Literature of Consciousness

Preface

… To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.¹

– Samuel Beckett

Art has no universal laws, though in each of its phases there certainly are objectively binding taboos. They radiate from canonical works. Their very existence defines what forthwith is no longer possible.²

– Theodor W. Adorno

The enigmaticalness of artworks remains bound up with history. It was through history that they became an enigma; it is history that ever and again makes them as such, and conversely, it is history alone – which gave them their authority – that holds at a distance the embarrassing question of their raison d’être.³

– Theodor W. Adorno

What is bad in artworks is a reflection that directs them externally, that forces them; where, however, they immanently want to go can only be followed by reflection, and the possibility to do this is spontaneous.⁴

– Theodor W. Adorno

In all likelihood, most of the readers and spectators of Beckett’s plays sentence themselves, perhaps willingly, to a permanent fascination with author’s face. In photographs, the author of Endgame seems to resemble one of the characters inhabiting his many works – with a sharp, penetrating look, his face is permanently furrowed with creases and with the passing of years, as Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk observed, it increasingly resembled the inhuman shape of a rare mineral.⁵ It is a sign of presence that announces yet another form – transformed, a victim of the merciless passage of degrading time. Beckett’s face seems to be an emblem of his entire project as a writer, one that successfully led literary modernity to its conclusion. This point is made absolutely clear by his precise construction and conscious provision of space for what is chaotic, dark, unspeakable, and random.← 7 | 8 →

His face is what brings disillusionment to men who would like to treat themselves as self-aware subjects. At the same time, it preserves the force of sceptical powers, which are constituted by a willingness to save reason and its singularity. Finally, it forces language to undergo definite destruction – a process that is the agent for the revival of the poetic power of the word.

Wolfgang Iser meticulously noted all those troubles, fascinations and contradictions converging in the singular place where we ought to start our reading. Our goal would be to find sense in this text and interpret the world deposited within its boundaries. First, I would like to provide an extensive citation of Iser, which grasps the precise stakes of an encounter with Beckett for any reader:

In some modern texts, this fact can be studied under almost experimental conditions. The works of Beckett are among those whose indeterminacy content is so high that they are often equated with a massive allegorization. The tendency to regard them as allegories is in itself a kind of exasperated form of meaning projection. What causes this exasperation, which can clearly only be pacified by imposing some meaning on the text? Beckett’s works, with their extreme indeterminacy, cause a total mobilization of the reader’s imagination; the effect of this, however, is that the totally mobilized world of imagination finds itself to be powerless when called upon to explain. And yet this impotence on the part of one’s own imagination seems to be necessary if one is to accept Beckett’s work at all, for the individuality of his text only becomes apparent when the world of our imagination is left behind. It is not surprising therefore, that one’s first reaction is to mount a massive operation of meaning-projection in order to haul the texts back within the limits of normal thinking.

If fiction stubbornly refuses to reveal the sought-after meaning, then the reader will decide what it has to mean. But then one realizes that by imposing an allegorical or unequivocal meaning onto the text, one’s approach tends to be superficial or even trivial. Should not this allegorization be seen as an indication of the nature of our current conceptions and preconceptions rather than as a means of explaining the text? If so, then such texts will show us the fundamental lack of freedom resulting from our self-imposed confinement within the world of our own ideas. In making his reader experience the embarrassing predicament of the failure of his understanding, Beckett opens up a road to freedom which can be embarked on whenever we are prepared to shed the preconceived notion that so far have dominated our outlook.

The works of Beckett provoke a desire for understanding, which can only be satisfied if we apply our own ideas to the text, to have them duly rejected as redundant. It is precisely this process that both stimulates and exasperates us, for who likes to learn that his own ideas have to be subjected to a fundamental revision if they are to grasp phenomena that seem to lie beyond their scope?⁶ ← 8 | 9 →