MARK HARMAN
577
Kafka anticipates another central insight of Beckett's when he notes in
an aphorism that "a first sign of nascent knowledge is the desire for death."
Beckett, too, is, as Christopher Ricks suggests in his witty book
Beckett's
Dying
VVords,
a writer who reveals to us in stark form the fact that at some
point, at some level, most of us long for death. Yet Beckett does not entire–
ly banish his characters' fear of death. Like Kafka, he profited from reading
Pascal and Schopenhauer, and his characters' obsessive cogitations are
merely a distraction-in the Pascalian sense--from death.
Kafka and Beckett are the two great modern connoisseurs of the
deathbed scene. Kafka's comments on the relationship between his own
attitude toward death and that of his characters are more forthcoming than
Beckett's. In the diaries he claims that in staging such deathbed scenes he
is deliberately exploiting the discrepancy between the reader's fear of death
and his own longing for it: "for me, who believe that I shall be able to lie
contentedly on my deathbed, such scenes are secretly a game; indeed, in the
death enacted 1 rejoice in my own death, hence calculatingly exploit the
attention that the reader concentrates on death, have a much clearer under–
standing of it than he, of whom I suppose that he will loudly lament on
his deathbed."
By contrast, Beckett's characters claim to be much in love with ease–
ful death. Yet, however much they look forward to their demise, theirs is
always a protracted farewell. For instance, in the opening lines of
Malone
Dies
the hero announces his inuninent departure--"I shall soon be quite
dead at last"-only to add "I would not put it past me to pant on to the
Transfiguration, not to speak of the Assumption." At one point Malone
even concedes that his insouciance about death is an act: "Yes, there is no
good pretending, it is hard to leave everything." Yet for the most part he
goes on pretending.
In their evasion of the death they ostensibly welcome, Beckett's char–
acters are every bit as obsessive as Kafka's. Malone, for instance, prepares for
his denuse-which he likes to call his great day-by repeatedly counting
his possessions: " I want, when the great day comes, to be in a position to
enounce clearly... all that its interminable prelude... had brought me and
left me in the way of chattels personal." And then he adds: "I presume it
is an obsession." One would seek vainly in Kafka for a sentence like that.
Although Kafka writes about characters who fret as much as Beckett's do,
he eschews such explicitly psychological language. True, he kept abreast of
the startling developments in Viennese psychology, as is evidenced by his
casual comment that while writing his breakthrough story "The
Judgment" he had had "thoughts of Freud, naturally." Yet he remained
wary of psychoanalysis and even dreamed about writing fiction that would
free itself from psychology. By contrast, Beckett, who underwent therapy
