I Shall Live On

Fizzle 4 is another of Beckett's "ars poetica" moments. While framed as the discussion of someone's death, I think Beckett, as he is wont to do, is actually examining what he thinks will happen to his work after his death. He clearly knows that what he's doing is intellectual fodder, ripe for constant investigation. After all, if you spend your life constantly plumbing the depths of your own psyche in such an intense way as he did, people will take notice.

I started the semester wondering how it was possible that Beckett could so accurately capture that which happens inside the human mind, how he could seemingly render the ineffable thought processes we all experience so beautiful and tangible. I still haven't figured it out. None of us have and it's likely that none of us ever will. That doesn't mean, however, that we will not try. Fizzle 4 is Beckett predicting how hard we will all try, sympathizing with our futile attempts. He personifies his own writing in this little excerpt and challenges the artistic notion that art lives within he artist. Rather, Beckett posits that art houses us like a shell full of stuff. Once we discover the stuff, we interpret the stuff. Art is not something we channel, it's something we exist within.

It is in this way that Beckett is immortal. All authors are immortal.

Is Nothing Something?

New coat of paint on this nothing.

After reading Texts for Nothing, I wrote and recorded a song that borrows some lines from Chapter 13 of the aforementioned work. Here it is:

curtains - song for nothing

The lines I borrowed from are

"get out of here and go elsewhere, go where time passes and atoms assemble an instant, where the voice belongs perhaps, where it sometimes says it must have belonged, to be able to speak of such figments."

As someone who writes (songs, not literature) and creates constantly, I find Texts for Nothing very comforting. These lines in particular, however, ring exceptionally true. I take them to be the ultimate challenge any artist finds him or herself negotiating: how do I make new what's already been done time and time again? Because there's no way to answer this question, creation of all art, especially writing, ultimately becomes an exercise in futility.

However, it is because this very nature of futility that Beckett's musings in Texts for Nothing becoming so comforting. He never stopped writing. He wrote about futility, about the futility of examining futility, about the idea that nothing is something, and about writing itself. Because there isn't a way to present new ideas, we must always figure out new ways to approach old ideas. Nothing is futile because everything is futile. Everything is futile because nothing is.

Therein lies the beauty of Beckett: failing better is not the same as failing. If we are doomed to constant failure and our only method of combat is to fail better, do we really fail? If we get closer and closer to describing an idea with each attempt, can we still say that we've failed at describing said idea?  If we're trapped in nothingness, left alone with our thoughts, we're in hell. But if we analyze those thoughts and draw conclusions from them, we transcend. When we stop failing better, we've failed. Until then, engaging in the artistic process is the most meaningful thing we can do.

As Michael Gira, leader of the brutally transcendent bands Swans, says,

"I learned from experience that you can never really look at a song as being finished. In most cases, it starts out on acoustic guitar even if it's just a rhythm idea with some vocal ideas, or it's a so-called finished song on acoustic guitar and starts out that way. That's one version. Another version is when I start working on it with people in a room and it becomes something and then maybe I go into the studio and record it and then I do all the overdubs and then it reaches this chaotic stage where I have to sort out all the overdubs afterwards and then it's mixed and that's another version. And then, when we go to play it live, I don't at all try to replicate what's on record because to me those are completely different worlds. And then it just transforms from there or it gets discarded, one of the two. I like to be in a position where nothing's ever settled and it's always kind of uncomfortable…like standing on a bridge made of sand. That makes me happiest when things are not sure."

 Nothing is ever finished. No idea is ever fully explored. Believing in ultimate futility is futile.

Hell is yourself.

I can't stand the sight of you.

Presumably, as literature students taking a class on Samuel Beckett, we are all familiar with the famous quote from Sartre's No Exit, "hell is other people." After reading a number of Beckett's plays, all of which seem to depict various kinds of existentialist crises or moments, we arrive at Happy Days, a play that presents the audience with another harrowing Purgatory scenario. The sizeable difference between No Exit  and these two plays is that instead of three characters forced to interact with one another for eternity, there is only a single character interacting with him- or herself, allowing for Sartre's most famous existential statement to be rewritten as "hell is yourself."

Much like Krapp's Last Tape, Happy Days presents a single character waxing nostalgic and poetic on her life, wondering how she got to where she is. And, similarly driven through constant monologue, the play relies upon the actors' facial expressions and calculated reactions to tell their stories of inner turmoil.

Stuck in the middle with nothing.

When one is stuck in a hole, like Winnie in the earth or Krapp in his study, and the only company is a person one cannot interact with, like Willie or Krapp's former self, all one has left are thoughts and memories. All one can do is analyze the moments that led up to the current, the define the current, that predicted the current. How is this not completely torturous? How does this not represent Hell? If there is no hope for a future, if nothing ever changes and all that's left to examine is one's past, who could truly claim a happy existence? By putting these characters in such awful situations, Beckett creates for them a Sisyphean being where one is forced to relive the past over and over without ever coming to any kind of conclusion. Without reprieve, without catharsis, without epiphany, Krapp and Winnie will never grow, change, develop, or understand. Thus, to be stuck with yourself for eternity is the ultimate definition of hell.

Existing is not enough.

Existential crises happen when one realizes that mere existence is not the same as living. Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin recognizes this in Gogol's story, "The Overcoat," and the Underground Man of Dostoevsky arrives at the same epiphany in Notes from the Underground. To be an exist-er is simply to function as a mass of biology, but to live is to introduce the nuance of emotion, thinking, and, perhaps most importantly, reaction. I think Krapp realizes this crucial difference during the course of Krapp's Last Tape, but is deeply troubled by said realization because it comes so late in life.

What's a more brutal way to understand how you've wasted your life than to listen to your younger self casually describe a happier time? Especially when said happier time did not continue past that documented moment? I think Beckett's ultimate point with Krapp's Last Tape is that of a warning: documenting every action, thought, love, sexual desire, or feeling is not the same as experiencing them and revisiting said documents only drives the point home. One cannot live if one constantly removes oneself from life. 

I always wonder how the people who film concerts remember those shows. I went to see Spiritualized earlier this year in Carrboro and the man standing in front of me filmed the band's entire set on his iPhone. Instead of watching the band, he watched the band through his phone. 

* * *

Seeing the play performed (by the great John Hurt, no less) truly drives this point home. Reading the play is a harrowing experience all its own, but because the action consists simply of a man listening to his past on reel-to-reel tape and occasionally shuffling off to guzzle some sort of booze, the impact of Beckett's vision cannot be fully experienced without seeing a great actor's face he hears his character recount painful memories. Perhaps this is the reason that Beckett chose to tell this story in dramatic form.

Thinking hard.

Here are some thoughts:

1. I wrote this after finishing The Unnameable when I thought I'd write my final paper on that particular novel:

The pairing down of language to its essentials helps differentiate between the separate identities. At the same time, the minimal nature of Beckett's writing complicates said identities, blurring the lines between them. In this way, the language is no longer minimal. Instead, the systematic stripping away of language reveals its complex simplicity. Similarly, the many identities at play in The Unnameable, complex in their plurality, become simple as, eventually, they all blur together into one.

2. Here are the sentences I wrote during our exercise last Wednesday:

A. An old man determined to understand his wounds, Krapp revels in recorded moments of his youth, no matter how foreign or painful.

B. Box three, spool five contains the memory of a love lost, forcing Krapp to recognize his age and mistakes.

C. Consumed by anger when thinking of his wasted life, Krapp withers in his study, searching for a glimmer in the darkness.

Samuel "Cormac" McBeckett

Cormac "Sammy" McBeckett

Reading and watching Beckett's play Endgame reminded me of Cormac McCarthy. Specifically, the sheer bleakness and utter dread the play embodies I find reminiscent of several of McCarthy's works, most notably The Road. The constant presence and/or looming threat of death worms its way into the discourse characterizing the relationship between what appears to be a father and son just as it does in The Road. In both works, one feels a palpable sense of time running out, of hope rendered a vague notion somewhere out in the cold, grey distance. 

At the heart of both works lies a desire to understand exactly what's real, what's left, and how to proceed given the circumstances. Relationships are both pointless and essential, especially those between father and son. In The Road, the father-son dynamic is rendered moot because the father cannot raise his son in a traditional role, instead assuming the only role available, protector. Because father is protector, biology plays little to no part in the man's identity. Similarly, if the audience is to assume that Hamm is Clov's father, Clov merely helps Hamm wheel about while providing an ear for Hamm's rants. Again, biology becomes moot, as anyone could step in and fill Clov's role as helper to an ailing old man. Therefore, in the new world's-end nature of both works, reality is simply whatever's the most convenient.

When nothing matters and reality becomes intensely subjective, all that's left is emotional brutality. Ultimately, in the dark, post-apocalyptic, savage terrain of both Endgame and The Road, existence can be described in Hamm's most powerful line, "you're on Earth, there's no cure for that!" (127).

Goth summer.