APOCALYPSE
355
flair for apocalyptic variations, the funniest of which is the frustrated
millennialism of the Lynch family in
Wall,
and the most telling, per–
haps, the conclusion of
Comment c'est.
He is the peIVerse theologian
of a world which has suffered a Fall, experienced an Incarnation
which changes all relations of past, present and future, but which
will not be redeemed. Time is an endless transition from one condition
of misery to another, "a passion without form or stations," to be ended
by no
parousia.
It
is a world crying out for forms and stations, and
for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform anti–
thetical influx.
It
would be wrong to think that the negatives of Beckett are a
denial of the paradigm in favor of reality in all its poverty. In Proust,
whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all
derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of
order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always
with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in,
checks which will bounce. Order, the Christian paradigm, he suggests,
is no longer usable except as an irony; that is why the Rooneys col–
lapse in laughter when they read on the Wayside Pulpit that the Lord
will uphold all that fall.
But of course it is this order, however ironized, this continuously
transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett's point, and provides
his books with the structural and linguistic features which enable us
to make sense of them. In his progress he has presumed upon our
familiarity with his habits of language and structure to make the
relation between the occulted forms and the narrative surface more
and more tenuous; in
Comment c'est
he mimes a virtually schismatic
breakdown of this relation, and of his language. It is perfectly pos–
sible to reach a point along this line where nothing whatever is
communicated, but of course Beckett has not reached it by a long
way; and whatever preseIVes intelligibility is what prevents schism.
This is, I think, a point to be remembered whenever one con–
siders extremely novel, avant-garde writing. Schism is meaningless
without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is sim–
ply unintelligible, even as novelty. It may, of course, be asked: un–
intelligible to whom?- the inference being that a minority public,
perhaps very small (members of a circle in a square world) do under–
stand the terms in which the new thing speaks. And certainly the
