Beckett, Modernist Antihumanism, and the Question of Meaning
Ben Papsun
With the advent of modernism around the turn of the 20th century, developments in psychology, art, literature, and philosophy all both contributed and reacted to a mounting skepticism about the livability of life. The birth of Freudian psychoanalysis, the Dada and Surrealist art movements, the fiction of Kafka and later Camus, and the resurgence of Nietzschean philosophy are all symptoms and catalysts of this skepticism. Within a particular cultural undercurrent, many of the leading thinkers across various disciplines began to engage in criticism of the widely accepted idea that not only is life innately meaningful, but that it is an experience which gives more to its subjects than it takes away from them. Following the second World War, this new vein of proto-existential thought coalesces into a rich ecosystem of ideas, including the theories of post-structural critics like Jacques Derrida about the impossibility of meaning and communication, and the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd,” which Samuel Beckett has come to be strongly associated with. When investigated, a clear link can be identified which bridges these later developments to their early modernist counterparts. Using Beckett’s 1953 novel The Unnamable [L’Innommable] as an exemplar of late modern existential anxiety, I will trace some of the antihumanist lineage that sets the stage for Beckett, as well as some key departures Beckett makes from his precursors. Identifying these precursors allows us not only to understand the artistic role of Beckett’s writing, but also the cultural and ideological conditions which contributed to an intellectual decentering of “the human” in the postmodern era.
Beckett writes in The Unnamable, “I would like to think that I occupy the centre, but nothing is less certain” (Beckett 297). It is apparent not only in The Unnamable, but throughout Beckett’s oeuvre, that he is very critical of anthropocentric models of thinking and living (i.e. humanism). Something very similar to Beckett’s distaste for humanism can be seen in the work of English modernist philosopher and poet T.E. Hulme. Both Beckett and Hulme recognized that the era in which they lived would inevitably decenter the ideal of the human. In a 1924 collection of Hulme’s writings, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, Hulme heralded the return of a particular art form which was native to “more primitive people,” which was to take the place of 20th century Romantic and humanist aspirations. These people
live in a world whose lack of order and seeming arbitrariness must inspire a certain fear. One may perhaps get a better description of what must be their state of mind by comparing it to the fear which makes certain people unable to cross open spaces. …They are dominated by what Worringer calls a kind of spiritual “space-shyness” in face of the varied confusion and arbitrariness of existence. (Hulme 86)
Hulme’s theory is adapted from the ideas of German art historian Willhelm Worringer, who originally proposed a theory of non-Western peoples as having a “spiritual dread of space.” Worringer characterizes this dread as arising from the starkness of the abstract and the uncertain; it is a symptom of living in what one perceives as an “extended, disconnected, bewildering world of phenomena” (Worringer 16). What neither Hulme nor Worringer could have foreseen is that the same lack of order Western thinkers would associate with “more primitive people” would soon become a looming absence in their own cultural sphere.
Samuel Beckett’s writing shows this to have been the case. Any notion that Western cultural “sophistication” was a ladder out of the rabbit hole of existential nihilism became dismantled (or “deconstructed,” as Derrida would put it) by a number of intellectuals operating during the twilight of modernism and the dawn of postmodernism. These developments have significant origins in Freudian psychoanalysis (and Beckett made extensive use of psychological textbooks for his writings (Habibi 212))—for instance, in psychoanalyst Otto Rank’s 1924 book The Trauma of Birth, which imagines all post-birth existence as marked by separation and violence. The idea that life could be a curse rather than a blessing, now with a multidisciplinary backing, left the fringes of the avant-garde and entered the fore. This is a point of departure between Hulme and Beckett: Hulme had a “horror of the abject, of anything that threatens the border of the ego, that evades control” (Carr 110), whereas Beckett embraces all of these qualities and uses them to his artistic advantage. Although Hulme reviled humanism, he was not fully willing to commit to its antithesis either. Beckett had fewer reservations.
The idea of life as a curse and birth as a punishment can be seen everywhere in Beckett, particularly in The Unnamable: “The best would be not to begin” (Beckett 294). … “I was given a pensum, at birth perhaps, as a punishment for having been born perhaps, or for no particular reason” (Beckett 312). … “…the inestimable gift of life had been rammed down my gullet” (Beckett 300). These are just a few characteristically cynical quotes from an inexhaustible body in Beckett’s writing. By eagerly embracing starkness and abstraction, Beckett satisfies Hulme’s prophecy of “a certain change of sensibility… [which] will differ in kind from the humanism which has prevailed from the Renaissance to now” (Hulme 91). For Beckett, life—the most sacred and unquestionable cornerstone of human experience—is subject to an inversion of its value. And if life, the origin from which all values arise (what Derrida might call the “transcendental signified”) is to be deconstructed, then the result will be “a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign” (Derrida 49), such that all values also become subject to inversion.
The inversion of value and its effect on sign-based communication is a central theme (if one can even call it that) of Beckett’s The Unnamable. Existing outside of time and space, in an inconsistently featureless abyss, the immobile narrator seems only to exist through his power of speech, or at least the speech inside his head. But for him, this is not his only recourse, his only blessing; his power of speech is, to him, an inescapable punishment. As he tells us:
I have to speak, whatever that means… No one compels me to, there is no one, it’s an accident, a fact. Nothing can ever exempt me from it, there is nothing, nothing to discover, nothing to recover, nothing that can lessen what remains to say, I have the ocean to drink, so there is an ocean then. (Beckett 316)
In a generally post- world—post-birth, post-life, post-meaning—the symbolic order of language, too, is threatened. If life has no intrinsic value, then neither does language, which acquires its meaning from life. Thus, language, which is built on a hierarchy of meaning, becomes invalidated. The “ocean” the narrator describes could be thought of as an ocean of surplus signification, made vast by the variability of interpretation and the speaker’s ultimate loss of agency over the meaning of their own words. The narrator bemoans this phenomenon: “…it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something, a little yes, a little no…” (Beckett 305). Whether or not language yields an accordance with truth and reality, our entire social order is built on at least the possibility of such relationships. As speakers, these relationships exist beyond our grasp, and so we have the same “ocean” to drink as Beckett’s narrator. Though we like to think that we control the meaning of what we express and how we express it, The Unnamable, taken together with postmodern thinkers like Derrida, shows that the opposite is the case: we are controlled by meaning. As philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once declared, “Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history” (Merleau-Ponty, xxii).
It is because we are condemned to meaning, as Beckett’s narrator is condemned to speech, that the narrator says, despite insisting it would have been better never to have begun, that “I have to begin. That is to say I have to go on” (Beckett 294). Perhaps this impulse to carry on, to live in a world in flux, provides a serviceable delineation between modernism and postmodernism. Hulme and Worringer, both modernists, are confronted with the possibility of a world without meaning and react by theorizing about artificial impositions of meaning. For them, the solution to an arbitrary world is a deliberate exercise of artistic will. Consider this passage from Worringer, describing the artistic approach of the “primitive cultures” which, insulated from Western “rationalist” logics, had not grown out of the “spiritual dread of space”:
Tormented by the entangled inter-relationship and flux of the phenomena of the outer world, such peoples were dominated by an immense need for tranquillity. The happiness they sought from art did not consist in the possibility of projecting themselves into the things of the outer world, of enjoying themselves in them, but in the possibility of taking the individual thing of the external world out of its arbitrariness and seeming fortuitousness, of eternalising it by approximation to abstract forms and, in this manner, of finding a point of tranquillity and a refuge from appearances. (Worringer 16)
Worringer describes how a people confronted by a world pulsing with disordered stimuli will respond by imposing seemingly abstract and eternal forms upon it. He does not consider that the role of art may not be to superimpose the eternal on the arbitrary, but to expose or even embrace the arbitrariness of the world.
In The Unnamable, Beckett does indeed eternalize the world by approximating it into an abstract form—the narrator’s “dungeon,” which is a simulacrum of the real world—but he does not do it for the sake of achieving “tranquility” or “refuge.” The main character finds no comfort in the abstractness or eternality of his existence. Rather, he is a vehicle for the articulation of a postmodern living, the experience of life in a world where meaning is not presupposed, and so “there is nothing, nothing to discover, nothing to recover, nothing that can lessen what remains to say” (Beckett, Unnamable 316). What is most frightening about this dramatized dungeon is not that there is ultimately nothing to be found in it—what is most frightening is that the fact of there being nothing does not exempt the narrator from attempting to make sense of nothing. This is also realized at the metatextual level, at which the reader undergoes a similar experience, wherein they read a book that is essentially about nothing, and they are faced with the task of making some amount of sense of it. Even the title of the book is a synecdoche for the same effect: it is called “The Unnamable,” but this title cannot help but be inadequate, since in its naming it has already violated its conceit.
Beckett does not create a new order of meaning to substitute the one he deconstructs, possibly because he knows that it would suffer from the same breakdown as the one it replaces, or perhaps because he does not take the world seriously enough to convince himself that such a task would be worthwhile. The Unnamable seems to scorn attempts by its readers and critics to tease out “meaning” from it; any such attempts would further illustrate our inability to escape meaning, our unwillingness to confront what Hulme termed the “varied confusion and arbitrariness of existence” (Hulme 86) on its own terms. Is it even possible, we might ask, for a text to be meaningless? One wonders how we could ever step outside of Merleau-Ponty’s condemnation to meaning, or The Unnamable’s narrator’s determination to go on because he has already begun.
Hulme and Worringer would likely be uneasy with such ambiguity. Hulme’s essay on art opens with a quote from one of his journals: “The fright of the mind before the unknown created not only the first gods, but also the first art” (Hulme 73). For Hulme, art is not only a coping mechanism to coexist with meaninglessness; it is a language of meaning so powerful as to rival the gods. We need not fear a meaningless world, so long as we can impose meaning onto it by way of art. This privileging of art as an edifice of meaning highlights an interesting contradiction in Hulme and Worringer: by embarking on a “quest for an answer to the problem of human knowledge” (Carr 110), they are engaging in a particularly humanist practice, despite advocating for ideals they both saw as rebelling against the traditional humanist dogma. Although both Hulme and Beckett were opponents of humanism, Beckett was content to return the gaze of the abyss of deferred meaning, whereas Hulme was determined to look the other way. Like Derrida, Beckett “seems to show no nostalgia for a lost presence” (Spivak xvi).
One can imagine why Beckett’s antihumanism would be so much more penetrating than Hulme’s, considering that between the publication of Hulme’s Speculations in 1924 and Beckett’s The Unnamable in 1953 lay the gaping absence of meaning called World War II. If the tragedy and senselessness during this time could not convince one that the humanist dream was nothing but an ugly farce, it is unlikely that anything could. In a 1946 essay, Beckett wrote of “L’humaine” [“the human”]: “it is a word, and doubtless a concept too, that is reserved for times of great massacres. There must be pestilence, Lisbon [the 1755 earthquake] and religious butchery, for people to think of loving one another” (Stonebridge 123). In other words, the idea of “the human” is a relative concept, and the state of our humanity at a given point of time will determine how heavily we need to lean on it to remain hopeful. This is why butchery prefigures love: an instance of hope or humanity can only be recognized in light of the inhumanity it stands in relation to. Humanism is an excuse for optimism, and optimism (as well as pessimism) is predicated on some degree of belief in an order of values. Once this order is deconstructed, humanism can be exposed for the tragic fraud that it is—or twisted into a postmodern comedy—or, as in the case of Beckett, both.
This line of thinking could end here, at a rather cynical and nihilistic impasse. This is one of several viable interpretations of what Beckett and his precursors can tell us about the human condition. One problem with this anti-humanist impasse is that an impasse implies an impossibility of motion, a complete stagnation. But Beckett’s characters, paradoxically, are never completely motionless. They are always compelled, even when hope is dim or nonexistent, to continue on, to speak, to try to begin again. As the narrator of The Unnamable confided in us, “I have to begin. That is to say I have to go on” (Beckett 294). Even if Beckett does not have faith in l’humaine or offer us a way out of our suffering, his characters are not exempt from an impulse to carry on. It is perhaps this blind, unyielding impetus which has inspired such a surprisingly large readership for Beckett.
As Cornel West describes Beckett, “[he] leads us through our contemporary inferno with love and sorrow, but no cheap pity or promise of ultimate happiness” (West xvi). Beckett does not offer us a utopia, because his works are reflections of our conditioned modern life, not of ahistorical fantasies. Let us think back for a moment to the quote which Hulme uses to open his essay on art: “The fright of the mind before the unknown created not only the first gods, but also the first art” (Hulme 73). Beckett did not offer his art in the form of salvific candles to ward off the darkness of the unknown. However, Beckett still felt compelled to create art in the face of an indifferently cold reality (he could just as easily have thrown in the towel). Could it be that Beckett was as frightened of the unknown as his readers are? Could it be that his art, his way of “speaking” and “beginning,” as in The Unnamable, brought him closer to l’humaine than he even realized? We may never satisfactorily answer these questions, and so we are left, like Beckett’s characters, to continue to try, even when failure seems unavoidable.
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable. Calder and Boyars, 1959.
Carr, Helen. “T.E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space.’” Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gąsiorek. T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism. Ashgate, 2006.
Derrida, Jacques, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Of Grammatology. 1st American ed., Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Habibi, Reza. “Samuel Beckett’s ‘Psychology Notes’ and The Unnamable.” Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 27, no. 2, Sept. 2018, pp. 211–227, 10.3366/jobs.2018.0237. Accessed 8 May 2019.
Hulme, T.E. Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, 2nd ed., ed. Herbert Read. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1936.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, trans. Colin Smith. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Forgotten Books, 2015.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Translator’s Preface.” Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology. 1st American ed., Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Stonebridge, Lyndsey. Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and Refugees. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
West, Cornel. The Cornel West Reader. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999. Print.
Worringer, Willhelm. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997.