Saintly in appearance, Samuel Beckett, in his own squidlike way, could release a cloud of ink that today blurs his image, making it even more indecipherable than it was in his time. One of the myths that he fostered about his own life was the story that he had been born on Good Friday, and moreover, the day happened to be Friday the thirteenth (April 13, 1906), although diligent biographers have shown that his birth certificate indicates he was born in May of that year. His family owned its own pew at the Tullow Parish of the Church of Ireland; and while he took great Asceticism in Literature and Philosophy pains to distance himself from formal religion, he borrowed the idiom and rituals of the church and the tension of its various crises in the same way that Jean Genet, T. S. Eliot, Robert Musil, and many other great Modernists tapped these sources. The biblical text of greatest importance to Beckett is the book of Job, and the anecdotal progress of Dante, par- ticularly of the Inferno and Purgatorio, is a stylistic as well as emotional foundation for his theologically based musings.
Although they are not as widely known as the plays or even the novels, Beckett’s poems offer some of the most startling imagery of asceticism in his work. In “The Vulture,” from the volume Echo’s Bones, he describes the deathly bird “dragging his hunger through the sky / of my skull shell of sky and earth.”** This desert scene, like a lost passage from Eliot, takes us right to the themes of impoverishment and pain that haunt the later plays and fiction. In another lyric titled “La mouche,” Beckett sounds out the “musique de l’indifference” that, in a Mallarméan gesture, silences the lovers. Beckett invokes the same imagery in the poem “Alba” with the Mallarméan line “beyond the white plane of music.” That haunted wasteland that Beckett discovers in his poems and ten roams through in the novels and plays has baffled and inspired critics and philosophers for decades. Harold Bloom calls it “the beyond”: “Call it the silence, or the abyss, or the reality beyond the pleasure principle, or the metaphysical or spiritual reality of our existence at last exposed, be- yond further illusion. Beckett cannot or will not name it, but he has worked through to the art of representing it more persuasively than anyone else.”*” Writing about Endgame, T. W. Adorno notes that Beckett creates a “zone of indifference” regarding subjectivity and objectivity:
“All content of subjectivity, which necessarily hypostatitzes itself, is trace and shadow of the world, from which it withdraws in order not to serve that semblance and conformity the world demands.”** Adorno lowers himself into the canyons of Endgame on the ropes of Schopenhauer, Proust, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. “The aesthetic principium stilisationis does the same to humans. Thrown back completely upon themselves, subjects—anticosmism becomes flesh—consist in nothing other than the wretched realities of their world, shrivelled down to raw necessities; they are empty personae through which the world truly can only resound.”” The language of suffering is relentless in Beckett’s plays. Waiting for Godot invokes the cross, as well as the sheer brutality of the beatings in the ditch, the little instances of physical pain such as the cramp from shoes that are too tight or a hat that does not fit, or more pathetically, the sores around the neck of Lucky created by the rope by which he is dragged from place to place. The visual austerity and poverty of the characters is reflected in the setting, including the bare tree by Giacometti in the first Paris production, the moon which is full and fat (a spotlight in most productions), the bare stage, the ragged clothes, and that overall sense of exposure that makes an old hat all the more precious. These clowns or tramps are not by any means saints in the ethical sense. At one point they mean to rob the passing travelers. There is an abundance of sexual innuendo, including the constant running offstage to urinate, or worse. Mean-spirited, shifty, and deceitful, as entertainers they try to dupe the audience into the notion that the time of the performance is filled satisfactorily.
The novels explore this territory in what may be an even more painful way. The only way out of distress is the gradual wearing down of the senses, to the point of unconsciousness. In Malone Dies the absence of sensation is represented by the condition of being in a coma and by the almost active (as illogical as that sounds) reduction of sense data. “I shall be neutral and inert,” the narrator declares at the outset of the novel.” Even when the meals arrive according to a “time-tablé” (the measure of time being a very important image in all of Beckett), he occasionally shuns them. He is imprisoned, and as in the prison paintings of Peter Halley, the texture of prison life becomes the substance of the work. Like Robert Musil’s hero, Ulrich, Malone uses mathematics as a way to quantitatively amuse himself. “He made a practice, alone and in company, of mental arithmetic,” Beckett writes.
This focus on habit is a key factor in Beckett’s work. In his challenging and often revealing little book on Marcel Proust, Beckett came closer to declaring his aesthetic credo than in any other work. One of the most sigónificant ideas in Beckett’s study is the centrality of habit in the ongoing negotiations between the individual and the environment. As Beckett wrote, “Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals.” In terms of the ascetic way of life, its rhythms and rituals, this strikes a fundamental pitch. In the odd opening pages of Molloy, a writer’s miserable routine (“blackening” pages) and rag-tag physical appearance are reminiscent of a cross between the tattered old martyrs of Yeats and Melville’s Pierre or Bartleby (“He gives me money and takes away the pages”). He recounts the physical abuse he has suffered and the distress he habitually inflicts upon himself in his daily existence. Like the “vanishing” reader of Heidegger’s ideal, he is almost perfectly disguised: “I was perched higher than the road’s highest point and flattened what is more against a rock the same color as myself, that is grey.”** More than the ashen annihilation of color, the flattening of form and the elevation of perspective serve also to position Molly among the oddly indolent saints of Beckett’s canon. Only a few passages later, this character, who has the sculptural quality of an object, observes: “To restore silence is the role of objects” (p. 13). He eats “like a thrush,” and his various ailments leave him almost paralyzed. With a Baudelairean love of the night in which he can hide, he contemplates his own objecthood: “I was a solid in the midst of other solids” (p. 100). The narrator of Molloy uses a routine to fight his insomnia. It leads him into a desert labyrinth and complements the imagery of drowning and inundation. In the end, it brings us closer to the mind and voice of Beckett himself, lulling us to sleep in a strange pianissimo that could be set to music by Messiaen, choreographed by Cunningham, with sets, of course, by Giacometti: “I did as when I could not sleep. I wandered in my mind, slowly, nothing every detail of the labyrinth, its paths as familiar as those of my garden and yet ever new, as empty as the heart could wish or alive with strange encounters. And I heard the distant cymbals. There is still time, and still time. But there was not, for I ceased, all vanished and I tried once more to turn my thoughts to the Molloy affair. Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea” (p. 106).
Metaphysics in Retreat: Martin Heidegger
If Heidegger had pursued the career path that his parents had intended for him he would have become a Catholic priest. He ended up leading a monkish existence, clad in Alpine boots, on top of a hill near Todtnau in the Black Forest. A favorite anecdote among academics (particularly those who believe in the sanctity of office hours and sabbaticals) is the tale of Heidegger firing his gun over the head of a graduate student to keep him from cutting across his property and disturbing his isolation.
Against the onslaught of technology, nihilism, and obscure academic theories that had clouded the original questions philosophy is meant to address (generally Greek in origin, although Heidegger was also interested in Asian thought), Heidegger posed his own wonderfully literary, human, nostalgic question: What is Being? The opening pages of the English volume of essays known as Poetry, Language, Thought are devoted to a series of brief lyric poems collectively titled “The Thinker as Poet” (Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens). The “single pathway” of these poems is an austere, solitary road to the top of a mountain, where Heidegger, who feels we are too late for religion and too early for Being, as he conceives it, contemplates its apparition: “To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the word’s sky.”*? The poems celebrate the “splendor of the simple” in mountain wildflowers, butterflies on the meadow breezes, the path through the trees, the rays of the sun streaming down through the clouds, the pleasures of living in a cabin way above society. He is careful to bring in the element of privation: “Pain gives of its healing power where we least expect it.”** The close communion with the seasons guides the philosopher to a calm clarity: “In thinking all things become solitary and slow.”* Heidegger’s thought is pointed toward the revelatory experience of the “transcendental” or “ecstasy,” like that of Gould, and very different from that of Olivier Messiaen, Joan Miré, or even T. S. Eliot. While they induce the rhapsodist’s flight, through a suspension of analytic rigor, Heidegger and Gould pushed their introspective interpretations to the level of creativity. One of the most revealing passages in Heidegger related to ecstasy and its aesthetic roots is found in the study of Nietzsche, which began as a series of lectures at Freiburg during the winter of 1936-37. Heidegger soars past Nietzsche’s aesthetic rapture into a description of “attunement”:
Rapture is feeling, an embodying attunement, an embodied being that is contained in attunement, attunement woven into embodiment. But attunement lays open Dasein as an enhancing, conducts it into the plenitude of its capacities, which mutually arouse one another and foster enhancement.
But while clarifying rapture as a state of feeling we emphasized more than one that we may not take such a state as something at hand “in” the body and “in” the psyche. Rather, we must take it as a mode of the embodying, attuned stance toward beings as a whole, a stance which for its part determines the pitch of the attunement.”* To gain an appreciation of how Heidegger attains this elusive “stance” from which the apprehension of Being becomes possible, let’s consider his reading habits. He had an approach to poetry that enabled him to address his ontological questions in the uniquely lyrical style that has vanquished so many translators and explicators since his time. The secret goal that Heidegger kept in mind as a reader is a kind of self-effacement that permits the poem to radiate its own meanings without interference.
As he writes, “The final, but at the same time the most difficult step of every exposition consists in vanishing away together with its explanations in the face of the pure existence of the poem.”*’ This is more than an act of Socratic restraint or academic politesse. It sets up an ascetic morality of reading. Despite all that has been made lately of the highly personal (on the brink of egomaniacal) strain of literary criticism, the strict application of Heidegger’s principle takes as its premise the effacement the reader’s agenda. He was also an advocate of the stillness of the wise participant in his dialogue on language, which invokes his powerful interest in Buddhism and Japanese aesthetics, he sets up a scene in which an “Inquirer” encounters a Japanese scholar (the occasion for the dialogue was the actual visit to Freiburg in 1953 of a certain Professor Tezuka of the Imperial University in Tokyo). Their colloquy, interrupted by long meditative pauses, touches not only on the differences between Western and Japanese perceptions of language but on aesthetics, the No theater, and the film Rashomon. The Japanese scholar demonstrates the way in which a No actor conjures a mountain scene, slowly raising and opening his hand. Asked what the “essence” of the gesture evokes, he ex- plains: “In a beholding that is itself invisible, and that, so gathered, bears itself to encounter emptiness in such a way that in and through it the mountains appear.” The Westerner, perfectly attuned, completes the thought without missing a beat: “That emptiness then is the same as nothingness, that essential being which we attempt to add in our thinking as the other, to all that is present and absent.” At the core of Heidegger’s masterpiece, Being and Time, there is a passage on silence that is arguably one of the great ascetic statements in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Bearing in mind the “death-centered” nature of Heidegger’s conception of Being, which relates its wholeness in death, the symbolic importance of one who keeps silent in dialogue is chilling, reminding us of the potency of the long silences in Elliott Carter’s string quartets. As a writer and thinker, Heidegger validates an economy of discourse in this passage, requiring the type of self-restraint that was noted in the dialogue on language. In his eyes, the protracted excess of words make clarity impossible, while silence bears the possibility of revealing:
Keeping silent is another essential possibility of discourse, and it has the same existential foundation. In talking with one another, the person who keeps silent can “make one understand” (that is, he can develop an understanding), and he can do so more authentically than the person who is never short of words. Speaking at length [ Viel-sprechen] about something does not offer the slightest guarantee that thereby understanding is advanced. On the contrary, talking extensively about something, covers it up and brings what is understood to a sham clarity—the unintelligibility of the trivial.” As the paragraph continues, Heidegger raises the stakes by distinguishing between merely rhetorical reticence and the deeper, meaningful, and “authentic” silence of the sort of attunement observed earlier. There is a discernible shift in this passage from the mode in which a person is speaking or keeping silent to a condition in which Dasein (“Being- there”) is communicating (“Dasein must have something to say”):
But to keep silent does not mean to be dumb. On the contrary, if a man is dumb, he still has a tendency to “speak.” Such a person has not proved that he can keep silence; indeed, he entirely lacks the possibility of proving anything of the sort. And the person who is accustomed by Nature to speak little is no better able to show that he is keeping silent or that he is the sort of person who can do so. He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment. Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say—that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case one’s reticence [Verschwiegenheit] makes something manifest, and does away with “idle talk” [Gerede]. As a mode of dis- coursing, reticence articulates the intelligibility of Dasein in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to a potentiality-for-hearing which is genuine, and to a Being-with-one-another which is transparent.”” For Heidegger, “clarity” is a supreme virtue, and nothing could be clearer than the transparency in which this “Being with-one-another” possible by silence. The problem is finding a language with which to discuss Dasein, which in a sense confirms Heidegger’s hunch that “silence is most noble in the end.” As Richard Rorty has ventured to suggest, there is a linguistic brink that cannot be comfortably crossed: “We do not need to ask which understandings of Being are better understandings. To ask that question would be to begin replacing love with power.”” The poetry coming down from the mountain begins to echo and break up in the valley below. Heidegger labored to rescue Dasein from what Nietzsche had called the “pale, cold, gray concept nets” of philosophy and went on to try nostalgically to protect Dasein from the encroachments of technology. Ironically, because Heidegger had deep-seated reservations about the spread of technology even in his age, with the growth of the Internet, Heidegger’s terminology is a fashionable resource, constantly raided by cyber-philosophers like Ernesto Grassi and Geert Lovink, whose Metaphysics of Virtual Reality portrays Heidegger as one who projected possibilities in the giddy way that devoted Netjunkies rhapsodize about. Much of this is far from the cold, clear atmosphere of Heidegger on his mountaintop, gripping with all his strength the scythe that made a clearing in which Dasein could be at home.
Baroque of the Void: Robert Musil
Unjustifiably neglected for decades in the English-only literary world, Robert Musil reemerged recently thanks to a new translation of his classic The Man without Qualities. The lead character in The Man without Qualities, Ulrich, is a scientist and amateur philosopher, just like Musil himself, who was born in a small town called Klagenfurt in Austria in 1880. After a brief stint of military service, he became a writer. He split his life between Vienna and Berlin until, afraid that the Nazis would ban his fiction, he moved to Switzerland in 1938. Desperately poor, he never finished his materwork (it was published in part nine years after his death in 1942).
Musil used Ulrich to show how he “realizes to his astonishment that reality is at least one hundred years behind what is happening in thought.” In his diaries, Musil brooded on the possibility of a new order, of “mind taking charge of the world” (geistige Bewatigung der Welt). His reading in Novalis, Emerson, and Husserl- is evident in this anthithetical stance, as are his literary tastes, which ran to Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, D’Annunzio, Verlaine, Rilke, and the ubiquitous Poe. Ulrich lives in a “dainty little white gem of a house” that has the cloistral touch of being both book-lined on the inside and surrounded by the “fine green filter of the garden air” on the outside. The reader usually finds Ulrich watching life through a window, keeping a muffling medium being himself and the world. We first meet him in the novel playing a weird little mathematical game, daydreaming with a stopwatch in his hand while he counts the traffic going by and attempts to calculate the unquantifiable busyness of the world. His mathematical reverie is an attempt at transcendence that take the place of theology, striving toward the kind of perfection that, sadly, often means inaction. He is mysteriously described as a “man returning after years of absence,” yet as the determined reader will find out through the course of the next 1,700 pages or so, Ulrich rarely emerges from what he later calls the “Baroque of the Void.” He moves through the scenes like a shadow, attuned to the “inner acoustics of emptiness,” replying to the “yes” of Joyce’s Ulysses with a deep, resonating pizzicato cello note of “no.” This indifference sets up an outer shell that protects the inner emptiness, leaving Ulrich in a state of paralysis, or “pseudoreality,” with a “passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled.” Ulrich extols the “masters of the inner hovering life,” looking ahead to the only genuinely happy period in his existence, when, sitting quietly with his sister Agathe in the home of his deceased father (a scene that is filled with the tension of impending incest, not unlike the kind found in the work of two other Modern Austrian masters, Georg Trakl and Thomas Bernhard), he reads the lives of the saints in search of what he calls a “sensible asceticism.” The “masters” are not specifically Christian or Buddhist: “Their domain lies be- tween religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between amor intellectualis and poetry. They are saints without religion, and sometimes they are also simply men on an adventure who have gone astray.” Out of this, Ulrich temporarily fashions a credo that takes into account the split of morality into mathematics and mysticism and that feeds the “alchemist’s fire glimmering behind the moral injunctions, no domestication of evil” (1:836-—37).
These saints recur subtly and yet regularly through the novel. The powerful businessman turned statesman, Arnheim, collects Baroque and Gothic sculptures of Catholic martyrs in twisted poses of torture and death that remind him of ecstasy and give him a feeling of “horrified amazement.” As Ulrich contemplates the difference between the mystical experiences of antiquity or the Middle Ages and the Modern age, he realizes that metaphysics has lost credibility. In a memorable sentence, Musil observes through Ulrich:
And while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of all the traditional, terminological husks of faith, freed from ancient religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn. (1:603)
As with the practical Arnheim, who defines even his happiness against the limits of propriety, legitimacy, and reality, Ulrich is after a moment of simplicity and clarity. To Arnheim, “at peak moments of perception, one senses how the cosmos turns on an axis of vertical austerity” (1:548).
That axis presents a stark contrast to the luxurious, overactive exterior of Arnheim’s wealth and business. The Proustian lush life of Musil’s characters is spent in posh, if comfortless, world of titled aristocrats mixing with social-climbing industrialists in Vienna’s better residences. When Ulrich fires every bullet from a revolver’s chamber into a piano that Agathe, his sister, is playing, Musil takes pains to indicate that it is a very good, “expensive” piano that is destroyed. The luxurious state in which they live is at odds with the selfless intentions (pretensions) they bear and the intellectual asceticism they use to force the “paling” of their drives and desires to keep them under control. Musil peers into the cells of his meditating monks—the boudoir of Bonadea, the music room of Clarisse, the bed- room of Ulrich, or the office of the General, outside of which a red light is lit over the door to indicate that he is not to be disturbed. The reader eavesdrops on their private forays into spiritual questions behind Musil, who drills deep into these characters’ soul-searching and then, reversing the drill deftly at chapter’s ends, extricates his narrative line without damaging the structure.
The imagery of Heraclitean fire in the work is significant, particularly as it leaves the ascetic residue of ashes or cinders. When, at last Ulrich and his sister do allow their relationship to become more physical, it is described (vaguely) in terms of their plunging into fire. Until then, as Musil writes, “Love and asceticism stand apart in their lonely kinship.
How aimless this pair appears, how devoid of a target, compared with the aims and targets of normal life” (1:610). Against fire, Musil poses the habitual cold of Ulrich. In an early diary entry, Musil observed: “Around me there is organic solution, I rest as if under a covering of ice, one hundred meters thick.”*? Arnheim, too, is locked in ice. Staring at his Black servant, Soliman, thinking of his sterile relationship with Diotima, he realizes that “at the very summit of his life, a cold shadow separated him from everything he had ever touched.”** A moment later, realizing that Ulrich too lived in such a selfless shadow but more comfortably—which Arnheim ascribes to an aversion to acquisitiveness—Arnheim recasts the barrier as “an almost imperceptible skin of ice” (1:597). Arnheim thinks that there is “something missing” in the younger— the sort of thing one might say about a eunuch.
The stunningly powerful ending to the novel’s “Pseudo-Reality Prevails” section is a late-night walk home that brings Ulrich face-to-face with the relationship between inner and outer. As he progresses from narrow to wide street and open squares, he is struck by the “foreshortening of the mind’s perspective” that allows visual relationships to be presented in a coherent picture, and he relates this to his own gift for a kind of necessary “abstraction” in the creation of narrative order. Throughout the novel, Ulrich has stopped conversations cold with his “stories,” and now he notes that the mathematical order or thread of narrative allows him to hold the world at bay. On the way home he is stopped by a prostitute and gives her the money she would have demanded for sex. Then he reaches home, abstemious to the last, where he is surprised to find the lights blazing, a telegram informing him of the death of his father, and his best friend’s wife throwing herself at him. But she too is rejected despite momentarily arousing him. These twin denials in close order underscore the ascetic strength of Ulrich. As dawn approaches and he slips into “a painless state of exhaustion that changed his total sense of his body,” he notices how his solitude has deepened. He takes in the cool air of morning and returns to “civilized European” precision with a bath and vigorous exercise session (2:725).
For Ulrich, love becomes a kind of anesthetized “antireality” on the same plane as the other psychological exercises (like the counting games that figure so prominently not only in Musil’s work but in the novels of Thomas Bernhard as well). Even when Ulrich and his sister are lying side by side, making a “constellation” (recalling Miro and Mallarmé), they are paralyzed. Lying on their stomachs outside watching one ant murder another, having one of their protracted discussions about the Annunciation, bliss, love, and death, they hover over making love or trying to commit suicide. Ulrich advises his sister:
Try to take it metaphorically. You don’t even have to rush to give it a particular significance: just take its own! Then it becomes like a breath of air, or the sulfurous smell of readiness for dissolution tremble. I can imagine that one could even get over one’s own death amicably, but only because one dies just once and therefore regards it as especially important; because the understanding of saints and heroes is pretty lacking in glory in the face of nature’s constant small confusions and their dissonances! (2:1396)
THE SAINTS OF MODERN ART
Charles A. Riley II
