THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS ANALECT A HUSSERLIANA THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH VOLUME XIII Editor: ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, Belmont, Mass. EUGENE F. KAELIN Dept. ofP hilosophy, Rorida State University, Tallahassee THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS THE POETIC PLIGHT OF SAMUEL BECKETT An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Literature D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY DORDRECHT: HOLLAND / BOSTON: U.S.A. LONDON: ENGLAND Libruy of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kaelin, Eugene Francis, 1926- The unhappy consciousness. (Analecta Husserliana ; v. 13) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906- -Philosophy. 2. Phenomenology and literature. I. Title. II. Series. B3279.H94A129 vol. 13 [PR6003.E282Z5) 81-12137 ISBN-13: 978-94-009-8524-7 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-8522-3 001: 10.1007/978-94-009-8522-3 Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Boston Inc., 190 Old Derby Street, Hingham, MA 02043, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland. D. Reidel Publishing Company is a member of the Kluwer Group. All Rights Reserved Copyright © 1981 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1981 To My Parents, Who Knew, Without Having Read of It, The Truth of Consciousness THE THEME LITERATURE AND INTERDISCIPLINARY PHENOMENOLOGY: The Pessimism/Optimism controversy in the work ofS amuel Beckett as viewed by Eugene Kaelin Eugene Kaelin's book appears in the sequence of the research program: Inter disciplinary Phenomenology and literature, which is being carried out by The International Society for Phenomenology and Literature, and follows the forthcoming Volume XII of the Analecta Husserliana series entitled The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature. Professor Kaelin plays an im portant role in this research program and we are happy that he has entrusted his book to us. Proposing the philosophical program for our literature and interdisciplinary phenomenology research, I have attempted to highlight the main perspectives in which literature and philosophy meet.* The enigmatic situation of the human being, the vicissitudes of his existence, his ever repeated efforts to discover his "unique destiny" over against the common doom, present puzzl ing issues by which both are haunted. To evoke, differentiate and show the multiple variants of answers to these issues is the task of one, while to unravel and to determine their ultimate factors in the Human Condition is that of the other. In some literary works the philosophical quest is intermingled with artistic literary pursuit; in others, philosophical reflection serves as artistic means. Yet, due to these common innermost concerns, even those literary works which appear as devoid of philosophical thought call upon philosophy in order to be appropriately appreciated. Eugene Kaelin's philosophical analysis of Beckett's work shows that al though on a primary analysis philosophical thought and literary artistry may blend, it still needs philosophically enlightened criticism to perform - as if counteracting philosophy's first impact - a secondary interpretation, so as to bring the significance of this blend to its maturity. * Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 'Poetica Nova: The Creative Crucibles of the Human Condition and of Art / A Treatise on the Metaphysics of the Human Condition and of Art,' Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XII, forthcoming. vii viii THE THEME Samuel Beckett has visited upon the world one of the richest and most awe-inspiring of contemporary literary oeuvres. His life's work includes poetry, novels, short stories, plays, radio and television skits, a movie scenario - all marked by a high degree of self-conscious artistry which reduces an abstract thought to an electrifyingly concrete image, and the image to a pattern of sound that gives it body. Indeed, in the same oeuvre there are plays without words in which ideas are portrayed through bodily gesture, and fIlms that are made to breathe in sight and sound. Never, in all this prodigious imaginative creation, is an idea pursued for its own sake as summarizing for our insouciant intellects the essence of our natural or social life-worlds, or the tragedy of our humanly projected individual existences therein, or how it is with the aesthete whose writing is performed in pain, and undertaken to relieve the pain of living, or even how it is with those of us who have never created a world or written a word the least pregnant with meaning. Ideas are for the intellect; art is made to wring the elevated element from our Human Con dition. Professor Kaelin has not written on all of Beckett's works. He begins his treatise with an overview of the criticism Beckett's art has already engendered: some good, some bad, some merely irrelevant. What makes criticism first relevant and then good is its fittingness to the corpus that has inspired it, its analytical acuity and perceptual clarity, and, ultimately, its effect in creating the desire to revisit the original artistic and creative mass. From the extant criticism on Beckett's art, Kaelin has chosen a dominant theme: Beckett as "philosophical" writer. What makes a literary artist philosophical? An attitude of resignation? Or of ponderousness? A penchant for analysis? Or merely a concern for the perennially unsolved problems of the human species? If so, the literary artist is like any other man or woman: humble before the awfully great, or prideful and a little pompous, as the case may be; too concerned with the accuracy of one's own categories, and foolish enough to continue stretching them to cover the imponderables of human existence, including the joys a well-turned phrase may evoke in the jaded hearts of the all-knowing but mysteriously unseeing cognoscenti. The literary artist is philosophical to the degree that his works exhibit a philosophical structure; such is Kaelin's thesis. The philosophy of a work does not appear on that work's surface, nor in the literal meanings of the words whose tokens appear on that surface, but only in the plots, if the idea is metaphysical, or in the author's characterization, if moral. For this reason, Professor Kaelin attempts to read through the surface of the works, through the semantic constructions of the author's syntax, to whatever reality is THE THEME ix depicted within the stratum of "represented objectivities," to use the term of Roman Ingarden, whether that is reality presented in a metaphysical or moral perspective. And since literature has been produced that is philosophical in this sense of the term - a genre of literature in which it is the literature and not the author that is philosophical, Kaelin has devised a method for the criticism of this particular genre of the literary art. We could call it "philoso phical criticism," but he prefers the more specific label, "phenomenological structuralism." It is a way in which anyone proceeds who reads the work and then describes what appears therein, and which could therefore appear to any attentive consciousness. The model for such a method had already been hinted at in the criticism of Beckett himself; the authors he criticized were Joyce and Proust. Such writers are "philosophical," claimed Beckett, in that they used a philosophical idea as a literary technique, merely as a convenience for giving structure to their works of art. Behind Joyce there stood Dante and Bruno and Vico; behind Proust, Schopenhauer and Bergson. This treatise attempts to gauge the extent to which Beckett himself is a "philosophical" author in the sense described; and behind him looms the shadows of a host of philosophers: Descartes, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre, to name only the most obvious. The central question asked in pursuit of this method is not how this partic ular work of our author seemingly expresses the absurdity of the Human Condition, for that is at once a loaded and misguided question. The works do not express absurdity at all; absurdity is sometimes used, however, to express whatever it is the total work itself expresses. Misguided, in the same vein, is the question whether these works express pessimism or optimism or meliorism; for they express neither of the three. Beckett's vaunted "pessi mism," like the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer Beckett has on occasion used to structure his work, is also a technical convenience. Where he has depicted the human being as completely caught up in the throes of inauthen tic existence - either as living in the past in the flight from the present in order to avoid the necessity of making a decision to produce a better future, or surrendering one's own will to that of another, or merely monotonously repeating an action that is no action because it lacks significance even to the person whose spirit has become deadened by such a habit - others have found the tragedy of our contemporary age; if so, it is a tragedy in search of a theory, a Sophoclean phenomenon in search of an unknown Aristotle. Aristotelian catharsis, we all recall, was developed for the humanity of antiquity, and necessitated a protagonist better than the average man or x THE THEME woman, albeit flawed by a particular human weakness, and could for this reason not fit the world inhabited by bums, weaklings, cowards, and the moral degenerates we all can be. Beckett's are no flawed characters; as artistic creations, they are characters perfected to produce the effect they do. Our perception of their fates does not shunt off our feelings of pity and fear as if into the atmosphere itself. Rather, it concentrates our feeling as if com pressed into an ache in the center of our breasts. Whether novelistic or dramatic, Beckett's characters are sublime. The more they suffer, the less significant their lives, the more inauthentic their struggles to relieve the hurt, the deeper into the mud their nameless essence is driven, the greater is the tragic lift controlled by an encounter with the literary or dramatic work which may thus be all the more authentic, as art, as the heroes or antiheroes of that art are themselves inauthe,ntic as personalities. After all these years, the play is still the thing, not the idea; the novel, and not our reading of it, whose encounter produces the aesthetic effect. For this reason, it is safer perhaps to aver that man's true nature is better known, because better learned, through our encounters with works of art than through any artist's particular vision of the truth of human nature. Such indeed is the assumption Professor Kaelin asks us to make in order to follow his account of Beckett's poetic plight. If you go along with his suggestion, you will be led through the labyrinthine ways in the imagination of a con summate artist. Philosophically, that imagination has been variously shaped: from the earlier points of view that are Cartesian, Berkeleyan, Schopenhaurean, we move to the middle stages in which the Hegelian self-referring infinitude of absolute mind gradually changes into the ultimate stages in which existentialist themes dominate the literary and dramatic structures. And throughout, in both the novels and the plays, there is Beckett's constant concern for getting it right, for making the direct point indirectly, to show and not merely to tell. Always the aesthete, he has approached his artistic zenith in accomplishing the maximum effect with the minimum "natural" resources - a sight varying from blinding light to utter darkness, each concealing the litter of our natural environment, and constituting one variance interspersed with another: a field of sound constituted by a baby's cry out of a stark silence and alternating with an adult's sigh; the two sets of variances constitute a new phenomenology of consciousness unfolding in less than a minute's exposure, yet experienced as a single harmony of sound and visual sense. In the later novels, as in many of the plays, the hero is the narrator. He may be nameless because unnamable, a voice struggling to control other THE THEME xi voices, a ping, indeed; or he may be a groveler in the mud, or a personification unhappily divided into two parts, separated only by the nothingness of time, the one controlling the words, the other the music. But as always the puzzle to be solved entails the harmony of the music with the words, the rhythm with the image invoked. Indeed, it is in the novels of the creative voice and in the plays raised to the second exponential degree, which Professor Kaelin calls "dramaturgical ," that the author's purpose becomes most obvious: showing how it is is perhaps the only way of relieving the pain of how it is, to live as a human being. Separated from oneself as from others and from others as from any rational ideal, which Hegel calls "the Beyond," the literary consciousness is the un happy consciousness per se, which, left to its own devices, may be allowed to languish in the pain of its own separation from the world and from others, or to assume the pain of its own self-deliverance, which is to create a reality of significance to itself. At their highest, i.e. in the slough of their despond, Beckett's literary and dramatic works illuminate in our every encounter with them a tragedy for our modern times; and they do this by evincing the sub limity of the human spirit. Parts of this treatise were delivered at the second annual meeting of the International Society for Phenomenology and Literature operating under the aegis of the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, with its headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts. ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA