A New Ulster presents discourse on Beckett

A New Ulster Presents Discussions on Samuel Beckett by Arthur Broomfield and Peter O'Neill

November 2014

A response to fair criticism : Arthur Broomfield replies to Peter O’Neill’s review of his book The Empty Too : language and philosophy in the works of Samuel Beckett.

Peter O’Neill has published an interesting and at times, perceptive, review of my study on the works of Samuel Beckett, The Empty Too: language and philosophy in the works of Samuel Beckett (CSP 2014). He reviews three of the chapters from the work, those that deal with Waiting for Godot, How It Is and Worstward Ho! I thank my fellow Beckettian for the work and thought he has applied to his review, and I acknowledge the importance of Peter’s contribution to a fresh discourse on Beckett’s works, a discourse that distances itself from that currently in vogue in Irish studies that seems to read the masters texts through the political agenda of the agent rather than through the artist’s texts.

In his analysis of my critique of Worstward Ho! and Waiting for Godot O’Neill gets my argument that Beckett wishes to free language (from the perceived) and ‘that language is the real that is haunted by non-being.’ Importantly he stresses that ‘ one of the very real pleasures of The Empty Too is that it, rather forcefully, encourages the reader to return to the texts’ for, possibly, the central point of The Empty Too is that Beckett’s texts themselves reveal the profundity of his understanding of the interconnectedness of philosophy and language.

Though I refer to Plato and other philosophers in my book where it is necessary to mention areas of convergence with Beckett’s thinking, I stress that Beckett exceeds the thinking of all philosophers to date, and to read him through the lens of even the greatest of them is to reduce Beckett’s works. Peter takes issue with the subtitle of my book language and philosophy in the works of Samuel Beckett on two points. He expects ‘a complete analysis into the linguistic and philosophical ideas which Beckett evokes’ and suggests an alternative subtitle. He may have a point about the wording of the subtitle, though I will defend it by saying that I am talking about the philosophy of Samuel Beckett that is evident throughout his works. Too often critics tend to read Beckett’s works through the erroneously perceived evocation of other philosopher’s thinking in his works, where Beckett, in many cases quarrels with, rather than evokes their thinking. In any case that kind of fossilised application of tired philosophy to Beckett’s texts has been overdone, and to the detriment of Beckett studies. I do draw on the thinking of Blanchot and Leslie Hill; both of their approaches go close to mine.

O’Neill wonders why I treat How It Is only in the English translation; the answer is simple - I am not competent to critique any of Beckett’s works in any other than the English language but as Beckett is the work’s translator I am assuming that he has given it his imprimatur.

When I speak of language I don’t mean the comparison of different languages, nor am I greatly interested in Beckett’s ‘multi-lingual fluency’ the study of which seems to me to address the comparison of accepted surface ‘meanings’ of languages rather than being a study of the impossibility of accurately re- presenting perceptions in a specific language – be it English – and relating it to being, which, as I read him, is where Beckett is at. This may well be the flaw in O’Neill’s approach, which we see in his comments on How It Is, that causes him to lose contact with the central point to Beckett’s project which is that language is the real and cannot be perceived by the senses at all.

The point of my chapter on How It Is is that Beckett, through ingenious arrangement of the text e.g.in the omission of punctuation and its openness to inter- and intra- genre interpretation, subverts all possibilities of connecting it to any definite point of reference. The Beckett project that Peter identifies in Godot and Worstward Ho! is sustained in How It Is, as it is through all of his later works. Sadly Peter loses touch with the master’s project and takes comfort from the last resort of conservative academics; he connects it to an approach, through Vico, that reduces that which defies the collective thinking of philosophers to date to

the approach of one of their numbers. Ironically Peter, in his final quote from Beckett’s study of Vico, taken from an early work, ‘Dante…Bruno, Vico…Joyce ‘untypically, misses out on the key to understanding Beckett: Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read- or rather it is not to be read.

It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself The citation read alongside a line from How It Is it places the emphasis on the reducibility of the word ‘it ‘ to its basic irreducibility in the existential world, and hence nearer to the aspirational, pure language, the life to come: ‘ ‘ that wasn’t how it was no not at all’ (Beckett 2006 519) ( my italics ). As in How It Is (so obviously pregnant with the word under discussion ), Beckett distinguishes between the higher and lower cases, significantly in what we would take to be a pronoun, the word that he reduces to the bare ‘it’ . The corporeal construction, the higher case ‘It,’ is to be looked at and listened to, while the purer lower case ‘it,’ distancing itself from the senses , is not to be read. By looking at and listening to the higher case ‘It’ we engage with the process of ‘going on’ towards the disengagement of language from the senses, to the possibility of the senses being unable to read ‘it’ We comprehend the profundity of Beckett’s vision, language is all and the realm of the senses will disappear into the void in ‘it is that something itself,’ form and content vacate the stage to leave ‘it’ as the unreadable, unsayable , aspirational and unreachable real, the something in itself, as the young Beckett says, that cannot represent , and strives for non-presence.

From this approach to Beckett’s remarkably consistently sustained thesis it is difficult to give credence to Peter O’Neill’s proposition that, in Beckett, ‘Be-ing (is) centred around the senses. Being , as I read Beckett , is of the life to come that cannot be perceived by the senses , it is the real that has jettisoned the sentient to the void, the real that is ‘ only me yes alone yes with my voice…no murmuring…when the panting stops ‘ (520-521 ). and not ‘as Peter suggests, food for thought ‘centred around the senses.’

Peter O’Neill has written a serious review of my book that I welcome. I thank him for his generous contribution of time and thought which, hopefully will stimulate further discussion. I am uncomfortable with the term ‘Irish studies’ when it is applied to Beckett’s works as it implies appropriation by insular causes and agendas with which I have nothing in common, of something that is universal. I prefer to talk about studies of Beckett by Irish critics and Peter is assuredly one of these. I look forward to hearing more from him.

La voix “d’elle”

The Appearance of the Viconean Muse ‘Autoritas’ and the Subversion of

Creation Myth in Comment c’est – How it is, by Samuel Beckett

Abstract Homeric parallels in the writings of James Joyce have been much documented and are well known, though in the works of Samuel Beckett they would appear to be less familiar.

Using Giambattista Vico as a departure point, one of the aims of this study is to highlight the Homeric parallels which take place in Beckett’s final novel Comment c’est by tracing the multiple appearances of the Homeric Muse throughout the work, and by identifying the Satyr Play which forms part 2, avec Pim. This study uses Reception Theory as its principal methodological source, in an attempt to highlight the structural support of Giambattista Vico’s ‘three ages of man’ theory, which it purports to be the principal mechanism which binds the tri-partite structure of Comment c’est together. Using Wolfgang Iser’s concept of the ‘intended reader’, the aim of the study is to attempt to clarify how deeply embedded the structure is by highlighting such relevant phenomena in the textual analysis, such as the Homeric Muse, and to reveal the depth of freedom it allows the author to appropriate other literary motifs- such as the two satyrs in part 2, the Narrator and Pim, thus evoking ancient Greek comedy, and so consolidating the subversion of creative myth theory which this dissertation aims to prove.

Treating the work as a subversive novel with Epic intent, this study also borrows ideas from Classical Studies, particularly the theories of Elizabeth Minchin and her treatment of the Homeric Muse, using the Muse, ‘la voix ancienne’, as a key theme which continues right through the work, following her different appearances in either ‘faded’ or ‘full appearance’.

Vico’s Muse is the mediator between Jupiter and man, her authority being divine- She is nothing less than a metaphor for the origins of language itself.

To my father, with much gratitude and love.

Table of Contents

Abstract

page 3

Acknowledgements

page 4

Introduction & Methodology: Vico & Paris - Heidegger & Constance

page 6

Chapter 1. Critical Review

page 16

Chapter 2. The Muse and Invocation in Comment c’estla voix d’elle!

page 21

Chapter 3. Arnault Daniel, Inscriptions of a Satyr -

page 32

Conclusion: Nietzsche contra Hegel

page 43

Bibliography

page 45

Introduction and Methodology/ Vico & Paris, Heidegger & Contance

In Paris in1928, Samuel Beckett was asked by James Joyce to write an essay on his monumental Work in Progress , whereby he would ‘trace Works debt’ 1to the writings of three Italians. Firstly, the epic poet Dante Alighieri, who in the early thirteenth century had ‘forged in the smithy of his* soul the uncreated conscience’ 2 of the Italian race. Secondly, the hermetic philosopher Giordano Bruno who, in 1600, was burnt at the stake in Campo di Fiori in Rome by order of the Vatican for the crime of heresy. And finally, the eighteenth century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico who proposed in his La Nouva Scienza, or New Science, a new method of interpreting history from a philosophical perspective.

Ruby Cohn’s emphasis on literary debt is the subject of the present dissertation, but whose, and to whom ,or to what?

Comment c’est was Beckett’s last attempt at the novel before he finally abandoned the genre devoting himself almost uniquely to shorter prose works and dramatic work be it for the stage, television, film or radio. It is the subject of the present work and its ‘debt’ to Vico’s ‘three ages of man’ which he expounds in the New Science. As this is the cornerstone of the present work I will firstly give a brief synopsis of Vico’s theory before continuing any further .

1 Beckett, Samuel: Disjecta, Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, Edited by Ruby Cohn, Grove Press, New York, 1984, p.8.

2 Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Penguin Popular Classics, London, 1996, p.288. * The italics are my own. I wanted to use this celebrated quote by Joyce to emphasise the uniqueness of what Dante had done before him. Dante is unique as a poet in the world in the sense that he created the language of his people by synthesing the better parts of each dialect in his epic Commedia. He wrote a linguistic study in Latin called De vulgari eloqentia in which he puts forward his reasons why he thinks that the ‘vulgar tongue’ of the people is the way forward and not Latin, which had up till then been considered the language of the cultural elite.

Giambattista Vico’s New Science expounds the idea that history has a cyclical nature which is ‘eternally recurring’.

3

According to Vico there are three ages, these being: divine, heroic,

and lastly of men. In the first age, or epoch, in the ‘natural order’ of things, everything from language to law has a divine authority and the muse is central in her guiding role, for it is she who wields Jupiter’s authority. It is through her that man learns the gift of speech, ‘From Jupiter the Muse began’, A Iove principum Musae.’ 4. It is an epoch where giants, along with men, are seen wandering the earth; they who live in solitude in caves, Prometheus being among them.

Homer is the ‘divine’ poet par excellence, who interprets the language of the Muse for men.

A whole section of Vico’s New Science is given over to a comprehensive study of Homer, as he is considered the first poet.

The heroic age follows, and this is a period of settlement. Towns and cities replace caves as dwellings, and the institution of marriage is established. It is the noble, or aristocratic, period.

Examples of this second age in history would include Rome under Julius Cesar and Cesar Augustus, Nietzsche took his metaphor of the ‘overman’ from this second epoch or cycle, which has been the cause of much catastrophic misunderstandings. 5

3 In fact there is mounting evidence to suggest that Vico and Nietzsche have more in common than one might possibly think. David W. Price suggests that their great mutual cause is their shared belief in the generative power of metaphor and how it, and it alone, is responsible for creating so called truths. In this they could be both seen as the antithesis of the rationalist school of thinking, which uphold the existence of absolute truths – Descarte’s famous dictum, ‘Cogito ergo sum’/’Je pense, donc je suis’/’I think, therefore I am’ being the cause of much of the humour in Beckett’s work, where no such certainty exists.

Price, David W. - Vico & Nietzsche: On Metaphor, history and Literature, The Personalist Forum, Vol 10, No 2, Fall,1994, University of Illinois Press, pp.119-132.

4 Vico, Giambattista- New Science, Translated by David Marsh with an Introduction by Anthony Grafton, Penguin Books, London, 1999, p.153.

5 Martin Heidegger in What is Called Thinking reminds us of Nietzsche’s debt to Schopenhauer (also a great influence on Beckett- see Letters of 1929-1940, p.550. ‘I always knew that he was the one who mattered most to me, and it is a pleasure more real than any pleasure for a long time to begin to understand now why it is so.’) and of Nietzsche’s metaphor of Julius Cesar merged with Jesus in an attempt to illustrate what he meant by the ‘overman’. In this short book Heidegger gives us an insight into NietZsche’s debt to Schopenhauer in his formulation of the ‘overman’ or ‘higher’ man. Heidegger’s insight is refreshing and is backed up by Nietzsche’s own praise of Schopenhauer in his essay devoted to him in his Untimely Mediatations, where he singles him out as the greatest German thinker.

Heidegger, Martin: What is Called Thinking, Harper and Row, New York, 1968, p.

Finally, there is the age of democracy, or man, which is governed by human reason. This final period, according to Vico’s account, is unsustainable and finally breaks down bringing an end to those particular societies in question. An example of which would be the final break up of the Roman Empire about three and half centuries after the birth of Jesus. Then civilisation falls back into its first age, the time of ‘giants’ and unsettlement, or ‘wandering’.

The so called ‘Dark Ages’ which followed the break up of the Roman Empire could fairly well illustrate this first age, until the rising again of great cities like Florence and Paris in the early middle ages leading to the Renaissance; the peak of the second age.6 Continuing this historical analogy, by Vico’s account, we would be well into the third age, and so our ultimate demise being just a matter of time. This last statement will later be confirmed by this study in the textual analysis of part 3, après Pim which makes up the conclusion.

Having now given a very basic overview of Vico’s theory, it would seem appropriate to return to Beckett’s own treatment of Vico in his essay Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce. 7 The particular area in the essay which is vital for our understanding of Beckett’s conception of Vico’s historical world view is when he speaks of Vico’s debt to Bruno, and which I should like to quote here.

At this point Vico applies Bruno- though he takes very good care not to say soand proceeds from rather arbitrary data to philosophical abstraction. There is no difference, says Bruno, between the smallest possible chord and the smallest possible arc, no difference between the infinite circle and the straight line. The maxima and the minima of particular contraries are one and indifferent. Minimal heat equals minimal cold. Consequentially transmutations are circular. 8 6 ‘We find precise parallels to this during the late part of the medieval return of barbarism in Italy. In this age, Dante, the Tuscan Homer, sang historical events. The anonymous biography of Cola di Rienzo vivdly expresses the morals of Homeric heroes. As Cola publicly decries the oppression of the wretched Roman state by haughty nobles, both he and his audience burst into uncontrollable sobbing.’

(NS, p.357) 7 Beckett, Samuel: Disjecta, Grove Press, New York, 1984, p.21.

8 The text was published by Eugene Jolas in 1929 in the periodical Transition, and also in book form by Shakespeare & Company, as part of a group of essays to prepare the reading public for Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake ( Our Examination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress).

IBID.

From the microcosm to the macrocosm, this extract is pivotal in our understanding of how Beckett views Vico’s approach to historical events which happen in the world, as it is a philosophical standpoint which is grounded in Aristotle, and so the empiricist school, rather than Plato, and so rationalist. This philosophical approach can be condensed down into one celebrated phrase – the universal in the particular.9 How Beckett applied this particular world view can be perhaps best illustrated perhaps in his sublime use of metaphor, and again this is something which he shares with Vico and Nietzsche; one is reminded of Godot- one tramp is all tramps, a pair of boots the same, and a solitary tree evokes the Comedy, which is to be found in eternal resignation.

But in order to show how unchanging Beckett’s ideas were on historical perspective, which indeed are crucial in our understanding of how he really considers Vico, here is an extract from a letter which he wrote a number of years after his first stay in Paris. The year is now 1936, and Beckett is travelling through Nazi Germany.

I am not interested in a ‘unification’ of the historical chaos any more than \I am in the ‘clarification’ of the individual chaos, and still less in the anthropomorphisation of the human necessities that provoke the chaos. What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know. Meir says the background is more important than the foreground, the causes than the effects, the causes than their representative opponents. I say the background and the causes are an inhuman and incomprehensible machinery and venture to wonder what kind of appetite it is that can be appeased by the modern animism that consists in rationalising them. Rationalism is the least form of animism. Whereas the pure incoherence of times and men and places is at least amusing.10

So, with the above in mind, by postulating that the hidden structure underlining Comment c’est is Vico’s ‘three ages of man’ , it must then be very clearly understood that this theory,

9 We can illustrate this maxim very succinctly by referring to Aristotle’s ideas on mimesis as expounded in his Poetics, for example when he speaks about the origins of comedy which will be referred to again in this paper when treating part 2 avec Pim. ‘Its beginnings , certainly, were in impromptus by the leaders of the dithyrambic chorus, and comedy in those of the leaders of the phallic performances which still remain customary in many cities.’

Aristotle: Poetics, Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by James Hutton, Norton, New York, 1982, p.48.

From this extract, according to Aristotle’s account, we can pinpoint the genesis of universal humour from one specific event in time. Aristotle goes on to suggest Sicily as the origin of comic plots, and Athens p.49 ibid.

10 Knowlson, James: Damned to Fame, Bloomsbury Books, London, 1997, p.244.

or system of hermeneutics, rather than claiming that it is the historical philosophical viewpoint through which the author conceived things, this dissertation rather is attempting to establish that the author merely appropriated Vico’s theory as a very simple, yet elaborate scaffold upon which to rest his own subversive and monumental epic.

Formulation of the Research Question Treating Comment c’est as a modern subversion of the epic creation myth, using as it does such commonplaces such as the invocation of the Muse and the inclusion of a Satyr play, as one finds for example in Homer, should the novel then not be treated in the same way as a classic Epic work, using the same methodological procedures, and if so, what then would the results of such a reading show? Such are the questions, at least, which the following study hopes to uncover. The methodological approach deemed most suited for such an enterprise would be Wolfgang Iser’s theory of the Intended Reader, as the narrative phenomena which will be treated, at least such is the case which will be put forth, have been embedded first and foremost by the author, and so the description treated herein will be one of the ‘intended reader’. It is perhaps opportune to briefly elaborate on Iser’s theory before going any further, but first let us consider again the historical context of such an approach, for it will prove extremely useful in all that is to follow.

Reception Theory – a Methodological Approach

In an article entitled The Reading Process, A Phenomenological Approach (1972), Wolfgang Iser quotes Edmund Husserl, the father of Phenomenology; ‘Every originally constructive process is inspired by pre-intentions, what construct and collect the sense of what is to come’.11 For Iser, these ‘pre-intentions’ are isolated phenomenon which are embedded by the author within the topography of the text and which come alive in the imagination of the reader, or not, and the ‘convergence’ between text and reader is what ‘brings the literary work into existence’12. The act of reading, seen in this way, is a highly creative process between the reader and the author, but which is not confined to them alone. They - text, author and reader- are of the world and as such, like all phenomenon, are subject to its constraints such as time, for example.

For Iser the text is a geographic phenomenon located on the horizon inside of which are embedded signs through which we, as readers, can negotiate our safe passage. Of course, one must be able to identify them, so sharing a common culture can help. But, like all phenomenon we, unlike the texts themselves, are subject to time and all of the many complexities of its passing and this factor has, for Iser, an extreme importance. Why, for example, are certain types of genres or texts more popular than others at a given time? For example, during the recent boom there was a huge increase in readers of Fantasy novels. J.K. Rowlings and Tolkien being just two prime examples of this, whereas after the Second World War the emphasis was on more existential matters, and so French novelistsphilosophers such as Camus, and indeed Beckett, were more popular. Such demographics 11 Iser, Wolfgang: The Reading Process, A Phenomenological Approach, New Literary History, Vol 3, No 2, Winter, 1972, p 12 Ibid.p.279.

have a certain place in helping to try and understand the complexity of social factors, particularly economic, which can sometimes, unbeknown to us, have a hugely deciding influence on our supposedly ‘personal’ notions of taste. This point is crucial, concerned as it is with notions of human identity, and would perhaps go a long way to explain why Iser was attracted to phenomenology, as a methodology worthy for the purposes of reading analysis, rather than a more psychological method which would place more emphasis on the subject itself, as opposed to the text. Also, considering that the text which is the subject of the present dissertation is a text by an author who questions, perhaps more so than any other, the idea of any actual notions of self13 it was thought that a process, such as that offered by phenomenology, which was more sympathetic with such a point of view would be the most appropriate. However, before considering it any further, it is perhaps opportune to give a little historical background in its connection.

Heidegger & Be-ing

‘The considerations which follow will not have been grounded in full detail until the ‘cogito sum’ has been phenomenologically destroyed.’ 14 Martin Heidegger –Being and Time

Published in 1926, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time had an almost immediate impact on the reading public. Germany was suffering the ravages of a catastrophic economic depression brought about by her defeat in the First World War, and the economic reparations which were imposed upon her and which were put into place after the Treaty of Versailles, did not make it any easier upon the nation’s citizens. In another 7 years, Hitler would be in power. Such 13 ‘Je. Qui ca?Le galérian, foncant vers les piliers d’Hercules,’ Beckett, Samuel: L’innommable, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1987, p.83.

‘I. Who might that be? The galley-man, bound for the Pillars of Hercules,’ The Unnamable, Calder & Boyers, London, 1975, p.53.

14 Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time, Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, Blackwell Publishing, Kundli, 2006, p.123.

was the historic background into which Heidegger’s mammoth work appeared, it was a time of unparalleled political and economic turmoil, and complete artistic license and excess. The paintings of Otto Dix, Gunter Gross and Max Beckeman are illustrative of the times, as indeed are the operas of Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht. These works portray a world governed by hyperinflation, and which was punctuated daily, rather like Greece and Spain today, by riots down in the streets. Why did Heidegger’s book have such a popular appeal?

The historical background, as described very briefly above, can certainly provide us with some possible reasons. 15Borrowing from Husserl’s beginnings in the phenomenological approach, yet radically altering it, Heidegger’s work was a shock to academic philosophical circles at the time, focusing as it did on ontological concerns as opposed to the traditional epistemological, suddenly Be-ing was the word on everyone’s lips. Da-sein as opposed to Descartes ‘cogito ’, Heidegger’s agent of destruction which was literally to atomise the idea of the all knowing subject, and to spawn the more genteel French school of deconstruction , which came to such prominence internationally after the Second World War. ‘Everyone is the Other, and nobody is himself.’16 This quote, taken from Heidegger’s magnum opus, is perhaps as good as any of Heidegger’s to allow us a small entry into the general idea behind Reception Theory, or Rezeptionsqeschichte as it was called in Germany where it first originated by German literary scholars such as Iser and Hans Robert Jauss17.

An interview conducted in 1980 between Iser and, perhaps one of his staunchest critics,

15 Einstien’s Theory of Relativivity could be seen as a metaphor for the times which also included the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the replacement of the Russian Monarchy by Communism, Atonal music and the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce.

16 Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time, Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Johnson, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, p.123.

17 What became known as the Contance School, both men working at the University of Constance.

Norman N. Holland18is deeply revealing of some of the ideas which the theory postulates19.

Holland represents the ‘actual readers’ whose responses to texts are the basis of his research, while Iser talks about the ‘implied reader’ with whom an ‘intricate hermeneutic interrelation’20 between the reader-text-author exists. ‘A phenomenological description allows us to focus on processes of constitution that occur not only in reading but also in our basic relations with the world in general.’ This point is all important, Iser goes on to say that the reader, in their response, reacts to specific stimuli which are embedded in the text by the author and which create in some, and not others, a specific response which will be partially governed by the reader’s own cultural background which becomes one of the subjects of his particular line of enquiry. In other words, Iser’s Receptionstheorie becomes an attempt at examining why certain readers will respond to very specific aesthetic criteria at a given time, and others will not. The outside cultural and historic influence being, for Iser, a very great determining factor on the individual’s individual response, which is consistent with ‘Continental’ notions of Self – Foucault’s ‘Man is Dead’ discourse being perhaps the most natural and radical extension of the discourse, which NietZsche had first instigated at the turn of the Twentieth Century. These ideas were to prove simply too extreme for traditionalists like Holland, who remain entrenched in the innate concept of self, and who like Noam Chomsky propound the Twenty First Century Cartesian notion of man which advocates neuroscience as a possible way forward for tapping into man’s ‘deep structure’ which is at the root of notions of Self.

Not all Americans, however, were to prove so resistant to such European influence. Stephen Greenblatt and the ‘new historicist’ theories which he advocates, taking a forensic, inter18 Author of The Critical I, a critique of Continental Philosophical Methodology originating from Heidegger and the phenomenological tradition and including such thinkers as Michel Foucault who also advocated the dissolution of the ‘I’, that is to say, the ‘all knowing’ subject.

See- http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nholland/criti.htm See also-Holland, Norman N.: The Critical I, Columbia University Press, New York, 1992.

19 Kuenzli, Rudolf E: Interview: Wolfgang Iser, Wolfgang Iser, Norman N Holland and Wayne Booth, Diacritics, Vol 10, No 2, (Summer 1980) pp.57 -74 20 Ibid, p,62.

disciplinary approach to literature21 , is perhaps one of the more fruitful results of the dialogue which went on between European literary and cultural theorists from Europe, such as Iser and Foucault, and who entered into a profound engagement with thinkers from the North American continent.

The ‘Intended Reader’ Iser’s theoretical construct of the ‘intended reader’ can be seen, in such a light, as having a highly moral function. The act of reading, then, been elevated to an act of cultural awareness when the reader, once thought of as merely being in a much more passive role, enters into a kind of communion with not only the author but with the particular culture, if any, which the author wishes to evoke. With a writer such as Samuel Beckett, who like Iser refutes the notion of an all knowing subject, when such an ‘engagement’ is mainly concerned with human identity, the very act of reading becomes a most finely elaborated game- so that an analogy with chess would not seem to be too amiss. Before one even thinks about moving, one must at least contemplate the very many possible variations, and consider them right through, with a particular focus on the endgame.

I would please most emphatically that it is- then, the actual reader’s so-called identity may, in the final analysis, be brought to light and articulated by the very activities to which he has been subjected to in following instructions which have been laid down by the text.22

So, a complete reversal of individuals finding meaning in the text, ‘actual readers’ with

21 In his essay Learning to Curse, Greenblatt while exploring the ‘linguistic colonialism’ which occurred with the exploration of the New World, which North America represented for the early pilgrim fathers, he also invokes Vico: ‘For Vico, the key to the diversity of languages is not the arbitrary character of signs but the variety of human natures.

Each language reflects and substantiates the specific character of the culture out of which it springs.’ Language like culture, and so all notions of human identity, being man made.

Greenblatt, Stephen: Learning to Curse – Essays in Early Modern Culture, Routledge Classics, New York & London , 1990, p44.

22 Kuenzli, Rudolf E.: Interview with Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland and Wayne Booth, Diacritics, Vol. 10, No.2, summer 1980, The John Hopkins University Press, p.63.

‘unique personalities’23 such as Norman Holland speaks of being advocated here – the idea, or thought, of selflessness itself, ironically, being the primary driving force behind both the activities known to us as writing, and reading.

.

Chapter 1 : A Critical Review The particular phenomenon which is the subject of the present work is the appearance of the Homeric Muse who also appears in Vico’s New Science and who is given the name Autoritas.

Because of the numerous appearances of the Muse in Comment c’est and due to the restrictions on word count here, it is impossible for me to treat each one individually here24.

Instead, I have chosen to treat three full appearances of the Muse, one from each part of the tri-partite structure, each appearance illuminating an age. In this way it is hoped the full extent of her import into the composition of the work as a locus, or architextural device, through which the author could send in at any apparent place in the narrative, will become apparent- as indeed was her role in Homer, as the research of EliZabeth Minchin shows.i Of course the Muse who appears in Comment c’est is one and the same as she appears in 23 Ibid. p.60.

24 Borrowing the same technique used by the Classical Scholar EliZabeth Minchin, I treat the appearances of the Muse in two ways; a‘full appearance’ is when she is actually named, or appears, as ‘elle’, which Beckett translates as ‘it’ in English, and in ‘faded appearance’ when ‘elle’ is not named but is clearly being alluded to. As in the case with the invocation in the opening two fragments on page 9 in Cc. There are two full appearances of the Muse in part 1, for example. Fragment 4, page 21, ‘je l’appelle elle vient’ in which she passes through him, eternalising him – which corresponds with Fragment. 2 on page 10 in HIS ‘I call it it doesn’t come’. Her next full appearance in part 1 ‘avant Pim’ is on page 22, Fragment. 1, ‘quoi sur elle ma mémoire’ corresponding with page 10 again in the English text in Fragment. 3. Here she appears as Mnemosyne, the personification of memory, and mother of the nine muses as they appear first in Hesiod’s Theogyny ( L.53).

In part 2, ‘avec Pim’, the Muses appearances are as follows: Faded appearances (F.A.) in Comment c’est : pp.79,116 and 130. And which correspond with How It Is- Faded appearances: pp.43,64,69,72.

Full appearances in Comment c’est (A) : pp.114,115,120,124,135,136,137. Correspond with How It Is pp. 63,64,66,68,74,75.

Finally, part 3 : Full Appearances Cc- 166,167,168,175,176,177,178,179,196,198,199,200,202,203, 205, 206,208,223.

Which correspond with HIS – 94, 98, 100, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117.

Faded Appearances in Cc – 164,165, 167, 179, 180, 189, 196, 198, 199, 200, 207, 215, 216, 224, which correspond with HIS – 92, 93, 98, 99, 101, 106, 110, 111, 112, 116, 121, 122, 126, 127.

Vico and Homer, but also as she appears in the fragments of Heraclitus, who also makes his appearance in part 1 of the book. His cameo is no accident,25for she is the selfsame Muse who appears in Fragment 64 ‘Lightning steers all things.’26 ‘She’ being the selfsame lightning whom NietZsche refers to in his Zarathustra27, and whom Michel Foucault describes ‘like a luminescence, a spreading light’28. She who is knowledge.

Chapter 2.

Invocation in Comment c’est – ‘la voix d’elle’

Beckett makes an invocation before presenting us to Pim in part 1 avant Pim, in the opening lines of Comment c’est. It is as startling as it is unexpected, as we normally associate invocations with classical writers such as Homer and Virgil.

When invoking, traditionally, the poet, or writer, calls on the aid of the Muse to help him, or her, with their poem or song, usually which is epic in its scope29 .

Here is Virgil invoking the muse at start of the Aeneid.

Tell me, Muse, how it all began. Why was Juno outraged?

What could wound the Queen of the Gods with all her power?

Why did she force a man, so famous for his devotion, 25 In August this year I will be presenting a paper Embodying Be-ING – Beckett & Heraclitus which treats the importance of Heraclitus in Comment c’est/How It Is. Please see http: http://beckettucd.wordpress.com/ 26 Heidegger & Fink: Heraclitus Seminar, Translated by Charles H. Seibert, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1993, p5.

27 ‘It does not suffice me that the lightning no longer does harm. I do not want to conduct it away: it shall learn-to work for me.’

NietZsche, Friedrich: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Translated with an Introduction by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, London, 2003, p.299.

28 Foucault, Michel : Power – Essential Works 1954-1984, Edited by James D. Faubion, Penguin Books, London, 2000, p. 8.

29 Juvan, Marko: History and Poetics of Intertextuality, Translated from the Slovenian by Timothy Pogačar, Purdue University Press, Indiana, 2008, p.15.

to brave such rounds of hardship, bear such trials?

Can such rage inflame the immortals hearts? 30 Almost 2000 years later, Beckett offers the following: comme c’etait je cite avant Pim avec Pim après Pim comment c’est trois parties je le dis comme je l’entends voix d’abords dehors quaqua de toutes parts puis en moi quand ca cesse de haleter raconte-moi31 encore finis de me raconter ivocation how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me when the panting stops tell me again finish telling me invocation32

The discovery of such a classical motif is arresting, particularly to see it so undisguised, so much so perhaps as if to pass unnoticed by the reader. For Simon Perris the insertion of such a formal literary device ‘is a highly charged literary manoeuvre’33, particularly in the area of Homeric reception .

Invocations are part and parcel of the epic tradition, epic poems by definition being of tri-partite structure as defined by Aristotle in his Poetics, and according to Mikail Bhakin ‘occassionally so deeply embedded as to be almost invisible’34.

30 Virgil: The Aneid, Translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Classics, London, 2006, Lines 8-13, p. 47.

31 Beckett, Samuel: Comment c’est, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1992, p. 9.

This is the original French edition of the text referred from here on in as Cc. 32 Beckett, Samuel: How It Is, Edited by Édouard Magessa O’ Reilly, Faber & Faber, London, 2009, p. 3.

This is the English Edition referred to in this text from this point on as HIS. 33 Perris, Simon: Proems, Codas, and Formalism in Homeric Reception, Classical Receptions Journal, Vol 3, Issue (2011), p189.

34 Bakhtin, Mikail: The Dialogic Imagination, Edited by Michael Holquist and Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holyquist, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2002,p.8

But what is the intent behind such a manoeuvre? What does the author hope to achieve by inserting such a classical motif at the beginning of the text?

These are just two of the questions which the following work will attempt to find an answer for, as they are highly pertinent as they can provide a key into the reading of the complex narrative which is to follow.

In Frescoes of the Skull, Knowlson35 and Pilling state categorically that Beckett is not, as in Milton, addressing the Muses and Urania, but ‘himself, so as to announce his ‘vocation’; call himself into existence and constitute himself at the centre of the work’36. Pilling and Knowlson go on to say that the phrase ‘racontre moi’, ‘tell me’, is both interpretable as being ‘a self-addressed injunction’, and also as, ‘a remark addressed to an Other’.37 If it is not the Muse, as would traditionally be the case, then who is this ‘Other’?

Elizabeth Minchin in her discussion on invocation in Homer, reminds us of the ‘metanarrational function’ which it plays in the construction of plot.

It is remarkable that when a storyteller is aware of a ‘knowing recipient’ among his or her listeners, s/he displays uncertainty about events even though s/he may be confident of the facts; s/he will check details, and ask for confirmation. In Homer’s telling of the Illiad story we find behaviour of this same kind; the same etiquette is observed.’ 38 It is the ‘conversational’ element which Minchin focuses on, emphasising the ‘performance’ of the piece which would appear to be so contextually appropriate with Beckett’s invocation. The invocation itself in Homer, for Minchin, is a formal device which Baktin was referring to genres and how the novel, a modern phenomenon, has assumed structures, particularly plotlines, from the ancient Greek & Roman Classical tradition, and made them its own. Beckett’s use of the invocation at the beginning of Comment c’est is a classic example of such borrowings, but also how he continues to use her in further appearances in the narrative, as this paper seeks to show.

35 Knowlson, J & Pilling, J: Frescoes of the Skull, The Late Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, John Calder, London, 1979.

36 Ibid, p.62.

37 Ibid.

38 Minchin, Eliabeth: The Poet Appeals to his Muse: Homeric Invocation in the Context of Epic Performance, The Classical Journal, Vol. 91, No. 1, (Oct-Nov, 1995), p.26.

has (1), the practical function in the actual performance of the piece of getting the audience to stop talking, as the invocation signals to them that the performance is about to begin, and (2), it also reminds the public that what they are about to witness has ‘divine’ origin, thus establishing the authentic nature of the performance which they are about to witness.

She goes on to speak about the Muse as one part of a very complex mnemonics, so that these rhythmic codas sweep in and out of the text performing themselves as an aid to the teller, or performer, in their ‘performance’ of the piece, but also so as to act as moments of relief in the telling, so that the listener may the better repair for the next onslaught. Minchin goes on to remind us how by coming out of the story, to invoke the Muse, the

listening public are

reminded that they are in fact actively participating in the performance also just by merely being there, listening in. 39 Usually the Muse appears at critical moments in the text, as a signal to the audience to prepare for the oncoming event, but also to act as a kind of springboard for the teller, in order to psyche themselves fully for the drama to come. So, the introduction of the muse in epic verse very much acting, in this light, as a narrative device in order to help the story along, for both performer and audience alike.

But putting aside all of the above, there is another reason why one could continue to postulate the existence of the Muse in Comment c’est and that is French grammar. When the voice is referred to directly in the text ‘ je la dit comme elle vient’(p.30), the pronoun elle, or she, is used. In French the voice is feminine, la voix, so there is no need for the pronoun elle to be used at all, as the feminine trait is already announced with the feminine form of the definite article which is la, unless of course the author wishes to specify that it was a ‘she’/elle.

39 Novelists have been employing this device since the establishment of the genre. Diderot in Jacques le fataliste et son maître uses it with particular comic effect, drawing the reader into the story bringing them closer to the action so that the voice of the narrator takes on a tone of confidentiality and familiarity, so that a form of ‘bonding’ between the narrator and the reader ensues. Louis Ferdinand Celine, a contemporary of Beckett’s and whom Beckett admired, also used this narrative device to great effect in Voyage au bout de la nuit and Mort et credit.

Curiously, in the English translation of the text translated by Beckett himself, he uses it at all times in the place of elle, which makes, of course, for a less poetic reading of the text. The only possible response to this is to perhaps remind the reader that Comment c’est, like the majority of Beckett’s work, was written originally in French for very specific reasons, and perhaps this was but one among them.40 In the following textual analysis, I will be taking all references to the voice indicated by elle as full invocations of the Muse, when indeed they are relating to her and not indeed to some other female character, and when she/elle is not mentioned, but still it is clear that she is being invoked, I will be treating these as ‘faded’41 invocations, as indeed is the case with Classical texts. Elizabeth Minchin numbers, for example, 6 full blown invocations42 in the Illiad, whereas only one in the Odyssey , that which opens the epic poem. Whereas, she only notes 2 ‘faded’ invocations in the Illiad.43 Beckett’s opening invocation is interesting in this light, as the Muse is fully evoked or named as elle, or it in the translation.

We have to wait another 21 pages before she, elle, makes a further full blown appearance.

Je la dis comme elle vient dans l’ordre mes lèvres remuent je les sens elle sort dans la boue ma vie ce qu’il en reste mal dite mal entendue mal retrouvée quand ça cesse de haleter mal murmurée à la boue au présent tout ça des choses si anciennes l’ordre naturel le voyage le couple l’abandon tout ça au present tout bas des bribes 44 40 ‘It could be, he wrote to John Calder, ‘at the best, a most lamentable à peu prés’ (approximation)’.

Knowlson, James: Damned to Fame, Bloomsbury Books, London, 1996, p.495.

41 Minchin classifies a faded invocation when , ‘the identity of the addressee is passed over, but the appeal which otherwise defines an invocation is also absent.’ p.31.

42 Using Robert Fagles translation of Homer’s Illiad, ( Penguin Classics, London, 1990) these can be identified as: Book 1, L 1-9, Book 2, L 573-583, Book 2, L 759-761, Book 11, L 253-255, Book 14, L 595-610, Book 16, L 136- 138.

43 These can be identified as: Book 8, L 313, Book 11, L 348.

This passage is crucial for the present essay, for it introduces the Viconean structure which the entire text rests upon, and the Muse is crucial in her founding role. For this reason it is reproduced here in its entirety: I say it as it comes natural order my lips move I can feel them it comes out in the mud my life what remains ill-said ill-recaptured when the panting stops ill-murmured to the mud in the present all that things so ancient natural order the journey the couple the abandon all that in the present barely audible bits and scraps 45 Anthony Cordingley46 posits that ‘l’ordre natural’, or natural order, is referring to the natural order of French Grammar, which was conceived at Port Royal during the time of the Enlightenment. He makes reference to the appearance of Malebranche47, and other ‘Occassionalist’ philosophers such as Arnold Guelincx, who was a life-long concern of Beckett’s48 to further substantiate his claims. However, Beckett being more concerned with the dichotomic nature of things, as opposed to dialectic, this only tells half the tale49.

44 Cc. p30.

45 HIS, p15.

46 Cordingley, Anthony: Beckett and “l’ordre natural”: The Universal Grammar of Comment c’est/How It Is, All Sturm and No Drang, Beckett and Romanticism at Reading 2006, Rodolpi, Today/Aujourd’ hui, Edited by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Amsterdam & New York, 2007, pp.185-200.

47 Cc, p.46.

48 In a note to Sighle Kennedy, who was writing her dissertation on Murphy at the time, Beckett indicated ‘Naught is more real...’ and the ‘Ubi nihil vales...’.( Disjecta, p.113), the former being a nod to the pre-Socratic Philosopher Democritus, and the latter a reference to Arnold Guelincx. That was in 1967. As an indicator of just how far research has yet to go in Beckett studies, the first full-length study of Beckett’s obsession with Guelincx was only published in 2012.

See- Tucker, David: Samuel Beckett and Arnold Guelincx, ‘Tracing a literary fantasy’, Historicising Modernism Series, Continuum, London, 2012.

49 Perhaps the best example of Beckett’s study in man’s binary nature is the novel Molloy, where the chief protagonist, the tramp or vagabond Molloy, is a figure resembling the cynic Diogenes and Moran, his counterpart, is the very model of logic and method- being an example of Cartesian man. This dichotomy has its origins in the biblical story of Cain and Able, of which Molloy is simply a modern retelling. In the Bible Cain was a ‘tiller of the ground’ or Farmer, while Abel was a shepherd or ‘a keeper of sheep’. Moran, being settled, assumes the place of Cain in the novel, while Molloy, being a wanderer, assumes the role of Abel- both men being analogous with man’s dual nature. This would also explain the symbolic appearance of the shepherd tending to his flock to Molloy at the beginning of the novel (pp.3637), and also just after Moran commits murder in the wood (pp.215-217). This brief outline is a possible further subject of study.

Beckett, Samuel: Molloy, Les Èditions de Minuit, Paris, 2002.

‘L’ordre naturel’ which Beckett cites in the passage above corresponds exactly with Vico’s ‘three ages of man’ thematically; ‘le voyage’, or ‘the journey’ which part 1, ‘avant Pim’ recounts corresponds equally with Vico’s ‘divine’ first age, when the Muse appears to man and gives him the gift of language which ‘She’ is representative of; ‘le couple’, or ‘the couple’, which part 2 in the book ‘avec Pim’ recounts, corresponding to Vico’s second age, or Heroic, which is the time of settlement; and finally ‘l’abandon’, or ‘the abandon’, also corresponding to ‘part 3’ in Comment c’est, which would be the ‘third age’, and last, in Vico, that of men, before the cycle begins again, reverting back to ‘the journey’ or wandering. In Book IV of La scienza nouva, Vico uses this same language ‘diritti naturali’50, ‘l’ordre natural’, or ‘natural law’ in English51.

The idea of invoking the muses goes right back to ancient Greece, Hesiod the author of the Theogony, a primitive creation myth, introduces them ‘Within Olympus, telling of things that are,/ That will be, and that were’52. This backs up Aristotle’s early comment about the construction of epic poetry, but more importantly helps to further illuminate the genesis of the dividing tri-partite structure of Comment c’est, it is a novel which promises to tell the story of ‘comment c’etait je cite avant Pim avec Pim après Pim’/ ‘how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim’. So, already we have the motif of the invocation, and the whole structural scaffolding of the novel, all borrowed and conforming to the epic.

In The Dialogic Imagination, Mickail Bakhtin refers to this kind of novel as the ‘adventure novel of everyday life’, using The Golden Ass by Apuleius as a model. The theme of metamorphosis is key in such a work, giving the form its particular chronotope, shifting as it does from the everyday to that of ‘adventure’. In The Golden Ass, for example we see ‘Lucius 50 http://www.letteraturaitaliana.net/pdf/Volume_7/t204.pdf - p. 445/550 51 NS, p400.

52 Wender, Dorothy: Hesiod and Theognis, Penguin Classics, London, 1973, p. 24.

before his transformation into an ass, Lucius as the ass and Lucius mysteriously purified or renewed’53. Likewise, in Comment c’est we see the metamorphosis of the narrator before Pim, with Pim, and after Pim.

There are, however, other links to Hesiod and his Theogony. Surprisingly, despite a comprehensive two page analysis of the possible significations of the ‘sac’/ ‘sack’, Ruby Cohen in her review of the novel54 does not mention the association of coal with fire, which the author would appear to be deliberately signalling to us; ‘premier signe de vie’55, ‘first sign very first of life’56. The association with Prometheus, who stole fire from zeus to give to men and was so cruelly punished, would appear to be quite clear, particularly as the phrase ‘du sac et du corde’ has ancient associations with theft and punishment57. Prometheus is one of the giants who inhabits Vico’s first age, dwelling solitary in the caves58 . Also, Pandora would appear to be hinted at in the ‘ la boîte’, ‘the tin’; ‘Boîte de merde’, being a typical popular expression in French to describe a ‘shitty’ place which would be apt considering all of the scatological references made in the text to the ‘boue’, or ‘mud’. je pissais et chiais autre image dans mon moïse jamais aussi proper depuis59 53 Bakhtin, Mickail: The Dialogic Imagination- four essays, Edited by Michael Holquist and Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981, p. 115.

54 Cohn, Ruby: Comment c’est: de quoi rire, The French Review, Vol 35, No.6, May, 1962, pp.565-567.

55 Cc, p.11.

56 HIS, p.4.

57 Ruby Cohn highlights the associations of the two object, the sack and chord, with theft and punishment. In ancient Rome it was the practice to place thieves in a sack which was then closed with a chord, before depositing them in the Tiber. http://www.expressio.fr/expressions/homme-individu-gens-de-sac-et-de-corde.php 58 ‘je suis un monster des solitudes’ Ccp.18 –‘I am a monster of solitudes’ HIS, p.8.

Again, this way Beckett has of blending the apparently autobiographic with the mythological – Knowlson notes that around the time of Cc’s composition Beckett sometimes struggled with the amount of socialising that his newfound fame as a highly successful and critically acclaimed author brought him. DTF, p.463.

59 Cc, p.13

I pissed and shat another image in my crib never so clean since60 In Book 2, Chapter 3, there is a remarkable passage in Vico’s New Science in which he describes the origins of the first giants who ‘wandered’ the earth, descendants of Ham, Japeth and Shem, and who ‘Wallowing in their own faeces (whose nitrous salts wondrously enriched the soil), these children struggled to make their way through the great forest, now grown dense after the recent flood’61. Vico’s pre-diluvian vision of the world must have had a considerable effect on Beckett, as his interest in the Bible was a life- long one and there has been some fascinating studies on his reception of the Bible in his own work62.

Of course the author’s own mother was a devoutly religious woman, and makes an appearance on pages 22 and 23 and which Eoin O’ Brien in The Beckett Country63 treats so magnificently. The correspondence of course between the Viconian Muse of autoritas and Beckett’s own mother cannot pass unnoticed; the voice of the maternal figure in authority from whose mouth issue the ‘divine’ words of the scripture. la tête géante coiffée de fleurs et d’oiseaux se penche sur mes boucles les yeux brûlent d’amour severe je lui offer pales les miens levés à langle ideal au ciel d’ou nous vient le secours et qui je le sais peut-être déjà avec le temps passera64 the huge head hated with birds and flowers is bowed down over my curls the eyes burn with severe love I offer her mine pale

60HIS, p.5.

61 NS, p140.

62 His English publisher, and friend, John Calder gave a series of lectures in 2012 entitled Beckett and God in which he underlined the importance of the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament, in Beckett’s work. Calder was at pains to emphasise Beckett’s ‘deep immersion in Calvinistic theology’* which the author received particularly at his time spent in Portora Royal School.  Taken from notes while attending John Calder’s lecture given at Dublin City University, 11/10/2012.

63 O’ Brien, Eoin: The Beckett Country, The Black Cat Press in association with Faber & Faber, Monkstown, County Dublin, 1986, pp. 11-13.

64 Cc, p.22

upcast to the sky whence cometh our help and which I know perhaps even then with time will pass away65 Beckett’s narrator crawls through the mud, with sack and tin, journeying like one of Vico’s giants, looking skyward for a ‘friendly’ sign, even in the ‘thunder’66, while the figure of the Muse appears, be it in dream or memory, to somehow calm him.

Michel Colomb 67, when speaking about the place of photography in literature, talks about the ‘ the mechanical mimesis’, and that when photographs are introduced into texts they lose their spontaneous nature and ‘act as reference points in the narration’, becoming added tools in the craft, or art of writing. He goes on to evoke Walter Benjamin who, when speaking about photography, speaks about ‘ the unconscious optic’,

which evokes Proust and his famous involuntary memory, or ‘Cet objet, il depend du hazard’68.

In the above extract, we have the author, Samuel Beckett, hovering Jove like above the image of himself when he was much younger looking up on his knees at his mother who must have appeared to him as terrifying as the Muse to those wanderers of the first age.

Indeed, taking the text globally there is a whole parallel narrative in the pris de vue of the three parts, which is wholly in keeping with the thematic content of each piece. In part one, the narrator pans over the architectural site hovering over the individual artifacts which are aligned horizontally on the surface of ‘la boue’ or mud. Heralclitus (Cc,p. 53), Belacqua (Cc, 65 HIS, p.10.

66 ‘From Jupiter the Muse began’, A Iove principum Musae. For, as we have just seen, Jupiter’s lightning bolts were the origin of the first Muse, which Homer later calls the knowledge of good and evil.’

NS, p.153.

67 Colomb, Michel: Le défi de l’imcomparable: Pour une étude des interactions entre literature et photographie, http://www.vox-poetica.org/sflgc/biblio/collomb.html, 2009.

68 Proust, Marcel: Du côté de chez Swann, Folio Classique, Gallimard, Paris, 1988, p.44.

‘The object, which depends on chance.’ Proust is speaking about everyday things, such as his famous madeline cake whose scent, or aroma, so evoked for him ‘the immense edifice of memory’.

pp.36,37) and Malebranche (Cc, p.46) all are illuminated as in an architectural dig and each representing their different ages; pre-Socratic, medieval and the enlightenment respectively.

Each one in turn corresponding with its Viconian epoch, ‘fin de joies éphémères et des peines d’empires qui meurent et naissent comme si de rien n’était’(Cc, p.

18), ‘end of fleeting joys and of sorrows of empires that are born and die as though nothing happened’ (HIS, p.8). Then, in part 2, the camera moves in in a close up of the couple, creating an unnatural tension, augmenting the whole domesticity required in narrating visually the period of settlement. All in such stark contrast finally to the closing long shot of the million hordes, like some cinematic epic69. The appearance of Heraclitus is all important, particularly in his correspondence to the Viconian idea of the Muse and the ‘devinari’, or divine poets who were consulted to interpret meaning, he being representative of the one who interpreted the ‘divine’ signs, be they of the sun or the moon, with the help of the divine Muse70.

Heraclitus made his first appearance in the Beckett canon in 1934, when his first work in prose was published More Pricks than Kicks 71. Belacqua Shuah72 in the text Yellow, is about 69 Beckett had a great love of cinema, he even went so far as to write a letter to Sergei Eisenstein in 1936 asking to be possibly taken on ‘as a trainee’ (DTF, Knowlson, p.226).

70 Σίβυλλα δὲ μαινομένῳ στόματι καθ' Ἡράκλειτον ἀγέλαστα καὶ ἀκαλλώπιστα καὶ ἀμύριστα φθεγγομένη χιλίων ἐτῶν ἐξικνεῖται τῇ φονῇ διὰ τὸ ‘And the Sibyl, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the god in her.’

Fragment number DK B92 – source : http://www.heraclitusfragments.com/files/ge.html

71 The book gets its title from a phrase in the Bible, which Beckett famously subverts, taken from the Acts 26:14: ‘And when we were fallen to the earth, I heard a voice speaking to me, and saying in Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.’

72 Belaqua Shuah was the name given by Beckett to the name of the protagonist of his first two fictitious works of fiction in English- Dream of Fair to Middling Woman, and More Pricks than Kicks. His name comes from a character who appears to Dante in his Divine Comedy. He appears twice in Comment c’est- p.14-p.37.

‘E un di lor, che mi sembrava lasso, sedeva e abbracciava le ginocchi, tenendo ‘l viso giù tra esse basso. lines 106108, canto IV, Purgatorio. The above description is how Dante introduces Belacqua in Commedia. ‘There was one there who, you could tell, was tired, for he sat with his arms hugging his knees,letting his head droop down between his legs.’

Musa, Mark: Purgatory, Penuin Classics, London, 1985, p. 43.

to have an operation and while contemplating the suffering which he will have to undergo attempts to console himself with thoughts on ‘the Obscure’.

At this crucial point the good God came to his assistance with a phrase from the paradox of Donne: Now among our wise men, I doubt not but many would be found, who could laugh at Heraclitus weeping, none which would weep at Democritus laughing. This was a godsend and no error. Not the phrase as a judgement, but its terms, the extremes of wisdom that it rendered to Belacqua. It is true that he did not care for these black and white alternatives as a rule. Indeed he even went so far as to hazard a little paradox of his own account, to the effect that between contraries no alternation was possible.73 Heraclitus and Democritus, the one crying representative of the tragic muse, the other laughing that of the comic, and representative also of the two theatrical masks which we find above every theatre.

Chapter 3. Arnault Daniel – the Inscriptions of a Satyr

In the previous chapter we looked at Beckett’s reception of Vico in relation to part 1, ‘avant Pim’, and the thematic similarities which take place in Vico’s first age, as described in his New Science, focusing particularly on the notion of the journey, or ‘la voyage’. In this chapter, the focus will now turn to the theme of settlement, which is the theme evoked in Vico’s description of the ‘heroic age’, and so we shall be turning to Beckett’s reception of the Satyr plays which part 2 ‘avec Pim’ very much is, particularly in its treatment of the narrator ‘Bom’ and the character Pim. But, in order to do so we shall have to first examine a little the historical legacies which precede this particular piece.

73 Beckett, Samuel: More Pricks than Kicks, Picador Books, London, 1974, p.148.

In a letter to Manning Howe, dated 1936, Beckett describes his interest in ‘the JohnsonThrale-PioZZi arrangement’74; ‘What interests me now above all else is the condition of the Platonic gigolo or housefriend, with not a testicle, auricle or ventricle to stand on when his bluff is called75.’ Beckett apparently researched the material comprehensively76, which is a wonderful insight into the author’s working practices. All of the grotesque elements in the Johnson –Thrale story, which Beckett so acutely describes above, are to be found in part 2 of Comment c’est. It is, however, Beckett’s treatment of the story of ‘la couple’, or ‘the couple’, in the form of a modernist twist on an ancient Greek Satyr play, which gives the material its truly remarkable power, and subversive force. However, before evoking both Euripides and Aeschylus, we must first pass through the seventh terrace of the lustful, in Canto XXVI of Dante’s Purgatorio, and in order for us to make contact we must first do so once again through the immortal Muse. She reappears in the middle of part 2 in a full blown domestic crisis. toujours les meme besoins d’âge en âge les mêmes soifs la voix la dit elle la dit je le murmure pour nous autres l’un après l’autre les meme soifs une seule vie 77 the same needs from age to age the same thirsts the voice says so it said I murmur for us here one after another the same thirsts and life unchanging78 74 Fehsenfeld & Overbeck: The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 396-397.

75 Ibid, 397. Beckett is referring to Samuel Johnson who was ‘involved’ with a Mrs Thrale who was the wife of his friend Henry Thrale (c. 1728-1781) .When Thrale died, Mrs Thrale remarried a certain Gabriel Mario Piozzi, despite Johnson’s protestations.

76 In the accompanying note to the short dramatic piece Human Wishes, Ruby Cohn states the following:’Although Beckett filled three notebooks with material for a play on the relationship of Dr Samuel Johnson and Mrs Thrale, only this scenic fragment of 1937 was composed.’

Beckett, Samuel: Disjecta, Grove Press, New York, 1984, p178.

77 Cc, pp.114-115.

78 HIS, p.63.

This appearance by her must be clarified in the light of its topographical placement in the text, for previous to this what we have been witnesses to, as readers, is the very graphic descriptions of a couple, any couple, as represented by the figures of Pim and the ever changing narrator: Bim, Bom, Kram, Krim, who shall be known henceforth as the many in one. The outcomes of this relationship, as described in the text, are as outlandish as they are comic. For example, at a certain point just before the appearance of the Muse, as outlined above, the two, the narrator and Pim, in full cinematic close up are lying together, ‘période heureuse à sa facon’ (Cc,p.79) a ‘happy time in its way’ (His,p.43). prestement comme d’un bloc de glace ou chuffé à blanc ma main se retire reste suspendue en l’air un bon moment c’est vague puis lentement redescend et se repose ferme voire légèrement propriétaire déjà à plat sur les chairs miraculeuses 79 smartly as from a block of ice or white-hot my hand recoils hangs a moment it’s vague in mid air then slowly sinks again and settles firm and even with a touch of ownership already on the miraculous flesh80

We are in the second age, the age of settlement and with this theme comes the idea, so previously absent in the first era, of ownership and property not only to things and places, such as land and acquisitions, but also, and more importantly, people! And what other way to enter into the ownership of another but through the legislative act of marriage, Beckett is unsparing in his description. His vision is pitiless, but not without its comedy. de l’ongle de l’index droit je grave et lorsqu’il se casse ou tombe jusqu’a ce qu’il repousse d’un autre sur le dos de Pim intact au depart de 79 Cc, p.80.

80 HIS, p.43.

gauche à droite et de haut en bas comme dans notre civilisation je grave mes majuscules romaine81 with the nail then of the right index I carve and when it breaks or falls until it grows again with another on Pim’s back intact at the outset from left to right and top to bottom as in our civilisation I carve my Roman capitals82

The inscriptions done by fingernails is an important detail, Caselli points to Dante’s Inferno as a possible source83, referring to ‘unghie merdose’84 , or ‘shitty nails’, which, given the scatological context of the piece, cannot be ignored. However, for Eric Denton85 long fingernails are a sign of the ‘wildness of nature’ which are further indicative of the Satyr and the Satyr plays of ancient Greece, which it is the purpose of the present chapter to highlight in Comment c’est part 2, ‘avec Pim’. But in order to first do so, let us uncover the inscriptions fully which are revealed in the text.

TOI PIM TOI PIM

Cc, p.111.

YOU PIM YOU PIM

HIS, p.61.

TA VIE LÁ-HAUT DANS LA LUMIÈRE

Cc, p.113.

YOUR LIFE ABOVE IN THE LIGHT

HIS, p.62.

Beckett indicates their strict origin, ‘octosyllable presque’ (Cc, p.113), ‘almost an octosyllable’ (HIS, p.62.) which he suggests is coincidental. In the next inscription there are seven, and six respectively.

81 Cc, p.109.

82 HIS, p.60.

83 Caselli, Daniela:Beckett’s Dantes, Intertexuality in the Fiction and Criticism, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2005, p.165.

84 Dante: Inferno, Edited and Translated by Robert M. Durling, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, pp. 280-281.

85 Denton, Eric: Satyr at Play: Goethe’s “Satyros”, Monatshefte, Vol. 88, No. 4, winter 1996, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996, p.437.

Syllables TA VIE ICI AVANT MOI YOUR LIFE HERE BEFORE ME

Cc,p.115.

7

HIS,p.63.

6

In the table below the syllable count of the other inscriptions are given as they appear in the text, and which can be read like a poem.

TA VIE LÁ –HAUT

Cc, p. 118.

4

TA VIE CON LÁ-HAUT CON ICI CON

Cc, p.118.

9

M’AIMES-TU TOI BOM MOI BOM

Cc, pp. 118-119.

6

ALORS ALORS

Cc, p124.

4

Syllables YOUR LIFE ABOVE

HIS, p.65.

4

YOUR LIFE CUNT ABOVE CUNT HERE CUNT

HIS, p.65.

8

DO YOU LOVE ME YOU BOM ME BOM

HIS, p.65.

8

YES OR NO

HIS, p.68.

3

While the inscriptions continue, the narrator suddenly, and without any warning, introduces us to his wife Pam, allowing Beckett to give us a synoptic descriptor of a marriage.

Pam Prim on s’aimait tous les jours tous les trois puis le samedi puis comme ça par-ci par-là pour se débarrasser essaya de relancer par le cul trop tard elle tomba de la fenêtre ou se jeta colonne brisée86

86 Cc, p.120.

Pam Prim we made love every day then every third then the Saturday then just the odd time to get rid of it tried to revive it through the arse too late she fell out the window or jumped broken column87 Or perhaps she was pushed? There exists also this possibility, why else would the narrator have need of the forgiveness which his wife apparently gives to him?

The Muse continues to appear, ‘la voix l’a dit elle parle comme nous la nôtre’(Cc, p.120), ‘the voice said so it talks like us the voice of us’ (HIS, p.66) and through the characters of the Scribe Krim, and through the character of the Witness Kram, She learns to write. Here in part 2, within the Satyr play itself, the concept of the written tradition is first introduced, meeting as it does, through the Muse, or origin of language, the oral tradition, which has been, up to now, represented through the Homeric performance, and if all of this were not enough, it is then that we are introduced to the concept of madness. cette voix c’est malheureux par moments il me semble l’entendre et mes phares que mes phares s’éteignent Krim me traite de fou88 this voice yes the sad truth is there are moments when I fancy I can hear it and my lamps that my lamps are going out Krim says I’m mad89 There has always been a correspondence between madness and the Muse in literature, so we should not be at all surprised. Plato speaks at length about the ‘divine’ ‘possession’ which overcomes all poets by the Muse herself90.

The inscriptions continue on until the end of part 2, accentuating the idea of madness: Syllables 87 HIS, p. 66.

88 Cc, p.130.

89 HIS, p.72.

90 ‘the Muse herself first makes some men inspired; then from these inspired people a chain is suspended as still other people receive inspiration. For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed.’

Plato: Selected Dialogues of Plato, Translated by Benjamin Jowett, The Modern Library, New York, 2001, pp.10-11.

M’AIMES –TU CON

Cc.p.141

4

ICI TA VIE ICI

Cc.p.149

6

TA VIE ICI TA VIE ICI

Cc.p. 150

8

YOU LOVE ME CUNT

HIS, p.78

4

YOUR LIFE HERE

HIS, p.82

3

YOUR LIFE HERE YOUR LIFE HERE YOUR LIFE HIS, p.83

8

Beckett insists on the octosyllables, throughout, even sending the whole idea up of rhyming schemes, as he does: A à B B à C home enfin

Cc.p123.

B à C C à D d’enfer en home enfer en home en enfer toujours Cc.p.123.

A to B B to C home at last

HIS.p.68.

B to C C to D from hell to home to hell always

HIS.p.68.

Why is he doing this? What is the author’s purpose?

In 1931 the Dublin Magazine91 printed a poem called Alba by a young Lecturer at Trinity College, this lecturer was Samuel Beckett. before morning you shall be here and Dante and the Logos and all strata and mysteries and the branded moon beyond the white plane of music that you shall establish here before morning According to James Knowlson, (DTF, pp. 58-61) the woman whom the poem was written for, and whom the poem is about, was a young woman called Ethna

91 Beckett, Samuel : Collected Poems in English and in French, Grove Press, New York, 1977, p.15.

MacCarthy. She had been a year ahead of Beckett when he himself was an undergraduate, studying French Provencal poetry and Dante- two subjects which heavily influenced the poem above. Once again we are in the presence of the Muse, but this time the ‘feminine incarnate’ (DTF, p.61) or, the erotic. grave suave singing silk stoop to the black firmament of areca rain on the bamboos flower of smoke alley willows 92 It is a much neglected side to Beckett, the profoundly romantic yet it is just as real as the many other facets of the writer, and man. Beckett, like Dante, was to see his ‘beloved’ married to another man, and just as Dante was to immortalize his beloved Beatrice in Vita nuova and Commedia, Beckett also chose to do the same. But by doing so, Beckett was only doing what any poet of his time would do.

Dante and the Provencal poets, or troubadours as they were also known as, had been going through something of a renaissance thanks to modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot and his fellow American poet Ezra Pound. In the early thirties, when Alba was written and published, both of these poets, along with James Joyce, would have been the great literary stars in the firmament, and both were champions of Dante. Eliot’s The Wasteland had indeed been dedicated to Pound with the now celebrated inscription ‘il miglior fabbro’93 this was a direct reference to Dante’s own reference to Arnault Daniel who crops up in canto XXVI when he has Guido Guinizella describe Arnault in these exact terms .

Beckett in his poem Home Olga, which he wrote for Joyce to commemorate the publication of Ulysses makes reference to theses poetic associations calling them ‘the sweet noo style’ 94, in imitation of Dante himself who spoke of 92 Ibid.

93 Eliot, T.S. : The Wasteland and Other Poems, Faber & Faber, London, 1999, p.21.

94 Beckett, Samuel: Collected Poems in English and French, Grove Press, New York, 1977, p.8.

Guittone’s ‘Li dolci detti vostri, che, quanto durerà l’uso moderno, faranno cari ancora i loro incostri”. 95 “Your sweet poems, which, as long as modern usage lasts, will make precious their very ink.”

But in a beautiful moment of profound humility Guittone corrects Dante, pointing out another: “O frate,” disse, “questi ch’io ti cerno col ditto,” e additò un spirto innanZi, “fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno.

“O my brother,” he said, “he I point out to you with my finger,” and he indicated a spirit further on, “was a better fashioner of his mother tongue.96

Here is the genesis of modernism itself, with a lineage starting in the 12th century with Arnault Daniel in the Dordogne representative of the great troubadour period in the south of France during this period, and who were so influential to Dante and Guinizelli a century later in Florence in Italy, who in their turn were to have such a profound influence on the two Dublin men, Beckett & Joyce, in the twentieth century. What can we say of modernism then but that it is simply the rise of the vernacular, it was Dante’s genius to realise this and which compelled him to write his Commedia in what we now know as Italian, or ‘lingua populare’, the people’s language, as opposed to Latin.

But to return now to Comment c’est, and the reference to octosyllables in relation to the inscriptions.

95 Alighieri, Dante: Purgatorio, Edited & Translated by Robert M. Durling, Introduction and Notes by Ronald L. Martinez and Robert M. Durling, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 444-445.

96 Alighieri, Dante: Purgatorio, Edited and Translated by Robert M. Durling, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, pp. 444-445.

There is a particular poem by Arnault Daniel which I should like to make particular reference to, especially considering its almost undisputed correspondence with the octosyllabic inscriptions which we have already reproduced in relationship to Pim. I shall just reproduce here one verse in the original ‘ancienne Limousin’, followed by a modern French translation before offering a translation into English.

Pro hi agra d’autres assais, De plus bels e que valgron , E si en Bernartz s’en estrais, Per Crist, anc no’i fetz que savais, Car l’en pres paors et esglais.

Car, si’ l vengues d’amon lo rais.

Tot l’escaldera’l col e’l cais; E no’l’s cove que dompna bais, Aquel qui cornes corn putnais. 97 Notice the predominance of the octosyllables, coupled with the incredibly tight rhyming scheme.

‘Il y aura bien assez d’autres épreuves, de plus belles et qui vaudront d’avantage, et si Seigneur Bernart s’est soustrait à celle –là, par le Christ, Il n’a pas un instant agi en lâche pour avoir été pris du peur et d’effroi. Car si le filet d’eau était venu d’en haut sur lui, il lui aurait échaudé entierment le cou et la joue, et il ne convient pas ensuite qu’une dame baise celui qui aurait corné dans une trompette puante.’

‘And there must have been other trials even more beautiful and with even greater advantages, and if Seigneur Bernard were to escape from them, by Christ, he didn’t for a second renege in a cowardly way by being gripped by fear and shock. For if the tide were ever to rise so high above him, he would just have had to warm the the cheeks and neck and it would have convened on him that a woman as her would have fucked him, and blown him from out of her stinking trumpet.’

97 Lavaud, René: Les poesies d’Arnaut Daniel, Réédition critique D’aprés Canello, Imprimerie et Librarie Edourd Privat, Tolouse, 1910, pp.6-9. http://archive.org/stream/lesposiesdarna00arna#page/8/mode/2up In Lavaud’s notes , taken from the Italian text published in 1883 and compiled by A-U Canello, it is stipulated that the term ‘corn’ signifies the ‘derriére’/bottom, or ‘anus’. The footnote goes on to clarify that a trumpet, or horn , all such brass instruments seemingly – no pun intended(!)- would appear to allude to the anus, a fact which Dante himself seems to have been aware of, as a reference is then made to the celebrated 139TH line of canto XXI in the latter’s Inferno – ‘ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.’ ‘and he of his ass made a trumpet.’

Alighieri, Dante: Inferno, Edited and Translated by Robert M. Durling, Introduction and Notes by Ronald M. Martinez and Robert M. Durling, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, pp.324-325.

The poem is called ‘Une Requéte déplaisante: Bernart devait-il lui Souffler...?’ or ‘An Unpleasant Request: Should Bernard Blow...?’ It is a highly satiric piece on the ‘courtly romance’ which Arnault would have been required to write at the time as a poet.

The emphasis on satire being apt, as we have seen with the Muse already, the ‘Gods’ are already contained in the language itself. The etymology of the word satire in English coming from Satyr, the ancient Greek character and subject of the Satyr plays of which only one remains – Euripides Cyclops98.

In this highly satirical take of Homer’s epic, Euripides recounts how Silenus, the God of the Satyrs, is almost taken by Polyphemus, the God of the Giants, in his cave; that is of course until Odysseus blinds him. In his essay Satyr Play in Plato’s Symposium, M.D. Usher (2002) traces the lineage of this third form of Attic theatre through its many manifestations in literature through the pseudo couples: Zeus & Gandymede, Polyphemus & Silenus, and finally through the characters of Alcibiades & Socrates in Plato’s Symposium itself, which he in turn reads as a Satyr play, or at least as a derivative of99. In Comment c’est, through the characters of Bom and Pim Beckett continues this literary genre: ‘Dieu sur Dieu’ (Cc,p.116.), ‘ God on God’ (HIS, p. 63.) as he himself puts it, which brings us back to Vico and Dante.

For Vico, the second age was governed by ‘heroic law, or the law of force’ (NS,p.400.), ‘we find precise parallels to this during the later part of the medieval return to barbarism in Italy.

In this age, Dante, the Tuscan Homer, sang historical events.’(NS, p.357.) One is reminded of the cries of the lustful upon the seventh terrace: “Soddoma e Gomorra! e l’atra: “Ne la vacca entra Pasife perché’l torello a sua lussuria corra!”100 98 http://www.poetryintranslation.com/theodoridisgcyclops.htm 99 Usher, M.D. :Satyr Play in Plato’s Symposium, American Journal of Philology, Vol. 123, No. 2 (whole number 490) summer 2002, pp. 205-228.

While Cacciaguida, Dante’s great great Grandfather, descended from ancient Roman nobility disdainfully looks on.101 His direct bloodline, or historic connection to Virgil.102

Conclusion: Nietzsche contra Hegel Vico’s third and final age is ‘governed by human law which is dictated by fully developed human reason’(NS, p.400.). Readers who are already familiar with Beckett’s relationship, or thoughts, on ‘human reason’ will not be too surprised when the author finally abandons the whole enterprise, apparently in utter disgust – ‘de la foutaise oui et cette histoire de procession’ (Cc,p. 226.)103. The monstrousness of the Hegelian dialectic, which part 2 hinted at, underscored as it was by Hegel’s Master and Slave dialogue, is given its full panoramic, and universal exposition. Once again, the Muse, in one of her final appearances, will be our guide, or point of entry, into the text. ainsi en moi je cite toujours quand ce cesse de 100 ‘Sodom and Gommorah!” and the others: “Into the cow goes Pasiphaë, so that the young bull will run to her lust.”

Lines 40-43, Canto 26, Purgatorio Alighieri, Dante: Purgatorio, Robert M. Durling, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 440-441.

101 ‘Cacciaguida’s ancestors, bearing the name Elieso, came from ancient Roman nobility;’ Lewis, R.W.B: Dante, a life, Phoenix Books, London, 2001, p.16.

102 ‘Per Umbras Obscuram’ – ‘Amid the Shadows’ The title of this dissertation is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI, Lines 452-453.

Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1-6, Translated by H.R. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard, 2004, pp. 564565.

103 ‘yes all balls yes and all this business above’ HIS, p.127.

haleter bribes de cette ancienne voix sur elle ses lapsus exactitudes sur nous les millions que nous sommes les trois nos couples voyages et abandons sur moi tout seul je cite toujours mes voyages imaginaires frères imaginaires en moi quand ça cesse de haleter qui fut dehors quaqua de toutes parts des bribes je les murmure104 so in me I quote on when the panting stops scraps of that ancient voice on itself its errors and exactitudes on us millions on us three our couples journeys and abandons on me alone I quote on my imaginary journeys imaginary brothers in me when the panting stops that was without quaqua on all sides bits and scraps I murmur them105

Giles Deleuze in his critique of Hegel compares his ‘negation’ of the Other, particularly when referring to the Master Slave dialogue, to Nietzsche’s affirmation of difference, what he calls ‘a nietzschean empiricism’106. The Hegelian dialectic being completely reversed, so that the ‘confrontation’ with the Other is affirmed, embraced; hence the joy in multiplicitydifference. Deleuze orientates the reader to the kernel of Nietzsche’s Genealogy in which he interprets Hegel’s system as one based on ressentiment 107 , or resentment. The notion of justice, which Beckett keeps evoking in the text, being nothing more than revenge calculated to an exact mathematical precision as the whole monstrous borreau/tormentor-victime/victim system in enacted. c’est mathémathic c’est notre justice (Cc, p.174.) it’s mathematical it’s our justice

(HIS, p.97.)

When the insane calculations take place, in the text, about the differing possible permutations regarding the possible outcomes for X or Y, as a reader, one cannot help but being reminded 104 Cc, p.177.

105 HIS, p.99.

106 Deleuze, Giles: Nietzsche et la philosophie, Presse Universitaires De France, Paris, 1983, p.10.

107 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Introduction by Peter Gay, Translated by Walter Kaufmann, The Modern Classics, New York, 2000, p.476.

of Stalin’s famous quote how one death is a tragedy, yet one million being a mere statistic108.

Comment c’est , it must not be forgotten, was written only a mere 16 years after the end of World War II. Beckett, himself, had witnessed at first hand the atrocities committed by differing factions of all isms, be they Capitalist, Facist or indeed Communist. Hegemony, of any kind, was to be avoided at all costs, at the risk itself of self-implosion. Part 3, l’abandon- the abandonment takes on epic proportions in three ways: Firstly, there is the personal story of the Narrator who is abandoned by Pim Secondly, there is the Viconian abandon of civilisation once hegemony takes place – the fall of the Roman Empire, or Communism/Capitalism being historic examples of our own time109 And finally, there is the physical abandonment of the text by the author ‘him-self’110.

This is, of course, reverting back to Vico and Beckett’s famous comments on Vico published by Transition in 1929: ‘Here form is content, content is form’.111 Beckett’s essay appeared in Transition at a crucial time in the review’s history.

Craig Monk (2001) reminds us that only 3 years after its appearance in the review Beckett was to return again to Paris and sign his name to Eugene Jolas’s tract Poetry is Vertical. Point 7 in Jolas’s publication is extremely pertinent, argues Monk, in the context of Beckett’s early development as a writer, as it reminds us of the almost fantastic aspirations of writers and artists of the period, of which Beckett 108 ‘The slave system would be senseless, stupid and unnatural in the modern conditions. But under the conditions of a disintegrating primitive system, the slave system is a quite understandable and natural phenomenon, since it represents an advance on the primitive communal system’. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm 109 The hegemonic imposition of the Hegelian dialectic in part 3 is reminiscent of the later writings of Jean Baudrillard, particular his polemical tract written after 11/9 in which he attempted to offer a Heraclitean analogy to the act of terrorism which stunned the world.

‘The fact that we have dreamt this event, that everyone without exception has dreamt of it-because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become hegemonic to this degree-is unacceptable to the Western moral conscience.’

Baudrillard, Jean: The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, Translated by Chris Tucker, Verso, New York, 2002, p.3.

110 One could perhaps add, and who has also abandoned such selfsame notions of Self!

111 Beckett, Samuel: Disjecta, Grove Press, New York, 1984, p.27.

was very much just becoming a part of. ‘ The transcendental “I” with its multiple stratifications reaching back millions of years is related to the entire history of mankind, past and present, and is brought to the surface with the hallucinatory irruption of images in the dream , the daydream, the mystic-gnostic trance, and even the psychiatric condition.’112 All of which could apply to the context of Comment c’est, a novel which was written almost thirty years later. The novel is full of dream like appearances and references to dreams, ‘un rêve néamoins on me donne un rêve comme à quelqu’un qui aurait goûté de l’amour’ (Cc,p.19) ‘a dream I am given a dream like someone having tasted of love’ (HIS, p.9). The references to time both personal and historic abound and are positively Viconian in their perspective, as indeed this essay has repeatedly asserted- ‘mais progress proprement dits ruines en perspective’ (Cc,p.34) ‘but progress properly so called ruins in prospect’ (HIS,p17). All progress, as we have seen, in Viconian term being eventually consumed.

Such is the natural order .

What strikes one about the findings outlined in the present study is the apparent emphasis on a great engagement with the past, and particularly with that of Ancient Greece, in order for us to engage in a more fruitful way on our own present, and which has enormous implications, (particularly when considering that the subject to hand is nothing less than human identity itself), for our future. In this respect the philosophical engagement of Martin Heidegger, particularly in respect to his ‘war’ with the Cartesian cogito , is perhaps unparalleled elsewhere, except possibly in the fiction of Samuel Beckett.

It is interesting to see contemporary critical thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek continue to argue the case for Hegel, using Lacan as an intermediary113. What would be perhaps interesting to 112 http://www.henry-miller.com/narrative-literature/eugene-jolas-transition-poetry-is-vertical.html 113 Žižek uses the analogy of the paintings of Francis Bacon , with the painted figures emanating ‘halos’, to be representative of the subject’s alternative symbolic world which he cannot escape, but must re-enter through the ‘torture house’ of language: the symbolic, for Lacan, being unltimately the Real, where jouissance can only really take place. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/hegel-versus-heidegger

consider, and perhaps the subject matter of a further study, would be to see if such a possible ‘rehabilitation’ could take place on Herr Heidegger, with Samuel Beckett taking Lacan’s exalted place.

i Endnote The following is a copy of my brief correspondence with the classical scholar Elizabeth Minchin, whose own treatment of the Homeric Muse was to prove invaluable to me in my own treatment of Comment c’est. Elizabeth was kind enough to allow me to reproduce her response to me here, and I should like to take this opportunity to thank her for her kind support and generosity of spirit.

On 24/10/2012, at 3:15 AM, Peter O' Neill wrote: Dear Elizabeth Minchin, I am a Post-Graduate student working on my dissertation for a Masters in Comparative Literature at Dublin City University, and my topic is 'The Subversion of Creation Myths in Comment c'est- How It Is by Samuel Beckett.

My initial working methodology is Reception Theory, however when I came into contact with the invocation which takes place in the very first two paragraphs I found myself researching articles on representations of the Muse in Classical Studies and I came upon an article written by you, 'The Poet Appeals to His Muse: Homeric Invocation in the Context of Epic Performance'. The theories which you discuss in this paper I found particularly relevant to Beckett's work, curiously enough.

I do not know if you are familiar with it, but he makes much use of the idea of the performer and performance ( some Beckett scholars see the whole narrative as a spoken performance, albeit written of course) through the mouth of the narrator, who assumes a series of multiple selves, two of which being the characters Krim and Kram who are both scribe and performer. They evoke Nineveh and the ancient scriptorium, but it is chiefly in his treatment of the Muse that I wished to ask you about.

Treating Beckett's text as you would Homer, I have identified the Muses appearance both in faded and in full blown forms. The formal structure which appears to bind the tri-partite nature of the work, is Giambattista Vico's New Science, where the Homeric Muse is treated as the origin of language and Science. It is Her authority which I see identified in Beckett's final epic prose poem. At least, all of which I hope to make a case for.

I am on the second draft of my dissertation now, and I would just really appreciate any thoughts you might have on any of this. I would also like to just take the time to say that I have found your work extremely helpful in my own research.

Kindest regards, Peter O' Neill