Go on…? Speaking of Beckett

I can’t go on, I’ll go on

Beckett’s famous line from his novel The Unnamable (1958) has been reiterated innumerably, in different contexts and for different ends. Regardless, these words resonate uncannily with our era. Today, every pretense to enlightenment reveals its obverse: unerring disregard for international law; relentless degradation of human life in the basest of conflicts; retrograde imperialism; ecological collapse; allegiance to capitalist abstractions requiring ever fewer workers, let alone human beings. The impetus to give up seems entirely warranted. Conversely, the motivation to keep going arises reflexively. For most, there’s no way to give up, there’s no outside, no security, no backup, no alternative guarantee of survival. Despite this, continuity can also be resistance, wilful obstinance in the face of circumstances weighted to make us quit, to shut-up, or to simply keep consuming as the passive receptors of content monetised through our inaction.

Making art (or writing) can seem pointless too particularly in a culture that promotes incessant self-entrepreneurialism and self-exposure through unending individualist competition. Every artist their own brand, a business open all the time, ever furtive to accrue more evidence of relevance and grounds for recognition. Whose art is best? Which artist is greatest? What individual is most compelling? Who’s in? Who’s out? And how close are you to the market, that ultimate signifier of value in an era seemingly imaginatively bereft of any ‘higher’ concepts? Or where genuinely superior alternatives are instantly swamped by capitalist imperatives, regardless of how beleaguered and pathetically threadbare contemporary capitalist ‘thinking’ is. Beckett’s frequent recourse to the figure of the ‘bum’, the outsider, the impoverished and rejected inhabiting featureless wastelands, abandoned architecture, or rubbish bins, seems prophetic now rather than ‘timeless.’

Unsurprisingly, much of Beckett’s writing revolves around absences. Implication rather than exposition prevails. Yet absence always requires presence. Unlike the stark blacks and whites of chiaroscuro though, Beckett’s world is decidedly murky. When drama arises its effect is frequently undermined by non sequiturs that suggest a character’s lack of conviction in what they’ve just said. The will to shape and create keeps cycling back to doubt. An inability to categorically determine the framing apparatuses that makes sense of worldly acts and words persists. Am I here? Was I there? Here is so like there it’s hard to tell. This unnerving indeterminacy plays havoc with typical notions of hierarchy, whether hierarchies of ambition and success or social hierarchies.

In Waiting for Godot (1948), the ironically named character ‘Lucky’ repeatedly abases himself before his master Pozzo who leads him around on a rope. Lucky utters two sentences in the whole play. One of these is seven hundred words long. Exhorted by his handler to ‘think, pig!’, Lucky’s monologue nonsensically blends references to the opinions of apparent experts with stream of consciousness prose. While rationally incoherent, Lucky’s articulation veers between absurdity and portending doom. At the level of intuition however, Lucky proves himself substantially more aware than his master. Relating is a game. One rules. The other suffers. Yet the sufferer knows things the ruler does not. In Beckett’s novella, The Lost Ones (1970) ladders lead up and down an oppressive, multi-tiered architectural structure simultaneously conjuring freedom and subjection. The prognosis is ambiguous though unpromising. Even a bird, robbed the possibility of ascent, is more like a rat scouring the earth for crumbs. Trapped, speech becomes babble, an attempt to escape an inescapable present where success and failure, escape and captivity, culture and barbarism, statically overlap.

Given the multivalent ‘Beckettian’ direness of our situation today, it’s no surprise that many reach for chemical aids. The upper, the downer, are like the on/off of binary code. Some speak. Others are silent. Some get happy. Others are sad. Some feel nothing. While recreational drugs are clearly still popular – irrespective of the vast networks of immiseration, exploitation and death they travel before arriving at your door - they have been usurped by widespread prescription self-medication. The use of opioids in particular has assumed epidemic proportions especially in the US. This is unsurprising given that the US is simultaneously the world’s most capitalist and militarised nation. Try logically reconciling your inability to afford medical attention at home while your country spends billions on weapons that kill hundreds of thousands globally. Capitalism eats its young. Militarism is its envoy. A tubular vessel, the gun communicates its hollowness by emptying life. In a world threatened, anything can appear, or become, a weapon. No matter. As a prescriptive antidote, self-help books are the most lucrative ever published. Look younger. Feel better. Be smarter. Protect yourself. Think less. Feel more. Do more. Do nothing. Give up. Keep going. Happy daze indeed!

Not all books are so revered though. Libraries are perpetually culled. Books are burned (again). Or their contents are censored or simply discarded, rendered inaccessible. The compromising facts of historical truth become a barrier to ‘thinking what you want.’ Better to remove certain facts for the fantasy of limitless subjective freedom in which you are at the centre of every story. Language flees to the flows of the internet equally encouraged by fiscal demands for perpetual immanence. Everything accessible all the time! What you read is watched and calculated in advance for returns. Beware unpopular thoughts! “Digitisation saves trees”, they also argue while warehouses full of electrical servers consume vast amounts of power and water. Distracted browsing consumes the landscape. Before the full flowering of a world obsessed with dreams of unending accumulation, the more Beckett wrote, the shorter his books became. Abbreviation was a means of literally taking up less space.

Unlike the baroque minutiae of Joyce, Beckett’s early mentor, literary sparseness for Beckett was a means of letting subtraction speak. As much as words are constructive, made up of individual units like the bricks of a building, their meaning is equally dependent on gaps. Spatiality in Beckett ultimately hinges on the emptiness that defines the architectonic. Annunciation edges towards self-effacement. The non-correlation between thinking, speaking and writing is as much a barrier as a vehicle. Consider a passage from Beckett’s novel Watt (1953) where narrative continuity stalls abruptly for the repetitious reordering of the same few sentences. Words as objects randomly reordered effectively rends them of their communicative capacity, their basic ability to ‘tell a story’. Instead, the task at hand becomes testing the limits of sense words can carry. The passage is funny because it exaggerates reading as a performative act in the momentary absence of any narrative possibility: what’s left to say anyway? Why bother talking? Or writing?

It would be misguided to ascribe a basic descriptive realism to Beckett. His works, while immured in acute materialist observation, are equally quasi-parables. Yet they are parables bereft of any reassuring symbolism. There’s no Beckett dictionary to consult that will give you a definitive explanation of his most recurrent signifiers. The absence of reassuring meaning in Beckett does not equate to meaninglessness though. Instead, his oeuvre indicates a crisis of meaning underscored by dramatic contemporary socio-cultural shifts. Waiting for Godot was completed a mere three years after the end of World War II. Not wanting to simplistically corral the multifarious implications of the play, nonetheless, the landscape of desolation it conjures would realistically have been instantly recognisable to any contemporary European. A seemingly indestructible order was in ruins. This was the ruin of language and expectation as well. Frequently deployed, ‘existential’ is too facile a descriptor, one that channels all horizons to the individual. Beckett’s persistence and those of his characters, is more collective, a shared predicament. Those who persist and endure do so despite every rational reason not to.

Alex Gawronski, August 2024