BECKETT
263
something I feel as an indefiniteness about the status he would like
to give his own attitudes. Or it's perhaps an uncertainty about whether
or not he even wants attitudes and ideas; is he willing, or isn't he, to
allow encyclopedic knowledge to sound like statements
about
things,
like a philosophical stand? At any rate, by his indefiniteness Beckett
just manages to avoid the inflated pseudo-significance which his critics
admire as "profundity." To call Watt's endless, and endlessly tedious
questions about Mr. Knott a satire of logical positivism, or to see in the
need Beckett's derelicts have of making an inventory of their possessions
a critique of capitalistic proprietary impulses, is to miss the way in
which the triviality and flatness of the "satirical" context make the at–
tack itself seem even more of a joke than the object of attack. "Taking
stock of the Enlightenment" would' require a more imaginative com–
mitment
to
the Enlightenment, some resistance from the things being
made fun of. Only then could Lucky'S "thinking" exercise in
Codot,
for
example, be more than learned horseplay. Not only does his incoherent
talk leave perfectly intact the rationality of language; a writer who
shows so little dramatic ambivalence in his ideas and attitudes de–
monstrates nothing more intellectually interesting than his own intel–
lectual mood of assertiveness and indifference.
But this is being too harsh, and, in all fairness to Beckett, I should
say that he strikes me as being far less interested in, say, Occasionalist
philosophy than in the anus, unadorned' and admirably unsublimated.
The trouble is, of course, that such an interest is also expressive, not
exactly of ideas, but of a certain kind of personality. I know of no
writer who has come closer than Beckett in his novels
to
translating
the rhythms of defecation into sentence structure, or to finding a
doughy, thick, smirching prose to suggest the monotonous pleasure of a
baby playing with its own excrement. And
his
bums exhibit the traits
of an ideally anal character: compulsiveness, sadism and, especially, a
profound, unrelieved miserliness with respect not
on~y
to their pos–
sessions but also to their very being, which they try desperately
to
pre–
vent from escaping into c.omrnunicable meanings or dramatic self–
projections.
Such an extreme fixation at least saves Beckett the embarrassment
of being "representative" of all humanity, but the image of conscious–
ness "at play," purposely attentive to and endlessly brooding about
the same things, is, after all, a "desertion" from art to life, a sign of
how difficult it is
to
render expression impossible. This is what Beckett
himself humorously refers to, with Duthuit, as his "unenviable situa–
tion." The attempt to eliminate "occasion" from
art
is
in
itself an oc–
casion, and insofar as this attempt is a pr.ocess of what Mrs. Cohn has
