For Assumpta

That voice

testing the palate of the void

was yours ;

—Fiona Sampson

CONTENTS

Foreword ................................................................................................... ix

The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett .............. 1

Film: Let’s Look at the Text ..................................................................... 13

Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot .................................................. 23

How it is in How It Is................................................................................ 41

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho ............................................... 73

Bibliography ............................................................................................. 97

FOREWORD

BENJAMIN KEATINGE

SOUTH EAST EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY, MACEDONIA

It has been suggested that there are two ways of ‘doing’ Beckett and

philosophy. On the one hand, the recent archival turn in Beckett studies

has urged an empiricist approach based on Beckett’s exhaustive,

autodidactic study of (mainly) Western philosophy in the 1930s as

evidenced chiefly in his Philosophy notebooks held at Trinity College

Dublin. The leading advocate of this approach, Matthew Feldman, has

advanced a major revisionist reading of Beckett’s engagement with

philosophy in his 2006 volume, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of

Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’. More recently, Feldman has been at

work as co-editor of Beckett/Philosophy (Sofia University Press, 2012)

where a range of contributors have followed Feldman’s ‘falsifiability

principle’ in excavating Beckett’s debt to the philosophical tradition.

These scholarly works have confirmed what has long been evident, that

Beckett was deeply immersed in the world of ideas, but at the same time, it

has shown that some corrective readings are necessary as to the scope and

sequence of Beckett’s erudition.

The alternative approach might be termed the speculative or

exploratory approach, one which suggests affinities and confluence of

interests even in the absence of hard evidence of inter-textual

indebtedness. Much early Beckett criticism, based on Beckett’s presumed

allegiance with existentialist thinking, or with theorists of ‘the absurd’,

was based on a sense of Beckett’s affinities with various thinkers - Sartre,

Camus, Heidegger, E.M. Cioran – but without the benefit of actual,

verifiable evidence. Beckett himself, on the other hand, has said:

When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and

existence, they may be right, I don’t know, but their language is too

philosophical for me. I am not a philosopher. One can only speak of what

Foreword

x

is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess. (Samuel Beckett,

interview with Tom Driver, Summer 1961)

We must take Beckett’s claim to not be a philosopher at face value.

After all, he also is on record as saying: “I wouldn’t have had any reason

to write my novels if I could have expressed their subject in philosophic

terms”. Nevertheless, there is a slight disingenuousness here, I would

suggest. How can we not read Beckett philosophically when his works so

conspicuously engage with major philosophical concepts: being, existence,

the subject, identity, epistemological questions, ethical questions … the

list could continue indefinitely?

The whole question of Beckett and philosophy therefore includes a

complex network of debts and legacies, not least the strong contemporary

tradition of thinking with or alongside Beckett evidenced by such major

thinkers as: Alain Badiou, Theodor Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, Maurice

Blanchot and, of course, Jacques Derrida. These latter two thinkers -

Blanchot and Derrida – are the major reference points in Dr Arthur

Broomfield’s study, The Empty Too: Language and Philosophy in the

Works of Samuel Beckett. Broomfield is interested in that key Beckettian

theme: the self-sufficiency of language and the irreducibility of the word.

Of course, a key insight of post-structuralist thinking generally has been

the sense that language constitutes and, in a sense, creates ‘the world’ or

‘the real’. When Beckett famously ends his 1950 novel Molloy with the

lines: “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain

is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining” he is

drawing our attention, in a way seemingly prescient of much post-

structuralist thinking, to the textuality of experience. Rather than words

representing experience, words create and constitute experience. Language

is prior to being.

None of this is new in the arena of Beckett studies. Indeed, one of the

most curious aspects of the history of Beckett and post-structuralism, is the

apparent affinity between Beckett’s literary experiments and the theories

advanced by Derrida under the rubric of deconstruction, while neither

Beckett nor Derrida are on record as saying anything extensive about each

other’s work. This is particularly surprising on the part of the French

philosopher who, when asked by Derek Attridge about his lack of response

to Beckett, famously said:

Beckett is an author to whom I feel very close, or to whom I would like to

feel myself very close; but also too close. Precisely because of this

proximity, it is too hard for me, too easy and too hard. I have perhaps

The Empty Too xi

avoided him a bit because of this identification. (Acts of Literature, ed.

Derek Attridge, Routledge, 1992, 60–1).

As numerous critics have suggested, it is because Beckett’s works

appear to deconstruct themselves that the architect of deconstruction felt

uneasy at his apparent proximity to the Irish writer’s work. Beckett’s

novels, in particular, have appeared to many as literary proof of

deconstruction as a methodology and critical procedure and several

noteworthy critical interventions on Beckett studies have read Beckett

alongside or through Derridean deconstruction.

It may be further said that more than one Beckettian has felt the same

sense of intellectual proximity to Beckett’s writing as articulated by

Derrida. One of the many merits of Dr Broomfield’s study is that he

combines personal conviction with a good measure of critical objectivity.

Without lapsing into jargon, Dr Broomfield offers a wide-ranging analysis

of Beckett’s work with particular attention to how Beckett has apparently

cast off the very conditions of an older literary tradition - subjectivity,

narration, character – so that we are left with the words themselves which

refuse to concede and which ‘go on’, as murmurs or traces, long after a

speaking subject has left the scene. Broomfield casts a cold eye across the

Beckett canon with particular focus of the dilemmas of perceptual

experience and linguistic expression in: Film, Waiting for Godot,

Endgame, How It Is and Worstward Ho. Although his approach is

philosophical, it is neither purely excavatory nor purely speculative;

rather, it relies on a kind of empirico-theoretical demonstration of how key

aspects of deconstruction are at work in Beckett. Added to this is Dr

Broomfield’s personal conviction that Beckett’s writing matters, in a way

which few other things do in our postmodern and post-literate world.

So what we have is a book written with the enthusiasm of a poet

(Broomfield is also a short story writer and published poet) but with the

critical rigour of the literary scholar. This is certainly not the first, nor will

it be the last book to interrogate the relationship between Beckett’s writing

and complex questions of being, perception and language. It is, however, a

noteworthy attempt to grapple with these intriguingly elaborate riddles of

our time.

Benjamin Keatinge,

Skopje, November 2013

THE REAL AND THE OTHER FROM PLATO,

THROUGH DERRIDA, TO BECKETT

Plato’s core thinking on the intelligible versus the sensible, the same

and the different, forms the foundation of Beckett’s works. Jacques

Derrida takes issue with aspects of Plato’s thinking and directs his focus to

the chora through which he seeks to break down the opposition between

the sensible and the intelligible in his thesis “Différance” (Rivkin & Ryan

1998). Beckett, through artistic and linguistic application of Plato’s

thinking, locates the question of language at the centre of the question of

being.

The question of being arises from the crisis between that which can be

intelligibly deduced and that which is perceived through the senses. To

argue that this crisis is evenly matched, so to speak, creates an impasse,

erects a barrier to the inquiry into the nature of being. It is a barrier that

Samuel Beckett in his important works, from Waiting for Godot (1956)

and The Unnamable (1959) on, addresses and overcomes. Beckett fine

tunes the relationship so that it is weighted in favour of the intelligible.

The intelligible to Beckett is that which, through reasoning and deduction,

can be shown to uniquely exist or be the real when all that is perceived

through the senses can only be doubted. He moves the thinking on being

forward to an emphasis on language. The real to Beckett is language; the

empty, pure word that remains after his process of interrogative deduction

has reduced the existence of the perceived to doubt. Before going into

deeper discussion on the thesis of the real and otherness that runs through

Beckett’s works it is necessary to refer to his great precursor, Plato, and

that which, in principle, links their thinking.

This relevant link in thinking is specifically related to what we call

“the real” in Beckett and “the same” in Plato. That which is relevant and

central is the leading question Plato (1997) asks (through Timaeus) in

Timaeus: “What is that which always is, and has no becoming, and what is

that which becomes but never is?” (1234). The former is grasped by

understanding, which “always involves a true account” (1254). It is

unchanging. The latter is grasped by opinion, which involves unreasoning

sense perception: “It comes to be and passes away, but never really is”

(1234). Central to that which is grasped by understanding is what Plato

calls “the same”; the same is “the same unchanging essence which is

invisible—it cannot be perceived by the senses at all” (1255). This is the

The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett

2

significant point through which we understand the same—it is not

material, in the sense that we understand materiality, but invisible and

cannot be perceived by the senses at all, yet it is “a thing” (1255), albeit

unpresentable to the senses. Plato draws us towards a different dimension

through a philosophical approach, while Beckett does so through a

combination of the philosophical, the imaginative and the linguistic. In

both instances, textual evidence affirms each author’s commitment to their

philosophical propositions. The marked distinction between the same, “the

unchanging,” on the one hand, and that which is grasped by opinion on the

other, “all the things we perceive through our bodily senses” (1254), is

explained by Plato. The same is unchanging, but that which is perceived

through the senses is “constantly borne along, now coming to be in a

certain place and then perishing out of it” (1255); the perceived world is

unstable and ever changing, which raises all the questions about the

fallibility of the perceived and the perceiver. What is not in doubt,

according to Plato, is the impossibility of the perceiver experiencing the

same—“it cannot be perceived by the senses at all.” The significance of

the relationship of Plato’s thinking on the same and what “we invariably

observe becoming different at different times” (1252), the different, to

Beckett’s thinking can hardly be overstressed. Importantly, Plato’s “same”

and Beckett’s language (the real) are intelligibly deduced while that

perceived through the senses never is, remaining an unstable, unprovable

perception of our senses, which are themselves unprovable. Alternatively,

it could be said that the same to Plato is the real that is haunted by

perceptions of the senses; they are a nuisance to it, but “it is the role of

understanding to study it” (1255).

Plato and Beckett reverse the notion of the other and the same/the real.

To both of them the perception of the senses is the other which disturbs the

real, where in conventional thinking the other is that which is other than

what we perceive, that which upsets the confidence borne of belief in our

self-identity. This is the high point of their philosophical agreement. It

establishes a definitive link between the thinking of Plato and Beckett. The

essential core principle that the other is the unverifiable which is perceived

in the empirical world, and being cannot be perceived by the senses, but

through understanding remains central to both.

Plato defines the same as that “which cannot be perceived by the

senses at all.” It is invisible yet is “one thing” (1255). The same to Plato is

one thing just as the empty, unpresentable word is a Messianic aspiration

for Beckett. The logic of Beckett’s thesis also points to the invisible,

unperceivable word as a “thing,” though not material, but very much a

thing in his imagined dimension, indeed the real. The perceived, on the

The Empty Too 3

other hand, according to Plato, “can be perceived by the senses … it has

been begotten” (1255), brought into existence by the actions of the

corporeal. The perceived is unstable; it comes to be in one place then

disappears out of it. Because it is understood by opinion “which involves

sense perception” (1255) the perceived is unreliable, and does not have

support from independent evidence beyond the perceptions and opinions

of the corporeal. On the evidence of his analysis it seems logical for Plato

to call what has been deduced through intellectual investigation “the

same,” and that which has been arrived at through a combination of

sensory perception and opinion “the different,” which appears to draw a

clear distinction between them both. But, Plato argues, “we prove unable

to draw … these distinctions,” (1255) because there exists a third thing

that clouds the possibility of posing a neat argument in favour of the

intelligible, and against one in favour of the sensible. Plato argues that this

third place “provides a fixed state for all things that come to be” (1255). It

is understood through a “bastard reasoning” that does not involve

perception. Though things come to be, or into being, from the chora—

which can be best understood as a neutral, amorphous something which

cannot be destroyed—those things cannot be described definitively as

things as such; i.e. since none of these appear to remain the same, “which

one of them can one categorically assert … to be some particular thing,

this one, and not something else?” (1252). Bastard reasoning is “bastard”

because it creates a schism within the legitimate reasoning that

understands the same, which is invisible and cannot be perceived by the

senses, as the true account. The chora “is itself apprehended by a kind of

bastard reasoning” (1255). As part of the make-up of the chora, bastard

reasoning does not involve sensory perception, yet it is a kind of bastard

offspring that indulges sensory perception, and by so doing betrays its

rightful parent, the intelligible, that which reaches a true account through

reason. Hence, even though the chora is an amorphous space, an

indefinable “something,” it creates a situation where “it takes on a variety

of visible aspects” (1255). Therefore, the bastard reasoning element of the

chora is forced to identify it. However, the process of identification creates

a scenario where it cannot be dismissed even if identified by us in our

“dreaming state” (1255).

The acknowledgement of the chora challenges Plato’s notion of the

same because it takes on a variety of visible aspects which, being visible,

are perceptible to the senses. Bastard reasoning has allowed this situation

to occur because, it seems, it permits the application of pure reason to that

which has been infiltrated by the senses. Heretofore, Plato has argued for a

clear distinction between the intelligible and the sensible because “the one

The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett

4

is not like the other” (1254). However, in the chora the distinct

independence of both has been compromised by the intelligible, because

of the recognition of something that is hardly even an object of conviction

(through bastard reasoning)—and therefore hardly not—and the sensible

being the “wet nurse of becoming … [ensures] that it takes on a variety of

visible aspects” (1255). The chora is that place or process where invisible

being is made available, through the miscalculations of a bastardized

reasoning to appropriation by the senses—what Plato calls “becoming.”

These core principles in Plato’s thinking form the foundation of Beckett’s

thinking; he develops and recreates them artistically and they form the

bedrock of his artistic and philosophical vision.

Beckett’s thinking exceeds that of the better-known philosophers to

date, which may appear to be a sweeping claim. His philosophical thinking

is part of his art. His work corrects the apparent miscalculations in their

thinking and goes on resolutely in a specific direction from the point

where they falter, seemingly driven by what Andrew Gibson calls “a faith

in possibility” (2006, 133). For example, we can relate a similarity in

Plato’s thought on the same and the other to Beckett’s—Plato’s

description of the same as invisible and the impossibility of perceiving it

through the senses and Beckett’s silence, and through their common belief

that perceptions of the senses are unprovable, and therefore the different,

or the other, insofar as Plato’s thinking goes. However, Beckett insists on

going on from the impasse in Plato’s thinking and pursues what is

possible, that which is so obvious and so ignored—the question of

language.

We shall return to Beckett in greater detail, but first we must speak of

Derrida’s contribution through his method of Deconstruction to the

thinking on language and meaning, and to the relationship between the

word and the referent, and we will identify the point where he too

miscalculates, from which Beckett insists on going on from.

Plato’s realizations that a place or space—a chora—cannot be denied,

is there, so to speak, and that perceptions of the senses are unstable

digressions, steer him towards the discourse on the Forms and away from

an intellectual interrogation of language. The questions that expose the

unprovability of sensory perceptions, and that prompt an interrogation of

language and the real, remained unasked in a fully serious way until the

arrival of Derrida and Beckett well over two millennia later. Derrida

develops the thinking put forward by Plato in that key passage of Timaeus

(1997, 1251–1252) by applying it to his understanding of the relationship

between language and perceptions. He continues the intellectual

interrogation of that which yields to that type of interrogation. Where Plato

The Empty Too 5

could be said to see the chora as an intrusion that questions the clarity of

his distinction of the intelligible from the sensible, Derrida grasps it as a

justification of his thesis that the chora represents that phase where the

distinction between the sensible and the intelligible breaks down.

Derrida’s thesis “Difference” argues for this breakdown; difference makes

the possible impossible, and the impossible possible. Differance is a

neologism in the French language, and in it Derrida replaces the second

“e” with an “a,” which puts into play the two distinct interpretations that

can be taken from differance—the verbs to differ and to defer. Because the

replacing of the letter “e” by the letter “a” in the word differance eludes

the senses of sight and hearing (in the French pronunciation), it may seem

that we are dealing with “an order that no longer refers to sensibility”

(Rivkin & Ryan 1998, 387–8) (the intelligible is also responsible for

inserting silent punctuation and spaces in written texts). However, neither

is it ideally intelligible, because the written neologism signifies the

breakdown of the classical opposition through “a movement of differance

between two differences” (387–8) (to differ and to defer). The Platonic

distinction between opinion that is perceived through the senses and the

intelligible that is arrived at through understanding, cannot be sustained,

according to Derrida, because that which resists it, the movement of

differance, challenges the certainty of the verb to defer when it is

understood as to differ, and vice versa when to differ is understood as to

defer also sustains it for the same reason. The play that is inherent between

both terms is emphasized in the neologism “one cannot choose one’s

favoured interpretation at the expense of the other.” When Derrida says

differance or “the trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a

presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself” (403), he is, at

core, talking about the attempts to represent in language the perceived that

is fleeting and unstable, that cannot for sure be stabilized as a “this” or

“that” but is in constant play, reflected in the word that seeks to represent

it.

Derrida holds, according to Caputo, “that presence (or reality) is

always the effect of … representation … meaning and reference are

always built up … from within the network of codes and assumptions with

which we all always already operate” (Caputo 1997, 101). Our acceptance

of what is represented through this process as meaning and truth is

challenged in differance. This acceptance is granted conditionally,

allowing the terms provisional status only but resisting holding them off

completely, and is the necessity of agreement on the meaning of words

and thus our ability to survive in the existential world. Yet it remains true

that what we call meaning is no more than our attempt to make sense,

The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett

6

through language, of unstable and inconsistent perceptions. We defer

naming presence because the present is representable, hence the possibility

of the empty, meaningless word that we will discuss later. Rather than the

intelligible subordinating the sensible, the breakdown creates an equality

of sorts between the two where neither dominates. This is “an order that

resists philosophy’s founding opposition between the sensible and the

intelligible” (Rivkin & Ryan 1998, 387–8); both are an admixture of

themselves and the other, and both infiltrate and subvert the other. We

might attempt to simplify the complexities of Derrida’s prose by summing

up this parity between the intelligible and the sensible like this: the same,

which is invisible and cannot be perceived by the senses, infiltrates

opinion formed and gathered through the senses, thus rendering it not fully

of the senses and questioning the truth value of the opinion. It breaks down

the neat side of the opposition that had been thought to be the sensible into

a confusion of the sensible and the intelligible (or the same). The sensible

may attempt to articulate and represent the same, but it is infiltrating the

realm of that which it cannot perceive and purporting to represent the

representable (which is in fact the unpresentable), so that neither the

sensible or the intelligible is a concept. For sure, the supposed clarity of

the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible has been broken

down, but has it not been replaced by an aporetic undecidable that, by

giving equal status to the sensible and the intelligible, recognizes the

reality of the world of perceptions and by so doing restricts exploration of

the possibility of the empty word. Derrida advances the thinking on

language to a linguistic chora where there is continuous play between

language and perception, and resolution is not possible.

Nevertheless, differance is located in the play between language and

perception in the world which we believe exists. The parity of status

mentioned gives the world of perceptions—of “non-being’ for Beckett in

Film—an unjustified advantage over the intelligible, because recognition

of it as reality creates the inevitable aporia that restricts full exploration of

the possibility of language as the real. The effect of that which “resists

philosophy’s founding opposition,” that between the intelligible and the

sensible, is that which traps Derrida in a prison of his own making—the

prison of the undecidable, which inhabits the “philosophical opposition,

resisting and disorganizing it … without ever leaving room for a solution”

(Derrida 2002, 43). “‘Differance,” he claims, “is even the subversion of

every realm” (Rivkin & Ryan 1998, 401). To which we might respond—

every realm bar one, the realm of the empty word, for this is where

Beckett’s view of being differs from Derrida’s.

The Empty Too 7

Derrida’s refusal to contemplate a disparity—rather than an

opposition—within differance creates a kind of muddled relationship

between the word and the perception that puts an onus on the word to

translate shifting unstable perceptions into language. The result is the so-

called failure of language, by which it may be understood that the

limitation of meaning in words, or the unavailability of the appropriate

word, fails to clearly or fully represent the perception. To say that

language fails when it clearly does not—or cannot—is said and accepted

because it is based on the flawed premise that the word and the perception

are equal in status when such a proposition is impossible to prove. For

Derrida, this failure is concentrated in the fruitless quest to present the

referent. “It is a feature of ‘marks’ that they are the signs of something

nonpresent” (Miller 2011, 201, 264), and the nonpresent to Derrida is “the

irreducibly nonpresent” (264). This, however, is not as it is in Beckett’s

pure language beyond relation to the corporeal, it is being beyond

language but not beyond the referent. The muddle in which this doubtful

premise lands language prevents the exploration of empty language as a

something beyond, free of the referent which is always of the perceived. It

contains language within the interminable chain of signifiers. It is

perceptions, not language, that fail, a point made in Texts for Nothing

(Beckett 2010) where the “I” that is language summarizes the conflict with

the corporeal “he” on the matter.

He thinks because words fail him he’s on his way to my

speechlessness, to being speechless with my speechlessness, he would like

it to be my fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He tells his

story every five minutes saying it is not his, there’s cleverness for you …

He would like it to be my fault that he has no story … (17)

Words fail the corporeal “he” because he is trying to “tell his story,”

which will necessitate representing perceptions that are outside of

language. But the corporal’s failure is the failure to represent, and his

speechlessness is borne of that failure, not of the failure of language. His

failure is not “my speechlessness,” the speechlessness that is free of the

corporeal and of meaning, that will not compromise its freedom by

attempting to represent, hence the corporal’s desire to blame the pronoun

“I.” “My speechlessness [is] a voice that makes no sound” (18), because it

is uncontaminated by association with perceptions.

The other to Derrida will always be that which is beyond language, the

possibility of non-linguistic existence, rather than that which is beyond

meaning, the empty pristine word: “Certainly deconstruction tries to show

that the question of reference is much more complex and problematic than

traditional theories supposed … (but) to challenge or complicate our

The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett

8

common assumption about it, does not amount to saying that there is

nothing beyond language” (Kearney 1993, 173). The other to Beckett is

the different, non-being, the parasite that is a torment to the real.

From a Beckettian standpoint, differance is immersed in a discourse on

non-being, the world of perceptions that are received through the senses,

and the frustrating task of trying to represent them in language. Beckett’s

faith in possibility is thwarted by differance’s claim to make the possible

impossible. Derrida’s order that resists philosophy’s founding opposition

between the sensible and the intelligible is challenged throughout the

imagined dimension created in Beckett’s works through an insistence that

language is the real—to which we can link Plato’s same—albeit the real

that is annoyed and tormented by that from which it cannot disassociate

itself, that which is perceived through the senses. The impetus of this

dimension is towards freeing language from referent, subject,

characterization, time and space, and from knowledge of anything outside

of language. Some of the most frequently used words and phrases in

Beckett’s works are “things,” “nothing,” “matter,” “it,” “that,” “don’t

know,” “and,” and “go on.” The verb “to be,” especially in its present

tense, is used infrequently and with marked precision and purpose. He

narrates “by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered” (Beckett

1959, 267). Seemingly commonplace terms and phrases are defamiliarized

so that their accepted meaning is questioned, e.g. “no matter” in “no

matter how it happened” (267), where the focus is switched from the

everyday filler in conversation to implicitly asking if there is no matter

then how did the word “it” happen? This dimension is located in a moment

of decay in the existential world like that in The Unnamable where “it”

doesn’t “matter”—“that’s all words” (Beckett 1959, 381)—which the

reader finds it almost impossible to go beyond, just as the narrator cannot

get beyond the threshold of the story he would like to tell.

Because the objects and concepts of the perceived world are never

more than perceptions that cannot be conclusively represented in language,

they also cannot be dismissed as non-existent. Beckett acknowledges them

unenthusiastically, “since none of these appear ever to remain the same”

(Plato 1997, 1252). Because he understands perceptions as non-beings that

nevertheless co-exist in some kind of parasitical relationship with being,

the real, which is language, he is constantly on guard against granting

them legitimacy by being seen to acknowledge them as referents, even to

the stage of differance which would reduce language to their level of

indeterminacy (and thus compromise its possibility of emptiness). The

great question that is central to Beckett’s works goes something like this:

The Empty Too 9

empty language is the real but, annoyingly, is haunted by association to the

world perceived by our senses—discuss.

This question shares a common origin with the thinking of Plato that

sees the same as “invisible—it cannot be perceived by the senses at all”

(Plato 1997, 1255) from which Beckett “goes on” from to seeing this

invisible, imperceptible as pure, empty, meaningless language that

somehow remains beyond the realm of the senses, the “voice that makes

no sound because it goes towards none” (Beckett 2010, 18) to explode the

aporia in differance: “What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do,

in my situation, how proceed ? By aporia pure and simple ? … I should

mention before going any further, any further on, that I say aporia without

knowing what it means” (1959, 267). Where Derrida is locked into an

undecidable, an aporia, because of the parity of status notion that he

pushes through differance, Beckett, in an example of what Blanchot calls

“neutral speech … (that) is the incessant, the interminable” (Blanchot

2003, 213), breaks free of the aporia by rendering the word aporia

meaningless.

If Beckett insists that language is the real, and if, to prove his point, he

undermines the credulity of character, narrative and narrator, we must ask,

as Maurice Blanchot asks, who is speaking in the works of Samuel

Beckett? “Who is speaking here, then? Is it the author? But what can this

title (The Unnamable) designate, if in any case the one writing is already

no longer Beckett but the demand that led him outside of himself” (213)

writes Blanchot in his insightful and yet to be surpassed essay on

Beckett’s works “Where now? Who now?” (210–217). Blanchot’s noting

of the demand that led him outside of himself pulls his understanding of

Beckett’s works agonizingly close to seeing—as it is argued here—that for

Beckett language is the real, and perceptions are the other. However, that

demand, for Blanchot, leads to the empty place “in which the listlessness

of an empty speech speaks” (213). It seems for Blanchot that the demand

is from an elsewhere, from an other to language—a who or what, maybe—

that will create, or be, an empty place in which empty language itself

resides. However, this is not a fully satisfying reading of Beckett, for in his

works language itself is demanding for itself, and there is no place in

which language resides—it is the ultimate, the real. Language is beyond

place, the material. We cannot say language is, as to do so is to question

and to assert its reality simultaneously. All we can say (is!), after Beckett’s

“I say I” (1959, 267), is language say language, or language language.

Blanchot, too, is conscious of the disparity seen by Beckett in the crisis

between the same and the other, the intelligible and the sensible. Yet he,

crucially, misreads Beckett when he says that “the being without being …

The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett

10

with great difficulty regains a porous and agonizing I” (Blanchot 2003,

213), for what Blanchot sees as the being without being is for Beckett

being (empty language), haunted and tormented by non-being

(perceptions), being with non-being. Yet because he sees language not as

the real but as subjected to a demand from some force beyond it, Beckett’s

thesis goes unacknowledged by Blanchot. The I which is regained or re-

claimed in a porous and agonized state is not the I that is the real but is the

I of non-being, the perceiver, we might say the deceiver, the corporeal.

Blanchot’s misreading of Beckett leads him to assume that there is a who,

or a what, that is outside of language, making the demand when, for

Beckett, the who is “it,” i.e. language itself demanding of itself. Blanchot

asks “What is the void that becomes speech in the open intimacy of the

one who disappears into it?” (2003, 210). By so doing he may leave

himself open to accusations of ignoring the linguistic, but also, by

misreading Beckett, of asking a philosophically related question that

cannot be supported with evidence from Beckett’s text. Blanchot’s

assumed void is not a void devoid of language, even if it becomes speech,

and the questions of language raised throughout Beckett’s works are

utterly complex propositions that embrace the philosophical, the

imaginative and the linguistic. Through all three they insist on

exhaustively addressing the question that is central to Beckett’s works.

We need to challenge Blanchot’s assertion that the void becomes

speech by arguing that in Beckett’s works the void does not become

speech, and that there is not or cannot be a void because the I who speaks

in The Unnamable (and his other major works, How It Is, Texts for

Nothing, Worstward Ho, etc.) is language itself, the real: “I’m in words,

made of words … the place too, the air, the walls the floor, the ceiling, all

words … I’m the air, the walls …” (Beckett 1959, 355). The I is in words

and made of words, is preceded by words; the place—even the air—is all

words, so a void outside of words, of language, is not contemplated

because to Beckett originary language is the beginning. “I’m the air, the

walls,” and nothing precedes it. Language is the singular truth towards

which, Beckett says, we go on. It is the “me who am everything (2010 17)

… the voice that makes no sound” (18), language that is neither heard nor

spoken because to be so would necessitate the use of the senses, whose

existence to Beckett are always in doubt, always non-being (which is not a

lapse into negative metaphysics), as we can see in the opening lines to part

IV of Texts for Nothing: “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be,

if I could be, what would I say, if I had voice, who says this saying its

me?” (2010, 17). Here it is language speaking, but speaking through the

doubted corporeal, as it must, just as it does when the speaker in The

The Empty Too 11

Unnamable says “I’m in words” (1959, 355). The frustration of language

wanting to speak independently of the corporeal, but at the same time

dependent on it, is obvious. Yet the certainty of the real as opposed to the

doubted existence of the corporeal, non-being is stressed in “I’m not in his

head, nowhere in his old body and yet I’m there” (2010, 17). Of equal

significance, in relation to Blanchot’s assertion on the void, is what

appears to be a spirited riposte to that type of position where language, in

response to the corporeal’s feelings, insists: “And where he feels me void

of existence it’s of his he would have me void” (2003, 17). The corporeal,

believing that all existence perceived through the senses would have

empty language (language that makes neither sound nor meaning),

stripped the senses definition of existence and condemned it to what s/he

believes to be a void. But language’s refutation , “and vice versa” (17),

which would have the corporeal stripped of his/her existence, would leave

the corporeal existing in the void, and language, stripped of the corporeal

and all of the impediments that its sensory perceptions impose on

language’s liberty, free, not in the void at all, but as the real.

Beckett’s art is built on a philosophical foundation—the question of

the opposition between the intelligible and the sensible. He reconstructs

Platonic thinking and applies it to the question of language, which he sees

at the centre of the question of being. Unlike Derrida, who becomes

imprisoned in the parity of status of the undecidable, he pursues the

possibility of a real where the intelligible is fine-tuned to outweigh, but

never dismiss, the perceptions of the sensible. When we ask who is

speaking in the works of Samuel Beckett we are faced with the daunting

possibility that language speaks, the possibility in which Beckett entrusts

his faith, that language is being; perceptions, the real’s great tormentor,

because they can neither be proved to exist, or disproved, are non-being .

FILM: LET’S LOOK AT THE TEXT

Beckett’s texts strive to remain faithful to the underlying philosophy

that guides them, and this is also the case in the screenplay of Film. For

this reason we need to be rigorous in reading what can often appear to be

cryptic language lest we rush to apply our philosophy of choice, instead of

Beckett’s vision, to the work. Beckett’s choice of language in the

screenplay is no less measured or exact than in any of his other works.

Therefore, to grasp the full significance of the work it is advisable to study

the text of the screenplay in depth. Where Beckett, in his other major

works, strives to establish the primacy of language over the unprovability

of perceptions, in Film the focus is directed towards proving the

unprovability of perception, and is concerned with the question of

perception of the external or extraneous world, and self-perception.

Language makes one brief appearance in the significant “ssh,” of which

more shall be said later.

The climate of the film, the screenplay tells us, is “comic and unreal,”

which is a strong suggestion of what is to follow: comic, possibly intended

to amuse but also, in conjunction with “unreal,” to create a setting that

subverts rather than affirms the credulity of the actions in Film. Beckett’s

choice of the term “unreal” in the screenplay is significant, as it

emphasizes why it is to the screenplay rather than to the film “proper” that

this chapter will direct its focus, the obvious reason being to savour

Beckett’s choice of language, which in turn reveals his philosophy. The

climate may be unreal but the actions in Film proceed in seriousness, for

they are the actions of the perceiver trying to make sense of the perceived

world from within the perceived world. The world in Film is the world of

the perceived and is set in a climate of unreality, but the actions therein are

believed to be real to the characters, E and O.

So what is going on in Film? Does George Berkeley’s maxim esse est

percipi—“to be is to be perceived”—act as some kind of philosophical

guideline within which Film proceeds, or does Beckett interpret it

creatively, even ironically? A little of each seems to be the answer.

Beckett is certainly possessed of the relationship of perception to reality,

as is Berkeley. But where Berkeley “denies the existence of that which

philosophers call matter, or corporeal substance” (Berkeley 1988, 65),

Beckett will only go as far as doubting its existence, as we see from part of

Film: Let’s Look at the Text

14

another cryptic sentence from the opening page of The Unnamable: “The

fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only

that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak …” (Beckett

1959, 267). Beckett’s philosophy—that language as the real is privileged

over the perceptions which are doubted—is clear, but unlike Berkeley he

does not deny the existence of “facts” or “things,” or as he says later in

that long sentence: “I forget, no matter,” which may be taken as a

refutation of Berkeley’s maxim on the non-existence of matter. Rather

than guide or inspire, esse est percipi may be taken as an introduction to

the theme of Film, which is perception.

This chapter will argue that the subject matter of Film is the

questioning of perception by itself, i.e. by self-perception. It may be seen

as a chapter in Beckett’s philosophical thesis, one that seeks to isolate

perception from the real, from language, and to exhaust all the avenues of

possibility that could lead to definitive proof of the perceived to be the

real. This is argued in spite of the references to the “search of non-being”

(Beckett 1986, 323) and that “Self-perception maintains in being” (323) in

the screenplay, which would seem to argue that Film is about the search

for non-being by being. I do not think that anywhere in his works is

Beckett involved in the search for non-being, or in the escape from being

(Critchley 2009, 9); he is driven to prove the truth, that empty language is

the real, and to break free, to escape from the impediment which makes it

impossible to reach, or go on to the truth, it being the actions of the senses

of the corporeal that perceive, and whose existence, and therefore whose

findings, can never be independently verified. This argument can be

sustained through closer scrutiny of the relevant passages in the

screenplay. The search is not for non-being, and the passage reads “Search

of non-being in flight from extraneous perception” (Beckett 1986, 323),

which may read as the search of that which cannot be disassociated from

being, that from which being cannot extract itself, i.e. the corporeal and its

inability to escape the act or process of perceiving. This search of non-

beings in flight from extraneous perception, helped by an eye-patch over

his left eye, cannot succeed because he is perception itself, or at least

represents the consciousness of perception in the process of rejecting

extraneous perception as it moves towards self-perception. He may flee

from extraneous perception but this flight heightens his consciousness,

thus driving him towards self-perception.

If we read the corporeal as that which is part of what is perceived

through the senses and is, therefore, non-being, are we not leaving Beckett

open to the charge of negative metaphysicist? Surely, the negative of being

is non-being, it can be argued? It is indeed, if we look at being and non-

The Empty Too 15

being as the dominant and subordinate poles of a binary opposition, but

that is not the case in the works of Samuel Beckett, and explicitly not so in

Film. Non-being is, as has been said, that from which being cannot

disassociate itself, that which adheres to being though not being itself. If

we look closely at the passage which mentions being we can justify this

claim. It states “self-perception is maintained, kept in existence in being,”

and therefore a parasite on being, though not of being but separable from

being itself. The passage makes it clear that self-perception is not being, it

merely maintains, exists in, and depends upon being for its doubted state

of existence. The search of non-being is the search of human perception by

human perception in its state of rising consciousness; its rejection of things

perceived externally leads it to self-perception, which is as far as it can go,

as we see at the end where O (object), who represents the process that

takes consciousness from extraneous to self-perception, is left redundant

and slumps head in hands into his chair. The protagonist has moved from

extraneous to self-perception, as the slumped body of O suggests, so the

focus is now on self-perception. But self-perception is not a release from

perception; quite the opposite, it is an intensification of the process and

cannot be otherwise, bringing perception to its deepest level, the point

from which it can go no further. That which maintains in being, self-

perception, is perception perceiving itself, perceiving perception. It is the

non-being parasite in being which, because it is non-being, cannot be,

which seems to be stating the obvious. Yet the obvious can present the

reader with the considerable problem of coming to terms with Beckett’s

proposition—that what we perceive ourselves to be is not being but that

which haunts being.

The great crisis, the question that runs through Beckett’s key works,

also emerges in Film, i.e. language is the real but is haunted and tormented

by that which will neither disappear or be proved to exist, that which is

perceived by and through the senses. Nowhere else in his works is

Beckett’s proposition on the nature of non-being, the “Search of non-being

in flight from extraneous perception,” explained with such brevity and so

coherently. Or so it seems, until we read on to Beckett’s strategy of

proceeding “by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered or sooner

or later?” (1959, 267). The negation comes in the next paragraph: “No

truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and

dramatic convenience” (1986, 323), which will completely throw us if we

insist on remaining within the realm of concepts and meaning. How, we

may ask, can such a cogently expressed philosophical proposition be

dismissed as having no truth value, in the next breath, so to speak? Surely

it leaves Beckett’s work open to the charge of being absurd? Forensic

Film: Let’s Look at the Text

16

reading of the texts will reveal his philosophy which, in turn, will explain

what are often misread as absurd contradictions therein. Beckett’s

philosophy, the belief that language is the real that is haunted by

perceptions, is inseparable from his texts. His quest is to prove that reality

and to distinguish it from perceptions which cannot be either proved or

disproved. His definitive instructions that “all extraneous perceptions [be]

suppressed (and) self-perception maintains in being,” however, bring the

text away from language and relate it to perceptions and concepts

“extraneous” to language, i.e. suppressed and self-perceptions. The

brusque command affirms, without suggestion of doubt, the reality of

perceptions, clearly in defiance of Beckett’s philosophical belief. The

affirmation is negated in “No truth value attaches to above” (323), but

also, importantly, it is of “merely structural and dramatic convenience”

(323), i.e. the temporary nod to the “reality” of perceptions is affirmed

merely to facilitate the narrative. Beckett, in The Unnamable , will not go

beyond language to tell the narrative. The novel closes with the narrator at

“the threshold of my story before the door that opens on my own story,

that would surprise me, if it opens?” (1959, 382), the same door whose

existence he doubts “it’s I now at the door, what door” (381). In Film he

puts the focus, as has been said, on the incredulity of perceptions; he

stresses the distrust of that on which the narrative is built. The emphasis on

always-doubted perceptions, however, cannot escape the presence of

being. Language is being, language that is “all words, there’s nothing else”

(381), though it can never be more than an aspiration, the to come of the

unpresentable presence, that is beyond experiencing in the existential

world. Beckett’s point that the relationship between the real and the

perceived is an imbalance that is weighted in favour of language being the

real. We must also remember that Beckett proceeds by affirmations and

negations “invalidated as uttered.” That imbalance is revealed to us in a

startling way in the phrase “no truth value attached to above” which, rather

than being an absurd negation for negation’s sake, releases the previous

instruction from what appears to be a unity of word and perception, of

signifier and signified. Any supposition that Film is about to embark on

some kind of narrative journey involving a struggle between credulous

extraneous and self-perceptions is immediately dispelled by the

qualification. The door is closed to the possibility that can lead to the

unacceptable reification of perceptions. Perceptions do not have a credible

future in the works of Samuel Beckett. To continue a narrative involving

belief in the existence of that which can be perceived would undermine his

philosophy; perceptions must be let wither on the vine so to speak,

condemned to the void.

The Empty Too 17

If Beckett’s negation “no truth value attaches to above” closes the door

on proceeding towards a narrative, it opens to an infinitely exciting

possibility—the possibility of the real, of language freed from meaning.

This is the possibility that Andrew Gibson says “Beckett edges towards”

(Gibson 2006, 133). This revelation in the passage—we might call it an

event—confronts the notion that Beckett’s text disappears into a void of

nothingness. Even Maurice Blanchot’s more enlightened misreading that

“the void … becomes speech” (Blanchot 2003 210), claiming that there is

a void of nothingness out of which speech “becomes,” is fundamentally at

odds with Beckett’s thinking on the void . If language is the real it cannot

be located in or “become” from, it merely is, without question (see chapter

5). Beckett’s philosophy is magnificently encapsulated in the passage from

Film, to which I here refer. Beckett does not merely affirm and negate, but

both affirmations and negations are invalidated as uttered, thus stripping

language of association to meaning yet showing it to continue in existence.

If we ask what is being affirmed, in the first instance the answer may

be the perception of extraneous and self-perceptions, but we must

remember that affirmation is simultaneously negated, “invalidated as

uttered, or sooner or later” (1959, 267). There is no value in the claim of

affirmation of perceptions because the claim of truth that is attached to

them has been invalidated, which gives us license to state, categorically,

that because we cannot in truth claim that the perceived for certain exists it

is not part of being, the real. What then of negations—what, firstly, is

being negated? That which is being negated may be the truth value in the

affirmation of perception which could suggest that the perceived does not

exist. Could this negation be construed as a descent into negative

metaphysics? If it were it would imply denial of the existence of the

perceived, but that is not what is happening here because the negation is

invalidated, as is the affirmation in the first instance. Does this mean, then,

that the perceived can now be argued to exist? Not at all. Just as the

invalidation of the affirmation undermines the certainty implied therein so

does the invalidation of the negation undermine any desire to claim

absolute non-existence of the perceived. That which is being affirmed

through the affirmations, negations and invalidations is the status of

perceptions, which runs through Beckett’s works, that are neither provable

nor unprovable, not of being but those which maintain in being. The search

of non-being confirms it as non-being. No truth value can be attached to

the passage in the screenplay because it is the perceptions of the

narrator/director, gathered through the five senses of the corporeal and

“uttered sooner or later” (267) through the sense of touch in writing and

presumably of speech on the set of the film. As perceptions are of non-

Film: Let’s Look at the Text

18

being they cannot verify any truth, only being can—so why does Beckett

include them in his text? Does his “structural and dramatic convenience”

fully explain the extent of his art?

By going away from the text to the world of perceptions, seemingly

without qualification, in the two paragraphs under discussion Beckett

could be seen to lapse into a narrative that would verify their reality.

Because Film is primarily involved in showing that perceptions are non-

being they need to be shown to be incapable of going on, as language can,

interminably; they remain stuck in some kind of aporetic limbo; the

highest state they can reach is not an understanding of reality but

perception of the self by the self, perception of the senses by the

perceiving senses. This inevitably calls into question the relationship

between language and perceptions; the reality status of both extraneous

and self-perceptions are re-presented in words in the screenplay of Film. If

we accept Beckett’s thesis that the existence of perceptions can neither be

proved nor disproved then we need to ask what precisely—and can we

actually say precisely?—does the language represent? Is the word re-

present a misnomer? Can something that is not a clear stable presence be

re-presented, or even presented and vested with what we call meaning, in

any instance? For Beckett the answer is “no” to all of the above questions.

No truth value attaches, not only to the possibility of the being of

perceptions but also to the claim to mean the language that purports to re-

present them. The structural process in the passage, when put under

scrutiny, is shown to de-structure the structure (which is more than

deconstruction—deconstruction implies a narrative in the perceived world

outside of the text, which the text subverts). The truth value of the

perceptions is invalidated; any and all claims of their non-being, or of

extraneous perceptions or self-perception’s inescapability, are relieved of a

relationship to truth, or so it could seem if we did not continue to apply, as

we must, Beckett’s prescribed rule of proceeding “by affirmations and

negations invalidated as uttered” to the rider of the screenplay’s direction.

When we do (apply it), the implied meaning in the rider itself is diffused.

The stern rebuke of any claim to truth in the previous paragraphs is

now directed to itself. The truth value of an edict that purports to affirm

truth value is itself negated and both are invalidated as the edict is uttered.

The relationship between language and perception is shown to be tenuous.

Language cannot truthfully represent perception that is in such a state of

confusion. We need to ask whether this means there is no truth per se.

First, we must look more closely at what is happening in the breakdown of

the assumption of re-presentation in the relationship between language and

perception. That which is perceived by the senses of the corporeal,

The Empty Too 19

because it is confusion in flux, cannot be frozen in a singular stable,

eternal entity which a single word, or series of words, will absolutely re-

present. We see this is in Film where extraneous perception is visible as

unreal—the cat is bigger than the dog; God’s image is represented then

destroyed by O; he covers the mirror with a rug; the rug falls from the

mirror, and so on. The question of representation is central to Beckett’s

thesis—perceptions cannot be accurately represented in language.

Beckett’s affirmation, negation and invalidation leaves perceptions in a

liminal space that is not being, but neither is it not non-being. Therefore,

truth value equal to the truth value of empty language cannot be attached

to perceptions and hence to the attempts to represent them in meaningful

language, the process of which necessitates an ever-changing

interpretation of the language used to capture the ever-changing

perception. The status, therefore, of perceptions is unequal to that of

language as the real, and it can neither be proved to be or not to be.

Because it cannot be proved to be, it merely maintains in being

parasitically, and through its refusal to go away is a tormenter of being.

What, then, of the status of language to which it is related through

some kind of crisis from which Beckett would appear to want to release,

and free, language? The crisis between language and perceptions that runs

through Beckett’s works is not a dialectical opposition where binary

opposites fight for control, where the winner triumphs and the loser is

subordinated, as in a battle where language is proclaimed to be the real and

perceptions are dismissed as the non-real, or non-being, and hence

excluded from the discourse. Nor is it an equal contest of the kind Derrida

argues between the intelligible and the sensible that ends as some kind of

stalemate in the undecidable, already discussed in chapter one. The

screenplay direction, and the rider, by exhaustively and forensically

casting doubt on the existence of the perceived referents that are outside

language, but that language purports to represent, tilts and weights the

balance towards an imbalance that favours language as being. This is

achieved, as we have seen, through an emphasis on the status of

perceptions and an insistence that language cannot truthfully represent

them. When the confusion of unstable perceptions is found to be incapable

of lasting and accurate representation, thus affirming their doubted status,

and confirming Beckett’s claim that no truth value can be attached to

representation, when the assumption that words “mean” has been

shattered, and the link between word and “thing” has been seen to be no

more than an agreed convention through which we attempt to make sense

of the world, we are still left with language. Language cannot be doubted

away; as perceptions, under scrutiny, fall into the liminal space we call

Film: Let’s Look at the Text

20

doubt from which they cannot break free; as the gap in representation

between the word and the perception widens the actuality of the imbalance

between the intelligible and the sensible becomes apparent. There can be

no truth value to language that attempts to fix meaning, to freeze blurring,

shifting perceptions within the parameters of give words. However, the

possibility of there being truth in the claim that language is being, the real,

gains strength as the impossibility of proving, without doubt, the existence

of perceptions becomes evident. There can be no truth value to the

screenplay direction, or to the rider that pronounces it, because both

statements purport to know what cannot, for sure, be known; i.e. that

language can represent that which is true, and that which is not true. The

crisis in Beckett’s works is not centred on the undecidable, it is in the

imbalance from which, theoretically, it may be possible to “go on” to

prove that language is the real.

In the actual film of Film, the only spoken word to break the silence is

the “sssh” of part 1. The “sssh” itself breaks the silence when the woman

of the elderly couple is herself checking her companion as he is about to

speak. The inclusion of “sssh” is the exception that proves the rule; it

draws attention to the absence of any other language in the film as it

isolates perceptions to their fate in a world without words. Their inevitable

fate in such a world is to collapse unresolved on themselves, as O and E do

at the end. The collapse demonstrates the impossibility, even in the highest

state of perception-self-perception, of going beyond or making sense of, or

proving the existence or non-existence of the perceived. Self-perception is

perceiving itself, and that is as far as perception can go; all perception

breaks down, cannot escape from or go beyond perception.

Beckett, in most of his works, tries to prove the reality of language by

divorcing it from the unprovable perception. In the film production of

Film, however, he reverses this process to prove the same point.

Perception isolated from language is irresolvable, and language is

excluded from the production just as in other Beckett works perception is

reduced towards irrelevancy. In Film, perception is remorselessly

scrutinized until its inevitable collapse proves the point of the exercise.

Perceptions cannot be independently verified from outside, hence the

“sssh” of part 1 that prevents the intervention of explanatory or discursive

language. The search of non-being in the film breaks down when it

collapses into that which is inescapable—the realization that the “pursuing

perceiver is not extraneous but self” (Beckett 1986, 323). The film isolates

perception to prove that it is “unreal” (323). While Beckett’s pursuit of

non-being may appear to reach a smug finality in the film version, it is to

The Empty Too 21

the text of Film we should turn if we are to avoid falling into the fallacious

trap that sees Beckett’s thesis as pessimistic, or worse nihilistic.

O and E’s inevitable collapse marks the impossibility of making sense

of the perceived world; the film comes to an end with O (and E) sitting in

the rocking chair. The final direction tells us “[h]old it as the rocking dies

down,” which we could interpret as the characters’ acceptance of the state

of not knowing and their resignation to it, which more or less sums up

Beckett’s view of the existential world. To see Film only as the produced

film and to ignore Beckett’s text inevitably leads to the drawing of such a

conclusion. The release from this gloomy interpretation comes through the

realization that the text opens our understanding to the consideration that

there may be a reality beyond the non-being that is not evident as such in

the film production. The text goes on to the possibility of the world of the

real towards which even corrupted language, through its insistence to rid

itself of its tormenter, will bring us.

WEIGHING THE WAIT IN WAITING FOR GODOT

Throughout his major works Beckett creates a fictional dimension that

is at a remove from the existential world as it is commonly perceived. That

perception, that sees language as the appropriate tool through which to

represent the things of that world, and the concepts, thoughts and feelings

experienced through it, presupposes the primacy of perceptions over

language; language is a means through which the world can be interpreted,

made sense of, and is secondary to perceptions, according to this

understanding of the question of being. Jacques Derrida, the French

philosopher and architect of deconstruction, realigned the relationship

between language and perceptions, the intelligible and the sensible,

through his thesis difference, locating language and perceptions within a

relationship of equality where neither can establish dominance. Within this

biphase each is cross-contaminated by the other. At the core of Beckett’s

art is the insistence that language is much more than a mere tool whose

function is to represent, or even that it shares an equal status with

perceptions. Language to Beckett is being, the real. “Art,” says Leslie Hill,

translating Alain Badiou, “is a way of thinking whose works are the real”

(Oppenheim 2004, 82), not merely the effect of the real. For Beckett the

aspiration is to go through the stage where words are disconnected from

meaning and referent, the stage of empty language where even the definite

article is freed of referent—“The empty too” (Beckett 2006 480)—to the

purity of disembodied language sought by Vladimir and Estragon in the

closing lines of Waiting for Godot (Beckett 1956). The significance of

Beckett’s fictional dimension is that in it the relationship between

perceptions and language is realigned and weighted in favour of language.

The validity of perceptions is challenged to the degree where they,

aporetically, can neither be proved to exist or to not exist, while language

can disengage from meaning and prove its reality beyond dependence on a

referent, thus establishing its primacy over perceptions, which, however,

refuse to go away. In Waiting for Godot (Beckett 1956), Beckett’s

outstanding portrayal of this created dimension of perceived existence is

shown to be unimportant. Perceptions are unstable; nothing can be done

and everything is unknowable bar the unknowableness of the unknowable.

Interpreted like this, Godot would surely be a depressing experience, but

the point made throughout Beckett’s works is that perceptions belong to

Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot

24

the realm of non-being. Being is “all words … all words, there’s nothing

else” (Beckett 1959, 381), so all that is not pure words is excluded from

being. The excluded would cover any distortions or contamination of

language that would arise from interventions of the corporeal—speaking,

writing and thinking. Words are reduced to “allness” through stripping

them of that which is not pure, or all words.

It is not true that nothing happens in Godot. Nothing much happens in

the existential world of non-being but much happens in the realm of the

real where language is forensically pruned and cleansed of all possible

association with perceptions. “Beckett’s lesson,” for Badiou, “is a lesson

in measure, exactitude and courage” (Oppenheim 2004, 81), pre-requisites

not merely in the creation of exceptional prose, but, ultimately, in

engagement with the question of being, for Beckett’s texts consist of a

“stenography of the question of being” (82). Beckett’s realignment of the

perceived relationship of language to perceptions creates a dimension that

makes it possible for him to express that philosophy through his art, and

by so doing show their mutual interdependence.

If How It Is can be read as drama masquerading as prose, then Waiting

for Godot, it can be argued, is prose masquerading as drama. Even though

it is laid out in dramatic form and its countless productions have, like Sir

Thomas Beecham’s cello, “given pleasure to thousands,” the subtlety of

the philosophical and linguistic implications of the text is of such

importance that their layered nuances can hardly be fully grasped by a

theatre audience out for a night’s entertainment. It is a measure of the

greatness of the work that it can appeal to those whose experience of the

text is necessarily fleeting and subject to mediation through a particular

interpretation. The aim of this chapter is to focus on the linguistic and

philosophical import of Godot through forensic reading of the words on

the page rather than through their interpretation by actors on the stage.

Ideally, the reader of Godot should begin on the last page where, in the

final lines, Vladimir says “Well shall we go?”, to which Estragon replies

“Yes, let’s go.” The stage directions tell us [They do not move]. So who

are the we and the us who decide to move and who are they who do not

move? Are they not the embodied figures of the two characters, Vladimir

and Estragon, who are speaking; are they not assuredly the human

presence, seen on stage, or drawn in the text? To go and yet remain in situ

would contribute to the common accusation levelled at Godot—that it is of

the Theatre of the Absurd, a misconception of the play, as is the common

assumption that the duo are tramps. To be confronted with this reality is to

bring us to the core of the question that drives Beckett’s major works,

namely that language is the real but how can it free itself from that which

The Empty Too 25

haunts it—perceptions that cannot be proved to exist? The question is

addressed in the opening lines of Act 1 when Vladimir, turning to

Estragon, says “so there you are again,” to be met with the response “Am

I?” (Beckett 1959, 1). We could link these lines to the closing lines of Act

2 and claim that Estragon has arrived at the agreed destination (where he is

awaited by Vladimir). If we ask who is speaking, who is the “I” in “Am

I?”, we must then ask with renewed interest who are the we and the us in

“shall we go” and “let’s go” in Act 2 (author’s italics) (87). And we may

also note that Vladimir says “there you are” (authors italics). We could say

that these references all point to a disintegration of the unified self—

Estragon is not sure if he is there, or of how much of him is there; the duo

make the decision to go but the body remains. So what goes and, even

more importantly, to where?

If we first look at the imagined world of Waiting for Godot we might

better understand the duo’s necessity of considering going on to some

place better. That world looks like a post- apocalyptic site on the verge of

collapse. The two characters are dependent on scraps of food, and a tree

provides shelter. Time and space mean little to Vladimir and Estragon. Yet

the post-apocalyptic world they inhabit is their world, and it is not shared

by others. Rather than represent some kind of post-apocalypse devastation

their world represents a heightened stage of linguistic consciousness

shared by only the duo. Pozzo and Lucky and the two boys merely enter it

temporarily. The assumed reality of the commonly perceived world is

reduced to indefinable perceptions. The tree may be a willow, a bush or a

shrub (6), and Saturday may be Sunday or Monday or Friday (7). The

view we get of the physical world is that it is indeterminate, and important

only insofar as Vladimir and Estragon cannot escape from it. Its value

belongs to the nuisance category and, because no truth can be established

in or from it, it should not be the focus for deep examination. Yet this is a

view not shared by the world outside of the duo. Pozzo owns land and

seems certain of the importance conferred by a name: “Does that name

mean nothing to you?” (15). He is confident that the clear instructions he

barks to the hopeless Lucky will be obeyed—as they are. “Up hog!”

“Back.” “Stop!” “Turn” (14). The “they” who beat Estragon (presumably)

grow the rations of turnips and carrots upon which the duo survive. Rather

than being merely some kind of representation of the physical world

approaching its end, the view is a representation of the stage of

consciousness reached by Vladimir and Estragon. Their minimal interest,

even annoyance, with the trappings of the world, and their desire to go on

from it to something else, are unfavourably contrasted to their awareness

of language. The crisis between the perceived world and the world of

Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot

26

language, which is the central question that defines all of Beckett’s

important works, defines Godot, and it is this crisis that is announced in

Vladimir’s lines “There you are again” and in Estragon’s response “Am

I?” that begins the drama.

The consciousness reflected in Estragon’s “Am I” is essentially his

awareness that empty language divested of all association to referent or

body is the real; language alone, for certain, exists, but cannot be

presented or perceived; for that to happen would necessitate the assistance

of the senses which cannot be proved to exist. Estragon’s “Am I” therefore

raises and challenges all assumptions to I’s identity as it questions the

existence of place, while establishing the existence, in the final analysis, of

language as spoken by the I. To whom, then, or to what, does Vladimir

speak when he says “There you are again?” Is it merely the corporeal

Estragon who, the text could suggest, spent the night in a ditch? But if this

is the case, why does Estragon raise the conversation from the banal to the

philosophical? If we insist that almost every allusion in Godot is in

question we can look into “Am I?” from a wider perspective, remembering

that Beckett has said “[a]rt has always been this-pure interrogation,

rhetorical question less the rhetoric” (Devlin 1938, 289). If Vladimir can

recognize Estragon we can wonder are they both now on the same plane of

consciousness? Is it a case of language speaking to language (bearing in

mind the closing lines of Act 2), but if this is so why Vladimir’s “again,”

seeing that they had both agreed to “go,” arguably to the level of pure

language, as this would have been the first time the “again” would rule out

that possibility? The “again” may say that Estragon is perceived in the

location “there,” that is known to both of them; it is a location of

consciousness, from which they aspire to escape to pure language but are

held back by the perceptions experienced through their senses. So when

Estragon asks “Am I?” he is reflecting awareness of the level of his

consciousness. He is not merely asking “am I the unified ‘one’,” or even

“do I exist?”, though he may be asking these questions as part of Beckett’s

insistent interrogation of the sensible, none of which can be conclusively

answered as part of his scheme is to isolate the real by disconnecting it

from the doubts that compromise it. Estragon can only respond to

Vladimir by questioning all of the inferences he draws from the question,

save one. If Vladimir is asking “are you, language, ‘there’?”, Estragon’s

reply, that questions all other possibilities at bottom because it responds in

language that borders on the unreadable, affirms the possibility of empty

language, and its existence as such. But Estragon, or rather the I who is

language, can go no further than to ask “Am I?” To go further would be to

present language, which can only be done in the existential world through

The Empty Too 27

employing, and thus colluding with, the assistance of the senses. The I

cannot say “I am language,” but by asking in language “Am I” the I proves

that when all else is questioned—even, or especially, the sense and

meaning of I’s own question—divorced from links to a given referent and

bordering on the unreadable, language is still seen to exist.

We hear a lot about going beyond language, and the failure of

language, but for Beckett language is as far as we can go. We go on

towards unpresentable language through insistent interrogation of that

which distracts from that purpose —perceptions of things which can never

be more or less than doubted. “And things, what is the correct attitude to

adopt towards things? And to begin with, are they necessary?” (Beckett

1959, 267). Beckett certainly insists that we go beyond meaning, which is

an entirely different matter. Meaning is created by marrying the word to

the perception, the signifier to the signified, thus implying an equality of

status in the relationship of that which exists (the word) and that which

never exceeds the level of doubt (the perception), where a definite

inequality exists (the weight of certainty being on the side of the word). As

we see in Estragon’s “Am I?”, the assumption that language fails, or that it

can fail, is another common assumption that needs to be confronted.

Beckett argues that empty language is compromised through its

association with a perceived referent or signified that reduces it to an

agreed meaning based on the flawed belief that the signified exists, for

sure. If we divorce language from that association through proving that

perceptions, that are in continuous flux, are what fail, we will show that

language, freed from that association and the meaning implied therefrom,

will continue, will “go on” through meanings towards unreadability, will

never disappear and hence cannot fail. The so-called “failure of language”

is a term applied within the existential world by those who find difficulty

in ridding themselves of the addiction of metaphysical certainties.

Importantly also, and a consequence of the misunderstood nature of

language that sees it as capable of failing, is the erroneous claim that

words are on a so-called “chain of signifiers,” that language is involved in

some kind of struggle to find the right word to match a perception that, it

is believed, can be represented in language. To argue along these lines is

to persist in the quest to make sense of the existential world, to insist that

“stable” perceptions can be accurately represented in language, or, if they

cannot, it is because language has failed, where “all that can be said is

what is missaid” (Oppenheim 2004 81). “Missaying, however, is not a

failure of language” (Ibid.), it is what occurs when one acknowledges that

the necessary function of trying to apply meaning to unstable perceptions

through language is a violation of the real. Beckett, as we will see when

Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot

28

we study his handling of the various perceptions of the perception that is

the “character” Godot, reverses the thinking that sees the signifier/word on

the chain, and shows that in its essence the word is stable and that it is the

signified/perception that fails, insofar as it cannot be shown to be fixed, or

a thing, and it, not the word, is on the chain. In Beckett’s created

dimension the impetus is to disconnect from the assumption of referent, to

reject missaying, and to go on towards unsaying, towards empty

language—“Unsaid then better worse” (Beckett 2006, 480). Godot may

not overtly tend towards unreadability in the way that other Beckett works

are said to, but it still has the capacity to be misinterpreted through the

reader’s desire to relate the text to referent, to find “meaning” in a work

that is concerned with language per se, and that repudiates the notion of

meaning. The process establishes an increment on the journey to the truth

that language can exist in its own right by talking about itself in

grammatically and syntactically logical sentences (as we see in How It Is).

It can divorce itself from the referent and still make sense as it strives to

go on towards unreadability. It is the “responsibility of the critic not to

reduce writing to the values of the already known, but to affirm the text in

its paradoxical refusal to allow reading to take place” (Oppenheim 2004,

74).

The famous, often repeated criticism of Waiting For Godot is that it is

a play in which nothing happens—twice. And for those who are expecting

great dramatic conflicts or a gripping tragedy Godot is not the play to see.

In reply to Vladimir’s question (about Godot’s occupation), Boy responds

“He does nothing, sir” (Beckett 1959, 84). The things that can happen in a

play that is firmly located in the existential world are of little significance

to our understanding of Beckett’s great play because it is not situated in

that world, but rather is located in an alternative dimension. In that post-

cathartic world, consciousness has moved on towards a heightened

awareness of being. From Estragon’s opening line “Nothing to be done”

(1), the repetitions of “I don’t know,” to Pozzo’s incapacity to remove the

trespassers, Vladimir and Estragon, from his land (17), doing, and owning,

and knowing things and about things are only important because their

unimportance is stressed, as is the uncertainty of time and place in the

opening stage direction [A country road. A tree. Evening] (1), and

throughout the drama. The realigned dimension, where the subordination

of worldly trappings creates space within which the duo can philosophize

on the primacy of language, is of fundamental significance as it

accommodates the momentum of the discourse. The main characters are

disinterested in conflict, from which drama has been, heretofore, made.

The Empty Too 29

If we can define catharsis as the purging of emotional tension through

art, we can see that Vladimir and Estragon inhabit a zone in which the

necessities of the corporeal—food, shelter and clothing—are minimal

basics. Estragon’s disinterest in the existential suggests Beckett’s lack of

credulity in things of the world; the ditch (where Estragon spent the night)

is merely “a ditch,” unqualified by any expression that might hint of

discomfort. To “A ditch! Where?”, Estragon responds “Over there.” Yet

the commonplace language and lazy assumptions, when negated and

invalidated as uttered, serve as philosophical discourse, as the stage

direction tells us [Without gesture] (1). “Without gesture” dislocates

Estragon’s response from a presumed reference to a physical location—

surely he would have gestured if it were—and moves it on to the realm of

philosophical observation “there.” The assumption that one can ask with

certainty of a given location in the world is put in question even before the

given location is addressed. It recalls the opening line of The Unnamable:

“Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning” (Beckett 1959,

267). The notion that we automatically accept the conventional use of

“where” as a question seems, on an early reading, according to Estragon

“over.” Its status as a question needs to be challenged; the implication of

question in the word needs to be removed because the concept of question

itself cannot be affirmed. “Where,” therefore, needs to be unquestioned, to

be divested of the meaning implied in the word/question. But it is never

that simple in Beckett. “Where” could be “over” if Estragon’s response

ended with “over”; Beckett could then well be accused of negative

metaphysics. Estragon cannot respond to the seemingly straightforward

question “where?” because to do so would privilege the assumption of

concept over the essence of Beckett’s understanding of language. He

cannot go unconditionally beyond language because the certainty of the

“existence” of language is continually haunted by the possibility of the

existence of things, just as Godot’s existence is supposed, but never

proved, to be beyond doubt. Because of this haunting, Estragon cannot

unequivocally say “over” and he must destabilize the certainty implied in

the term, which he does by saying “over there.” Now the apparently

informative reply to a query that seems obvious and direct has taken on the

most profound philosophical and linguistic questions. It will not dismiss

the concept of question implied in “where,” and so retreat into pure

language, yet by acknowledging the haunting of the word by the always-

doubted but never dismissible possibility of the existence of thing, or truth,

or concept, it prioritizes the claim of language, the word, to be the real

over the doubted concept and thing. Estragon’s use of “there” after “over”

dispels any possible charge of negative metaphysics. “Where” may be

Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot

30

“over” indeed, but if it is “over-there” the finality stressed in “over” is

irrevocably weakened by “there,” which as we see in Beckett’s text is not

qualified by any punctuation. The reader (and the actor) is left to put

his/her emphasis on it, which in turn will leave him/her open to the charge

of appropriating the word. This, of course, is what an actor must do, which

is not a fully satisfactory way of interpreting Beckett’s works which are so

arranged that they quarrel with any singular interpretation. This seems

clear in “over there”—can it be “over there” as in “the ditch is over there,”

“over-there!” as in “it is over, so there,” or the unqualified “over there,”

which, while open to numerous interpretations, significantly invokes the

word “there”? That possibility, among others, secures the position of

concept as a doubted phenomenon, one that can neither assert itself or get

off the stage, so to speak, one that has the power to cause annoyance to the

claim made that the word is the real. For if, in the anodyne response from

Estragon, language is guided (because of the absence of gesture, and the

lack of punctuation which would indicate emphasis) towards

meaninglessness, it at least is dispersed across a number of interpretations

and cannot be said to settle on any one.

The juxtaposition of the worldly to the primacy of language in

Beckett’s dimension accommodates an interpretation of Vladimir’s

outburst that affirms his philosophical approach: “Vladimir: When I think

of it … all those years … but for me … where would you be …?

[Decisively]: you’d be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the

present minute, no doubt about it” (1–2). Vladimir is commending, and

taking credit for, Estragon’s raised level of consciousness; he has rescued

Estragon from the wholly corporeal, from being—not dead, for death is

not mentioned—a mere physical manifestation. The word is in perpetual

danger of becoming flesh. The outburst may have been triggered by

Estragon’s possible reference to the Platonic “same” (discussed in chapter

one). “The same? I don’t know” (1), that which, like unpresentable

language, “cannot be perceived by the senses at all” (Plato 1997, 1255),

and so cannot be known by Estragon. Vladimir acknowledges Estragon’s

elevation by raising the level of the conversation to an affirmation of

language itself through discussion of one of Beckett’s key words—the

pronoun “it.” The narrator in The Unnamable says “it can only be I,

speaking thus” (Beckett 1959, 320), i.e. the pronoun “it” is not replacing a

noun, for there is no obvious link to a given noun in Vladimir’s remark;

“when I think of it” is self-referential, it stands unconnected with any

influence beyond itself. “It” goes as far as is possible, within the

existential world, to being the real, and “it” is the I that is empty language,

speaking. It represents the unpresentable, pure language which, because it

The Empty Too 31

is beyond the break in continuity, cannot be perceived by the senses. Yet

the unpresentable is the only logical next stage for “it.” The unpresentable,

pure language unrelated to and uncontaminated by the senses, is the next

stage of “it” in the going on. That is the conclusion drawn by Vladimir

when he pronounces “no doubt about it.”

We see that much is already happening in Waiting for Godot. The

foundations of a perceived new vision of reality are being laid, and the

awesome realization that the real cannot be found in a physical world

whose actual existence is in perpetual doubt is being revealed. Beckett’s

relentless inquiry into the nature of being is that which, this author is

convinced, leads him to the phase of investigation which proves that

language is the real but that its pure state is beyond the reach of the

corporeal. All we can do is “go on” towards it, in response to the demand

of language. It is this “clash with doubt” (Blanchot 2003, 108) that is the

stuff of all of Beckett’s major works; the clash between his intelligibly

reached conviction that language is the real but is haunted and tormented

by the doubted perceptions of the senses which will not go away. It is a

clash between the linguistic I, the I that is language “the empty place in

which the listlessness of an empty speech speaks” (Blanchot 2003, 13),

and all that is perceived through the senses by the corporeal.

So we see already, in the opening lines of Act 1 being is put into

question, the relationship of language to perception is put under scrutiny—

which results in the establishment of the primacy of the former over the

latter—and the myth of Godot being comic and absurd, at its highest level,

is exploded. Most significantly, from all points of view, the question of

who or what is speaking is stressed almost from the opening lines where

Estragon replies “Am I?”

In fact, Godot is a play in which much happens both in and between

the two acts. Far from being absurd, that which happens is, typical of

Beckett’s insistence that language is the final arbiter, subtle, incisive and

demanding of the forensic approach. Indeed, as Leslie Hill remarks, “at the

heart of Beckett’s studies remains an unrelenting demand for philosophical

explanation which by its nature is impossible to satisfy” (Oppenheim

2004, 82).

That demand for philosophical explanation raised by Leslie Hill draws

attention to questions addressed by Beckett. If language is the real that is

haunted by perceptions whose existence can neither be proved nor denied,

can the existence of language as the real be conclusively proved? In this

sense, the demand for philosophical explanation cannot be fully satisfied if

we only treat the impossibility of reaching originary language and the

sustainability of doubt within perceptions equally. Beckett, however, does

Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot

32

not treat the two equally. Rather than the doubt of perceptions holding

back the possibility of going on to pure language, in his work the balance

of probability is weighted in favour of language being the real. There is

not an aporia in this crisis between language and perception, and it is not a

question of “‘Differance’ (producing) what it forbids, (making) possible

the very thing it makes impossible” (Derrida 1974, 143), i.e. the

representation of perception produced by language forbidding the deeper

exploration of language as the real, because language is primary to

perception. Language will always forbid authentication of the concepts it

produces by virtue of the possibility of its reduction to meaninglessness

and unreadability, where concepts must reach out for justification to the

presumed existence of things. Language is a “neutral speech that speaks

itself alone … for it is the incessant, the interminable” (Blanchot 2003,

213), i.e. interminable in its Beckettian going on. Focus on language can

undo the certitude of the concept created by it, and undermine the

suppositions and meaning read from it; while they will have been fractured

and scattered from which the concept has been composed, language

remains empty and unreadable, which is the point to stress . Scrutiny of

language can and will undo the concept, but scrutiny of concept will have

no effect on the fundamental questions central to an understanding of

language as the real. The aporia, in fact, is to be found within the sensible

itself. Through our senses we perceive that these perceptions are

represented through language.

Beckett the philosopher/artist has created a dimension in Waiting for

Godot where past certainties are disintegrating and a heightened awareness

of the “to come” is challenging them. Far from being tramps, the main

characters, Vladimir and Estragon, represent this seminal moment in the

question of being. Their weariness of a world of failed perceptions is

contrasted to their acute awareness of language—“neutral speech,” free,

empty language that is incessant and interminable, is the only place to go

towards, the exclusive, messianic place of hope that is revealed through

the dialogue of the duo. In Endgame, Clov asks Hamm:

“Do you believe in the life to come?”

Hamm: Mine was always that (Beckett 1986, 116).

Hamm’s life is to come and it will be language towards which he will

go through the empty “that.” The passage, that is “at once quite

straightforward and semantically dense” (Bennett & Royle 1955, 109), is a

summation of the interdependence of Beckett’s philosophical and artistic

purpose.

The Empty Too 33

What then happens in Waiting for Godot? Or, more specifically, what

changes take place within and between the two acts? It will be argued in

this chapter that the measured fine-tuning of the dialogue between Acts 1

and 2 spoken by the linguistically conscious characters of the play,

Vladimir and Estragon, is the major event of the work. It is here we see

Beckett’s philosophy given “substance” through his art and his art justified

by his philosophy, i.e. that language is the ultimate truth beyond which we

cannot go or out of which we cannot get.

Of course other changes occur—Pozzo has become blind in Act Two,

and Lucky thinks in Act One, but not in Act Two. Lucky’s monologue

may magnify the chaos that ensues when the word is thought to represent

the perception, and when expressed information is assumed to be

knowledge.

That fine-tuning of language, though subtle and minimalist, is often

stressed through the pause or punctuation. It is in Beckett’s treatment of

language above all else—and that includes the appeal of Godot as a

theatrical spectacle and his philosophical views—that we experience what

we might call jeuissance, such is the intensity of Beckett’s artistic

examination of that which has always been there, and is not new under the

sun, but whose absolute significance had not been understood. Language is

that which “interposes itself between the void and itself” (Badiou 2005,

506–7). Badiou’s fascinating observation focuses attention on the real, the

void, and the gap in continuity between that which interposes itself—

articulated language—and that which cannot be presented—language

itself—as the real. To understand that articulated language is interposed

between the void and itself gets to the philosophical core of Beckett’s

thinking, i.e. that language, being the real, eliminates the possibility of the

void (see chapter five). Beckett’s created dimension in Waiting for Godot

is the place where the real becomes aware of its reality, and this reality is

contrasted to the ultimate void over which non-being, the perceived world,

is suspended.

Beckett begins the process of going on towards the real in a number of

instances in Act 1, some of which we will discuss here. The first is through

a leading remark by Pozzo: “You are human beings none the less,” in

reply to Estragon’s explanation “[w]e’re not from these parts, sir.” Pozzo

adds, in a typical Beckettian negation “as far as one can see” (Beckett

1959, 15), that stresses the doubt inherent in the perception. The second

instance comes when boy asks “What am I to say to Mr. Godot sir?”, to

which Vladimir replies “Tell him … [He hesitates] … tell him you saw,

us, [pause]. You did see us, didn’t you?” To which the boy replies: “Yes

sir” (45). Both instances employ the complexities of commonplace speech

Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot

34

to cast doubt on the existence of the corporeal and to suggest that there can

be no absolute certainty beyond language. You are human beings none the

less is actually a compliment to their raised consciousness, as it suggests a

minimalist trace of the human, an unlessenable degree, within the

existential which places an emphasis on their consciousness. That Pozzo

identifies the limitations of their humanity in “as far as one can see” is

ironic in view of Pozzo’s “humanity” in Act Two. It suggests that even he

may be aware that there is more than the physical to their make-up. The

happening that develops between acts one and two crystallizes when

Pozzo asks, in Act Two, “Who are you?” Vladimir’s reply “We are men”

is first met with silence, then with what can be read as Estragon’s

expletive: “Sweet mother earth.” Estragon’s response is a positive

rejection of the human element to his make up that he must, reluctantly,

bear. In the second instance Vladimir appears to celebrate the real when he

starkly says to boy “You did see us didn’t you?”, a far from forthright

question as it employs the confusing negative “didn’t you?” alongside the

interrogative “did” in the one sentence. So is boy’s answer “yes sir” “yes”

in reply to did you, or to did not you see us (author’s italics)? We could

profit, when reading Beckett, from Wittgenstein’s advice that one “keeps

forgetting to go right down to the foundations … (one) doesn’t put the

question marks deep enough down” (von Wright & Nyman 1980, 62).

Although Estragon engages with boy when they first meet it is Vladimir

who conducts the dialogue with him (boy), so there is ambiguity in

Vladimir’s “us” (“you did see us”). Are the “us” Estragon, who has moved

away to fix his boots, and Vladimir, or are they the “us” that Vladimir

recognizes in himself, the corporeal and the real? This point is worth

noting because of Vladimir’s early remark to boy: “You don’t know me?”

(44). If we read “didn’t you” as did not you see us and say that not you is

not you the corporeal, we can then argue that Vladimir sees the possibility

of relating to boy on a raised level of consciousness, that he detects an

awareness of the real in the boy. Vladimir’s transition from “me” to “us” is

encouraged by boy’s refusal to profess knowledge of Godot’s relationship

with him; he doesn’t know why Godot doesn’t beat him, or if he is fond of

him, but is confirmed in boy’s response to Vladimir’s question “You don’t

know if you’re unhappy or not ?” (45, author’s italics)—“No sir.” There is

a possibility that some of boy is “not”; that he is not “all humanity,” the

state that, through the senses, can experience unhappiness, the little heap

of bones that could have been Estragon’s fate. Vladimir can now relate to

boy: “You’re as bad as myself” (45). Vladimir’s probing, seen in Act One,

continues to stress the inseparable co-existence of the real and the

corporeal within that particular relationship in Act Two. Act Two is a

The Empty Too 35

progression from Act One, where the relationship is acknowledged as a

foundation from which to proceed to a discussion on its inherent

imbalance. Vladimir asks boy “Did you meet anyone?” “… Two other …

[He hesitates] … men (84, author’s italics). Boy’s insistence that he didn’t

meet any one does not exclude the possibility of there being the two others

queried by Vladimir; they may be part men, as their humanity is put in

question, and part the real, language. But now the stress is directed

towards the primacy of language in the relationship. Vladimir is no longer

the “us” of Act One, he is now “me,” the restored me of Act One. Boy’s

knowledge of whom is there questioned in “You don’t know me ?” (44)

but is here accepted. “Vladimir: Tell him … [He hesitates] … tell him you

saw me …” (85). The me may be language speaking, asserting itself as the

real, responding to its own demand, and it is confident enough to assume

Boy knows it as such, that they are relating on an elevated level of

consciousness. The imbalance between the real and the corporeal that

emphasizes the primacy of the real is attested to when Vladimir continues

with “and that.” “Tell him you saw me and that,” which, significantly, is

followed by a long pause and a repeat of the stage direction [He hesitates],

which directs an inescapable focus on “that.” If “me” represents the

unpresentable, pure language that endeavours to identify itself through

articulated speech, “that” can only be the scorned encumbrance of the

corporeal from which boy recoils and flees the scene.

Much time and space has been wasted on idle speculation on who or

what the character Godot represents, and need not be indulged here. There

may be those who scorn what is called a “textual reading” and would

justify a limited reading of the work through a wish list of their favourite

cultural or other references, but such is the precious nature of the measure

and exactitude of Beckett’s treatment of language, and implicitly of his

resistance to the tyranny of the referent, to read it so seems little short of a

violation of the text. To relate Godot to some extra-textual referent may

satisfy the need for meaning; ironically, this is the very approach that

Beckett’s character Godot is contesting in the drama. Godot, it can be

argued, represents that very desire to accept perceptions as reality, and to

submit to the craving for the stable presence that is beyond doubt. What

we know of Godot we know from those who have perceived him, either

directly or at one remove—the two boys, Vladimir and Estragon, and

Pozzo, who struggles to recall the name Godot, which he has heard from

the duo. We learn from the first boy, in Act 1, that Godot is good to him,

that he does not beat him, but does beat his brother, and that Godot feeds

him (the first boy) fairly well. (44–45). We also learn that Godot can speak

and can hear. Yet for this information we are dependent on a boy who

Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot

36

does not know if he has seen his interrogator—Vladimir previously—as

we are of the boy in Act 2 who knows he has a brother—“He’s sick sir”

(84)—but does not know if it was he who came to Vladimir and Estragon

yesterday. We learn a bit more about Godot—that he has a white beard—

from this equally unreliable source. None of this has convinced the duo of

a corporeal or other identity that can be explained to Pozzo—“Estragon:

Personally I wouldn’t even know him if I saw him” (16). But that which

supports the argument that Godot represents no more than perception can

be read from Estragon’s opening remark to Pozzo: “You’re not Mr. Godot

sir?” (15), in which the question mark is all important. He does not ask,

“Are you Mr. Godot,” and neither does he state “you’re not Mr. Godot

sir,” which, if we can divorce the arrangement of words from the

colloquially implied assumption therein—“you are Mr Godot”—and look

at the words on the page which state categorically “you are not Mr. Godot,

sir,” would remove Pozzo from the area of doubt and establish clearly that

he is not Godot. However, by concluding with the question mark Beckett

firmly locates Godot as a perception whose existence can be neither

proved or denied, nor can be unconditionally wrenched from the word that

it haunts. This we see when Pozzo asks “Who is Godot?”, to which

Estragon replies “Godot?” Again, we have the question mark but this time

Estragon can be argued to be replying that Godot is the word “Godot,” and

all else is put in doubt through the question mark. It may signify that

Godot is essentially the word Godot that is provable through the

articulated appearance, freed of meaning, of the word Godot : “what it lays

bare is the singular namelessness at the core of the name as such”

(Oppenheim 2004, 75); the name is always, at bottom, the word. In Act

Two, as in the other instances discussed, the probes of Act One are firmed

up, the philosophical impetus of the work is pronounced through the subtle

emphasis on the alternative possibilities within, and the misconceptions of

everyday language are questioned. The duo engage in the following

exchange where the word that has now established primacy over the name

is seen to survive:

Estragon: Are you sure it wasn’t him?

Vladimir: Who?

Estragon: Godot

Vladimir: But, who?

Estragon: Pozzo

Vladimir: Not at all [less sure]. Not at all [still less sure] Not at all! (83)

Here Beckett goes further than the “who is Godot?” passage of Act 1,

where Godot’s reduction to a proper name is stated but then put in

The Empty Too 37

question. In Act 2 Godot appears to have unequivocally become the word;

he is no longer a him or a who but now seems to be the disembodied word,

free of referent. The point is stressed by Vladimir’s repetition of the

question “who?” and Estragon’s retraction and substitution of Godot and

replacement by Pozzo as the who, of whom he has earlier said “He’s all

humanity” (76). Read like this there is a distinct division between the

body, the who represented by Pozzo, and language, the word “Godot,” a

distinction that could give comfort to those who argue that Beckett is

sympathetic to, if not advocating, negative metaphysics. It seems to be a

rare example, in his important works, where he discards the method of

proceeding when he advocates in The Unnamable “by affirmation and

negation invalidated as uttered” (Beckett 1959, 267). Or at least that would

appear to be the case if we were to ignore Estragon’s opening question:

“Are you sure it wasn’t him?”, which of course we cannot because it is

there that the affirmations and negations are proposed and invalidated, and

invalidated again in Vladimir’s response “Not at all! [less sure] Not at all!

[Still less sure] Not at all!” (83). The key word in Estragon’s question is

“it”—a motif, as we have seen earlier, that runs through Beckett’s texts.

“Are you sure it wasn’t him?” puts the focus on the significance of “it” in

the question. The short exchange is a crushing response to any suggestion

that we can proclaim the existence of the thing as independent and

provable outside of language. Nor can any charge of negative metaphysics

be now sustained, as the annoying connection between the words “it,” in

this case, and “him” is re-established. Estragon asks, “are you sure it

wasn’t him,” not “are you sure it was him”; he is stressing Beckett’s belief

that language is the real, and is looking for reassurance that “it” is

independent of things, that “it” is it, not him. However, Vladimir’s

response neither affirms nor negates Estragon’s desire for assurance, his

repetitions of “not at all” emphasized through a sliding scale of conviction

.The triple repeats appears to favour the probability of “it” being “the word

‘it’ over it being ‘him’.” He begins, in his response, by affirming his

uncertainty (that “it” wasn’t “him”), but with each repetition he is

becoming less sure that he is unsure, so to speak. In other words, his initial

treatment of the crisis between language as the real, on the one hand, and

perceptions of the senses, on the other, as being equal in merit, is being

thought out. The conclusion to Vladimir’s thinking tilts the balance of the

crisis in favour of language being the real, because his doubts that “it”

wasn’t “him” become more pronounced (as his feeling of unsureness

weakens). Further support for language being the real can be drawn from

putting the emphasis on the “it” in Estragon’s question “Are you sure it

wasn’t him?”, and seeing Estragon’s response to Vladimir’s “who?”—

Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot

38

“Godot”—as responding to the “it” not the “him” of the question. Reading

“it” thus, the person Godot, as has been said earlier, is reduced to the word

“Godot,” but only in a Beckettian affirmation that is soon negated by

Vladimir’s “But who?” So the questions now appear like this—are you

sure, the it, the word Godot, wasn’t confused with, or contaminated by the

who, Pozzo? The intervention of “Who?” at that precise moment

underlines the inescapable contamination of the word by the senses. It

illustrates that the crisis between the real and the corporeal is caused by

the parasitical nature of the intrusive corporeal. It imports assumptions of

the corporeal to the essential purity of “it,” the word “Godot.” “Who”

destabilizes the affirmation attempted in Estragon’s question, and insists

on continuing to confront the question that haunts Beckett’s major

works—if language is the real, how can it be proved to be so if it is

haunted by perceptions of the senses that can be neither proved nor

denied? The question cannot be answered or the crisis resolved because of

the haunting presence of the perception, the “who.” Nevertheless, it is

cogently addressed in this important passage. The independence of the free

word is stressed through “it,” and for a moment “Godot.” The possibility

of “Godot” imposing its authority as “listless … empty speech” (Blanchot

2003, 213) emerges in the moment before the affirmation of the empty

word is put in question by Vladimir’s “but who?” This is important

because it favours the probability of the existence of language over

doubted perceptions, for which there is no evidence of a reciprocal quid

prop quo that would render the possible, pure language, impossible. So

when we ask who Godot is we can only answer that question from the

evidence provided by the text, and that evidence is acquired (by the duo)

second hand through the sparse and unreliable accounts relayed by the

boys. Estragon admits (to Pozzo): “Personally I wouldn’t know him if I

saw him” (Beckett 1959, 16). Godot, then, to the duo, is not even a

perception whose existence is in doubt. It could be argued that he may be

something like a shadow or a ghost that represents the hope that he will

take on the form of a perception; he is drawn so as to stretch the doubt

(that underscores our experience of perception) close to breaking point.

Yet to become exercised about perceptions to the degree of wanting to

celebrate them in literary works is unimportant in the dimension imagined

by Beckett. He reluctantly acknowledges Godot as the bleak bare ghost of

a perception who cannot be dismissed or be known by Estragon, even if he

were to assume corporeal presence. The text also draws attention to the

presupposition that the thing can be represented in words if only language

did not fail, as we can see in Pozzo’s deliberations over the name Godot:

“Godot … Godot … Godin … anyhow you see who I mean” (22). Pozzo,

The Empty Too 39

being “all humanity,” represents the intruder from the existential world,

hence his fixation on the thing Godot behind the name. “You see who I

mean” stresses the secondary role of language that is assumed to represent

the thing, hence the turn to the so-called floating signifiers Godot, Godot,

Godin. Pozzo’s intervention assumes the stable existence of the thing

Godot, despite all evidence being to the contrary, and is oblivious to the

primacy of language in the imagined dimension of Godot. Pozzo’s double

irony stresses the distinction between his level of consciousness that

solidly represents the they of the existential world, and Vladimir and

Estragon’s level of linguistic consciousness in the dimension imagined by

Beckett. The passage directs us to ask who is Godot, and why are the duo

waiting for “him”? To see Godot as the possibility of a corporeal

manifestation whose arrival the duo feels compelled to await would

undermine the impetus of the purpose in Beckett’s work, which is to stress

the primacy of language over perceptions. Based on the above reading of

the passage, it is logical to argue that Vladimir and Estragon are waiting

for that which they eventually decide to go on towards—the arrival of

Godot as godot, the word stripped of connection to referent.

Far from being a depressing reflection of the hopelessness of existence,

Waiting for Godot treats the grim existential as the transitory that must be

endured. Sense cannot be made of it so why bother trying? Those who try

fail—Pozzo who believes that things exist, and Lucky who doesn’t know

that we can’t know. The existential is the delusionary realm of non-being

that distorts our thinking on reality. That which is the obviously real—

language—is treated, in the existential world, as a mere tool through

which we can make sense of a “reality” that is no more than ever-shifting

glimpses, brief disclosures, of that which can neither be proved to exist or

to not exist. To relegate language to this role is to mis-say. It is to invest

language with “meaning” that robs it of its inherent freedom. Because

Godot is mediated in the dramatic form, the inclination is to accept the

characters Vladimir and Estragon as “real” people, but in Beckett’s works

all presuppositions can be reduced to their foundation, the free state, the

linguistic “I” speaking—that is, empty language. Beckett’s created

dimension, in which Godot is set, realigns the relationship between

language and perceptions that weighs the balance in favour of language.

He achieves this realignment through questioning and subverting the

assumptions that we presuppose when using so-called everyday language.

Beckett turns commonplace language into poetic language through

fastidiously measured and arranged texts where the punctuation (and its

absence) and the pause, the subtle disconnect, open words to a dimension

Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot

40

of understanding that is beyond ambiguity and the undecidable. Words are

released, and the reader is exhilarated by the intoxicating scent of freedom.

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?

Estragon: Yes, let’s go.

[They don’t move]. (87)

When we ask who is speaking in Godot we can answer, not the scorned

“that,” the das man of Act Two, the “they” who don’t move, nor the

corporeal perceptions Vladimir and Estragon, the “we” and the “us” within

whom the crisis between the real and the perceived is being played, but the

I of Estragon’s “Am I” (1)—empty language that is going on towards its

messianic destiny, purity beyond, and free of that which can be perceived

by the senses. It is significant that the last line, and the decision to “go,”

belongs to Estragon. Language, speaking through Estragon, will rise from,

and leave behind, the perceptions of the body and go on to be its

“unlessenable least”—the real.

HOW IT IS IN HOW IT IS

One can say of Samuel Beckett’s works what Jacques Derrida has said

of Georges Bataille:

[T]o continue to read, interrogate and judge Bataille’s text from within

“significative discourse” is, perhaps, to hear something within it, but is

assuredly not to read it. Which can always be done—and has it not

been?—with great agility, resourcefulness occasionally, and philosophical

security (Derrida 2001, 338).

Beckett’s works transcend anything that has yet been argued in

philosophy or imagined in literature. They may indeed nod to philosophers

of the past but it is usually on the way to a creative revision of their

interpretations of the nature of being; to read him through the prism of

their thinking is to reduce his work to a worldview with which he

fundamentally quarrels. It is to overlook vital passages of his texts so as to

serve the presuppositions of those philosophers, to squeeze Beckett into

the “philosophical security” of their mould. Yet it is little short of a crime

to read Beckett from within what Derrida calls “significative discourse,”

by which I assume he means the discourse of the world of signs, to look

for meaning. The raison d’etre of Beckett’s work is to dislocate the word

from implication of meaning. To read it from within significative

discourse is to limit ones approach to all that is implied by that discourse

to the exclusion of that which is significant beyond it. And that which is

excluded by significative discourse is, mainly, what is significant in

Beckett’s work. No doubt much will be heard in it to justify this approach

for there is so much there, yet they are mere scraps that leave the main

course, so to the speak, untouched. To approach it thus is assuredly not to

read it, it is to miss and to misread most of what makes Beckett the most

significant writer of the twentieth century; namely, both his philosophical

approach to and his selection and arrangement of language—a powerful

and necessary justification in itself of his philosophy, as his philosophy is

a justification of his selection and arrangement of language. Because

Beckett’s philosophy is an alternative way of approaching the question of

being, as it advances thought into a dimension that makes metaphysics

seem redundant, it is pointless to approach his work from its

(metaphysical) preconceptions, assumptions and tired language. The

How it is in How It Is

42

central argument of this work is that Beckett should be read on his own

merit, rather than be interpreted through the philosophical security of those

who preceded and succeeded him. To interpret him through the latter is to

reduce his work to limitations that it exceeds, while to read it on its own

merit is to experience the event, not merely in the work, but in the word

itself.

How It Is continues the process of the linguistic I towards pure

language while remaining within the context of the question posed in the

crisis between the real and the perceived. It takes the process a stage

further than the “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” closure to The

Unnamable, albeit with an important linguistic change—the I now

becomes me, and me becomes I. Another significant step taken in How It

Is is Beckett’s attempt to signal his disassociation from the arrangement of

conventional syntax through his attempts to exclude any form of

punctuation throughout the text. The significance of these two points in

relation to the thesis statement of this book will be discussed in this

chapter.

As has been said before, Beckett’s vision is of an alternate dimension

to the one we perceive through our senses and which we believe to exist as

we perceive it. Consequently, his syntactical device of omitting

punctuation is designed to further portray that vision; it will move our

understanding of language away from the assumption that it is a tool

which we use to describe the world to fixing the focus on language itself

and how the one phrase or sentence can be dislocated from the perception

which it attempts to describe or explain. The perception is simultaneously

announced, doubted, and overturned by another that is in turn doubted, or

contradicted. This, as is known, is nothing new in Beckett; encapsulated

within the technique is his philosophical belief that while perceptions can

neither be disproved or proved, language can be proved to exist. However,

in How It Is his syntactical innovation of omitting punctuation has, or

should have, the effect of switching the focus from that which the word is

perceived to describe, and that which is believed to be beyond language,

back to language itself, to the words on the page. Such is his arrangement

of words in How It Is that our attention is drawn to them, and belief in

their primacy is favoured over that which, in normal prose, they would

struggle to describe. Through this syntactical device Beckett, yet again,

stresses the primacy of words over the perception of things. The virtual

absence of punctuation marks isolates the continuous stream of words that

we see as only words that, for the brevity of that all important moment,

stand alone, separated from meaning. In that moment, when our natural

inclination to convert them to meaning dominates, we are aware of the

The Empty Too 43

awesome reality that words may exist when stripped of referents, that

through them we can experience “a voice at last in the dark” (Beckett

2006, 488).

The root of Beckett’s vision is to get to that stage to which the

corporeal human cannot go, namely the voice that is “in me when the

panting stops” (Becket 2006, 41), the voice that will “go silent for want of

air, then the voice will come back and I’ll begin again” (Beckett 1959,

362). We may not necessarily interpret Beckett as meaning “death” here,

rather the going on to the world of the real which to Beckett, I argue, is

just that; neither in time nor place, language the real is devoid of all else.

Indeed, death is a much-challenged concept in his work, one example of

which we can see in the extract quoted from How It Is (below). The route

to Beckett’s root, so to speak, is through the dematerializing of language.

That this cannot be fully achieved brings the work to the Blanchot

question and its confrontation. If literature begins with a question, what is

that question in Beckett’s works? In initiating the process, Beckett opens

our thinking to the possibilities imagined in his vision. He cannot, being

material, and being unable to inscribe, other than through the corporeal,

dispense with the very material act of writing words and marks on paper.

But what he almost does in How It Is is remove those human inventions—

punctuation—as a stage in the process of de-coupling word from thing. Of

course, this intervention in the convention has a profound effect on how

we, the readers, engage with the text. On first sight it appears to be a

continuous tract of commonly used words that, however, seem to be

arranged in an order that compels us to ask what, if anything, they mean,

and why does Beckett bother spreading all of these words that seem to not

make sense over a hundred or so pages of useful paper?

This is the starting point from which if we proceed, in a particular

direction, we will understand the philosophy which drives Beckett, that

direction being towards non-meaning, towards the empty word that is

empty because it has been divorced from meaning. Unfortunately, because

of our inclination to try to make sense of the world, we go in the opposite

direction and try to invest those words with meaning. We link them to the

world that we perceive though our senses, and we do this in contravention

of what is obvious in Beckett’s texts, particularly in How It Is; that is that

he persists in his efforts to separate the word from the perception and that

he insists on favouring the existence of the word—inaccessible though it

is—over the doubted existence of perceptions. To go in this direction, that

is to proceed along the course clearly indicated by Beckett, will lead us

away from meaning towards the separation of word from perception, for

we must take the text as given to us by Beckett and accept that the

How it is in How It Is

44

omission of almost all punctuation—full stops, commas, quotation marks

etc.—was a decision made by him towards an end or cause, not memory

lapses by him or his editor. Almost, but not all punctuation. This is the key

area on which to focus our attention, for it is here that Beckett’s smooth

passage to the silent word becomes disrupted by inconvenient reminders

from the senses. Beckett’s project—one thinks—in How It Is is to create

an imagined world that will reflect his philosophical beliefs, where

language will be known to exist independently of any or all association to

perceptions. Let us for a moment forget that the continuous stream of

what, on the first reading, seems to be meaningless language has been

inscribed by the corporeal. That important point being overlooked, most

readers of the text will agree that it takes some amount of work to make

sense of it, that logic or an obvious narrative structure need to be patiently

sought out, and that even then they can only make sense if interpreted

through a multiple of meanings, that they cannot be reduced to a single

interpretation. The argument running through this book—that Beckett

favours an intelligibly reached acceptance of the empty word over the

doubted perceptions—is supported by claims of difficulties in the

conventional sense of reading the text of How It Is. It could be, if we

overlook the corporeal input, an amalgam of words, appearing in a

vacuum neither coming from nor going anywhere. By way of example, let

us look at the following passage: “no never a gleam no never a soul no

never a voice no I the first yes never stirred no crawled no a few yards no

ate pause ATE good and deep no if he knows what’s in the sack no never

had the curiosity no if he thinks he can die one day pause DIE ONE DAY

no” (Beckett 2006, 481).

As we can see, the reader’s first impression could easily be to reject the

passage (hence the entire work) as meaningless nonsense. It is quite the

opposite to a narrative of the quality of, say, Wuthering Heights by Emily

Bronte (1847), that draws us into the story that we believe is beyond or

behind the language chosen by the author, and puts it into words, makes it

real. This passage focuses our primary attention on language. Language is

presented in a way that jolts us into acknowledging that, yes, it can be

separated from its links with perceptions and remain in existence—

standing, so to speak, when all around it has fallen. Instead of involving

him/her in the narrative the passage repels the reader from the notion of

narrative. It may be the case that many readers, at that stage, close the

book and give up on Beckett, for it is believed that we, the human species,

need to make sense of the world through stories. If this is so then Beckett’s

work is not the most obvious place to begin, most may agree. But the

species has another great need—the need to be free. As Heidegger claims:

The Empty Too 45

“freedom is the ground of the possibility of man’s existence” (Heidegger

2002, 95). We can argue that Beckett sees the narrative as repressive of the

need to be free because it makes sense of the world through a story: sacred

scriptures, for example, or politically motivated works, become weapons

of power because enough people believe them to be absolute truths, or the

“true” way to attain a political objective. Hence, the narrative content in

How It Is is weakly constructed. It is told apologetically, if at all; designed

to undermine any claim that the narrative is a location of power, and

confronts its temerity to dare impose any ungroundable truth, as we see in

the failed attempt at characterization in a description of Pim: “the cries tell

me which end the head but I may be mistaken with the result … certain

cries sex nor age” (Beckett 2006, 447–8). Of course, even from these few

lines it is possible to extract numerous interpretations, but the point being

made is that truth or certainty—“certain”—cannot be supposed to reside

within the narrative. Words will inevitably be invested with meaning, but

provisional, and temporarily necessary, meaning can always be challenged

when we free words of it, as we can argue Beckett is doing in the passage:

never a gleam no never a soul no never a voice no I the first yes never

stirred no crawled no a few yards no ate pause ATE good and deep no if

he knows what’s in the sack no never had the curiosity no if he thinks he

can die one day pause DIE ONE DAY no ( 481).

This we can see if we return to Beckett’s approach to death, as seen in

the above passage. If we extract “he thinks he can die one day pause DIE

ONE DAY no” and rework it in conventional form we could be looking at:

He thinks he can die one day.

Die one day? No!

We could interpret this as his (Pim’s) knowing assertion “he thinks he

can die one day” being undermined by the superior authority of Voice, but

then we need to ask what exactly is Voice saying? Is he saying that Pim’s

thinking process is faulty? Is he questioning the narrated account of Pim’s

alleged thinking when, in both cases, he says “no”? Is he rejecting the

possibility of death “one day”? The ultimate place of freedom, Beckett

seems to propose, is the word freed of meaning, and there is the reason for

celebration, for it is there that the presumption of corporeal death is

confronted by the death of meaning in the word “death” itself.

Let us look at the passage from page 481 to see if the argument—that

the free word is the habitat of freedom—can be supported in an extract

that is typical of the text of How It Is. The impetus of How It Is, as noted,

is to bring language on a route that will separate it from perceptions and

endeavour to establish proof of its own existence. If we take the passage at

How it is in How It Is

46

face value the narrator is relating the hapless plight of his cohabitant, Pim,

albeit through a style that is totally unfamiliar to the general reader who

will find little evidence of an interesting narrative. Beckett’s project

aspires to isolate language that has been freed of semantic baggage, and so

prove its existence, and the arrangement of the text is central to the

project.

The first problem to confront the reader in addressing this passage is

where to begin reading? Should one go back to the previous paragraph? If

so, where does one establish a cut-off point? It is not possible—there is no

outside to language. Therefore, we might as well begin our examination of

the passage believing it to be one that undermines the possibility of words

ever being reduced to something called a passage, with all the implications

of fences, roofs and walls. The arrangement of the text challenges our first

assumption that a passage or paragraph is a separate piece of writing

intended to convey a single point or thought that differs from those that

precede or succeed it. In How It Is, the linguistic link is continuous, broken

only by a so-called blank space between the paragraphs. So do we read the

blank spaces as defining boundaries that separate and stabilize,

irrespective of thoughts, while simultaneously unifying them into a

coherent whole? It may be possible, with great difficulty and a highly

selective approach, to read it like this, but it is the kind of approach to

reading Beckett that this book seeks to challenge. If the language in the

paragraphs tends towards the meaningless then we could look at the spaces

from a perspective that challenges the normal. We could continue the logic

of the paragraph, its drift towards the empty word, and see in the “blank”

space Beckett’s insistent attempts to present that which is unpresentable.

The words of the paragraph progress towards the unpresentable, namely

the impossibility of presenting the word in its originary, empty state, i.e.

the word as separated from any intervention of the senses. Yet the task is

not complete, nor can it ever be, so long as the corporeal believes that s/he

manufactures paper or subsists within the realms of space. Yet the blank

space reveals the possibility of the dimension that is language; we see a

blank space on a page and we say “there is nothing there,” meaning no

words have been written on that space, which is true—they have not been

materially inscribed. The thing called the word is absent; it is not or no

longer a thing in the physical, material sense. Yet we can prove that it

continues to be presented even where it is not visible to the senses.

Language continues to present through the blank spaces, albeit unrelated

to the assumption of meaning in the inscribed passages. We do not look at

the blank spaces and go blank, so to speak. We look at them and say, “oh,

these are blank spaces, what does Beckett mean by leaving them so?” and

The Empty Too 47

so on. Language does not come to a stop in the spaces, to be replaced by

some unimaginable dimension or by nothingness. The thinking that

accepts the presence of the thing, in the conventional material senses,

believes that language is a representation of the thing, and if it is not there

hence the assumption that Beckett is negative. But the spaces in How It Is

show that these beliefs are assumptions tied to the belief that what we

perceive is the true. They show that language will go on to its reality freed

of perceptions, and that, though unpresentable in the material senses, it is

there, “there” being the realm of pure, unpresentable language that is free

of all else. Beckett’s project irrevocably drags us towards the knowledge

that we cannot go beyond, or escape from, language, as we can see in the

cited passage, and brings us face to face with the irrefutable

pronouncement—language exists. The passage brings us on this course

through continuous challenges to the assumption of stable meaning. For

example, how do we read “never a gleam no never a soul no never a voice

no I the first yes never stirred” (481). Do we ignore the evidence that is

before us by correcting the “errors” left by Beckett and read it according to

our notion of punctuation as if it were a puzzle in a morning newspaper ?

Hardly. The deliberate absence of punctuation leads us closer to the

originary word, and away from convention. To ignore its absence is to fail,

at an elementary stage, to understand what is going on in Beckett and to

where “it” is going. So now we are confronted by a line of sixteen words

without punctuation or emphasis, with the significant exception of the I, to

which we will return later. The first thing to note, unsurprisingly, is that

the words are written, not spoken. Derrida has had much to say about the

presumed superiorly of the perception of the spoken over the written

words by philosophers from Plato to himself.1 We may say that Beckett

had little choice in the matter but the fact is that he has given us a written

text in which he intervenes very deliberately in the accepted conventions

of receiving and understanding language as meaning. By delivering it as

he does, he brings us closer to the originary word than it is possible for the

spoken word ever to do. If we present the above eighteen words in speech

we will naturally infer emphasis and meaning in their enunciation, but in

rigorous reading of the written word as presented in the line it will be

possible to move away from meaning and go with it towards the realm of

the empty word. It could be asked why Beckett did not instead write, fe, fi,

fo, fum, or such like words that are obviously free of meaning? Beckett is,

of course, well aware of the commonplace belief that what is perceived is

the real. As we have seen, he confronts that notion throughout his works

1 See “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julia Rivkin and

Michael Ryan, 1998.

How it is in How It Is

48

with a singular persistence. In How It Is he appears to move on from

explicit confrontation2 to an impatient gesture of recognition towards the

notion, albeit one that he still deems necessary, hence the link to “reality”

through the referents “gleam,” “soul” and “voice.” However, the structure

of the line is such that it favours a tendency towards reading it as

meaningless language over one that is immediately drawn towards the

significance of the referent. And the possibility of a stable referent is so

persistently undermined through the absence of punctuation and the

unusual arrangement of language that the reader, confused by his/her

attempts to get to the stable thing beyond language, will be of a mind that

agrees with the former reading. Because of the ideological power of

metaphysics, s/he will insist on locating Beckett’s works in the depressing

world of the existential, and will, through this flawed reading, overlook the

profundity of Beckett’s treatment of language. For example the line, while

suggesting non-meaning, simultaneously offers a number of

interpretations, none of which can even be claimed to be the obvious

intention of the author, if we must bring interpretation to a state that no

longer bears credence but can be used to prove a point. If we proceed from

a starting point where the line strikes us as meaningless, and succumb to

inserting our own punctuation in an attempt to make sense of it, we could

end up with something like the following examples:

(1) “[N]ever a gleam, no never a soul, no never a voice. No, I, the first. Yes

never stirred.”

(2) “Never a gleam, no. Never a soul, no. Never a voice, no I. The first yes

never stirred.”

(3) “Never a gleam. No never a soul. No never a voice. No I. The first yes

never stirred.”

(4) “Never a gleam?”

“No”

“Never a soul?”

“No”

“Never a voice, no I?”

“The first, yes? Never! (stirred)

Here are four possible examples of how we can attribute meaning to

the line through punctuation, capitalization and revision of form, and there

are other possibilities. Of course, we can have great fun working them out,

2 For example, in Waiting for Godot Vladimir’s response to Pozzo’s question “who

are you,” “we are men,” draws the exclamation “Sweet mother earth” (74) from

Estragon, which can be construed to be an explicit challenge to the notion that

what is perceived, in this case “men,” is the real.

The Empty Too 49

but we can only do so through an unjustifiable and gross violation of the

text as presented to us by Beckett. Imagine someone in a reverse process,

cutting out the punctuation marks from Wuthering Heights or

Middlemarch! Still, it is a necessary exercise if we want to go on that

journey towards the originary word, for it shows us that a seemingly

meaningless line of words can be arranged to make sense of the world, if

we halt the exercise after our first interpretation. No doubt this kind of

thing happens, but it is a practice unworthy of attention in a serious study

of Beckett’s works. It is when our exercise reveals a number of equally

weighted interpretations that we need to ask questions like what is that line

saying about the world beyond language? Is it making a number of

observations? Can any one of these observations be sustained? Can we say

anything in language about the world beyond language that is definitely

true? The equal weighting of the various interpretations—unlike, say, the

hidden ambiguity in a poem—confronts us with these questions. Because

of its structure, the line forbids us to avoid them. Each possible

interpretation is simultaneously disputed by the others, and each

interpretation is therefore doubted. Beckett lures us into trying to make

sense of the world through language, but by using language to see it

through a multiplicity of interpretations shows that those interpretations

can be no more than perceptions of our senses that can neither prove nor

disprove their existence. The line, on first reading, discourages us from our

natural inclination to describe the world through language. Having

overcome the barrier it tempts us to do so only after further study, to

disabuse us of any notion that it may be possible so to do.

Therefore, the reader of the line is back where s/he began. S/he realizes

that if there is anything beyond language its certainty cannot be justified

through language, yet because the problem has been written, and reasoned,

and thought in language, language must somehow exist. The line first hits

us as unreadable; later, during examination, we think it readable, and only

on reflection do we agree with our original judgment—reading in this

sense means that the language used by the author reflects perceptions

acquired through his senses, and that language would normally convey an

impression of something beyond language, such as feelings or things to

which the reader could in some way relate. But, as we can see from the

above citation, that does not happen in How It Is. The presumed link from

language to thing is rendered impossible through the multiplicity of

possibilities suggested, no one of which can be claimed to be the right one.

They are there, represented in words, but are they real or are they

illusions? Dare we choose lest, like the concussed boxer, we get the finger

count wrong and grasp at nothingness? From the uncertainty of the world

How it is in How It Is

50

of perceptions, Beckett draws us back to language to look and look again,

and again, at language. He shows us that we cannot safely go beyond

language as to do so is to trust our untrustworthy perceptions, for it is they

that are of the world of differences, neither limited or defined by

negativity or positivity, unprovable and not contradictable. In such a

scenario, the inclination is to retreat from the confusion of the world of

perceptions and to re-examine the status of language in comparison to it.

Deterred by the frailty of the link between them as stressed by Beckett, we

now see language in a process of divorcing itself from meaning, becoming

unreadable, meaningless; but yet, remaining free of meaning, language

still exists, and in fact its existence is now more pronounced, it is proud,

almost, and free, no longer a mere tool and medium but a something in its

own right. This, above all else, is the realization to which Beckett brings

us—that language, in the final analysis, may be the only thing of which we

can be sure exists. As Leslie Hill says, “Beckett’s words end up …

supplanting objective reality” (Oppenheim 2004, 79). To Beckett language

is the real, yet it must exist in the knowledge that it is haunted by that

which may, or may not, be of another reality. Language is the knowable,

perceptions are unknowable. Language establishes primacy over that

whose existence can never be conclusively proved. Perceived reality is

shaken to reveal its vulnerable underbelly. In the shakings, an imbalance

between language and perceptions is created that reduces perceptions to

the level of the doubted.

We get definite glimpses of this stressing of the unknowable

throughout Beckett’s works. The authenticity of the hat and boots in

Waiting for Godot, for example, is singularly not questioned, and is almost

the reverse of the deconstruction motif of the text subverting the narrative.

Estragon’s boot is a “bloody thing” (Beckett 1956, 2). In How It Is, the

stable anti- narrative persists in subverting the norms of syntactical and

narrative structure. Yet its discipline too, ever so occasionally, breaks

down to allow its other to disrupt its smooth passage. We see it in the

higher case letters attributed to ATE and DIE ONE DAY in the passage on

page 481:

Never a gleam no never a soul no never a voice no I the first yes never

stirred no crawled no a few yards no ate pause ATE good and deep no if

he knows what’s in the sack no never had the curiosity no if he thinks he

can die one day pause ONE DAY no …

This occurs elsewhere in the capitals to proper names, Pim and Bom,

in the numerous use of the hyphen, e.g. in ditch-water (477), and the

various apostrophes, e.g. what’s (481). The capital letter “I,” of which we

will speak later, can be addressed from a different approach. So why, we

The Empty Too 51

must ask, the breakdown in the rigid discipline? We cannot, of course,

prove Beckett’s intention, but we can draw conclusions from the

transgression of the narrative. As has been said, Beckett’s philosophical

thesis that language for certain exists is haunted by his doubt of

perceptions; the Blanchot question that makes his work literature. If the

narrative of How It Is were to incessantly hammer home his philosophical

theses it would never reach the level of literature or art. The intervention

of the higher case letters and the hyphens, however, poses a number of

interesting questions, and their answering draws our attention to

difficulties involved in the material act of writing. The presence of, for

example, ATE can be construed as being a response to the question “ate?”

as in:

“Ate?”

“No (pause) ATE, good and deep.”

The emphasis, stressed through the higher case letters, pulls the word

towards meaning and naming against the trend towards meaninglessness

that drives the passage and the work. It can be argued that to be the

insecure cornerstone that destabilizes the disunity of the work, just as in

deconstruction, certain textual anomalies are seen to subvert the unity of

the narrative, but this can also be seen to illustrate Beckett’s annoyance

with perceptions that, by refusing to go away, put his thesis statement into

question. The higher cases, and capitals, are evidence of the desire to make

sense of the sensory world. Their intervention in the text underlines

Beckett’s acknowledgement of both the doubted existence and the doubted

non-existence of the perceived. The hyphen in ditch-water is even more

interesting, for its presence weights ditch water towards a singular

interpretation as “ditch-water”—water that flows or lies in a ditch, and by

so doing makes it more difficult to argue for a number of possible

interpretations, e.g. “ditch” as in abandon, “water.” These examples tend

to stress meaning through “glamorization” of the mark. With the exception

of untypical interventions in the material inscription of the text, of which

the above are examples, How It Is is notable for its author’s extraordinary

and imaginative efforts to reduce the connection between the material act

of writing and the perceived. The disproportionately few capitals, higher

cases and hyphens to neutered inscriptions emphasize the direction

towards which the general text leads us, notwithstanding the doubts which

their presence stresses, that is towards the silence of uninscribed—through

writing, speech or thought—language.

That which drives Beckett—his philosophical belief that language

exists and perceptions are in doubt—that can be extrapolated from his

How it is in How It Is

52

texts, of which we have already seen a number of examples, is responsible

for the uniqueness of his art form. For it is in the crisis between his desire

to disengage language from perceptions to prove its independent existence

and the impossibility of disproving the existence of perceived things that

his art is created. That crisis is at its most intense in the final pages of How

It Is (518–521). It has already been noted that the first person pronoun is

inscribed in the capital letter “I.” Before we address this significant

emphasis we must ask, after Blanchot, who is speaking in How It Is? Like

The Unnamable, is there more than one speaker? Who or what are the

speakers? Who or what do they represent and present? It is in this

approach that the significance of the I, and its distinction from the me,

needs to be closely studied to the end. (The) I MAY DIE … I SHALL DIE

(521). We note the use of the higher case letters again to stress the

certainty of the upcoming death of I. So, who is “I”? Earlier, we read of

“someone in another world yes whose kind of dream I am” (520). It can be

argued that the I who speaks is the corporeal I, the dream, or invention, of

someone in another dimension, the I whose existence cannot be

conclusively proved. The I may be “the last scraps … in the familiar form

of” (519), i.e. the perceived corporeal, the dream that is imagined from

language. I goes on to say “questions I am said to ask myself and answers

I am said” (519). While the temptation to take extracts from Beckett’s text

and reduce them to a favoured interpretation can challenge what is

resistible and may appear to be contrary to what is argued throughout this

work, such is the complexity of his text, there is nevertheless an

identifiable core thread running through them that is grounded on his

philosophical belief and that which challenges it. Obviously, as in the

passage from page 481, there are a number of possible interpretations to be

drawn from the above citation, but this does not mean we can abandon the

pursuit of reading, even—or especially, if it can lead to unreadability—if

we persist towards unravelling the revelations in Beckett’s texts. Our task

in reading is twofold: first to argue that Beckett’s texts claim the certain

existence of language, and that their unreadability, their pronounced

tendency towards meaninglessness, supports that argument; and second

that the perceived world, which we attempt to interpret through language,

cannot be proved to exist independently of language, but neither can it be

proved to not exist. So our philosophical quest, to prove that the essence of

being is pure, unpresentable language, is thwarted by our doubts of the

existence or non-existence of perceptions. To Beckett it is not a crisis of

binary oppositions but a crisis of certainty being favoured over, and

haunted by, doubt. The failure to prove or disprove that what we perceive

to exist supports Beckett’s philosophical thesis, as the failure is the failure

The Empty Too 53

of the senses to accurately perceive the stability of the thing. It is not just

the failure of language to describe it, it is our erroneous belief that

language can be made to describe that which cannot be proved to exist. To

talk of the failure of language is to accept that definitive, unchanging

meaning resides in language and that no word is available to represent the

particular perception or issue. Beckett shows that perceptions are always

in doubt, ever changing and unstable, even when we can claim to sense

them. Therefore, there can be no possibility of accurately representing

such a world through language. Such is the relationship between

perceptions and language that if it is agreed that such a word accurately

represents such a thing, even it, in times of stress, will come into question

as it, in reflecting the instability of the perception, inevitably distances

from it. Therefore, the word’s accepted meaning that had previously been

acknowledged as a true representation of the thing, in reflecting the change

in its perception also begins to crumble. So what do we see here that

supports Beckett’s thesis that pure language is all that we can be sure to

exist? Let us look again to a passage from page 519 of How It Is :

there was something yes but nothing of all that no all balls from start to

finish yes

this voice quaquaqua yes all balls yes only one voice here yes mine yes

when the

panting stops yes.

We should also bear in mind that the haunting of his thesis by the

doubt of perception is a necessary part of his thesis, as it will prove that

while perceptions remain in perpetual doubt the certainty of the emptiness

of the words that are used to describe them is beyond doubt. We can

illustrate this point by taking liberties with the absence of punctuation in

the original text, e.g. “there was something yes” is a definitive assertion,

not a speculation that is contradicted by what follows, “but nothing of all.”

If we remember that to Beckett the real is “all words, there’s nothing else”

(Beckett 1959, 381), then we will see the “something” as not of the real

but of non-being, possessing none of the qualities of “all … no all.”

However, if we read the line as “there was something yes but nothing of

all that,” we see that the “something” is the real that is decontaminated by

association to perceptions: “there was … nothing of all that, no! (That is)

all balls from start to finish.” “Something” now denotes not a thing but a

“something”—yes, there is a something we can claim that is beyond

doubt, and, as is argued throughout this work, the only something that is

beyond doubt is language. There was something, yes, but no thing. So the

something that was there is, as we see through the “yes,” not a material

How it is in How It Is

54

thing. Pure language is not of the realm or dimension of things, it is

something and yet is distinct from that world, it is “this voice … only one

voice here … when the panting stops.” This (voice) is “yes.”

In this reading, the assertion that something is no thing is not

contradicted. Rather, it now puts the world of things under scrutiny and in

question. Having asserted the certain existence of something, the discourse

moves on to examine the possibility of things. “Nothing is all balls from

start to finish,” which is not the same as saying nothing exists, if we take

“all balls” as it is generally understood to suggest stories without any

foundation in fact. This would not eliminate the possibility of other

stories; it rubbishes the particular stories at issue but does not dismiss the

possibility of other interpretations or insights to existence. (Of course,

after Paul de Man’s deconstruction of the Yeats’ metaphor in “Among

School Children”3 we can also read “all balls from start to finish” in the

purely literal sense.) Of course, we would then need to ask what kind of

balls? Footballs, snowballs, testicles? And are we actually getting away

from the metaphor, especially with testicles? So the metaphor is put into

question, or at least representation is. Are testicle and snowball as accurate

representations of “ball” as, say, football? To argue “no” is to raise the

Plato belief in ideal forms, and to challenge it through Nietzsche’s

argument in his “On truth and lying ….” All of which, in any case, Beckett

exceeds—even Nietzsche, as this book will try to prove. So if we exclude

“nothing” from the charge of “all balls,” can we read “nothing” as a notion

that definitely cannot be described as being constituted entirely of

spherical objects, or of all that is perceived, which would separate it from

any connection with things, thus confirming its “no thing-ness”?

The problem in reading the passage thus, or indeed almost any passage

from Beckett, lies in our taking for granted the verb “to be” as an

assertion. Beckett scholars will be aware of the general paucity of its use

in his works, except for rare, seemingly deliberate instances of its

inclusion. This so-called “problem” is not a problem as such, but rather a

gateway towards understanding the indivisibility of his philosophy from

his belief in what language is. In common speech the verb “to be” in

present and past tense has two definite meanings. Is and was are both

assertions and questions. When the narrator in How It Is says “there was

something,” our first instinct is to read it as an assertion, as we have done

in the manner argued through the passage above, and this reading is

challenged by the succeeding “yes.” But if we look back at the preceding

3 See Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading (1979, 11–12), where he transforms the

rhetorical question that ends Yeats’ “Among Schoolchildren”—“How can we

know the dancer from the dance?”—into an actual question.

The Empty Too 55

paragraph, if we may call it that, we see almost lavish use of the verb—

four in all in a short time: “that wasn’t” “it was” “how was it” “HOW

WAS IT”—which seems on first reading to be equally divided between

stressing the assertion and stressing the question in “was.” “That wasn’t”

and “it was” seem to confirm the assertive reading, and it is only when our

natural instinct is consciously challenged that we can see, or cannot fail to

see, the inherent question there. In a similar mode of thinking, both

instances of “how was it” draw us towards a reading that stresses the

question and a ready acceptance of reading it as such. If language is no

more than an agreed convention do we have the right to interpret the verb

in either way? If it is understood in both senses what gives us the power to

exclude one of them? The answer, as far as Beckett is concerned, is that

we assume that power is based on the belief in the existence of things

outside of language which cannot be proved, yet we do not have the right

to vest meaning in either sense, other than to satisfy our desire to make

sense of the world. By so doing, we overlook the essence of reality

through language, whose existence can be proved, in favour of that which

is beyond it but that cannot. Beckett, in these four examples of the verb “to

be,” is stressing the primacy of language; that once we go outside of it we

are trading our knowledge of reality for that which cannot be known. He

does this by dangling the obvious in front of us, by confronting us with

that which a millennia of thinkers have thought too unbelievable to

believe—that language is the essence of reality. He does this by offering

us a third choice, a third interpretation, but one we cannot argue against

that relocates language in a place where it presents rather than represents

reality, even if that presence is unpresentable. To the two interpretations

we need to add a third that radically shifts the emphasis from the verb “to

be” to what was formerly the interrogative “how,” which has now become

the subject. Reading it as “How was it,” we can argue that “how,” the

word “how,” now stripped of its meaning and reduced to an equal state of

emptiness to “it” was it, the empty word on the last possible stage in the

existential world before realization as the unpresentable in “the life to

come” of Hamm in Endgame (Beckett 1986, 116). Reading it so does not

get over the problem of the verb “was,” and its presence there stresses the

Blanchot question that torments Beckett throughout his works, but it does

prove that language can talk about language independently of things. Even

if the suggestion of things continues to haunt, and cannot be excluded

from, the context, things are in a secondary role to the favoured and

grammatically coherent exclusivity of language, which Beckett goes as far

as is possible to stress while still including the verb “was” by emphasizing

the exclusivity of language through the even distribution of the higher-case

How it is in How It Is

56

letters. The sentence’s lower case switches from being a straightforward

question, how was it—insofar as the omission of the question mark can in

itself question whether it is a question—to an assertion of the primacy of

language doing its utmost to will away the bothersome question inherent

in “was.” What the sentence does prove is that language can be shown to

talk about language even if it may be argued that it is talking about things,

whereas things can only be represented through language, through signs,

the mark. (Yet, Beckett will never leave himself open to the charge of

negative metaphysics by omitting the verb “to be” when the Blanchot

question must be addressed. He may well argue through his works that

language for certain exists, is the real, but the non-existence of that which

haunts it is in equal doubt to its existence.)

To argue this point it is helpful to return to the question Blanchot asks:

“Who is speaking in the books of Samuel Beckett?” We asked who is

speaking in How It Is, but what gives the authority to ask who? Can the

speaker be an it? “It say it” (Beckett 2006, 268), and it who asserts and

questions its being as in “it is not I” (268)? We should position ourselves

in the world created—rather than imagined—by Beckett where the crisis

between the desire to state a philosophical proposition is frustrated by the

language necessarily used to state it. In response to the question “what is

speaking,” Beckett wants to answer “it,” but is it the voice that language

speaks? As we have seen with the “Where now? Who now? When now?”

questions that open The Unnamable, not only is the question, as

meaningful question, unanswerable, it cannot, as such, be asked. We

cannot assume an embodied “what” in Beckett, who goes to such

extraordinary lengths—and rounds—to strip language of linkage to the

certain existence of things, all we can assert is “what is language?”, and

just as in How It Is simultaneously question that assertion.

In The Unnamable, the speaker who wants to go on to the origin of

language, to the real, is I. In How It Is, “I” is relegated to the corporeal and

is honoured with a capital, while what Blanchot calls the narrating voice is

“me” in lower case. “Me” is stripped of personality and, insofar as it is

possible, of personhood. “Me” is unnamable insofar as it strives to

articulate the level of linguistic consciousness that it/s/he has reached, but

is aware that it cannot do so through language that implicitly questions and

haunts that philosophical proposition. The inability of “me” to sever links

with perception contaminates the purity of its voice through its extra-vocal

connection with perceived materiality, so “me” cannot be called the me

that is language, though that is what it desires to be, the linguistic “me,”

and because it is part corporeal it cannot but present language through the

contaminated senses.

The Empty Too 57

This crisis is played out in the conclusion to How It Is (519) in the

following passage:

… only one voice here yes mine yes when the panting stops yes when the

panting stops yes so that was true yes the panting yes the murmur yes in

the dark yes in the mud yes to the mud yes hard to believe too yes that I

have a voice yes in me yes when the panting stops yes not at other times no

and that I murmur yes I yes in the dark yes in the mud yes for nothing yes I

yes but it must be believed yes and the mud yes the dark yes the mud and

the dark are true yes nothing to regret there no (519).

The crisis is acted out by two actors, the I and the me. If we can cut to

an affirmation of the text that follows the initial, seemingly unreadable

engagement, that is but a halting site on the way to its final

“unreadability,” or at least inability to conclusively go beyond language.

The dialogue form through which the good reader can best enjoy the

passage could be laid out as follows:

I – Only one voice here?

Me – Yes mine!

I – Yes?

Me – When the panting stops.

I – Yes?

Me – When the panting stops.

I – Yes? So that was true?

Me – Yes

I – The panting?

Me – Yes.

I – The murmur?

Me – Yes.

I – In the dark?

Me – Yes.

I – In the mud?

Me – Yes to the mud

I – Yes? Hard to believe too.

Me – Yes?

I – In me?

Me – Yes when the panting stops.

I – Yes not at other times?

Me – No.

I – And that I murmur?

Me – Yes

I – I?

Me – yes in the dark, yes in the mud, yes for nothing.

I – Yes. I?

How it is in How It Is

58

Me – Yes.

I – The dark?

Me – Yes.

I – The mud and the dark are true?

Me – Yes, nothing!

I – To…

Me – Regret? There (consoling) No!

Of course, Beckett’s text has been appropriated and distorted through

the addition of all that is obvious in the above rewrite of the passage.

Through it, it is possible to understand his thinking on the real, even if

momentarily, in isolation from the effect of perception. His thinking could

be summarized like this:

When the body dies language will continue as “me.” The perceptions

of panting, of murmur, of mud, are true to the perceiver at the time of

perceiving. Though it is hard to believe they must be believed at that time

but “not at other times”; they are true and they are nothing.

The two part dialogue reflects the different levels of consciousness

between the corporeal “I” and the higher, linguistic “me.” The corporeal I

stresses the distinction in “hard to believe … I have a voice … in me.” The

linguistic me, impatient with the ponderous questioning of I, and annoyed

that it cannot disengage from the wearisome corporeal, tries to put the

matter to rest through explaining I’s murmur. We take murmur as speaking

in a manner that is low and close to inaudible. (You murmur) in the dark,

in the mud, for nothing, he seems to chastise I, but if we look closely we

see that I murmurs for “nothing.” I’s voice is but a murmur, it is going on

towards linguistic consciousness, and desires to be of the dimension of no

thing, to be of that dimension that is language where there will be nothing,

(no thing) to regret.

That summary is a brief attempt to see the crisis from outside the

language of which it is constituted. It is part of a necessary discourse, but

one from which we must go on if we are to “get a handle” on Beckett. If

Beckett’s created dimension of the real is language—pure, if never

simple—if that is his philosophical belief, we need to remember that How

It Is is also literature, a work of art that asks a major question of that

philosophy and importantly takes it at its word. If Beckett’s philosophy

claims that empty language is the real, Beckett ‘s literature both questions

and supports that claim through its insistent focus on the unprovability of

the existence of perceptions, and the impossibility of proving that they do

not exist, and through that awareness being represented in and as

language. Beckett’s literature is essentially freedom driven. Its logic is to

resist all efforts to repress language through its supposed external link to

The Empty Too 59

perceptions until the moment is reached where the word stands empty as

the possibility of the real; all else is doubted. Beckett’s exhaustive

questioning brings us into language and away from what is outside it. That

journey shows us that perceptions can be no more than that, that ethics are

concepts thought up by humans to enforce order in the existential world.

Language needs to be appropriated and agreement needs to be reached on

specific meaning so that a code of ethics can be applied within society. But

using language thus is a long way from the fundamental questions asked in

Beckett’s works. Ethics are necessary in the existential world but “not at

other times,” i.e. the “time” that Beckett’s forensic examination shows

itself to be of a different dimension to the existential, the preoccupation

with the real. Language in the existential world is presumed to be no more

than a tool, and is not linked to the notion of the real which is thought to

be other than only language. Yet in Beckett, “Word and world cannot

coincide because the world is nothing, utterance everything” (Weller 2005,

108).

Much thought has been applied to what is erroneously called negativity

in Beckett’s work. To level this charge at Beckett is to expose an inability

to locate oneself in Beckett’s dimension, and to show that the accuser has

his/her feet and mind firmly planted in the metaphysical world. One finds

it necessary to express forthright disagreement, after a fairly intensive

study of Beckett’s major works, with this line of thinking. He, as is

stressed through this work, doubts the existence of things but affirms

language. Language is the “something yes but another” (Beckett 2006,

519) that is celebrated in his literature, the great positive against which all

else fades. He reverses the thinking that sees things as certainties and

words as “only language,” and remorselessly destroys the presuppositions

that sustain it. For Beckett, is will be “the words that remain” (Beckett

1959, 38). The raison d’etre of his works seems to be to establish this fact

without equivocation, in spite of the doubted perceptions that it

supersedes. Thus concepts, metaphors and the assumption of narrative are

rigorously contested. All are brought back to the words from which they

are composed to show us that when the concepts, metaphors and narrative

have been demolished, the words, like the scattered stones of a former

edifice, remain.

If language is the real, Beckett appears to say, let us put it to the test.

By so constructing his syntax, Beckett divorces language from perceptions

and allows us to read it as language talking about language. In it there is a

continuous contest taking place between language’s wish to describe

things and language talking about itself, which the latter invariably wins.

Through this contest Beckett asserts the primacy of language, its

How it is in How It Is

60

undeniable existence, towards which we must go on while all else withers

into doubt. In the quoted passage above (519), all the questions asked can

be reduced to the empty word, but the word cannot be reduced.

In the passage under discussion we see a clear example of the

assumption of narrative being undermined to the degree that we need to

work on what first seems to be a jumble of words before we can argue that

it is a readable narrative: “hard to believe too yes that I have a voice yes in

me yes when the panting stops yes not at other times no and that I murmur

yes I yes in the dark yes in the mud yes for nothing yes I yes but it must be

believed” (Beckett 2006, 519). If we remove the “yeses” and “noes” and

further violate the text through the addition of punctuation, the piece could

take on the form of a narrative structure thus: “hard to believe too, that I

have a voice in me, when the panting stops. Not of other times, and I

murmur in the dark, in the mud for nothing. But it must be believed.” The

effect of the “yeses” and “noes” and the absence of punctuation is to

disrupt the assumption that the passage should be read as a narrative. Their

inclusions and omissions draw us towards examination of the language of

which the passage is composed. By so doing we distance ourselves from

speculation on something that is outside the text and cannot be finally

endorsed, and direct out attention to the exciting prospect that it can be

language proving that it (language) can talk about itself, and the

possibilities in both reading and thinking language divorced from

association to things can continue to make grammatical sense, alongside

the realization that language may be the real. From The Unnamable on,

Beckett’s works pay extraordinary attention to a small number of key

words: “it,” “that,” “matter,” “what” and the verb “to be,” especially in its

present tense “is.” In almost all cases the presence or absence, as in is, can

be read to prove that reality can be reduced to the word, e.g.: “It say it, not

knowing what” (Beckett 1959, 268). We can neither know what “it” or

“what” means, but we can still say them. Rather than being trapped in

language, we escape to language. So in How It Is we read “yes hard to

believe too yes that” (Beckett 2006, 519), the words which, we may say,

begin the narrative. It is hard to believe the word “that” can also be

reduced to read as itself, as the word “that” cut off from any ties with

external “reality” can still make grammatical sense. Beckett insists on

developing his argument. The voice that I have in me murmurs for

nothing, wants to be free of the link to things, yearns for no thing; not, on

this reading, that its murmuring is in vain. Beckett’s fascination with the

word “it” surfaces in the concluding words to the paragraph: “but it must

be believed” (519). It may be hard to believe that reality can be reduced to

the word “that,” but it must be believed that this is so and may be an early

The Empty Too 61

reading of the line. However, we should realize that we cannot become

involved in discussion on this point if we accept Beckett’s argument—to

do so would attribute meaning to empty language. The basis of reality

must be believed, and “it,” as a word, must be believed to be the word “it”

in its final, material manifestation. The argument could be summarized

like this—if the empty word, as in “that,” is its final presentation before its

accession to the real, then words cannot be drawn into discussion on the

composition of reality. Therefore, to say “it” must be believed is not to

support the claim that “that,” when it suggests anything other than the

word “that,” is the basis of reality, for when we do this we invest language

with meaning and are going beyond the word. We can however say that

“it,” as the empty word, must be believed to be the empty word, free of

meaning and free of association with “that,” and that the empty word

predicts reality.

Another of Beckett’s key words, the undecidable “is,” is significant in

this passage because of its absence. Because the passage, in its final

analysis, is making a definitive proposition it cannot risk the intrusion of

an undecidable that would undermine the basis of the proposition. It is

interesting to observe the skills invoked by Beckett to avoid committing to

the undecidable that could jeopardize his case. “Yes hard to believe too

yes that” could have been less clumsily managed, as could “it is hard to

believe too—yes, that,” but the “is” would have questioned (and asserted)

the proposition. However, the proposition, when read as consciously

divesting language of linkage to thing, both makes grammatical sense and

stresses that language can talk in language about language; by so doing it

adds considerable support to Beckett’s insistence of the primacy of

language over perceptions. We could make it more readable through

something like this: “Yes hard to believe, too, yes, that.” Here, as we can

see, the believability of “that” as a pronoun is acknowledged and doubted

while “that” as the empty word is shown to be reducible to just that, while

continuing to make grammatical sense. The myriad of possibilities

represented by “that” as a pronoun are hard to believe if we acknowledge

them as unprovable perceptions, and also if we note the paucity of

referents in the context. Therefore, unable to do no more than doubt their

existence, we move up to that which we can accept as existing, the empty

word “that.” While perceptions represented in a pronoun reading of “that”

are hard to believe, the simplicity of “that” as empty word may be hard to

believe if we insist on straying beyond language. Nevertheless, the

sentence is definitive when talking about language, and that which makes

it definitive is the absence of the verb “to be,” in the present tense. The

inescapable question in the undecidable “is” would have put Beckett’s

How it is in How It Is

62

entire proposition into question had it been incorporated as in, for

example, “Yes, hard to believe too, yes, is that.” “Is” would have both

asserted and questioned the fact of “that” where the Beckett text, poised

above such questioning, releases language from dependence on the

external world, thus showing that its existence in an independent state can

be justified.

When reading Beckett through this approach, one is conscious that one

must write about this reading in the language of metaphysics. One is

doubly conscious of the trail of puns and ironies that litter its text, and that

to attempt to avoid it would make it appear to be some unfortunate parody

of a Beckett text. Derrida says of the language of metaphysics: “we can

pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had

to slip into the form, the logic and the implicit postulations of precisely

what it seeks to contest” (Lodge 1988, 111), nor can we if we intend to

survive in any way close to what is called normality in the existential

world.

However, the argument of this book tries to show that Beckett creates

an alternative existence to that accepted by metaphysical thinking, yet one

that is built on a belief system—a truth, if one might dare use that

discredited word and be understood. As has been repeated here, Beckett is

in agreement with those who argue that there can be no absolute truths in

the world of perceptions other than perceptions, which can neither be

proved nor refuted. Where most remain in this zone of thought, and leave

themselves open to charges of relativism or, worse, nihilism, Beckett goes

on to ask what is the real, and what is it to be? He proves that those

questions cannot be answered in the empirical world, and insists on

continuing the search. It is neither an accident nor a coincidence that the

command “go on” features so often throughout his work. That truth, he

argues, is the truth of the existence of language, albeit language as the

exclusive other whose truth can be ascertained through the actions of the

favoured status of the intelligible over the sensible, that is nonetheless

dependent on and relies on the sensible to get it to its destination; it can

never go further than being a proposal, as originary language cannot be

reached by humans as they are presently constituted. One hesitates to use

the term “wholly other” in a book devoted to the study of Beckett’s works

(though it is much in vogue in the poststructuralist discourse), for neither

of the terms sit comfortably in relation to it. Rather, they could have the

effect of distorting it to fit the post-structuralist mould. For in spite of

Derrida’s claim that deconstruction is not a theory, despite all that it has

contributed to an understanding of language, his claim of an equality

between the sensible and the intelligible cannot be sustained (see chapter

The Empty Too 63

one). Certainly, it is not one which finds favour or agreement through

Beckett’s texts. Beckett, as has been said, favours the certain existence of

language arrived at through the intelligible over perceptions experienced

through the senses. Because Beckett insists on the truth of the existence of

language it does not seem to be right to refer to the dimension created by

him as the other. His skepticism of the sensible world, his discomfort in it,

and his refusal to attempt to accurately define it, suggest that his works can

be read as seeing the world perceived through the senses as the other, and

language as the real. Maurice Blanchot has much that is interesting and

original to say of Beckett’s works. What he calls “the narrating voice …

cannot embody itself … it is different from whoever or whatever utters it

… (Blanchot 1993, 386). That the voice cannot be embodied in Beckett’s

works is so, as is Blanchot’s reading that it is always different from

whoever or whatever utters it. Rather than talk of inside or outside the

body, as Blanchot does—for these terms may suppose accepted existence

of the body as such, which Beckett doubts—it may be preferable to say

beyond the body, that which Beckett insists we go on. The voice that

speaks in Beckett is in fundamental conflict with whatever utters it, which

is the assumption of the body in all its manifestations—the senses, the

presumption of knowing, the will to power and so on. It is in constant

revolt against all efforts to tie it to any presumption of presence. It

renounces all claims of certainty except the certainty of its own aspiration

to emptiness, to freedom and, ultimately, to pure presence. In Beckett the

voice does not merely differ from, but asserts its primacy over that which

can be perceived, but never proved, and this includes the body which

makes it possible to be articulated it in the existential world and assert its

difference from that which haunts it. Both of these points stem from

Beckett’s belief that language is the real and that perceptions are doubted,

or in question. However, because he favours the former over the latter the

dimension of the real, language, cannot be, to Beckett, “the other.” The

other, in How It Is, is the empirical world, the world of perceptions (and

this can be said of much of his work, especially from The Unnamable

onwards). He insists, as in the above example, that language is the real,

though annoyingly, for the moment at least, it must rely on the senses to

chart or identify its “going on” towards itself, and its divorce from that on

which it relies to do so. So when Blanchet says the narrating voice is

“spectral, ghostlike” (386), he can be accused of not “getting” Beckett, for

in so saying he is consigning the real to otherness and representing the

sensible as the real.

Language is some thing as opposed to no thing. Some thing that is not

a material thing. The mud and the dark are words it is true. They are not

How it is in How It Is

64

things, they are “something yes,” but something that is not a thing. Beckett

here wrenches something out of the assumption of the chain of signifiers

and asserts his authority to invest it with a meaning appropriate to its

status; Language is now something that has no relationship to nothing. By

so doing, it establishes the right of an individual to challenge the

ownership of the name on equal terms. He disputes the right to fix the

name “something” to a material thing; he wrests control of the term and

radically alters it to represent empty language in transition to being, the

unpresentable real. To the narrating voice it is different to both of these; it

is something that is unrelated to things in either the positive or negative

senses. The voice also dislodges “something” from any assumed place in

the so-called chain of signifiers. “Something” is here not linked to things

as in “every thing,” “all things’ things,” etc. It is now a word independent

either of link to referent or influence from its neighbours on the chain. The

voices descend into the murky world of meaning because it must establish

beyond doubt that the word as “something” exists. It needs to appropriate

the language of metaphysics, it needs it to communicate its truth, the truth

that drives the work, that language is a something, the real, it is the real

that is itself haunted. The voice, by declaring language to be a something,

emphasizes what is so vital to Beckett that the voice in How It Is must

condescend to compromise to have its truth understood. It will lead us to

understand that language is true; all implications of meaning can be

stripped from it. The mud and the dark are true; as words they exist, and

are grammatically correct, yet they are haunted by their possible

association to perceived things. The voice, by stressing “nothing,” by

including the word at all, of course insists on the real of language. It can

survive without linkage to things and prove it is true, but also conveys the

fear that the true may be corrupted by belief in the spectral. The real is in

constant danger of being disrupted by the spectre of the sensible, not the

reverse, as Blanchot says.

If there is a key to reading Beckett it is to grasp this understanding of

the raison d’etres of his works; “[t]hat the literary work remains fatally

split” (Oppenheim 2004 72) between the aspiration to completion and the

impossibility of completion, because language will always exceed and

disrupt, deconstruct that which its author aspires to narrate, and is a

problem that applies to the pre-Beckett novel. Beckett has left it behind

through his awareness that what Blanchot calls “the listlessness of an

empty speech” (2003, 213) is in fact the story. To get there he does his

utmost to undo the credulity of the narrative. His aspiration is not to

complete the narrative but to make a literary work in its own right by

going back into its component parts, the emptiness of the speech, the

The Empty Too 65

language from which, essentially, it is constructed. Empty and

meaningless it may be, but Beckett’s belief that language is the real is

delivered with a messianic conviction that goes no further than

proclaiming his annoyance towards the presumption of equality in the

crisis between the sensible and the intelligible. Far from aspiring to

complete such a project, Beckett cannot start it for the reasons that have

been discussed throughout this book; to do so he will need to commit

heresy by renouncing his belief that language is the real. This he would do

if he were to stabilize characters, situations and things as seductive, fixed

moments that would be all too easily believed by the naive and the willing,

instead of the ever-changing perceptions that he believes them to be, and

that can never be fixed to the erroneous claim of meaning,

That Beckett will not indulge in what, for him, is a betrayal of

language is made clear in the opening passages of How It Is. He cannot

attempt a narrative because “my life last state last version ill-said ill-heard

ill-recaptured ill—murmured” (Beckett 2008, 411) is of a dimension other

than language. To attempt to present it through that which is of a different

dimension—language—is to merge two different dimensions through a

process that is no more than arbitrary, especially as the one that is the real

must make all the compromises to accommodate the one that cannot be

proved. Therefore, the “fatal” split in Beckett’s work is not in his

aspiration to completion but in his aspiration to resist completion—of the

narrative of course—though to talk of resistance to completion of the

narrative is self-evident from an early stage in the study of his serious

works, where his hostility to such a project becomes clear. The resistance

to completion is manifested in How It Is from the beginning, obviously in

the exclusion of punctuation, the inclusion of which would suggest

meaning and thus repression, the resistance to form—is it narrative,

dialogue, poetry, or something else? Disjunction, contradiction,

ambiguity? All vigorously contest any lapse towards completion of its

very inception, and make the examination of almost every word an event.

Its selection and arrangement of language, its refusal to allow it to be a

fixed or isolated context, its constant refusal to acknowledge perceptions

as anything other than that, all fit Badiou’s definition of the event: “A truth

is solely constituted by rupturing with the order which supports it, never as

an effect of that order” (Badiou 2005, xii). Essentially, Beckett ruptures

the link with the order which heretofore sustained the literary work, and its

connection to the dimension of perceptions. The passage from meaning to

emptiness, through which How It Is brings us, is an exhilarating journey

towards freedom, driven as it is by what Blanchot calls “the demand of

writing.”

How it is in How It Is

66

What is this demand? Is it the demand of language to assert itself as

itself? Is language the irreducible me, not merely the real that is something

outside me, but me? And why Blanchot’s significant reference to writing

rather than language? Since Derrida, the position of writing vis-à-vis

speech has invigorated thinking on writing, for writing creates a distance

between the assumption of the thing and the word that is less obvious in

speech, possibly because of the obvious imperfections in human memory

and the possibility of re-readings of the written word, which are rewarding

in the study of Beckett’s works. In Beckett, one of the demands of writing

is to destroy the assumption of thing by proving that the thing cannot be

truly represented in writing. The written word thus becomes detached from

that assumption through multiplicities of doubts cast towards it through its

being written. That which is thought to be nameable is shown to be in

some kind of flux and impervious to any process of fixed naming because

of its essential unbelievability, not because of any so-called “failure of

language.” Perceptions, as has been said, fail to present what has been

thought to be stable reality, thus even agreed linguistic conventions cannot

accurately represent them. As what is perceived refuses to stabilize,

meaning must also continually shift if it is to represent it. But as Beckett

insists in How it is, we can never know if perceptions are perceptions of

reality or not. Therefore, to say language fails, in itself fails. It is a failure

of understanding language, as it assumes language to be a mere tool

through which we can represent what is believed to be reality. Yet it is

perceptions that fail, not language, as they fail to identify anything of

which in language we can say absolutely, without doubt, exists. It is

understandable that from time to time an emerging perception will not be

represented in readily accessible language. However, this does not mean

that language has failed, it merely means that investing in a particular

meaning in a word, or series of words, has not met with general

understanding. Language is interminable—meaning fails, not language.

The demand of writing is a stage in the “going on” process towards the

demand of language, the demand to free the word. We know in Beckett

that the constant restless struggle is goal driven and truth driven. How It Is

never relents in its aim to rid language of association to thing. Freedom is

the free word, the word free of contamination by what can repress its

freedom. All so-called freedoms in the empirical world must in themselves

oppress as Voice oppresses Pim in Part II. The demand of language is the

demand to rid itself of these contaminations which, as has been said,

includes the contamination of the senses. The going on, we note in How It

Is, is the going away from the contamination of punctuation and capitals

and closer to the possibility of the unattainable goal—pure language.

The Empty Too 67

If we argue that the raison d’etre of Beckett’s works is to prove that

empty language is the real, we have to ask how Beckett argues that case if

he does it through language that means and/or represents some thing or

concept that is beyond language, and thus applies meaning to language,

thus depriving it of its freedom? If we argue that in “there was something

yes but nothing” Beckett wrests the word “something” from its assumed

meaning, can we defend him against the charge of investing it with the

meaning of his choosing; i.e. “something” that is not material but is,

nevertheless, the thing that is language? If we note that Beckett’s

appropriated meaning of something, “there was something yes but

nothing,” now appears to be a categorical statement that defines Beckett’s

understanding of what language is, we can now relate to the notion that

language is a something that is other than material things, or concepts,

imagined or believed because of the actions of the senses. At this level of

reading we can argue that he is necessarily using language that he has

transformed to suit his cause, i.e. to explain his thesis. Yet if this is so, the

very act of resorting to language that means to prove that it does not mean

would undermine his thesis, and would be the flawed cornerstone that

would destabilize the edifice. Yet, Derrida insists, we cannot escape from

the language of metaphysics. “We have no language that can escape, the

form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to

contest” (Lodge 1988, 111), and the postulation in “there was something

yes but nothing” is indeed implicit. Yet we do have the language of

metaphysics, built on postulation and provisional as it is, to use against its

own assumptions and the belief system reinforced over two and a half

millennia. No one need explain that in relation to Derrida’s thinking, to

whom everything is owed for opening our understanding to language. Yet

even Derrida, when he is writing philosophy, can lapse into acceptance of

postulations in this language which even he fails to question, whereas

Beckett, in his philosophy/literature, continually and vigorously does.

Language is categorized to represent genres and disciplines so that we can

put order on the world of our senses. Assumptions are read into language

in the various disciplines that help us to understand the thinking of its

author. Yet, as Derrida has insistently explained, this language is always

provisional. Yet he too, in his philosophical writing, lapses into the

categorical language of those whose opinions he seeks to contest. This is

most noticeable in his use of the verb “to be” in the above citation: “We

have no language … which is foreign to this history” (iii). He uses the

verb “to be,” present tense, as an assertion and ignores the undecidable in

“is.”

How it is in How It Is

68

Unless we choose to pass over the question of being, the only positive

thing we can say of is is that it is an undecidable, and Beckett is aware of

this fact. Throughout How It Is, from the title on, the paucity of the

selection of “is” (in its various tenses) is rigorous in its relation to its

undecidability. By way of explanation we could look at “if all that is not

how shall I say no” (Beckett 2005, 519). Voice cannot affirm or deny all

that is or is not because the undecidable “is” will both assert and question

whatever he may say, so he cannot say anything definitive about “that” if

“that” is taken to mean something outside of language. However, if “that”

is taken to be the word that, that “that” is, it exists in its own right as the

word “that.” Though he cannot say no to the proposition “that is,” neither

can he say yes to it because of the possibility that “that” may refer to

unprovable perceptions. The logic of the undecidable becomes clear in

Beckett. “Is” asserts the reality of language “that is” and questions the

existence of perceptions, and the possibility of their existence haunts the

real, language. “All that,” the passage continues, “is not false” (519). The

undecidability of “is” is stressed, but beyond the falsity or otherwise of

“all that” the language in which it is written remains standing, so to speak,

and pursues the relentless journey towards emptiness.

So when we read “was” in “there was something yes but nothing” as

an undecidable, the apparent intention to stress meaning dissipates;

inevitably, it takes us on the journey through the assertion that language is

a “something” to questioning such a possibility, to the exposition of

“something” as the empty word, back to the reality of language being a

something. Yet even noting the undecidability of “was,” the point is still

made through language that is, basically, readable, even if it consistently

favours the inevitability of its unreadableness over its link to the

intelligible over the sensible.

We would now need to ask—is the verb to be an undecidable if it is

weighted in favour of the intelligible over the sensible? It is not an

undecidable to Beckett because it favours the intelligible over the sensible,

where Derrida sees an equality of sorts between the two through the cross-

fertilization process at work in the biphase, discussed at length in Positions

(1981). Beckett insistently “goes on,” so long as intelligent questions can

be answered in the intelligible, to where doubts cannot be resolved in the

sensible. He is left with the intelligibly-reached truth that the empty word

exists but is undoubtedly haunted by the possibility of both the existence

and non-existence of that which is perceived by the senses. We can

conclude from Beckett’s approach that “is” is not an undecidable, as an

undecidable “is” would create an aporia, or impasse, where both

interpretations would carry equal weight. An aporia would signify

The Empty Too 69

disputed meanings where Beckett creates an aporia from the unlikeliest,

but at the same time most obvious verb in the language, but also opens an

escape route out of the aporia by insistently going in to the language that

creates what the aporia is, only in so far as it engages with referents

outside language. The voice in The Unnamable says “I say aporia without

knowing what it means” (Beckett 1959, 268). When the temptation to

chastise Beckett for using a word (aporia) the meaning of which is unclear

to him abates, the reader could note that in “aporia” Beckett can be

referring to a representation of a stable referent beyond the text. We could

profitably direct our interest to re-reading the sentence, and by so doing

could see that Beckett goes back into the language of the sentence. The

referent aporia is excluded and the focus is now turned on the word “it.”

The narrator does not know what “it” means: “It, say it, not knowing

what” (268). “It” has rid itself of connection to a referent and,

simultaneously, of meaning. “It” no longer represents the thing. Beckett is

only sure of the existence of the word “it” as word, so he can say aporia, as

he can say “it,” not knowing what it means. So aporia has been reduced to

the same level of meaningless as “it” as we see in Beckett’s sentence, and

aporia is replaceable with it. It has taken on the status of an empty word

divested of links to referent. He proves that the sentence can survive

without association to the referent. In “if all that is not how shall I say no

answer if all that is not false,” the question in the verb to be “is” releases

the sentences from the most obvious implied assertions “if all that is not”

and “all that is not false” by questioning both “is not?” And “is not false?”

The point to be emphasized here is that through the use of the verb “to be”

Beckett gets out of the aporia: “The sovereign operation scars discourse

inscribing itself there by crossing out the predicates that define it” (Wood

2009, 134). Beckett proves that language in its own right can make

grammatical sense when it is exclusively talking about itself and is

compromised through linkage to a referent that cannot be other than

unstable. We can only go outside of language provisionally, and when we

do so we weaken the focus on, and the curiosity about, language; language

can be perceived to be “only,” or “mere” language—a tool, rather than

argued to be the core of existence, the real. The paucity of Beckett’s use of

the verb “to be” stresses its significance to the author. It is impossible to

find an instance of its use in How It Is that does not consciously support

Beckett’s philosophical belief that language is the real, through its

“Beckett undecidable” subversion of its own assumptions. “The ultimate

aporia is the impossibility of the aporia as such” (Derrida 1993, 78) is a

problematic statement of Derrida’s that, he explains, “reckons with the

incalculable itself. Death, as the possibility of the impossible as such, is a

How it is in How It Is

70

figure of the aporia in which ‘death’ and death can replace—and this a

metonymy that carries the name beyond the name and beyond the name of

the name” (79), all that is only possible as impossible. How close Derrida

is to Beckett’s thinking when he talks about “death” carrying the name

beyond the name and how much closer he would have been had he said

“carries the word beyond the name” etc. Where Beckett insistently goes on

to, and beyond, the stage where language “is dispossessed, can say,

nothing” (Bataille 1988, 14), Derrida is constrained by the

possible/impossible dichotomy of the equality of the intelligible/sensible

axis on which his thinking appears to be constructed. He, as Sarah Wood

remarks, is “committed to the belief that here is something other than

language” (Wood 2009, 147). It is this commitment that holds Derrida

back from going on, in the Beckett sense.

If we read Derrida from a Beckett viewpoint, one that would release its

thinking from a Derridean constraint, we would interpret death as “death,”

signifying the death of meaning. Such a reading would promise a “to

come” that would fine-tune the balance in favour of the intelligible, and

thus release us from the prison of Derrida’s possible/impossible

dichotomy. The death of meaning outweighs the perception of death of the

body. The word, hence, will be carried beyond the name of the name, not

to the stage Bataille calls “the annihilation of everything, which is not the

ultimate unknown” (Bataille 1988, 115–118), but to the state where

everything except empty language is reduced to doubt. The impossibility

for Beckett is to get to this place where the word can be seen to be beyond

the name, beyond meaning, but such is his certainty that language is the

real that he can hold out this place as a definite to come, if and when we

can rid ourselves of the hauntological perceptions. Such a Beckett reading

emphasizes the difference between the significance Derrida sees in “love

the gift, the other testimony and so forth” (Derrida 1993, 79), and

Beckett’s impatience with bothersome manifestations of the empirical

world in general. Beckett wants to go on beyond the aporia to the

incalculable. Even if Derrida says “the aporia can never simply be endured

as such” (78) and “the ultimate aporia is the impossibility of the aporia as

such” (78), it seems that his commitment to the belief that there is

something other than language forbids him from taking the step—that

Beckett takes—from belief to doubt. Derrida’s belief is that something

other than language links him to a belief in a reality that is radically

different from Beckett’s reality.

The question in How It Is that makes it literature, that marks the point

where literature and philosophy both challenge and support each other—if

language is the real how do we cope with the doubts in perceptions—

The Empty Too 71

confronts us with the inescapable supplementary questions raised by

Blanchot: who, or what, is speaking in the text? What is the demand of

language? That “the literary work remains fatally split between the

completion to which it aspires and the incompletion that precedes and

exceeds it” (Oppenheim 2004, 72)4 does not really apply to How It Is (or

indeed any of Beckett’s major works), because it does not aspire to

completion in any conventional sense. In fact, as we have seen, it

renounces nearly all of the elements that posit completion, such as

narrative, punctuation, narrator, and so on. How It Is, on the contrary,

aspires to reveal that which exceeds completion and meaning, the

emptiness of the word that irrevocably points to language as the real. It

seems that critics and commentators sometimes forget that Beckett’s

works, as well as being of philosophical and literary import, are also works

of sublime fiction. Beckett is invoking an imagined world where it is

possible to create a reality that is distinct from the metaphysical reality that

critics apply to it and see it through. When we ask who is speaking and

what the demand of language is we are, basically, asking two questions in

one. The constant going on is the demand of language to get to that place

where it can be itself, where it has shaken off all the annoying doubts

perceived by the senses and the senses themselves which are also

perceived. It is the case, as Leslie Hill says, that “Beckett’s words end up

supplanting objective reality” (Oppenheim 2004, 79), though they confront

so-called “objective” reality in every aspect of its manifestation, and crush

the case for its truth in open combat rather than supplant it. Beckett’s

words and the demand of language are one and the same. He “gets”

language, and goes outside “significative discourse” as we, the reader,

must if we are to be enriched by the vast reservoir of wealth that lies

within them. The demand of language to be, to be the real, to be “all,”

insists on speaking despite the impediment of the parasite which haunts

it—that which is not all.

4 In an excellent essay by Leslie Hill (“Poststructuralist Readings of Beckett” in

Lois Oppenheim’s Samuel Beckett Studies.

THE WORST WORD IS BEST

IN WORSTWARD HO

Worstward Ho is, perhaps, Beckett’s most difficult yet simultaneously

most fascinating work. It is the book of on that engages with the

possibility of disconnecting “the representational ties that bind language to

our shared understanding of the world” (Von Wright & Nyman 243). That

on, or going on, respond to and engage with the opening passages of The

Unnameable, which ask “Where now? Who now? When now?” (267) and

provide a powerful platform to justify a reading of Beckett’s texts that

argues for his insistence that language is the real that is haunted by non-

being. In the distinction between language in the world of representation

and language as the real is sharper than in any of his previous works. The

impossibility of proving the existence of anything that may be represented

in language is stressed in language that reaches a level independent of

representation yet still makes grammatical and logical sense. Language

reaches the stage where it can be seen to be talking about language,

language is talking about, and talking to language: “It is as though

language and non-being were forever divided one from the other” (Weller

2005, 191). To reach this stage the questions of what is being, what is non-

being, what is the void, and what is language as the real, are forensically

interrogated. It is hardly necessary to mention that Beckett is a creative

artist and that his creations are set in an imagined dimension that is a

realignment of those elements—language and perceptions—as they are

perceived in the world as it is commonly experienced. Beckett’s

dimension accommodates his philosophical belief that the perceived world

is non-being and that which is being cannot be perceived through the

senses. We distort language through representation, by giving it meaning,

and by believing that our efforts to represent a perceived world outside of

language are accurate, and reflect true knowledge of existence that,

however, can never be more than what is perceived by our senses. Because

those perceptions vary from perceiver to perceiver, within a single

perceiver, and from time to time, and thus cannot rise above a state that is

unstable and inherently unreliable, they can never be claimed to be being,

or the real. This manipulation of language, whose aim is to represent that

which is perceived, situates language in a subservient role to perceptions.

Of course, there have been those who question the arbitrary or provisional

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho

74

relationship of language to perception from Saussure to Derrida, but

Beckett, uniquely, through his art, stresses the disparity between the two.

Language to Beckett is the real, is being; perceptions, because their

absolute existence is unprovable, are excluded from being. They can never

be more than unstable, unreliable ephemeral “presences” succeeding for a

time in manipulating and appropriating language in the cause of the

corporeal senses of the perceivers. However, if language is the real it must

contend with the annoyance of the perceiving corporeal. Such is the

condition of what we call the human, even if it may not be the fully real, as

has been said more than once throughout this book. Because language

remains standing, so to speak, when perceptions are cast into doubt, as

they incessantly are in Beckett’s work, the possibility of “going on”

towards experiencing it in its pure state gives it a messianic aura. Unlike

that of religious faith, which is based in an imagined otherness, the truth,

or reality essence, of language is identifiable in the corporeal world.

However, because this world is weighted towards the assumption that the

perceived is the real that is served by language, Beckett creates an

alternative dimension where the superiority of language over the perceived

can be demonstrated. We can experience this dimension through his major

works, such as Waiting for Godot, The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, Ill

Seen Ill Said, as well as Worstward Ho. In Beckett’s created dimension the

focus is on the reality of language, and it is privileged over perceptions

which are marginalized to a degree where their interest value is always

haunted by the doubt of their existence. Because of the frustrating

attention of the parasitical perceptions, language cannot free itself and be

“pure,” and cannot proclaim its realness, even in Beckett’s imagined

dimension. There is an imbalance in the relationship between language

and perception that allows us to logically interrogate the reality status of

both, as given to us in Beckett’s texts, and to bring us beyond the aporia

that equality of status would create. This imbalance opens a perspective in

our thinking through which it is possible to disconnect language from the

ties that bind it to perceptions in the empirical world and show that it can

speak itself, of self. Perceptions, it shows, can never go beyond being

doubted, and they can neither be proved to exist or to not exist. Beckett

brings us as far as it is possible to go within the existential world, for

example by mentioning the word “aporia” and then negating its meaning

in “I say aporia without knowing what it means” (Beckett 1959, 267).

Aporia is free of its link to meaning yet remains in existence, as it were.

We can go on, having disconnected the tie between word and referent, to

the isolated word, yet we cannot go on from the word. The isolated word

remains, as is evident in the spontaneous blurting of those afflicted by

The Empty Too 75

Tourette’s Syndrome or Schizophrenia. This chapter will argue that

Worstward Ho is Beckett’s most committed attempt to stress the

possibility, in art, of the pre- and posthumous existence of the word. If we

take posthumous to mean occurring after death, i.e. after the death of the

corporeal, and can substantiate the interpretation of Worstward Ho that

would see language surviving the intervention of the corporeal—what we

would call life and death—then we would be seeing the work in an

optimistic light. But to get to the essence of what is going on, especially

in, but not confined to, Worstward Ho, we need to continue asking, as

Blanchot does: “Who is speaking in the books of Samuel Beckett?” (2003,

210). If we do this we make Beckett’s created dimension more easily

accessible. We realize that if we allow his texts to speak for themselves, if

we read Beckett through Beckett, if we pursue all the doubting of things,

“the affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered” (Beckett 1959,

267), to their logical conclusion, we will see that the one affirmation that

is not negated is the affirmation of language as the real. As things,

concepts and matter dissolve into doubt, and language can be seen to be

indestructible, infinite, bearing within itself the essence of continuity that

can go beyond separation from that which haunts it, not just the

psychological but the corporeal subject, and all of the perceived world

which cannot be proved to be the real, a suggestion of which we see in

Endgame: “Clov: Do you believe in the life to come? Hamm: Mine was

always that” (Beckett 1986, 116).

Nicholas Royle quotes these lines in his discussion on what he calls

“the impossible experience of posthumous culture” (Royle 2003, 221–224)

in Beckett’s works. Posthumous culture is some kind of corporeally

impossible state, as Royle interprets Beckett; that is, pre-birth, “to be

between dead in-between interred and disinterred, heshe the other, not

gendered but polysexual, cryptic beings” (224). Royle, apparently, takes

this interpretation from a passage he cites from The Unnamable: “Do they

believe I believe it is I who am speaking? That’s their too. To make me

believe I have an ego all my own, and can speak of it, as they of theirs.

Another trap to snap me up among the living. I’m neither one side nor the

other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition. I don’t belong to either, it’s not

to me they’re talking, it’s not of me they’re talking, no … try something

else, herd of shites … I can’t get born” (224). Royle seems to see the

speaking I as a unified entity of sorts located in an extra life dimension,

bearing marks of the corporeal “heshe, the other … polysexual, cryptic

being” (224), that is “dead in-between” (224), “neither above or below”

(222).

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho

76

Royle’s reading of this passage leans towards a Derridaen reading of

Beckett, unsurprisingly. It is an application of Derrida’s thinking to

Beckett’s text more than it is a forensic reading of Beckett through

Beckett’s thinking. Royle fears being ensnared by impressions that in

Beckett’s text are “verbal concepts … being overpowered by non-verbal

affects” (223). If we recall that, according to Derrida, differance makes the

possible impossible and the impossible possible, and look to Richard

Kearney’s (1995) question put to Derrida: “can language … refer to

anything other than itself?” (173), Derrida’s response distances him from

“the habitual structure of reference” (173), an approach he admits may

challenge or complicate our common assumption about the connection

between language and the referent. Deconstruction asks whether our term

“reference” is entirely adequate for designating the “other” (173). For

Derrida the other, which is beyond language and summons language, may

not be a referent in the normal sense; however, he insists that saying this

“does not amount to saying that there is nothing beyond language” (173),

where throughout this book it is argued that for Beckett language is the

real, and as a consequence of that there is a weighted imbalance between

the real and that which is perceived, that which is beyond language, which

for Beckett is “non being.” For Derrida, “the trace (or differance) is not

more ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible” (Derrida 1997,

65). This is the crux of the difference between Beckett’s and Derrida’s

thinking; Beckett acknowledges perceptions as belonging to the realm of

doubt, but no more and therefore not fit to qualify for being, which is

reserved for language, while Derrida sees an equality of status in language

and perception, the intelligible and that which is perceived through the

senses. It is this aporia, this undecidable, that in making the impossible

possible while simultaneously making the possible impossible, when

applied to reading Beckett’s texts, limits and reduces them to its particular

approach. Weighing the power of non-verbal effects equal to verbal

concepts, even if we have to remind ourselves that concepts are made up

from words, acknowledges, as does Derrida’s possible/impossible

proposition, the possibility of language and perceptions cohabiting in

some kind of equality of status. To apply this thinking to reading Beckett,

as a Derridean reading inevitably will, aborts the possibility of going on to

explore the proposition that language is the real. Let us go back to

Blanchot’s question and ask who is speaking in The Unnamable, and let us

also remember to go even deeper as we attempt to answer this question. In

the above passage, cited by Royle, the narrator in The Unnamable asks

“Do they believe I believe it is I who am speaking” (Royle 2003, 224), the

they being of the living, just as Pozzo is “all humanity” in Waiting for

The Empty Too 77

Godot (Beckett 1956, 76). The they want “me” to believe I have an ego as

they have, and can speak of it, as they of theirs. So who are the they, and

who is I/me—or can we say who? One of the aspirations of The

Unnamable is for “It (to) say it” (Beckett 1956, 267), for it to announce

and affirm itself as the word “it,” having undone the “cause of ‘meaning,’

‘belief’ and ‘knowing’ … The discovery of Endgame, both in topic and

technique, is not the failure of meaning (if that means the lack of meaning)

but its total, even totalitarian, success—our inability not to mean what we

are given to mean” (Cavell 2002, 116–117). So it should be clear that in

the early passage of The Unnamable, to answer Blanchot, language is

speaking; language freed of the curse of meaning, belief, knowing, ego

and referent, language that “can’t get born” (Royle 2003, 2224), that is

celebrating the probability of its liberation from the corporeal, not

bemoaning its exclusion, we could say, but to do so would be inferring

meaning which is the property of the living, the they from whom language

aspires to free itself. Language cannot yet be because it is compromised by

association with the senses that presume to mean and to know. The they

wonder if the I that is language believes it is speaking, but to wonder thus

is to presuppose that the drives of the sensible apply to the real, to a

dimension from which belief has been jettisoned, where empty language is

gloriously free.

The text of this passage compels us to continue asking “who is

speaking?” Who is the I who can’t get born, who apparently does not have

an ego, but can be thought to believe it has, who is in the middle, the

partition, neither one side nor the other? This I is not of the living but the I

“who” is; the living, the they that feel susceptible to entrapment in the

state of existence. This “middle” needs to be examined for one to hope to

understand Beckett on even a basic level, for there is more than one voice,

one “I,” one level of consciousness, speaking here. The I who can’t get

born may be understood to be the aspiration of language to be pure, but

pure language divorced from the corporeal cannot communicate with the

senses. It does not merely inhabit silence, it is silence itself because it is

the real: “Hearing it still without hearing what it says, that’s what I call

going silent” (Beckett 1959, 362). Here, the I aspires to this state of perfect

stillness where even what we take as the pronoun “it” to say can only be

heard “still.” The pure I that is language can’t get born even into the world

of the “middle” where the speaker is “the partition,” yet the pure I contests

every attempt of non-being to “snap me up among the living” (Royle

2003, 224). The I that is the partition may be the pure I infected by

association with the corporeal, but who does not belong to the worlds of

perception or language because s/he is aspiring to go on to the real and

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho

78

cannot get born into the world of perception but nevertheless is

contaminated by it through the senses without which s/he cannot

articulate, and hence compromises the purity of language. S/he cannot

belong to the real because this purity is compromised, as we see and hear

through its ability to write and speak, thus employing the senses. Yet the

imbalance between the corporeal and the real is continually stressed

through the desire of language to go on from the world of representation,

knowledge and meaning to the purity of its stark emptiness. In Beckett’s

dimension, language is in constant conflict with the influence of the ego,

which the they, the living, insist on reading into words: “Do they believe it

is I who am speaking?” (224). Beckett’s sublimely subtle use of the

insignificant pronoun to make such a profound philosophical point can

easily go unnoticed, yet “it” presents language in its least referential state

because it draws us close to the core of Beckett’s philosophical thesis—

that language is the real: “It is I who am speaking.” Efforts to identify a

referent, other than “I,” are fruitless, for “it” should mollify those who fear

that verbal concepts are at risk of being overpowered by non-verbal

effects. If “it” is I who am speaking than it is being presented as the word

“it,” not as a representation of some thing or concept. “It” represents

nothing and means nothing; it is presented as such and cannot be

reasonably linked to a non-verbal effect. It signifies no thing or concept, so

is it therefore a signified? In the sense that the signified is assumed to refer

to a stable thing or belief in the existential world, it could not be accepted

as a signified. It is a key example of what Stanley Cavell calls:

… the language Beckett has discovered or invented (in) its grammar, its

particular way of making sense, especially the quality it has of what I call

hidden literality. The words strew obscurities across our path and seem

willfully to thwart comprehension; and then time after time we discover

that their meaning has been missed only because it was so utterly bare—

totally, therefore unnoticeably, in view. Such a discovery has the effect of

showing us that it is we who have been willfully uncomprehending,

misleading ourselves in demanding further, or other, meaning where the

meaning was nearest (2002, 119-120).

J. Hillis Miller’s “good readers” of Beckett’s works are aware that they

are not set in the existential world as it is or appears. Beckett has created

an alternate dimension, one in which the existence of perceived reality

cannot be proved beyond doubt, where language is elevated to a level

where its claim to be the real cannot be disputed. In this dimension the

perceived world can never attain the state of absolute reality reached by

language, and the perceived is always doubted. The word “it,” then, if we

follow the logic of such an interpretation of Beckett’s works, could not

The Empty Too 79

compromise the state of emptiness by deferring to the perception of

something that is not the real, even if it can be perceived through the

senses. So is “it” a signified? If “it” has divested itself, so to speak, of the

encumbrance of representation, because doubt cannot be represented as the

real, what we are left with is Blanchot’s “empty speech,” the empty word,

triumphant in the moment where it believes it can go on to freedom; not,

as Blanchot says, to look to regain “a porous and agonizing I” (Blanchot

2003, 213), but rather to seek to rid itself of the association with the

corporeal I. Even if “it” has divested itself of association with

representation, it has not or cannot do so with the corporeal, even in

Beckett’s fictional dimension, as is evident in the fact that the word has

been written on the page. In Beckett’s dimension, the perceived is

doubted, never excluded. So can we now say that “it” is the signified and

is the signifier representing the real “it,” the transcribed word ‘it’

representing the real it that the narrative voice aspires to; that is “the true

silence the one I’ll never have to break anymore, when I won’t have to

listen anymore” (Beckett 1959, 362)? Language is not in a place of true

silence, it is itself silence immunized against contamination by the senses,

and even the porous and agonizing I who accepts that s/he is “in words

made of words” (355); the porous I who leaks humanity as we see in “If

it’s I who speak, and it may be assumed it is, as it may be suspected it is

not” (Beckett 1959, 358) there we see the imbalance between the

intelligible and the sensible stressed again; “it” may be assumed where it

may only be suspected that “it” is not speaking. But is this not merely an

argument of who is speaking, central though this passage is to Beckett’s

thesis, which is the question of what is being, the real. It may be “assumed

it is” where it may be “suspected it is not.” We also need to scrutinize

Beckett’s use of the verb “to be” in the present tense as forensically as we

would the pronoun “it,” i.e. always from the supposition that Beckett is

acutely aware that in “is” is both an assertion and a question. Therefore,

when he says it is, he is not quite saying “it,” the non-representational

empty word as presenting reality, because by saying “it” he is

compromising and contaminating its state of essential reality, which is

beyond and immune to any relationship with the senses. To say “it is”

therefore always and equally questions the obvious statement of fact that

co-exists beside the question. Yet Beckett insists that language is the

unattainable being towards which we must go on; being is “all words …

all words, there’s nothing else” (Beckett 1959, 381), from which we may

deduce that being is words, as is argued—empty, pure words,

disconnected from representation and association with the perceived, pre-

and posthumous, beyond the disconnect.

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho

80

Worstward Ho opens and ends with the word “on.” “On. Say on”

(Beckett 2006, 471) and “No how on” (485). Approaching Worstward Ho

as the book of on may confirm it as the final affirmation of Beckett’s

philosophical impetus to go on through affirmation and negation towards

that final truth where the affirmation/negation dialectic breaks down, the

unlessenable least, the word that cannot be presented. The full opening

line reads: “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said

nohow on” (471) Between the two “ons” the text proceeds towards the

affirmation of being (the real). This progression contests each suggestion

of meaning, and guards against every desire to lapse into acceptance of

conventional interpretations of words and phrases. The fastidious undoing

of meaning emphasizes the disparity that distinguishes non-being, that

which is perceived through the senses, from empty language which will go

on towards being “all.” This distinction cannot be affected in the

existential world or even within the fictional reality created by Beckett,

tilted though it is towards the word being favoured over the perception. It

cannot because, even in Beckett’s fictional world, the word must be said,

heard, written and seen through the senses, and thus contaminated. Its “all”

has been diluted by that which is of non-being, yet the demand of language

insists on its speaking despite these obstructions. What we do see in

Worstward Ho is the accentuation of the primacy of empty language over

supposed meaning. From being a word in the opening of the work that can

be said and suggests an impetus towards a referent beyond itself, “on”

ends in isolated emptiness—there is no “how” to know anything about it,

other than its existence as a word. The impetus of the text compels us to

see “on” purely as the uncontaminated word on, and by extension all

words as empty, and to aspire go on beyond the inscribed to the pure word,

to being itself.

The contamination of the real, pure language is confronted in the

opening line of Worstward Ho in: “Be said on” (471). If being is “all

words,” pure language uncontaminated and undiluted by connection with

the corporeal, it clearly cannot speak; being could not have said “on,” and

to have done so would have introduced into being a function of non-being,

the corporeal. Any intervention, therefore, from non-being would be

missaid, and could not have been said by being, which is “all words.” In

The Unnamable the voice says “It will be I … that’s all words … all

words, there’s nothing else” (Beckett 1959, 381); it will be I, and the

corporeal will have disappeared into the void (see below), and it, language,

will be I, the I who speaks in the works of Beckett; but “it will be the

silence,” the uncontaminated pure I that is free of the torments of the

senses, that will be all words, there’s nothing else—that is the real.

The Empty Too 81

Missaid is also an assertion, albeit an incorrect one, that claims to know, to

mean, missaying names. The ability to name, according to Blanchot “has

been given only to a being capable of not being” (Blanchot 2003, 32). Be

that has said purports to know both what “on” means and to have some

knowledge of how to go on “Somehow on” (Beckett 2006, 470). It will be

drawn towards going on in the existential world that is the habitat of non-

being, where to do so it must name. “On” is reduced, lessened, to the least

possible link to association with the existential in perfect harmony with

“said” and “nohow,” both of which share the experience of attaining

emptiness. This we can see if we continue to look at “Said nohow on,” and

we can we read it as “said nohow is on,” bearing in mind Beckett’s

fastidious aversion to using the verb “to be,” present tense, because of its

inherent and unavoidable ambiguity. If, to make the point, we take a

liberty with “is” by reading it only as an assertion, we see then that the

meaninglessness now evident in “on” is extended to “said” and “nohow.”

“On” is empty because there is no how to know on, therefore said and

nohow are also on, and are both of equal, empty, status to on. If there can

be no how to know “on,” neither can there be a how to know nohow;

nohow, like on and said, is not a name, it is an empty word. We could

rearrange the sentence thus to illustrate the point: “said and nohow are on,

and on is the empty word on, therefore said and nohow are also empty

words.” Going on is not a question of a physical or material entity going

on, a not uncommon interpretation of the closing lines of Waiting For

Godot that feeds the charge that it is of the theatre of the absurd. It is a

matter of language moving towards “all” and divesting itself of that which

it is possible to so do, that which contaminates it, non-being, in

preparation for its be-coming. Lessening or worsening words are “at all

costs unknown … they only they” (478). As words move towards the

unlessenable they worsen, their link to meaning and knowing weakens,

until, when they reach the state of allness, they become the

uncompromised real. Their “costs,” or values, in relation to any mode of

presumed existence outside their allness, the state of which they are “at,”

are unknown. Words are all words “they,” like the empty definite article in

“The empty too” (480) is the word “they,” which is all and “All least”

(485).

Because the existential human claims the ability to name, it may be

identified as the contaminating parasite that haunts being. Rather than

respond to the demand of language, the human, that like Pozzo is “all

humanity” (Beckett 1959, 76), rejects being in favour of a supposed

referent towards which it believes it is possible to go, and somehow on.

Although language is the speaker in Worstward Ho it can only function

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho

82

because of and through the body that is held to be non-being, and with

which it is in conflict, even in a situation where the distance between the

two has been stretched to its limit. Consequently, language, while

convinced of its destiny, cannot be the actual real in the existential world.

It speaks “as through a medium in an oracle” (Szafraniec 2007, 178) but

continually reminds the reader of the inferior status of the medium to

which it is, nevertheless, tied. If non-being thinks it can somehow go on,

language reminds it of its ephemeral state of existence and of the

permanence of language after the death of meaning. Be that said will

somehow go on until its end, until it cannot know how to go on, until there

is no way on, no “how” on. Language reappropriates “how” to its state of

meaninglessness—there is no how, how is now a word rid of its

association to non-being and freed of that which has been imposed on it,

the ability to mean, to know. Now it does not know how because there is

no “how” to know. “How” has been relieved of its obligation to know, yet

the word how remains, exists; even in its printed state it announces its

destiny, which is the affirmation of its existence, not in, or of, any time or

place but as the real, beyond , and uncontaminated by the senses. Shane

Weller asks “is that affirmation not ultimately like the text itself rather

than anything it might name or thematize?” (Weller 2005, 193). Before

responding to Weller’s significant observation we might refer to

Blanchot’s discourse on the demand of writing, that which is demanded

“by any morality of any man … maintains no relation with him, while at

the same time summoning him to support this relation” (Blanchot 2003,

31). This summons demands the impossible—that the unpresentable, pure

language that can neither speak nor write but is, be represented in writing,

not the uttering of useless true and simple words but those used in

Beckett’s texts that struggle to say words that unsay knowledge, meaning

and the desire to name. The demand is impossible to fulfil because the

relation between the text and language that is beyond the text, the real, is

unbridgeable. Beckett’s text does insist that language is the real through

persistent negation that leaves language standing, not through “rhymes or

alliteration” (Weller 2005, 193) that feed the illusions of the senses and

distract the script from pursuing this relation. Worstward Ho does not end

with the text, as many critics who have yet to appreciate the significance

of Beckett’s fictional world do not realize. It is the book of on that brings

us to the outer limits of meaning and exhausts, through logical

interrogation, any case that could argue for the unquestioned existence of

perception, and messianicaly implores us to seriously engage with the

possibility of disembodied language being the real. Beckett’s selection and

arrangement of the text—because it creates a fictional space in which the

The Empty Too 83

focus is directed towards the primacy of words almost to the exclusion of

representation, the subject, and the perceived—are positive responses to

the demand of language that comes from beyond the text, but not beyond

language. Here is the affirmation, not just beyond “the dialectic of

affirmation and negation” (Weller 2005, 193), that is not the mere

affirmation of the text, as Weller suggests, but is the affirmation of the

unpresentable; that to which we must go on, the real, the unlessenable least

which cannot be negated. It supports the call to relate to that to which the

author cannot because, tormented and agitated “with boundless joy”

(Blanchot 2006, 31), he knows that everything that is not all words is

excludable, is not of “unnullable least” (Beckett 2006, 479), and the

written text obviously is nullable. The speaker in Worstward Ho, who is in

the main part being, implores the reader through that part, contaminated

though it is by non-being, to go on to the “unlessenable least,” to that

which can be lessened no further, to being in its pure state, which Beckett

has already told us is “all words.”

Textual evidence from Worstward Ho contradicts any interpretations

of Beckett’s works that see them as nihilistic; “Naught not best worse”

(479) further supports his argument that perceptions can neither be proved

to exist or to not exist. They are not argued to be naught but to be in doubt.

As such, they cannot fall into the category of being but must be classified

as non-being, which is not naught. Being, on the other hand, because it is

unullable, can “Never by naught be nulled” (479); it, having been proved

to be unullable, is the real towards which we must go on.

The other great question raised in Worstward Ho is the question of the

void. The void represents the problem posed to Beckett’s philosophy of

the real through that which is perceived by the corporeal. Language, as is

argued, is the real to Beckett, yet it is haunted by that which can neither be

proved to exist or proved not to exist, that which is perceived through the

senses. One gets a sense that Beckett the philosopher very much wants to

prove perceptions to be non-existent, which would leave him open to the

charge of propagating negative metaphysics. He refuses to step into that

trap and creates a category of existence for perceptions that he calls non-

being whose existence status is inferior to that of language. Beckett the

artist explores and exploits the imbalance in this conflict to prove that,

although language can speak both of and to itself, and that it may be all

there is to existence, it cannot be expressed without the complicity of the

doubted corporeal.

From demonstrating that words can be rendered meaningless, as we

see in the discussion on “on,” Beckett proceeds through affirmation and

negation to show that empty language is the entry point to being. If being

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho

84

is all words then all words, i.e. words that are all, or words alone, words

divested of meaning, articulation and inscription, unattainable, empty, pure

words are being. We see this with the pronounced focus directed towards

various key words running through Beckett’s texts—“it,” for example, and

“that”; “it, say it, not knowing what” (Beckett 1959, 267), and “is that

what it is” (381). If we accept that in Beckett’s created dimension pure

language is believed to be the real and the aspiration is to “go on” to that

state, seeing the closing lines of The Unnamable as a two-part dialogue

will clarify the logic that drives the text:

Linguistic I: … where I am I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence

you don’t know.

Corporeal: You must go on, I can’t go on.

Linguistic I: I’ll go on.

Here we can see that the linguistic I, having throughout the text defined

the real towards which s/he aspires, agrees to go on towards and is

encouraged to do so by the corporeal which cannot. If we continue to ask,

after Blanchot, “who is speaking” in Worstward Ho, we will see that

language has now been almost completely decoupled from the referent.

Language now is the “what,” language speaking about itself with a greater

insistence of authority than in The Unnamable, where the necessity of a

defence system against that which threatens it is continually stressed.

Language has now gone on as far as it is possible in the existential world,

towards proving the argument that runs through Beckett’s works that being

is all words. It has exacted the admission of non-being from the corporeal

in the closing lines of The Unnamable and now feels no compulsion to

resort to the confusion that may be the cause of misreading the linguistic I

as the subject.

“Language speaks here itself” (Szafraniec 2007, 178). It looks forward

to its complete state of being when it will be all, having rid itself of that

which now contaminates it, its association with the senses. As Szafranciec

says: “This near autonomy of language reflects the position of God. As

Derrida says, ‘Language has started without us, in us and before us. This is

what theology calls God’” (178). The problem that confronts Beckett is the

question of how near language can get to autonomy in the existential

world. If words are “all” of being, how can we get to “all” if we of

necessity employ the trappings of non-being, of the corporeal, that are not

of all? Worstward Ho goes as far it is possible to go, in language as it is

understood in the existential world, towards autonomy. But in so doing

Beckett defines the distinction between being and non-being. Worstward

Ho therefore demonstrates the—to language—unnecessary contaminant by

The Empty Too 85

the existential world and shows that it can go on, despite the hindrance of

the desire to represent, to a state where language can proclaim its

autonomy, can speak of itself and thus affirm itself beyond the text.

Worstward Ho shows that language can never be dismissed as an option.

“It stands” (Beckett 2006, 471) when perceptions cannot go beyond being

doubted. Worstward Ho is the book of on. Having established the

possibility of language’s autonomy even in the existential, albeit fictional,

realigned world that Beckett creates and which furthers his philosophical

proposition, it must of necessity promise to go on, to be, to be the real.

The raison d’etre of Beckett’s works is to decouple language from

subject, knowledge and perception and so declutter the path to the real.

The speaker in Worstward Ho cannot represent that which is unpresentable

yet which is the real, so s/he forensically annuls the possibility of meaning

in words that could detract from the aspiration to go on towards the real.

We see this in the attempts of be to get beyond written and spoken

language where be is “missaid,” as in this opening citation: “Be said on.

Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. Say for be said. Missaid”

(471). But we also see the implications of meaning in “said” coming under

attack. Be said on until said can somehow go on; meaning will somehow

be sustainable until, that is, there is no how, no way, for “said” to sustain

its authority. Meaning in said is annulled, yet the word said stands alone

and empty. The point is stressed later “Whenever said said said missaid”

(481), but said cannot be missaid because said is said, and missaid is

another word—missaid, or is said missaid? “Said is missaid” (481) may

conceal, beneath the too obvious clarity in its assertion, an ambiguity that

Beckett reserves for his deliberate and limited use of the verb “to be,”

present tense. In fact, “is” is almost absent from the text of Worstward Ho.

Is makes an assertion and asks a question, and each interpretation must be

weighed in equal measure to the other if we are to exhaust full value from

the text. The obvious, first, reading of the line, if we take “is” as an

assertion, is that the implication of representation, the truth claim in what

has been said, is mistaken, and “said” has been “missaid.” Yet this reading

hardly goes deep enough if we are serious about going on towards the

unlessenable least, as we must if we are to remain true to the text. What,

then, if we read it as “Said is. Missaid”? We are obviously taking liberties

with Beckett’s punctuation, which we can justify after the precedent he

establishes in How It Is, but even without the obvious full stop we are at

liberty to interpret a significant pause after “is.”

Let us refresh our familiarity with the passage under discussion: “Be

said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. Say for be said.

Missaid” (471). We could also extrapolate the following—to say is to be,

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho

86

and “say for be” is apparently confirmed in the assumed finality of the

tone in which “said” is delivered, which could be read thus, say for be.

Said! In this intervention in the text the distinction between “say” and

“said” is obvious. It affirms Beckett’s philosophical thinking on reality,

but in so doing it also affirms fixed meaning in both the terms “say” and

“said.” Unsurprisingly, the affirmation is followed by the hasty negation

“missaid.” To say for be said is missaid for a few reasons. To say, as has

already been noted, is to employ the use of the senses which would distort

being, and to attribute definite meaning to “say” and “said” would have a

similar effect through the implication of meaning in pure language. One

could go on almost indefinitely in this vein. The purpose of the exercise is

to argue that in Beckett’s works we cannot, with any confidence, go

outside language—language speaks itself, of itself. It continually exposes

the arbitrary connection between it and meaning. As a first step only in the

process of going on it reduces everything outside of language to doubt and

focuses on reducing language to the unlessenable least. Said, therefore,

can be taken, in Beckett’s approach of affirmation and negation, as an

assertion that: (a) what has been said has been said by being, “Be said on,”

and (b) that the word “said” is, from which we can extract two readings:

(i) that the word said means something has been said, in this case “on,”

and (ii) that it exists in its own right, decoupled from an association to

knowledge or representation. But the (equally significant) question part of

“is” attempts to negate these assertions, and by putting them in question it

reduces the assertion to the level of doubt beyond which it cannot rise. The

rare but significant use of “is” in this passage of Worstward Ho equates

meaning to existence. But that doubt introduced by “is” is eliminated

through the absence of the verb “to be,” present tense, in the next

sentence: “Whenever said said said missaid” (481) .

We need to dwell on the supposed distinction between “say” and

“said” that seems to run through the early stages of the work. The speaker

asks us to “Say for be said” (471). We could say “a body” where “none,”

which could be taken to say there is no body, and to ask where is the

location where “none” can be found/exists? In either case, even when the

mind is non-existent “no mind” (471), we can say the word “body.” These

syntactically and semantically complex orderings of the text undermine

any claim of connection between word and referent. Said is now

decoupled from meaning—“From now said alone” (481)—as is missaid

which is now equal in meaninglessness to said, as is seen where the

negation of the earlier affirmation of “say for be said” (471) itself seems to

be negated in “said for missaid” (471). In “For be missaid” (481), “for”

and be are both missaid once they are said at all, and they employ the

The Empty Too 87

services of the senses, even when they imply emptiness. The logic of the

project that is Worstward Ho insists that we cannot go outside of language,

and the more we look into language the more assuredly we are going on to

prove the truth that language is empty and meaningless and will stand

alone when stripped of meaning that is imposed upon it by the unified

subject. The distinction between say and said has been broken down

through the lessening of meaning that reduces both words to the

“formation of an initial speech whereby words that say something will be

distanced” (Blanchot 2003, 375, citing Mallarrne)—“The say? The said.

Same thing. Same nothing” (Beckett 2006, 481)—and they have the

potential to be the real, to be “all,” but for their relationship with no things

of non-being, “Same all, but nothing” (481). Once words are established as

being empty, language is in a position to go on towards being as we see

with the dissection of back (Beckett 2006, 481). Back is now alone, and

like “say” and “said” it has been lessened to “the listlessness of an empty

speech” (Blanchot 2003, 213) and can go somehow on. The apparent

contradiction “Back is on” (Beckett 2006, 481) is no longer that when we

realize that “back” has been divested of meaning; this process is some

“how” “on,” as it can be accomplished “within the arena of its limitations”

(Badiou 2009, 25), i.e. within the existential world where it is within our

power to prove that meaning is no more than a convention. The power,

“the how,” that makes it possible to create and attribute meaning to words,

can equally question and undo meaning. It can “lessen” meaning to a stage

where the spoken and written word is perceived to be empty. The methods

used in “how” challenge the perceived meanings of words until all of them

are subverted and the word is left alone. The word is lessened but not to an

unlessenable least, as this is not possible within the limitations of the

perceived world; hence some “how” will, through rational interrogation,

bring the word, as it is understood, to the limits of where it can go when

accompanied by the senses of the corporeal. But still the word is prepared

and poised to go on to be “all,” pure, being, uncorrupted by the non-being

of the perceived world. In this book of on, every supposition of meaning

and perception is put in question until the speaker’s aspiration to be “all

words” is emphasized beyond doubt. The significant invalidation of

meaning in “say” and “said,” to which we have referred, prepares the

reader for the messianic conclusion “Said nohow on” (Beckett 2006, 485).

The say and the said may be equal in meaninglessness but they are also the

same in “all,” and both have the potential to be the real. It is towards their

capacity to be, once rid of the nuisance of the attendant non-being, that

words can go on, to “the true silence … the real silence at last” (Beckett

1959, 362), through the stillness of the existential world which is not true

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho

88

silence, though it is a significant stage in the movement towards the

silence of the real; “Worse less … Less best (479) … Still worse again”

(471). Only words can go on: “What left of skull not go” (484), and a

simplistic reading suggests what is left of the skull cannot go, but

Beckett’s defamiliarization of commonplace speech is so measured that, if

we interpret “what” as is normally implied, as that which is, we risk

missing out on what is central to his thesis. Readers of Beckett’s works are

obliged, if not compelled, to proceed through affirmation and negation,

which here will affirm and negate the implied assertion and question in

“what” and should lead the good reader to the point where the connection

between words and referents asserts the primacy of the word.

“Said nohow on” is the important closing line of Worstward Ho. The

text has moved from the cryptic opening line “On, say on. Be said on.

Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on” (Beckett 2006, 471) to the

repetition of the closing “Said nohow on,” which by now, we know from

reading the text, has been divested of meaning. Said, nohow, on—each

word has been shown to be of equal, empty, status. It is not that the

sentence “has only been said” (Weller 2005, 194), it has been unsaid, has

been comprehensively stripped of meaning and connection to referent, and

the book of on has gone on to the empty “on,” by so doing showing that all

words have that capacity for emptiness. This, indeed, is as far as language

can go in the existential world, and unsaying proves, at the very least, the

primacy of language over the perceived. “Said,” “nohow” and “on” remain

standing in meaninglessness and emptiness, just as both “it” and “what”

are reduced to inscribed words in “It stands. What? Yes” (471) announced

on the opening pages. In “The empty too” (480), the definite article is

empty. Pure language is not an option and there is no other choice, as all

possibilities have been annulled throughout the work—“skull” the void,

“back” and so on—through the methodical invalidation of all suggestions

of meaning therein. “Said nohow on” has reached the state where the three

words represent language talking to itself about itself, and the real exhorts

the contaminated real to go on to itself, to reality, to all. They are now

prepared to go on towards the real by going into language. Suddenly it

becomes clear in “no move and sudden all far” (485) that without doing

anything, without even moving, the assuredness of language’s claim to be

the real is “vasts apart” (485) from the never provable speculations of its

reality by the non-being of the perceived world. The future beckons,

messianicaly, from “beyond the horizon of the possible … because, in the

absence of the possible, it is still necessary to go on” (Oppenheim 2004,

84).

The Empty Too 89

We argue that the thinking of Samuel Beckett excludes the possibility

of a void insofar as the real is concerned. Yet a considerable amount of the

text of Worstward Ho is devoted to addressing the question of the void.

Beckett’s focus and concern is to distinguish between his philosophical

belief that language is the real, and that which haunts and challenges that

belief, the unprovable perceptions of the existential world, that which he

calls “non-being.” If language is the real, “all,” for it there cannot be a

void. In its essence language is all, and does not inhabit time or space.

Language is, we would say, though Beckett avoids using the verb “to be,”

present tense. Perceptions, on the other hand, cannot be independently

proved to exist, but through questioning lead only to identifying unstable

views of existence that cannot be traced beyond the function of the

corporeal that claim to know and name them. Perceptions cannot be

proved to exist or to not exist.

For Beckett there is no void, and there is a void; there is no void for the

real, but perceptions, because they are non-being and not the real, and

even though they sustain us through what we believe to be existence, are

doomed to end in the void. Throughout the passage Beckett interchanges

the emphasis on “void” from the thing void to the word void through

qualification, lack of qualification and, of course, affirmation and

negation, and negation of negation. He seems to lead us out of language

towards discussion of the thing void, only to undo this argument by

pointing up meaninglessness, for example how the sentence “all there as

when no words” (482) could read, with some difficulty, to claim that all is

there in the absence of words. Such a reading would firmly locate the

sentence in the conventional world where the relationship between

language and things privileges things over dispensable language. It would

miss what is vital to a satisfying understanding of what is going on in

Beckett’s works—that they are set in an imagined dimension where

language takes precedence over perceptions. To approach the sentence

from the latter angle shatters the illusion of meaning and the link between

word and thing, showing that language can speak of itself and still make

sense. It also highlights the nub of Beckett’s philosophical thinking that

language is the real, “all,” through proclaiming all there, and then through

affirmation by showing that “when” and “no” are words without links to

meaning. All, we remember, is the real that is “all words” of The

Unnamable, and all will be the real when “when” and “no” have been

divested of all links to a referent, when they have become all words. Of

course it can be argued that the above quote proves that words cannot get

out of meaning (even if we argue that words can themselves speak of

themselves). Beckett implies conventional meaning to stress his

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho

90

philosophical belief that language is the real as he will go on to show

language justifying his position in “as when no words.” What we see in

this example of the void/no void is the conflict between the real and non-

being acted out. As when no-words! can utterly transform our

interpretation of the unreadable non-being of the former to the explosive

revelation of the latter, it is an example of the moment when the scales fall

from the eyes of the reader. The content that is of non-being, that which is

perceivable and inscribable, is destined for the void, while language,

divested of those encumbrances, is prepared to go on to its state of being.

“Two once so one” (482) have now separated to the extent that “vast of

void atween” does not say that a division exists between the real and the

perceived, which would suggest a binary opposition. “Atween” may be an

archaic word for between but it also suggests through the prefix “a” to

“tween,” not between, but the prefix of, for example, amoral and asexual.

A vast of void does not exist between the two, and the void, through its

being the destiny of non-being, is part of non-being, its aim to be all, and

hence atween, as it is understood to mean here. The void is “most when

almost” (483), and it consumes most of the debris from non-being when

most, or a great majority of “all,” is in a position to jettison that which

contaminates its purity, which is as far as “all” can go, even in Beckett’s

imagined dimension. Beckett cannot separate the real from the perceived.

The “so-said void” is “so missaid” (477). Beckett seems to be negating his

negation of meaning in the say and the said of 481 where both signify the

same nothing. Perhaps he is emphasizing the point that the perceived

cannot be negated, and that the void is shade-ridden with multiple

interchanging perceptions and will only attain its status of void when

language has divested itself of perceptions—when it has gone on—which

will be deposited in the void.

Can void ever be reduced to the status of the word void? The speaker

exhorts “All save void” (483), but all cannot because “Void” too suggests

it is the thing as well as the word voice. The word cannot be saved from its

connection to the perception void; the void is unworsenable, never less but

also “Never more” (483). The studious evasion of absolutes to describe the

void emphasis the status of perceptions, in general, as neither provable nor

unprovable; it is unmoreable and unlessenable, in sharp contrast with the

unlessenable least, to which the word aspires. Beckett’s sturdy defence of

the status of the void protects him from any charge of negative

metaphysics that might be hurled his way, but in it there is also a deeper

investigation of the nature of being. In an apparent answer to the question

“What the so said void” (479) we read “The so said dim … so said shades

… so said seat and germ of all” (479). If we take “so said” as a negation of

The Empty Too 91

the empty “said,” insofar as it cannot categorically represent either—and

note its repetition before each manifestation—we can see neither the

continued presence or absence of the unmoreable, unlessenable kind of

language that refuses to define, but yet makes the philosophical point that

the void is the “germ of all,” i.e. it is the germ that infects the health and

purity of language and condemns it to an unhealthy association with

perception from where it can only aspire to go on. The so said void is of

the world of perception, referring to a perception it names “void.” The

language has relinquished its aspiration to go on, such is its level of

contamination and its inevitable fate, and is therefore the oblivion of the

void.

As we argue here, the dim shades of unprovable perceptions cannot go

on to be the real, so for them there is the void that reflects, through its

fraught association with the concept void, the unease of defining either

presence or absence. For the real, however, there is no void other than the

empty word void. Void, like “the,” is empty too (480). The impetus that

runs through Beckett’s works drives remorselessly towards the

unlessenable least, so whatever weakens representation and meaning is

good. “Worse less” (479) because it does this and helps the word like the

old man and the child “unreceding on … (till) they then the word” (479)

rather than its corporeal representation “Worse less” (479) and “Least best

worse” (479) as this is as far as language can go in the existential world

for the reasons already discussed. In such conditions it cannot become the

least for “want of worser worst,” because in the existential world there will

always be a remainder of the perceived to prevent it going on to freely

become the unlessenable least, which is worser worst. Worse and to fail

are good because they leasten words, reducing their capacity to mean and

represent and thus allowing the word to go on towards being the

unpresentable real. Each stage of worsening can only occur within the

existential world. The speaker can say least best worse with words that

lessen their meaning, reducing them to emptiness, but cannot go on to their

ultimate unpresentable purity for “want of worser worst” (479). In the

existential world, language must go on to its ultimate possibility, which

would relieve it of every possible connection to the senses. The value-

based terms “better” and “worse” are necessary tools of the emptying

process, and to worsen is to attack the connection between the word and

the perceived. Worse brings language towards good, the worse the better

“better worse” (471) until language is sick for good (471). The ultimate,

the unpresentable, the “worser worst,” the real that is all words, is beyond

better and worse, as it is beyond body and mind “Where neither for good.”

All is the real and all is good, “good and all” (471) are the one, the real

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho

92

(which might be of interest to those who like to write about ethics and

nihilism in Beckett’s works). The speaker asks “What word for what

then?” When language is the real, then what can the word “what”

represent when perceptions have already been consigned to the void?

Because the real is “good” and “all” it cannot “be” anywhere, certainly not

in a void. The void is part of the perceived world and, like it, cannot be

proved to exist. What, then, of the intriguing dash in “no hands in the—No

save for worse to say” (480) (?) It could be argued that the dash represents

the so-called failure of language, but as is argued elsewhere in this book,

language cannot fail in the real sense. There are indeed many examples of

language failing to represent perceptions. In those cases it is the “dim

white empty hands” (480) of the perception that instigate the chain

reaction, resulting in what is called the failure of language. Language may,

in such instances, fail to represent, but it does not fail and will continue to

renew and to re-represent some freshly conceived perception, some

unprovable manifestation, some shade of what we call existence until the

application of Beckett’s logic will prove it to be empty and infinite. Like

most of Beckett’s texts, the passage in question here is open to more than

one interpretation. So why the dash, what does it signify? It could indeed

be argued to represent the failed attempt of language to represent an

indefinable perception, a “what” on which he elaborates in what “words

for what then?” (480). However, to read it as such still leaves too much of

a remainder, too much slack, some of which can be lessened before the

suggestion of meaning is exhausted. It is noteworthy that Beckett ends this

sentence with a question mark, implying that the first “what” retains its

conventional interrogative meaning, the question being directed towards

the discussion around the absent “what” of the dash; if what is implied as

the absentee in the blank space, then what is that “what”? Can it represent,

or is it specifically the empty word “what” that defies the notion of

representation? But even then it is lessenable, insofar as the physical act

that inscribed it as a material perception can be undone and replaced by

another act that will reduce it to an implication, albeit one that is

dependent on the implied meaning in the words that surround the blank.

Or should we insist that because the dash is not a blank it is a mark? Yet

this implication to which “what” has been reduced is of profound

significance to those who would wish to understand what is going on—or

precisely what going on is—in the works of Samuel Beckett. The dash is

the best worse least in the realm of perceptions, yet it is not the

unlessenable “least which” is pure language, uncontaminated by

inscription. Because the unlessenable least cannot be perceived it is

therefore unpresentable. The reduction of what (?) to “what” and “what” to

The Empty Too 93

“—” brings us to the brink of the unpresentable. Beckett’s process of

affirmation and negation challenges all presuppositions of reality until

everything, concept and perception, can only go as far as “being

unmorable and unlessable,” where that which is (ab)used to represent it

goes on to_______? “Art,” Beckett writes, “has always been this—pure

interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric” (Oppenheim 2004, 75).

Beckett’s interrogation brings us not to “nothing,” but to a stage in a

process where the case for acknowledging perceptions as reality can be no

longer be sustained, and from where the only possibility open, the sole

truth remaining, is that language is the real. If the real is affirmed as the

true silence, “the one I’ll never have to break any more, when I won’t have

to listen anymore” (Beckett 1959, 352) of the narrator of The Unnamable,

then we need to continue asking who is speaking in the works of Samuel

Beckett? If, as we argue here, the speaker is language and language is

“all,” then the true silence is the silence of the real that can neither be

spoken or heard, for as “worst they may fail ever worse to say” (Beckett

2006, 178).

We have argued that the perceptions of the existential world have been

consigned as non-being to the “unprovable unmorables unlessenable”

void, and that the real is and does not inhabit any place or time, and

therefore is not a void. Reading Worstward Ho can be an exhilarating

experience if one views the text from Beckett’s philosophical impetus.

Simultaneous contradictions actually harmonize within Beckett’s cryptic

syntax. Words strive to “unmean” within a context that affirms his

philosophical belief that language is the real. That the actuality of the

existence of a void into which the real would disappear is dismissed in the

layered levels of “Void no if not for good” (478), which could lazily be

read as there will be no void if it is not for the good, which would imply

that the void is possible only when it is for the good. This would refute the

approach argued here that there is not a void for the real. However, if we

raise the reading to a higher level that tends towards disassociating some

of the words there from conventional meaning, we can arrive at an

interpretation that is radically different and illustrates Beckett’s

philosophy. In this reading, because key words are reduced to unmeaning,

they both affirm his philosophy and make grammatical sense. By taking

liberties with the punctuation as a way of illustrating the point, the

sentence could read thus: “Void? No. If not for good.” Here, the issue

around the void is dealt with conclusively, but what of the remainder of

the sentence which seems to be illogical? Yet that part of the sentence is

repeated, significantly, as the closing sentence to the paragraph,

justification, no doubt, for those who would argue that Worstward Ho is

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho

94

unreadable. However, if we reduce “if” and “not” to skeletal, empty words

we can read the sentence as follows: “Void? No. If not for good.” The

words “if” and “not” (and it follows all words), emptied of meaning, are

for good. Just as in “The empty too,” which on an early reading seems to

be unreadable “if not for good,” from a value-free reading reveals itself in

a way that startles and proceeds to reveal the depth of Beckett’s

philosophical impetus. That philosophical impetus is insisted upon through

“good,” and good and all are of the real; words are all, all is good, and the

real is good and all. Yet, to explain his philosophy, Beckett must root the

key word “good” within a value system even if that which is good rises

above and beyond any understood ethical code. It is not possible for

language to completely disconnect with the existential as we see in the

speaker’s closing line of The Unnamable. “I can’t go on” may be

interpreted as the speaker admitting that language connected to the

corporeal is incapable of breaking that connection. It is the voice of the

worldly I of too much humanity, who will not aspire to going on to the

state of pure language. The exhilaration that comes from reading Beckett’s

texts arises from his art, i.e. the arrangement and selection of deceptively

simple language that through an awesome mishmash of cross, inter and

intra referencing affirms, negates and invalidates as uttered, but inevitably

leads, “goes on,” to a stage where language disconnects with referent and

conventional meaning, that even in the empty state is shown to be readable

when seen as speaking itself about itself. Read from this approach the

words that precede “good” in the passage under discussion have severed

connections with meaning to prove the truth in the value-based terms

“good,” i.e. empty language is good. Enlightened by the possibilities

inherent in this approach we could remember to look at Worstward Ho,

and indeed most of Beckett’s later works, as imaginative creations, as

constituting an art form through which his underlying philosophical

impetus can find expression. When philosophical impetus can find

expression, when we liberate ourselves from the conventional approach,

we will find that the text too is liberated and almost miraculously reveals

itself in a very different way, but a way that is nevertheless consistent with

and affirms the logic of Beckett’s philosophy. Let us look again at the

sentence “If not for good.” “Good,” as has been said, means, albeit not in

the conventionally accepted interpretation. If we can wring ourselves from

the stranglehold of convention and remember that not only “the empty

too” for Beckett, but potentially all words, we can see the sentence

justifying the emptiness of all its words except good, and still making

sense, thus: “If, not, for, good.” Then if we go back to the earlier sentence

“Void no if not for good” and apply the same logic to the reading we will

The Empty Too 95

see that the word void too has become empty, which is of profound

significance to the overall understanding of what Beckett is about. To

avoid becoming bogged down in a fruitless and interminable argument

based on the supposed meaning or metaphysical import of the sentence,

the reader could profitably relocate to Beckett’s imagined dimension and,

remaining true to his textual support in “the empty too,” empty the words

of meaning. If we do this the sentence following on from the shortened

version already discussed will read like this: “Void, no, if, not, for—

good.” It will be seen to list a succession of words emptied of meaning, all

of which, in their empty state, are equal, value-free examples of Beckett’s

philosophical notion of the good. This reading goes on, in this book of on,

from the earlier example that sees the word void questioning the existence

of the perception void to the stage where language, because it has been

divested of meaning, cannot question, it is “being Unquestioning” (Beckett

1959, 267). It stands visible to the senses because it has been inscribed but

is otherwise empty, which is as far as it can go in the existential world.

The sentence aspires to the real, to be all words, and therefore is consistent

with its aspirations to read it as all words. When we do this we see that

void is equal in meaninglessness to those others on the list that define real.

“Void” can have no meaning and cannot exist where the real is all words.

To apply meaning to void is to relocate it in the area of non-being, of

perceptions where its realness will be contaminated by that which is

destined for its actual void.

Though it is argued throughout this book that Beckett’s thinking

exceeds that of most philosophers, or at least the impositions on his texts

of “an impression of fashionable philosophy” (Cavell 2002, 115), we can

acknowledge similarities between his thinking, in certain areas, and that

of, for example, Plato on the intelligible and the sensible, Descartes on

Cartesian doubt, and Berkeley on perception. Yet Beckett is never a mere

philosopher; he is a philosopher-artist whose thinking may coincide with,

even be influenced by, others, yet through his texts we can see where this

point of convergence separates and where his thinking goes beyond theirs.

Berkeley’s central idea that “any sensible object should be immediately

perceived by sight or touch, and at the same time have no existence in

nature, since the very existence of a thinking being consists in being

perceived” (Berkeley 2004, 86) is especially interesting when considering

Beckett’s philosophy. That an object can be perceived through senses yet

have no existence in nature seems to be a trigger point for Beckett’s

thinking that the perceived is not the real. Berkeley’s claim that “we

cannot attain to any self-evident or demonstrative knowledge of the

existence of sensible things” as well as reflecting Cartesian doubt is also

The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho

96

seen in Beckett’s “Enough still not to know” (Beckett 2006, 479) and his

insistence, running throughout his texts, that we cannot know. But

Berkeley, like Plato, does not really consider the centrality of language to

being. Plato sees “the same” as that which “cannot be perceived by the

senses at all” where Berkeley retreats to the comfort zone of “that Eternal

invisible mind which produces and sustains all things” (Berkeley 2004,

88). If Berkeley’s thinking supports Beckett’s notion on perceptions,

Plato’s thinking on the same establishes a base from which Beckett can

project his theory that language is the real. It may not be coincidence that

he actually mentions the terms “the same” in a significant reference that

appears to correct the flaw in Plato’s thinking that fails to consider the

centrality of language to being. The same is “Same thing. Same nothing.

Same all but nothing” (Beckett 2006, 481). For both Plato and Beckett the

real, or the same, cannot be perceived by the senses at all, but for Plato it

is the Forms where for Beckett it is pure empty language, the real that is

“all words” is the same, which is all “but nothing,” that excludes

everything that is not pure language (which to Beckett is non-being).

Beckett, possibly unlike Plato and Berkeley, is an artist. Where they step

outside of language to define their representation of the real, Beckett, by

proving that language can with certainty only talk about language, creates

an art form that purges language of all possible association with that which

is outside it in the existential world, which proves that “It stands” (472)

when reduced to “all words.” He departs from the logic of Plato’s and

Berkeley’s thinking once it becomes unsustainable through Cartesian

interrogation, insisting on staying within that from which there can be no

release, that which is not an option—irreducible language.

Worstward Ho is the book of on in which we witness the aspiration of

pure language speak to speak. The aspiration to purity is intensified by

going into language and by creating doubt of the existence of that which

corrupts it, perceptions of the senses which nevertheless continue to haunt

it on its passage through the existential world. Pure language is the

unpresentable real to Beckett, that messianic to come that is beyond time,

place and ethics. It inhabits no zone—it is all. That which is not of all is

non-being and is destined for the void.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackerley, C.J and Gontarski, S.E. The Faber Companion to Samuel

Beckett, London, Faber and Faber, 2006.

Badiou, Alain. Second Manifesto for Philosophy, Cambridge Polity, 2011.

—. Infinite Thought: Truth and the return of Philosophy, London,

Continuum, 2005.

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. London: Faber and Faber, 1956.

—. The Beckett Trilogy. London: Picador, 1959.

—. Texts for Nothing. London: Faber and Faber, 2010.

—. The Complete Dramatic Works: London: Faber and Faber, 1986.

—. Samuel Beckett, The Grove centenary editions, series editor Paul

Auster, I, II, IV, New York, Grove Press, 2006.

—. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-40, Edited by Martha Dow

Feshenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 2009.

Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience, New York, Random House, 1988.

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights, London, Penguin Classics, 2002.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come: Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 2003.

—. The Infinite Conversation, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press,

1993.

Caputo, John D. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: Fordham, Fordham

University Press, 1997.

Cavell, Stanley. Must we mean what we say? Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 2002.

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, The University of

Chicago Press, 1982.

—. Positions: Translated Alan Bass, London: Continuum, 2002

—. Writing and Difference, Oxford, Routledge, 2001.

—. Aporias, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1993.

De Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading, Yale, Yale University Press, 1979

Gibson, Andrew. Beckett and Badiou: Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2006.

Heidegger, Martin. The Essence of Human Freedom, Continuum, London,

2002.

Bibliography

98

Hill, Leslie. Beckett’s Fiction in different words., Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1990.

Kearney, Richard. States of Mind: New York: New York University Press,

1995.

Miller, J Hillis, Others, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011.

Plato. Complete Works: Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny, New York, Routledge, 2003.

Sampson, Fiona. Common Prayer, Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2007.

Szafraniec, Asja, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature, Stanford,

Stanford University Press, 2007.

Weller, Shane. A Taste for the Negative, London, Legenda, 2005.

Wood, Sarah. Writing and Difference, London, Continuum, 2009.

Anthologies

Bennett, Andrew and Royle, Nicholas. An Introduction to Literature,

Criticism and Theory, Hertfordshire, Prentice

Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995.

Bennett, Andrew and Royle, Nicholas. An Introduction to Literature,

Criticism and Theory, Hertfordshire, Prentice Hall/Harvester

Wheatsheaf, 1995.

G.H. von Wright, H Nyman, editors. Culture and Value Oxford, Blackwell

1980.

Rivkin, Julia, and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: an Anthology:

Oxford, Blackwell, 1998.

Oppenheim, Lois, editor. Samuel Beckett Studies, Palgrave, London, 2004.

Journals

Emerging Perspectives. Post graduate journal in English Studies, vol. 3,

Dublin, University College Dublin, English Graduate Society, 2012.

Denis Devlin in ‘Transition,’ Paris 27, April May 1938.

Websites

Critchley 2009 http:nakedpunch.com

...................................... Index

Ackerley, C.J and Gontarski, 98

allness, 24, 82

aporia, 7, 9, 32, 69, 71, 74, 76

Badiou Alain, x, 23, 24, 33, 66,

88, 98, 99

Bataille Georges, 41, 70, 71, 98

Bennett, Andrew, 99

Berkeley, 13, 96

Blanchot, x, 9, 10, 11, 17, 31,

32, 38, 43, 51, 52, 56, 57, 63,

65, 66, 71, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82,

84, 87, 98

Caputo, John D, 6;98

Cavell, Stanley, 77;78,96;98

chora, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6

Critchley Simon, 14, 100

de Man, Paul54

deconstruction, x, xi, 8, 18, 23,

50, 51, 54, 63

defamiliarization, 88

Derrida, vii, x, xi, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,

9, 12, 19, 23, 32, 41, 47, 62,

63, 66, 68, 69, 71, 74, 76, 85,

98, 99

Derridean reading, 77

Descartes, 96

differance, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 76

Differance, 5, 7, 32

Endgame, xi, 33, 56, 75, 77

failure of language, 7, 8, 27, 53,

67, 93

Film, vii, xi, 7, 13, 14, 15, 17,

18, 19, 20, 21

G.H. von Wright, H Nyman, 99

Gibson, Andrew,4;17; 99

Heidegger, Martin,ix;45; 99

Hill Leslie, 23, 32, 50, 72, 99

How It Is, vii, xi, 11, 24, 28, 41,

42, 43, 45, 46, 50, 51, 52, 55,

56, 57, 59, 61, 64, 65, 67, 68,

70, 71, 86

inscribed, 44, 46, 52, 80, 89, 93,

96

Kearney, Richard,8;76; 99

linguistic, xi, 1, 2, 6, 8, 11, 24,

25, 30, 31, 39, 40, 42, 46, 57,

58, 67, 84

meaninglessness, 30, 32, 51, 53,

81, 82, 87, 89, 90, 96

Miller, J Hillis, 79, 99

non-being, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14,

15, 18, 19, 21, 24, 34, 40, 54,

73, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85,

87, 89, 90, 94, 97

opinion, 2, 3, 5, 6

Oppenheim Lois, 23, 24, 28, 32,

37, 50, 65, 71, 72, 89, 93, 100

Oppenheim, Lois, 100

Plato, vii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 30,

47, 54, 96, 99

Positions, 69, 98

post-structuralist, x, 63

Pure language, 54, 89, 97

Rivkin & Ryan, 1, 5, 6, 7

Royle Nicholas, 33, 75, 76, 77,

78, 99

Sampson, Fiona, 99

senses, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11,

14, 15, 18, 19, 26, 30, 31, 32,

35, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 49, 53,

55, 57, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 72,

73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82,

84, 85, 86, 87, 92, 96, 97

Szafraniec, 82, 85, 99

Texts for Nothing, 7, 11, 74, 98

the real, x, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10,

11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23,

Bibliography

100

24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33,

34, 38, 40, 42, 43, 48, 50, 54,

56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65,

66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76,

78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87,

89, 90, 92, 94, 96

the same, ix, xi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,

9, 10, 11, 16, 20, 26, 54, 69,

72, 82, 88, 91, 95, 96

The Unnamable, 1, 9, 10, 11, 14,

16, 29, 31, 37, 42, 52, 57, 61,

64, 69, 74, 75, 77, 81, 84, 85,

90, 94, 95

Timaeus, 1, 5

University College Dublin, 100

unnullable, 83

unpresentable, 2, 3, 6, 16, 27,

30, 35, 46, 53, 56, 64, 83, 85,

92, 97

unprovability, 5, 13, 59

void, vi, 10, 11, 17, 33, 73, 81,

84, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97

Von Wright & Nyman, 73

Waiting for Godot, vii, xi, 1, 23,

24, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 48,

50, 74, 77, 98

Weller, Shane, 59, 73, 82, 89, 99

Wittgenstein, 34

Wood, Sarah, 70, 71, 99

Worstward Ho, vii, xi, 11, 73,

74, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87,

89, 94, 97

Yeats, 54