576
PARTISAN REVIEW
Hours passed there, hours breathing together with a single heartbeat,
hours in which
K.
constantly felt he was lost or had wandered far–
ther into foreign lands than any human being before him, so foreign
that even the air hadn't a single component of the air in his home–
land and where one would inevi tably suffocate from the foreignness
but where the meaningless enticements were such that one had no
alternative but to go on and get even more lost.
Similarly, for Beckett heroes such as Malone in
Malon.e Dies,
sex is no
more than a gateway to a nameless unhappiness:
Let us think of the hours when, spent, we lie twined together in the
dark, our hearts labouring as one, and listen to the wind saying what
it is to be abroad, at night, in winter, and what it is to have been
what we have been, and sink together, in an unhappiness that has no
name.
Kafka's melancholic VISIon of art and life first emerged
In
an
epiphany that he had as a youth on a hill overlooking Prague:
Many years ago
I
sat one day, in a sad enough mood, on the slopes
of the Laurenziberg. I went over the wishes that I wanted to realize
in life. I found that the most important was to attain a view of life
in which life...would be recognized...as a nothing...a dream, a dim
hovering...somewhat as if one were to hammer together a table
with painful and methodical technical efficiency, and simultaneous–
ly do nothing at all, and not in such a way that people could say:
"Hammering a table together is nothing to him" but rather:
"Hammering a table together is really hammering a table together
to him, but at the same time it is nothing..."
Kafka's conception of art as something and at the same time nothing
IS remarkably close to the aesthetics of failure that Beckett is already
beginning to evolve in the 1930s. In 1937 Beckett speaks of wanting "to
bore one hole after another into it [language], until what lurks behind
it-be it something or nothing-begins to seep through." His goal in
ripping apart the veil of language is "to feel a whisper of that final music
or that silence that underlies all."
