And Then What: Random Thoughts on Samuel Beckett

Fig. 1: Photograph of Samuel Beckett by Roger Pic (1977)  

Fig. 2: Arthur Atkinson as Hogg in Beckett's one-act play And Then What 

 (BBC Television 1972)

 

 

When it comes to the Irish writer Samuel Beckett - last of the great modernists, etc., etc. - the strange thing is that whilst I'm fully on board with his absurdist philosophy and think him a hugely attractive figure and daring as an artist - one possessed of the courage to both wander and squander - I've never been a fan of his work and often wonder why that's so.

 

Similarly, I've never been a fan either of Beckett's one-time mentor James Joyce (whose daughter, Lucia, Beckett may or may not have fucked) [1].

 

Perhaps, like Joyce, Beckett is just a bit too intellectual and experimental for my tastes; too rooted in psychoanalysis and avant-gardism. One is almost tempted to say of Beckett what D. H. Lawrence wrote of Joyce; "too terribly would-be and done-on-purpose, utterly without spontaneity or real life" [2]. 

 

Almost, but not quite and it's possible that Lawrence would have found more to admire in Beckett than he did in Joyce [3]. 

 

At any rate, I certainly prefer Beckett to Joyce - as evidenced by the fact that there are several posts published on Torpedo the Ark that refer positively to Beckett's work: click here, for example, to access the post from 2013 on Beckett's idea of failure in Worstwood Ho (1983); or here, to read the post on Beckett's short story 'Dante and the Lobster' (1934). 

 

Finally, I've just recently read Beckett's one-act play Krapp's Last Tape (1958), which, again, I very much like as an idea, but didn't much care for as a short drama. 

 

However, I did love Beckett's little known play entitled 'And Then What', which was filmed by the BBC in 1972, starring the legendary music hall performer and comic actor Arthur Atkinson in the role of Hog - 'a lonely, bitter, pinched, wizened git' - a role written especially for him by Beckett, a lifelong fan of Atkinson's, as he was of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and other vaudeville clowns.    

 

A short clip can be viewed on YouTube by clicking here [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Beckett was introduced to Joyce in Paris in the late 1920s and the meeting had a profound influence on the younger man. Afterwards, he served as a research assistant for Joyce, who was then working on Finnegans Wake (1939) and Beckett's first published work (1929) was an essay defending his master from accusations of wilful obscurity. 

      Meanwhile, he was also (allegedly) involved with Joyce's daughter, Lucia. However, after making it clear to her that he really wasn't interested in a serious romance - not least because he was seeing another woman at the time and she was already showing signs of mental illness - his relationship with the girl's father also cooled somewhat, though they remained close and when, in 1936, Beckett was almost fatally stabbed in the chest, it was Joyce who paid his hospital bills and made regular visits. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Harry Crosby (6 September 1928), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 548.

      The (non-)relationship between Lawrence and Joyce is fascinating. Although very much aware of one another in the 1920s, the two men never met and each disparaged and dismissed one another's work. Readers who are interested in knowing more might like to see the essay by Earl Ingersoll entitled 'D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce: The Odd Couple of Literary Modernism', in The D.H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2013), pp. 1-20. It can be accessed on JSTOR: click here. 

 

[3] Not that Beckett was overly enthusiastic about Lawrence's writing. Having read the latter's short novel St Mawr (1925), Beckett wrote in his journal: 'Some lovely things as usual and plenty of rubbish'. As Lawrence died in March 1930, he had no opportunity to read any of Beckett's work. 

 

[4] For those who might otherwise be confused, please note that this is a clip from The Fast Show (S3/E8), dir. Mark Mylod and first broadcast on BBC Two (29 December 1997). It features Simon Day as Tommy Cockles and Paul Whitehouse as Arthur Atkinson.

 

 

For more random thoughts on Beckett - in relation to fashion, bravery, and overcoming the spirit of revenge - please click here. 

I Have Nothing To Say

Jiggs the Chimp as Ollie's evolutionary predecessor in  

the Laurel and Hardy film Dirty Work, (dir. Lloyd French 1933) 

 

 

Sometimes, people tell me they would like to begin writing a blog. But when I ask what's stopping them from doing so, they reply:  I have nothing to say.

 

Having nothing to say, however, didn't prevent some truly great artists from producing some very interesting work; one thinks, for example, of Cage and Beckett, both of whom illustrate the crucial function of silence and how you can build upon or radically foreground nothingness: click here. 

 

One thinks also of Seinfeld - a show famous for being about nothing: click here.   

 

And one remembers also Oliver Hardy's refusal to be fazed by or comment upon events in the classic short film Dirty Work (1933). Even when he is devolved into a chimpanzee after falling into a vat containing Prof. Noodle's rejuvination solution, Ollie still has nothing to say: click here. 

 

If, after explaining all this, any would-be blogger still feels at a loss for words, then I advise them to stick with posting pictures of their cat on Instagram. 

 

 

Cocoon Above! Cocoon Below! Notes on Chapter 2 of Metamorphoses by Emanuele Coccia

Emanuele Coccia: Associate Professor at the  

École des hautes études en sciences sociales

 

 

What kind of man likes the idea of shutting himself up in a cocoon? Well, Emanuele Coccia, certainly seems excited by the thought: 

 

"I've often dreamt of it. [...] Cutting off all relations with the world and giving myself over entirely to the transformative workings of matter. Feeling my soul carving itself out and knitting itself together anew, in a new form." [a]   

 

This sounds a rather solipsistic fantasy to me and, personally, I could think of nothing worse than being cocooned in spun silk. 

 

But Coccia is right, however, to argue that metamorphosis is something greater than a conversion or revolutionary change; the two terms in which men (contra caterpillars) usually think transformation:

 

"In conversion it is only the subject that changes: their opinions, their attitudes, their way of being are transformed, but the world remains, and must remain, the same. Only a world left untouched by conversion can testify to the transformation. Conversion is often the outcome of an inner journey, full of trials and revelations, long periods of abstinence and asceticism. Such change presupposes absolute and total self-mastery.

      Nothing could be further from metamorphosis than a conversion." [47]

 

As for the second model of change, revolution:

 

"In this case it is the world that changes; the subject who causes this change and stands surety for the passage from one world to another, cannot themselves be transformed because they are the only witness to the transformation underway." [48]

 

Thus, in a sense, revolution is "as far removed from metamorphosis as conversion" [49]. 

 

So what then is metamorphosis - and what makes it so unique? Well, according to Coccia:

 

"In metamorphosis, the power that passes through us and transforms us is not a conscious and personal act of will. It comes from elsewere, it is older than the body it shapes, and it operates outside any decision. Above all, there is [...] no negation of a past or a former identity. On the contrary, a metamorphic being is a being that has renounced all ambition to recognize themselves in one face alone." [48]     

 

Unfortunately, whilst that's fine for insects - and Coccia writes a whole section in praise of insects [see pp. 50-54] - we're not metamorphic beings and the only people who renounce all ambition to recognise themselves in one face alone are actors, impressionists, and schizophrenics [b]. 

 

Just to be clear: I'm as interested in insects as the next man (unless they happen to be an entomologist). I've even written several posts on our six-legged friends: click here, for example, or here. 

 

But I find it hard to share Coccia's obsession with insect metamorphosis in its various stages and what he terms postnatal eggs (his term for the chrysalis or cocoon built by the larva), even though I do find intriguing his suggestion that to change form "means having the strength to turn one's body into an egg capable of creating and bearing a new identity" [63].  

 

I do worry, however, that this is Coccia's method for reviving the (slightly addled) idea of the mundane egg; a major symbol in creation myths around the world, which even some modern cosmologists have figuratively adopted [c]. The egg, writes Coccia, "is the emblem of the metamorphic state" [63], a line which could have come straight from a theosophical handbook. 

 

More interesting, to me at least, is Coccia's argument that the cocoon-as-postnatal egg must be understood as a question of technics and not simply as something natural or spontaneous; nor as a form of what Ernst Kapp termed Organsprojektion [d]:

 

"According to Kapp any technical object, any instrument, is merely the projection of an organic structure outside the body, in a perfectly isomorphic relationship. The extension of the organ, its projection out of the anatomical body, makes it possible to correct its defects [...] but above all to humanize the world. Thanks to the organ-projection, thanks to technics, the world becomes an extension of the human body." [72] 

 

As Coccia rightly points out, from this perspective, technics is something Allzumenschliches - as if other organisms couldn't possibly be technologically savvy. He's right also to say that in the idea of technics embodied by the cocoon, "the manipulation of the world becomes something that allows us to cast off our own nature, to change it from within rather than project it outward" [73].   

 

Coccia arrives at the interesting conclusion that every technical object is (potentially at least) a cocoon that enables metamorphosis:

 

"A computer, a telephone, a hammer, or a bottle are not just extensions of the human body. On the contrary, they are ways of manipulating the world that render possible a change of personal identity, ethologically if not anatomically. Even a book is a cocoon that makes it possible to reformulate one's own mind." [73]

 

The cocoon, then, for Coccia, is "the paradigm not only of technics, but of being-in-the-world in general" [80]; a kind of transcendental form not only of selfhood, but self-consciousnes, thus proving that "metamorphosis is above all the relationship we have with ourselves" [81] [my emphasis]. 

 

I somehow knew Coccia would say that, as he drifts back into a dream state, seeing cocoons everywhere and enjoying the sensation of being encased in "white, soft silk" [84] like a grub. Still, who am I to criticise if, like Samuel Beckett, his preoccupation with the eternally larval allows him to reimagine the human condition [e].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, trans. Robin Mackay, (Polity Press, 2021), p. 45. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the main body of text. 

      When Coccia, expanding upon his fantasy of becoming-unrecognisable, describes seeing wings sprout from his body one is reminded of something that Seth Brundle famously said: "I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over and the insect is awake." See David Cronenberg's 1986 film The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle.  

[b] I suppose Coccia might argue that insects didn't originally possess the ability to metamorphose either - that this was something that evolved over time. And so perhaps people too, in some distant future, might be able to "condense within the formal plurality of a single individual existence the impulse towards the multiplication of forms", thereby making planetary biodiversity into "a question of personal virtuosity" [50]. 

      It should be pointed out, however, that in the absence of an exoskeleton, it seems highly unlikely that this will ever come to pass outside of fiction, such as Kafka's Die Verwandlung (1915) and George Langelaan's 'The Fly' (1957), although maybe certain religious-minded people who believe in reincarnation or metempsychosis might claim that metamorphosis is already a human reality.          

[c] Following Edwin Hubble's experimental observations of the universe's constant expansion in 1929, Georges Lemaître proposed that what he had earlier described as a primeval atom might better be thought of as a cosmic egg, from which the universe had hatched. Understandably, not all physicists welcomed the idea (not least because it created the need for a cosmic chicken). 

[d] See Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik, (1877), one of the first books on the nature of modern technology by a philosopher. It has recently been translated into English, by Lauren K. Wolfe, as Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, (Minnesota University Press, 2018).   

[e] For a prize-winning essay on Beckett's thinking on the eternally larval (as well as what he called the worm-state), see Rachel Murray, 'Vermicular Origins: The Creative Evolution of Samuel Beckett's Worm', in the Journal of Literature and Science, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2016), pp. 19-35. 

      See also Murray's fascinating book on the role of insects in modern literature; The Modernist Exoskeleton, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). A revised version of the above essay appears as chapter 4, following on from a chapter on Hilda Doolittle's experimental writings on the cocoon, in which the author contends (in a similar manner to Emanuele Coccia) that the latter not only has a protective function, but allows the self to respond to its surroundings in new ways. 

 

 

To read my notes on the Introduction and first chapter of Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses, click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter three ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter four ... click here.  To read notes on chapter five ... click here. 

Lobster Variations (I - IV)

Nobuyuki Shimamura: Fantasy Lobster (2013)

Hoki Museum Collection, Chiba, Japan 

 

I.

 

Such is my fascination with lobsters at the moment that I'm beginning to think that, like Prufrock, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas" [1].

 

Though of course, literary scholars are divided about the nature of the marine creature that is immortalised by Eliot in these lines: is it a lobster, is it a crab, or is it some other (perhaps entirely imaginary) denizen of the deep? 

 

Whilst I understand the arguments put forward by those who favour the crab reading - for example, it's true that the word scuttling is more suggestive of the quick movements made by crabs than the slow crawling walk of the lobster - nevertheless I opt for the lobster interpretation, as I think lobsters have a richer (and more perverse) symbolic history. 

 

Ultimately, however, we can never know and, of course, Eliot's poetic language doesn't really operate by referring us to some actual sea creature outside of the text, so this question is largely moot.            

 

 

II. 

 

Lawrence's poem 'Demiurge' [2] is one of a series of late verses that share a common objective; namely, to expose the absurdity of Plato's theory that only ideas encapsulate the true and essential nature of things, rather than physical forms existing in the material world.     

 

It's also a poem which features a rather lovely description of a lobster ...

 

They say that reality exists only in the spirit

that corporal existence is a kind of death

that pure being is bodiless

that the idea of the form precedes the form substantial.

 

But what nonsense it is!

as if any Mind could have imagined a lobster

dozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!

 

Even the mind of God can only imagine 

those things that have become themselves:

bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in creation

even if it is only a lobster on tip-toe.

 

 

III. 

 

More Pricks Than Kicks is a collection of ten interlocking short stories, set in Dublin, by Samuel Beckett [3]. It was first published in 1934, just a couple of years after Lawrence's Last Poems. 

 

The opening story - 'Dante and the Lobster' - concerns the reaction of the tale's protagonist (Belacqua) discovering to his horror that the lobster he has purchased for dinner with his aunt must be prepared in a particularly unpleasant manner:

 

"In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. [...] Now it was going alive into scalding water." 

 

His attempt to console himself (and us) with the fantasy that the creature's death will be a relatively quick and painless one is undermined by the narrator of the tale declaring with grim assurance: It is not.      

 

 

IV.  

 

And this brings us, finally, to David Foster Wallace's famous essay 'Consider the Lobster' [4] ...

 

Disguised as a review of the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival and originally published in the August 2004 edition of the food and wine magazine Gourmet, it's a wilful provocation which irritated many readers by primarily concerning itself with the ethics of boiling a highly intelligent and sensitive creature alive in order to enhance the consumer's (sadistic) pleasure. 

 

Keen to dispell the myth that lobsters have such simple brains that they don't really experence pain as we understand it, Wallace even includes a handy discussion of lobster neurobiology. Though, as he points out, deciding whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer isn't just determined by the complexity of their sensory hardware; we must also examine whether the animal displays behavior associated with pain. 

 

And of course, as anyone who has ever watched a lobster thrashing about in a pan of boiling water for up to 45 seconds and desperately trying to escape will tell you, it requires an impressive display of intellectual gymnastics not to view this as pain-behaviour.  

 

Arguably, however, in even raising the possibility that we might compare the treatment of lobsters at the 56th annual Maine Lobster Festival to the fate of the Jews transported to Nazi extermination camps, Wallace oversteps the mark (i.e., he's walking the lobster, as they say in 1990s urban slang) [5]. 

 

Indeed, Wallace himself nervously backs away from this line of thought, but not before wondering if the reason why such an argument seems so outrageously extreme is precisely because we still largely believe animals to have significantly less moral value than human beings.

Wallace concludes his essay by asking his readers (as fellow meat-eaters and seafood lovers) two key questions:

 

"Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)?"

 

And to those who show no desire to worry about such things or dismiss the question of animal welfare out of hand, he asks:

 

"Is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don't want to think about it? And if the latter, then why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it?" 

 

Ultimately, Wallace is right to argue that we all need to be a bit more thoughtful about what we eat and how our food is produced; all need to be a bit more attentive to the suffering not just of our fellow mammals, but birds, fish, and, indeed, crustaceans like the lobster.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] T. S. Eliot, 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock', (1915): click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Demiurge', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 603.  

[3] Samuel Beckett, 'Dante and the Lobster', in More Pricks Than Kicks, (Chatto and Windus, 1934). A more recent edition, ed. with an extensive Preface by Cassandra Nelson, was published by Faber and Faber in 2010. The story can also be read online as originally published in the literary magazine Evergreen Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1957): click here. 

[4] David Foster Wallace, 'Consider the Lobster', in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, (Little, Brown and Co., 2005). To read this essay online (in an annotated version), click here. Or, to listen to the author read his essay (audiobook style) on YouTube, click here.   

[5] It might be noted that several writers, including Jewish Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, have drawn a comparison between the treatment of animals within the industrialised food industry and the Holocaust. Animal rights groups, including PETA, also have no problem with making such a metaphysical equivalence, though there are many who find the idea that meat is murder morally obtuse and highly offensive. 

      Without wishing to get too off-topic, it might also be noted that the Nazis were greatly concerned with animal welfare; for example, they outlawed vivisection, regulated animal slaughter, gave the wolf protected status, and prohibited the boiling alive of lobsters. 

 

 

I would like to acknowledge my debt for (some of) the ideas pursued here to an article by Jonathan Greenberg; 'A Lobster Is Being Eaten' (19 May, 2019), in the Journal of the Modernist Studies Association Modernism/modernity. Click here to read online.    

On Travel/Writing (with a Deleuzian Punchline)

 Have monogrammed trunk will travel 

 

To consider travel writing is one thing: but to conceive of literature as travel is something else; something a bit more philosophically interesting, a bit more Deleuzean ...

 

For Deleuze understood that penser c'est voyager and that the true nomad doesn't need to traipse around the world or migrate here and there; that they move even when standing still and that the most vital trips are in intensity, not space. 

 

Deleuze hinged his theory of travel upon observations from several writers, including: 

 

(i) Fitzgerald, who insisted that travelling - even to remote islands or the darkest jungles - never amounts to a real break if one takes along one's old beliefs, memories, and habits of thought ... 

 

(ii) Beckett, who described it as dumb to travel simply for the pleasure of travelling itself; there had to be a destination of some kind ...

 

(iii) Proust, who said that upon waking the true dreamer has to go and check things out in the world; i.e., what motivates their desire to travel is not to discover new lands, but to confirm the reality of their own nightmares and visions. [1]     

 

Deleuze was also a serious reader of D. H. Lawrence - and Lawrence was both a great traveller and a great writer, frequently overtaken by the necessity to move, although, amusingly, his own savage pilgrimage ultimately brought him to the conclusion that travel is a splendid lesson in disillusion. [2]

 

Of course, that hasn't stopped Lawrence scholars packing their suitcases and floating from international conference to conference, in order to endlessly discuss Lawrence's world tour and talk about his uncanny ability to connect with the so-called spirit of place. 

 

For as Deleuze once joked, that's how academics travel - by generating a lot of hot air ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Gilles Deleuze: 'Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel', Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 77-78.  

 

[2] Readers interested in knowing more about Lawrence's thoughts on travel can click here for a related post to this one.  

This post is for Adam Peter Lang.

 

 

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

It's true that we learn from failure. But we don't learn how to succeed in the future, no matter what feeble-minded optimists like to believe. At most, we learn how to fail better, as Samuel Beckett informs us in a prose piece amusingly entitled Worstward Ho (1983).

Beckett is absolutely not telling us that if at first we don't succeed, we should try, try again in the hope and expectation that such endurance is bound to pay off. Rather, he's saying that no matter how hard you try, no matter how many times you fail, you will never succeed: that success is not even an option.

For we are fated to fail. We are destined to fail. We are doomed to fail. Such is the tragic character of our mortal being. The fact that Beckett affirms this and finds in it a source of darkly comic satisfaction, demonstrates that his is what Nietzsche would term a pessimism of strength (or, if you prefer, a Dionysian philosophy).

The fact that his words are to be found on a wide variety of motivational posters, mugs, and fridge magnets is also something that should cause laughter amongst Beckett enthusiasts, rather than despair and irritation. For as one commentator notes, observing corporate executives and New Age hippies draw comfort and inspiration from lines they have naively misunderstood is like watching someone innocently throw a stick for their dog, not realising that it is in fact a human shin bone they've just picked up in the park.