Deleuze et Samuel Beckett. Elle a enseigné à l’université
de Manchester et collabore aujourd’hui à un projet d’étude sur le théâtre
populaire en France.
