Leo Bersani
NO EXIT FOR BECKETT
The most interesting fact about Samuel Beckett's novels is
that they are, at their best, almost completely unreadable. I say "at
their best" not merely because Beckett, in one of his rare theoretical
remarks, has insisted that "to be an artist is to fail," but also because
he has been developing in his novels more and more effective strategies
designed to make us find them unbearable, to disgust us with his
"talent" in order to interest us in the destruction of that talent.
In three dialogues with Georges Duthuit on contemporary painters,
reprinted in Martin Esslin's collection of critical essays on Beckett for
the Prentice-Hall "Twentieth Century Views Series," the ordinarily in–
communic'ative Beckett praises Bram van Velde as the first painter "to
submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation, in the absence
of
terms, or, if you like, in the presence of unavailable terms," the first
whose work is rid "of occasion in every form, ideal as well as
material." The "anxiety to express as much as possible, or as truly as
possible, or as finely as possible, to the best of one's ability," an anxiety
common "among those whom we call great artists," is absent from van
Velde's ideally "inexpressive" painting. "Helpless to paint" because there
is "nothing to paint and nothing to paint with," van Velde has created
"art
of a new order." His failure is his success, and what we ordinarily
call success is, it would seem, a failure to accept the "insuperable
indigence" ,of art, the irrelevance to it of anything outside of it. No
"relation" to anything else, no "terms" to refer to, no "occasion"
to investigate and exploit, no meanings to be expressed.
What's left?
If
you suppress your irritation and try to take these
statements seriously (as I will), you will have to conclude, it seems
to
me, that nothing is left. What Beckett calls his "dream" of an in–
expressive, insignificant art is also the dream of an incommunicable art.
Since any reference or relation to "living"
is
considered as a "desertion,"
it's difficult to imagine what the living would respond to, or simply
recognize
in
this new art. And if there's any connection between
Beckett's work and these theoretical remarks, nothing is more mystifying
