“Beckett’s Philosophical Imagination: Democritus versus Pythagoras and Plato in Comment...

anthony cordingley

Beckett’s Philosophical imagination: democritus versus Pythagoras and Plato in Comment c’est/How It Is

the dense, fragmented Prose of Beckett’s last work of long fiction, Comment c’est/How It Is (1961/64), is a thick carapace against the sort of allu-

sion-hunting that has revealed the complexity of ideas within his earlier works.1 my aim in this article is to push through this surface to show, first, how Beckett’s early learning about ancient greek philosophy remained present within sequences of images written some thirty years later in How It Is and, second, how these images are vital keys to understanding this most difficult of texts. i will also consider how Beckett’s use of ancient philosophy in How It Is complicates conventional intertex-tual hermeneutics by depriving his allusions of the power to affirm past meanings and their traditions. more broadly, i will suggest that this strategy defines Beckett as a late modernist.

to corroborate this argument i will refer to Beckett’s extensive “Philosophy notes,”2 now available for consultation in the archives of trinity college dublin (tcd), and which are believed to date from a period of intense private study in the British museum reading room during the summer of 1932. amounting to over 500 pages (267 folios recto-verso), they are both handwritten and typed and remained in Beckett’s possession until his death in 1989. the notes devoted to the ancient greek period were drawn largely from archibald alexander’s 1907 A Short History of Philosophy, John Burnet’s 1914 Greek Philosophy, and the 1902 english

1 Comment c’est/How It Is was first published in french in 1961, and Beckett translated it into eng-lish in 1964. all references to both french and english versions of Comment c’est/How It Is and their manuscript drafts are from o’reilly’s critical-genetic edition of this text. Page numbers are cited, followed by part and paragraph number.

2 i am indebted to the estate of samuel Beckett for their permission to quote from Beckett’s “Philosophy notes.” i especially thank matthew feldman for generously giving me access to his tran-scriptions of Beckett’s notes, and whose exciting scholarship inspired me to venture into the Beckett archives.

Comparative Literature 65:4 doi 10.1215/00104124-2376606 © 2013 by University of oregon

Comparative Literature

Published by Duke University Press

comParatiVe literatUre / 384

3 i thank dirk Van hulle for communicating this fact to me.4 the most intensively studied set of allusions in the text are those to dante (see caselli 148−82).

a smattering of other allusions to familiar Beckettian references — the Bible, augustine, descartes, Pascal, and Proust — have been identified, an overview of which is found in ackerley and gontarski (259−62).

edition of Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Western Philosophy (engelberts 67−73). importantly, an original german edition of Windelband’s History remained in Beckett’s library at the end of his life;3 the text was Beckett’s principal reference in his early study of philosophy and the singular source for his “Philosophy notes” dealing with texts written after the ancient period. matthew feldman mentions how the “Philosophy notes” emerge, albeit fleetingly, as a figure in Beckett’s writ-ing in the 1964 short prose piece “all strange away,” whose narrator abruptly recalls that “ancient philosophers ejaculated with place of origin when possible suggesting pursuit of knowledge at some period” (Beckett, Complete 175; feldman 33). here, Beckett fictionalizes his writing process by making his narrator evoke an erstwhile “pursuit of knowledge,” an apparent allusion to a map Beckett drew in his “Philosophy notes” that located ancient philosophers within the geography of the mediterranean (Notes Diverse Holo 76). “all strange away” was published in the same year as How It Is, and the quotation represents more than just a memory of Beckett’s earlier desire to acquire an encyclopaedic, Joycean erudition: when Beck-ett wrote How It Is he was still engaging with the philosophical doctrines contained within these notes, or rather, with his memory of engaging with those doctrines.

i will focus here on Beckett’s construction in How It Is of an ingenious dialectic between pre-socratic (particularly democritean) and Platonic (including neo-Pythagorean) ideas. archives and intertextuality, memories and the status of their contents in recitation/repetition, are explicit concerns in Beckett’s text. indeed, it purports to be both a recitation and a “quotation” (193; 3.315) channeled through a narrative dyad that Beckett termed the narrator/narrated: an “ancient voice” speaks in the first person present tense to an “i” who attempts to offer a verbatim recitation of that voice (see Kenner 94). this “ancient voice” looms like an archive of that “pursuit of knowledge,” embodying what is referred to in How It Is as “the humanities i had” (35; 1.164). yet the “i” that speaks in the present can only hear “bits and scraps” (5; 1.7 et alibi) of his past-i, and the “ancient voice” is “ill-said ill-heard ill-captured ill-murmured in the mud” (3; 1.5). the archive is thus scat-tered into fragments, most of which have not yielded the sorts of clues that have radically altered the interpretation of Beckett’s other prose texts.4 and, although the parallel between the underworld of mud and dante’s Inferno has been well documented, Blanchot’s brilliant and highly influential analysis has sanctioned a critical tradition that sees the subject of the text to be hermeneutics itself (see Blanchot 481–82, hill 134–35).

my aim is to reconstitute some of this contextual information, this archive of “ancient voice.” a genetic strategy does not imply that episodes and images will be “explained” through the discovery of allusive discourse: at this stage in his writing career Beckett had moved beyond his earlier, more conventional prac-tice of drawing upon the meaning of a source so as to expand and complicate his own text. By the time he came to write Comment c’est/How It Is the meaning of a reference is often its functional value as, for instance, a metonym of objects in



BecKett’s PhilosoPhical imagination / 385

the memory, the residue of past learning, or the past learning-self. this does not, however, entirely neutralize the content of the allusion, and Beckett exploits the conjunction between the remnant meaning of an allusion and its function. thus, if Beckett’s “i” appears at times to be “ignorant” of the meaning of the doctrines of ancient philosophy he divulges, the text never is.

Beckett never formally studied philosophy before his intense and private study in 1932. although he had made notes on descartes while at the ecole normale in 1925−26, it was his diligent reading and laborious note-taking from Windelband’s A History of Philosophy that must have impressed upon Beckett a sense that the his-tory of philosophy was a grand narrative of the progress of reason. Windelband’s enthusiasm for the virtues of a greek education (paideia) and the assimilation of aristotelian ethics into christian morality is exemplary of the teleological current of intellectual and artistic history against which Beckett’s oeuvre stands. in the concluding remarks to his History, Windelband, a prominent nineteenth-century Kantian, rails against both relativism and nietzsche (680), while relentlessly defending philosophy against the dilution of its eternal truths and the encroach-ment of other disciplines: “Philosophy can live only as the science of values which are universally valid [. . .] the organising principle for all the functions of culture and civilisation and for all the particular values of life.” it must not shy away from the “giving of laws — not laws of arbitrary caprice which it dictates, but rather laws of reason, which it discovers and comprehends [. . .] to win back the important conquests of the great period of german philosophy” (680−81; my emphases).

in How It Is the philosophical “formulations” of Beckett’s “i” are sabotaged not by relativism, but by a nietzschean laughter unbeholden to the strictures and aspirations of the ratio. the text’s anti-Platonic saboteur is the poet-without-subject slipping through the manifold layers of the narrator/narrated’s “ancient voice” and “i”; excluded from the republic, paideia, and the regeneration of philosophical dialectics, he orchestrates “ill-hearing” into Beckett’s parody of philosophical ratiocination, a process best charted by examining the relationship between Beckett’s “Philosophy notes” and the discourse of his present “i.”

in the conclusion to this intertextual analysis, i consider how Beckett freed his present-i from the institutional constraints of the discipline of philosophy, allowing him to edit, cut, and hear anew his “ancient voice.” this “i” makes creative, formal decisions that shape or arrange the past discourse and its inherited dialectics into a novel poetics, and the fragmenting and undermining of those dialectics exem-plifies Beckett’s quintessentially late modernist aesthetic strategy. although he undermines a straightforwardly modernist “mythical method,” the philosophical tradition is not “neutralized” within the narrative discourse, as might be expected in a post-modern text. But neither is the status of the metanarrative affirmed. indeed, Beckett’s use of ancient philosophy in How It Is offers an exemplary dem-onstration of one of the limit-points of modernist aesthetics.

Thesis: Pythagorean Mysticism in the Platonic Cosmos

the very nature of philosophical method, indeed reason itself, is at stake in How It Is, as Beckett’s “i” struggles to find a satisfactory “solution” (189; 3.296) that will allow him to move up the cosmological ladder towards “the other above in the




light.” yet this figure often appears to an estranged other of his own self, a voice which speaks to him of his own life and which he calls the “ancient voice.” his goal is to become one with his past-i and, by performing its perfect repetition, lift him-self out of his muddy/textual morass (the metafictive elements of this situation are not hidden, for the “i” often alludes to the writing and reciting of his narrative). the scene is thus set for the cosmological comedy that unfolds during a mock-existential journey when the nameless “i” crawls through an underworld of mud in what appears to be a purgatorial afterlife: he must not only meet a being named Pim and then torture Pim until Pim can speak and sing; he must also discover the physical and theological “order” of his predicament in the mud. his “solution” — also referred to as his “formulation” or “calculation” — involves accounting for his universe with an elaborate, though confused, philosophical model. he goes to great pains to prove a logically incontrovertible ratio of “sacks” (material/spiritual provisions) to “souls” (individuals), thus echoing rationalist cosmologies such as leibniz’s Monadology when striving for an “exquisitely organized” (189) pre-estab-lished (dis)harmony. the scaffolding of seventeenth-century rationalism is some-what obvious, yet the text also looks back to the “rationalism” inhering within Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy. this is complicated by the fact that one singular relationship, not one singular monadic cogito, dominates all interactions in the invented cosmos of the narrator/narrated: the meeting of a sadistic master and a tortured student. Plato is a key reference here, for the master’s violent and punitive mode of questioning Pim is a dark inversion of socratic method (dowd 175−76; h. abbott 92; cf. duffy 65–66). this is echoed by the text’s narrative struc-ture: the “i” is in a situation analogous to that of the subjugated Pim, for rather than interpret the world and the “ancient voice,” he claims to do nothing but “quote” the voice which speaks to him. the appellation of this french “voix anci-enne” is more straightforwardly an old or former voice, although Beckett’s pro-vocative english translation — “ancient voice” — accentuates an underlying dis-course with the ancients, for the transferral of voice and its learning finds its allegory in principles of Pythagorean and Platonic education.

Plato initiated the tradition that saw socratic method as the ideal means of instruction and the tool of paideia — that is, as both the formation of the reason-able faculty and the development of the mind’s autonomous “consent” to good-ness through controlled dialogues of question and answer that draw out of stu-dents their capacity for independent logical thought and their ability to learn how to perceive truths by themselves, rather than merely accumulating knowledge. however, in How It Is Pim is literally inscribed within this master’s voice: he is sav-agely attacked until he comes to understand the behavioral responses desired and, then, the letters and meaning of the words being scratched into his back. the master’s ritual of question and answer is punctuated by his sadistic and often repeated “good” (for instance, “face in the mud nose mouth howls good” [129; 2.129]). the structural affinity between the i/Pim and i/ancient voice relation-ship becomes evident in the final scene of How It Is when the dialogue form of Pim’s torture (typographically highlighted with the return of uppercase letters) appears to have been internalized so thoroughly by the “i” that he turns it upon his “ancient voice” in the belief that he is freeing himself from this dyadic stric-ture. screams and howls are elicited on seven occasions, each of which draws the sadist’s approval: “good.”




5 “the idea of good is lord of the intelligible world, as the sun is of the visible. it is the good that enables ideas to be and to be known & that constitutes final causes of knowledge. all other ideas are specific adumbrations of the idea of good. “good is best among the things [. . .] good is god” (tcd ms 10967/82v).

how was it then no answer hoW Was it screams good [. . .] my name no answer What’s my name screams good [. . .] so that’s life here no answer that’s my life here screams good[. . .] die no answer die screams i may die screams i shall die screams good (191−93; 3.301−14)

Beckett was not ignorant of the Platonic valence of the word “good,” its attainment being the goal of socratic discourse and life’s highest pursuit.5 here, however, the “good” has given way to a perpetuating tyranny arising from the perversion of its pedagogical model. Beckett therefore suggests that the success of the revolution of the “i” against its need to reconcile itself with the “ancient voice” is as improbable as one of his narrators ever being able to escape their voices from the past. indeed, in all of Beckett’s novels after Molloy “pedagogical” voices from the past increasingly haunt his narrators, threatening to usurp control over their own voices and stories.

Beckett’s notes for chapter 12 of Burnet’s Greek Philosophy, Thales to Plato acknowl-edge that Pythagoreanism is deeply implicated in this corruption of the Platonic, pedagogical motif:

Programme of stUdies

Based on principal (Pythagorean) that the function of education is the conversion of the soul from contemplation of Becoming to that of Being. hence course to consist of 4 Pythagorean sciences (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, harmonics). (tcd ms10967/89 v)

the “i” of How It Is employs these four Pythagorean sciences as he ploughs through the mud, looking for evidence of a cosmos as rational as the one Beckett encoun-tered in the description of Plato’s Timaeus: “Pythagorean mysticism plus idealism of socrates” (tcd ms10967/80 r).

the “i” calculates his path to be a perpetual “zigzag,” advancing two yards, turn-ing 90 degrees, advancing two yards, turning back 90 degrees. there is thus a hypothetical straight line, which he cuts at 45 degrees, creating right-angled triangles at either side of the straight line, each with two sides of one yard and a third side that is the square root of two. the connection of these hypotenuses thus forms the hypothetical straight line, his “old line of march” (59; 1.276). yet, because the “i” reveals that his line is an accumulation of surds or irrational numbers, Beckett undermines the geometric efforts of the “i” with the insinuation that his trajectory is in fact “irrational” — an idea which is a literary corruption of mathe-matics, rather than a geometric truth — just as Beckett described the “dark zone” of murphy’s mind as a “matrix of surds” (Murphy 66). nevertheless, from his “ancient voice” the “i” receives intimations of the meaning in the blind spots along his connected hypotenuses: “between two vertices one yard and a half a little less dear figures golden age” (61; 1.276). the “little less” is the square root of two, which is the sum of the squares on the other two sides and is irrational, 1.414241 . . . (acker-ley, “samuel Beckett” 18). But the “golden age” of such figures has passed, for they no longer hold the meaning they once did, and there is more at stake than simple trigonometry.

although the surd is an unlimited number and so undermines the Pythagorean equation of the mathematical truths with the physical world, in How It Is the narrator/narrated powers on with his own Pythagorean mysticism, indifferent to




6 ackerley first explored Beckett’s use of Pythagoreanism when annotating Beckett’s Murphy, tracing Beckett’s reading to Burnet’s Greek Philosophy, which feldman later cross-referenced to Beckett’s “Philosophy notes”: “tradition represents hippasos as divulger of Pythagorean secret, and he is said to have been drowned at sea for revealing the incommensurability of side and diago-nal” (ackerley, Demented 47.7–9; feldman 68–69; tcd ms 10967/22v).

the existence of the irrational number which his fractions could not express.6 furthermore, in perceiving triangles within the mud and attempting to align his path over them, the “i” evokes Plato’s infamous idea, in Philebus, that triangular forms underlie and form the essential structure of all matter. Beckett’s “Philosophy notes” show that he studied Windelband’s account of how in Timæus Plato sketched the rationale that our cosmos is the most perfect and the most beautiful; formed in reason, all phenomena act towards reasonable ends. rather than democritus’s material universe, where matter circulates as a consequence of its earlier being, the Platonic universe moves as a whole according to the organizing principle of the World-soul. however, Windelband also stresses the momentary dualism in Plato’s doctrine at the point when the world comes into being from non-being, when matter takes up form: “not-being is characterized as infinite plasticity, which takes up all corporeal forms into itself [. . .], and yet at the same time forms the ground for the fact that the ideas find no pure representation in it” (130). therefore, at this moment in Plato’s theory, working against the accessory cause is what Windel-band defines as the “mechanical necessity” — what cannot be understood teleo-logically. Quite simply, this is the moment at which matter emerges out of not-being into form: “divine activity according to ends and natural necessity are set over against each other as explaining principles. on the one hand for the perfect, and on the other hand for the imperfect in the world of phenomena. ethical dualism passes over from metaphysics into physical theory” (130).

Windelband closes his chapter on Plato’s idealism by questioning Plato’s unusual theory in the Philebus that triangular forms inhere in matter: “these triangular surfaces, which were, moreover, conceived of being indivisible, have a suspicious similarity with the atomic forms [greek] of democritus” (131). he likewise dismisses Plato’s reliance upon Pythagorean number theory as a “deplorable construction” (123) that he would rather have passed over if not for its influence on the likes of speusippus, Xenocrates, Philippus, and archytas, not to mention neo-Pythagoreans and neo-Platonists, “even to the threshold of modern phi loso-phy” (123). Windelband prefers, however, to emphasize democritus’s influence not only on Plato but also the enlightenment, whereas other historians of philoso-phy typically stress the opposing inheritances of Platonic idealism and aristotelian materialism.

Beckett’s focus on the triangle inhering in the mud of How It Is follows Win del-band in honing in on this quiet ushering in of the “mechanical necessity,” which nonetheless generates in How It Is a point of dialectical contention with narrator/narrated’s assertions regarding the democritean atomism of his world. this is both typical of Beckett’s use of philosophical contradiction — in Murphy he exploits to great effect descartes’ uncomfortable reliance upon the “conarium” (pineal gland) — and characteristic of what anthony Uhlmann has described as Beckett’s use of the “occluded” philosophical image, that is, an allusion that points not to a referent so much as to an aporia or unresolved issue within the philosophical discourse from which it is derived, therefore doubling any problem of rep re sen-tation between Beckett’s text and its source (Philosophical 68−69).




7 Beckett wrote principally on the recto side of his notebook, leaving verso pages for notes. a conservative scanning for such triangles (looking for those where the triangle motif is dominant, rather than integrated into another doodle) yields the following pages: notebook one (ms-hrc-sB-i-10-1) verso side of pages 23, 32, 37, 42, 45, 46; notebook two (ms-hrc-sB-i-10-2) verso side of pages 1, 3, 22, 40, 41, 42, and also inside back cover; notebook three (ms-hrc-sB-i-10-3) verso side of pages 11, 12, 22, 31; notebook four (ms-hrc-sB-i-11-4) verso side of pages 10, 15, 23, 28; notebook five (ms-hrc-sB-i-11-5) verso side of pages 59 and 60.

this process of tracing over once excreted philosophical discourse explains why the narrator/narrated’s zigzag is described as a “series of sawteeth or chevrons” (59; 1.276), which for the reader of Comment c’est generates the image of french guillemets — « »—the journey through the mud on hands and knees cutting a path of incomplete or open-ended quotations. these fragmented quotations reflect the piecemeal survival of an archive of “ancient voice” in the memory of the “i.” they also recall the very nature of pre-socratic texts themselves: surviving voices assembled into incomplete collections of textual fragments and second-hand testimony, often with unquantifiable influences (such as the debated presence of democritus in Plato’s thought).

furthermore, Beckett’s doodling on the grid or quadrille pages of the six note-books that constitute the first complete manuscript of Comment c’est highlights how the material conditions of his writing had become inseparable from the content of his narrative. on over twenty occasions in the first five notebooks, Beckett traced triangles or sequences of triangles forming paths or trajectories over the grid squares of his notebook pages.7 for instance, early in notebook two (page 3 verso, bottom left) the zigzag path connecting the hypotenuses of connecting triangles is merely suggested by a doodle, with this nascent and imperfect trope (left-hand side, two thirds down the page) but one among numerous forms. however, thirty-seven pages later the precise zigzagging triangulator materializes not only in the narrative (recto page) but also in its accompanying doodle/sketch and geometric equation.

given that in the earlier versions of the manuscript the narrator claims more explicitly than in the published edition to be an author in the business of com pos-ing a narrative, the scattering of these triangles throughout the manuscript cannot but reinforce the link between the effort to produce the script on the facing recto page, whose slanting letters cut their path through lines of grid paper, and the churning, zigzagging of the novel’s “i” through the mud. the writing and editing process mirrors, furthermore, the journey of the “i” traveling back over his past mud as he revisits his formation in philosophical discourse, a zigzag course which generates eye movements parallel with the scanning of pages, as if he were poring over a patchy archive of past learning, voices, and experience, and one which, perhaps like the “Philosophy notes,” may have even played a less distant role in the writing of Comment c’est.

in the cosmological calculation that dominates part 3 of the text, the straight line that the “i” plots by connecting the hypotenuses of his triangles is offered in opposition to an image of the great circle of interacting beings in a subterranean realm that had previously occupied him.whether four then revolving or a million four strangers a million strangers to themselves to one another but here i quote on we do not revolve

that is above in the light where their space is measured here the straight line eastward strange and death in the west as a rule (159; 3.152−53)




8 Because Beckett’s father owned a surveying business, the young sam no doubt had many an occasion to watch the triangulation of distance mapped over land. indeed, Beckett more than likely handled such equipment as a boy and was perhaps trained by his father in the employment of their basic principles. in How It Is images of the mother are often associated with piety and religion, those of the father with reason and a patriarchal rule of law.

those who “revolve” (think) are above, but journeying with this pomander of ideas the narrator/narrated rejects his hypothesis of circling bodies to affirm a meta-physical principle recovered from the Platonic philosophy of movement recorded in Beckett’s “Philosophy notes.” in the margin next to the following entry, Beckett wrote “God proof of”:motion of heavenly bodies must be caused by good souls or soul indeed by the best, since they are the most circular by all measures. that is due to their circular character, which must have been given them by a good soul, since things, if left to themselves, do not move in a circle, but in a straight line. (divine gravity!) (tcd ms 10967/96v−97r)

in spite of his best Pythagoreanism, the “i” moves without the good measure apportioned “above in the light” in the realm of the circle. Beckett’s exclamation “(divine gravity!)” may intimate knowledge of the geometry of hyperbolic space pioneered by reimann and gauss and developed by einstein: the critique of euclidean geometry, whereby the theory of general relativity proved that gravi-tational force bends lines in space-time so that, as einstein showed, under gravita-tional force the interior angles of a triangle do not add up to 180 degrees. estranged from the forces impressing upon the revolving heavens, the narrator/narrated calculates his advance, guided by his neo-euclidian, Platonic-Pythagorean triangle.8 finding himself in the unformed chaos of mud, he imputes an ethical purpose to his own form, inscribing it within a teleological hierarchy that gives his life purpose. like Plato in the Timæus, he introduces the “mechanical necessity” into his cosmology, calculating his advance 2 x 2: “clung on to the species we’re talking of the species the human saying to myself [. . .] two and two twice two and so on” (59; 1.274). Plato’s eidos or soul-as-form is translated as species (the same word is adapted by aristotle), and the process of perfecting the individual soul (the species) brings it closer to the one. the narrator/narrated eventually laments his “loss of species” (31), which ackerley, also noting this Platonic dimension, describes as “his loss of what makes one one with others; hence the unnamed nar-rator’s tragic conclusion (a final nominalist irony) that he is ‘sole elect’” (“samuel Beckett and science” 152). But now, clinging to his species, the “i” is aligning himself with imperceptible, ideal triangles inhering in matter. his zigzag charts a straight line while he hangs on for dear life to his form, the Platonic notion of the fundamental eidos: “the eternal straight line effect of the pious wish not to die before my time in the dark the mud” (59; 1.272). once schooled in Pythagorean mysticism, he attempts now to stave off his submersion in the chaos of Platonic non-Being by advancing along a course unambiguously divulged in the first manuscript proper of Comment c’est (but erased from the final version) as “la vieille ligne de marche une série <un nombre impressionnant> des triangles isocè isocèles” (392; ms 1.276; the old path a series <an impressive number> of isos isosceles triangles).

the “Philosophy notes” attest to Beckett’s learning that the Pythagorean princi-ples of harmony, universal ordering, and music of the spheres were each supported by the discovery of the mathematical ratios of the musical octave (tcd ms 10967/20v). the analogue with the visual arts is expressed in Beckett’s “three dia-logues,” when “B” advocates the painting of Van Velde, differentiating it from both




9 Beckett’s “Philosophy notes” discuss how Plato’s geometry superseded the Pythagorean opposi-tion of the one and the many with its one (limited) and the indeterminate dyad (the unlimited), the latter being not the number two but an increase and decrease caused by the motion of the un-moved mover: “the new idea here expressed is the infinitesimal, infiniment petit. this ‘destroys’ [. . .] hypothesis of natural integers, & extends conceptions of number to include the irrationals. the series now begins, not at 1, but at 0, & the [. . .] surds are numbers [. . .] the one combines with i.d. [indeterminate dyad] to permeate the numbers, just as the forms with the finite & small to perme-ate sensible things” (tcd ms 10967/95v-r). thus, from Burnet’s Greek Philosophy Beckett learned how the Pythagorean hierarchy of begetting descends from monad to dyad to numbers to points to lines (two dimensions) to entities (three dimensions), to bodies, and finally to the four elements.

the “spiritual Kandinsky” and mondrian (“no painting is more replete”) (144−45; cf. his letter to georges duthuit of 9 march 1949, Letters 134–43). in Concerning the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky argues that the artist inhabits the tip of an upward mov-ing triangle, while mondrian’s neo-Plasticism emerges from the neo-Platonic revival and geometric mysticism of the de stijl movement. in the dialogue of “B” they are aligned with: “a kind of tropism towards the light [. . .] with a kind of Pythagorean terror, as though the irrationality of pi were an offence against the deity, not to men-tion his creature” (Disjecta 125). the narrator/narrated of How It Is becomes prone to bouts of Pythagorean/Platonic zealotry: all fictive names in his underworld end in m; thus Pim’s singularity is pi. like a surd, the irrational number pi cannot be expressed as a fraction of two rational numbers, and Pim’s prelinguistic emergence out of unformed chaos is an affront to the Pythagoreanism of the “i,” provoking his most violent effort to inscribe Pim within the Logos. commenting on the irrational in Beckett’s work, david hesla observes that latin translations of euclid used the term surdus (deaf) for alogos, which was an irrational or “deaf root” (7). Pim is also deaf, and his absurdity must be hammered into order until his “song ascends in the present” (81; 2.80). in the eye of the narrator/narrated, Pim’s song is stripped of the pure absurdity of its primary being, for Pim has been coerced into a prevailing “tro-pism towards” the mysterious “deity” of the “i,” his “other above in the light.”

Beckett satirizes the Pythagorean-Platonism of his hero when the narrator/nar-rated claims that the difference in size between his own two buttocks conforms to a ratio of 4:1, while “Pim’s though undersized were iso” (45; 1.210). these com-ments are less baffling if understood as the extension of the narrator/narrated’s Pythagoreanism: health was “isonomy” of opposites in the body, disease undue predominance of one or other. health was “attunement” (apmonia) and blend (temperament). (tcd ms 10967/21r; see ackerley, Demented Particulars 3.8)

like Watt’s discordant piano, Pim’s body of alogos is a site in need of “attunement,” for the “Pythagoreans held the body to be strung like an instrument to a certain pitch” (tcd ms 10967/21r). But music itself should offer no encouragement to the rationalist obsessive, and the narrator/narrated should therefore take less pride in “training” Pi-m when boasting “it seems to me i am rather musical this time i have that in my life” (81; 2.81). the revision (“this time”) flows, however, from the rejection of Pythagorean geometry at the beginning of part 2 (with Pim) — “no more figures” (62; 2.3) — which follows the acknowledgement of the irrational numbers that added together form the line at the end of part 1: “all measures vague yes vague impressions of length length of space length of time vague impressions of brevity between the two and hence no more reckoning save possibly algebraic yes i hear yes then no” (63; 2.3).9 yet the final “no” renders doubtful the abandonment of a Pythagorean reduction of geometry to algebra.




indeed, the narrator/narrated appears to need to express his universe with Pythagorean consistency in order to feel confident that it will supply him with a mathematical “solution” to his material and spiritual questions (one or “not alone,” the balance of sacks and souls). in part 3, the third option of the infinite line is declared “possible” (161; 3.160), though within its infinitude are “two kinds of solitude two kinds of company [. . .] being regulated thus are of equal duration” (163; 3.167) — and the now familiar machinery of calculations begins again. the measure of “stages” is introduced (with its theatrical echo) — “one stage per month this word these words months years i murmur them” (163; 3.168) — but the proceeding calculation and proof is apparently not very compelling, for he soon reverts to the familiar measures of “yards” and “hours.” Whether these terms still hold the same value they once did is not certain, but the universe retains its equation of theoretical bodies with numbers: “last reasonings last figures number 777777 leaves number 777776 on his way unwitting towards number 777778 finds the sack without which he would not go far” (179; 3.244). the “figures” are crunched to prove the nature of the encounter with Pim and Bom, as the narrator/narrated attempts to harmonize his universe by having distance, time, hearing, and recitation accord with a single recurring ratio (mathematic reason restoring his unity of mind — a philosophical rather than poetic mimesis).

the prevailing “movement” of the “i” is his reiterated “ten yards fifteen yards push pull.” this proportion orders the recitation of the “one above in the light”: “when the panting stops ten seconds fifteen seconds [. . .] the breath we’re talking of a breath token of life when it abates [. . .] then resumes a hundred and ten fifteen to the minute when it abates ten seconds fifteen seconds” (173; 3.223). the “ancient voice” has from the outset a most puzzling relationship to the “i,” who states, “voice once without then quaqua on all sides then in me when the panting stops” (3; 1.2) — that is, when the voice is without there is nothing but “quaqua,” caca, the material universe of shit/mud, and unknowing, like the french language’s suite of “qu” interrogatives. the narrator/narrated’s “i hear it my life” (3; 1.7) is literal: he receives his life as breath. yet his breath will never be refined into Logos or imitate the breath of christ, the christian Logos, for it is fundamentally “ill-heard ill-recaptured ill-murmured” and thus “ill-said” (3; 1.5). this divine voice of unity is said to be heard at a rate of “a hundred and ten fifteen to the minute,” which is closer to verbatim than its recitation, then filtered through the ratio that governs the narrator/narrated’s movement: “ten seconds fifteen seconds” (13; 1.61); “this voice ten words fifteen words long silence ten words fifteen words” (165; 3.178). Between this “silence,” this listening, is “the mud gibbers ten seconds fifteen seconds of sun clouds earth sea patches of blue” (173; 3.219). Words find their harmonious concert in physical movement through the mud, the hearing of the ancient voice, their recitation, and the temporal measure of their annunciation. the hypothesis is only possible if the words are consistently bent into this ratio of performance as it negates the intonation patterns of habitual speech rhythms. there is a “Pythagorean gap,” analogous to that of Watt’s choir, between the musical necessity of a consistently measured octave and the acoustic reality of its fine tuning.

if the narrated’s words are repeated verbatim by the narrator, there is the unity of one divine Logos; if not, there will be “losses everywhere.” as a species of imperfect recitation, the “i” differs from his narrated or supreme monad: “so




10 Beckett’s knowledge of such formal logical structures came from t.K. abbott’s The Elements of Logic, a 108-page course in aristotelian logic and the required text during the two-year course in logic that Beckett took at trinity college dublin (cordingley 183−95).

many words so many lost one every three two every five first the sound then the sense same ratio or else not one” (123; 2.252). the “ratio” 1:3, 2:5 initiates a series, asymptotic to 0.5 and n/(2n+1), hence 3:7, 4:9, 5:11. . . : his “tampering” ratiocination further estranges his own listening and discourse from the “ancient voice” by generating a progression by halves. this logic of Zeno’s paradox of the heap undermines the attempt to prove that the “i” is not alone but part of a “procession” (161; 3.161). the conditions may be represented as such: the totality of the procession (P) will be represented at its limit, say Z, yet Pz – 1 is still a procession, and each coupling, say Pz – 1 and Pz – 2 (or y and X), appears equally true in respect to Z. the sorites series is inscribed into a “life above,” a constant shuffling: “a to B B to c [. . .] B to c c to d from hell to home hell to home to hell always at night Z to a divine forgetting” (101; 2.165−67). Just as the order “to hell to home” is stuttered over and confused, in terms of the series that this logic suggests, home is hell: the sorites paradox is often represented as a=B B=c c=d therefore a=d, which manifests linguistically as vagueness; a “heap” or a “hell” is both a and d.10 the circularity of the Z to a is a linguistic, not a geometric, limit, and is historically linked with the euclidean geometry that Pythagoras inherited.

similarly, the narrator/narrated flirts with attributing his own ratio to the “other above in the light,” who is imagined to be “bending over me noting down one word every three two words every five,” even if this is “impossible [. . .] folly [. . .] folly folly” (113; 2.215). the balance of part 2 is calculated: “it still can end it must end it’s preferable only a third to go two fifths then part three leaving only part three” (113; 2.217). therefore (. . . 1:3, 2:5 . . .) it can only end when artificial, generic divisions are imposed.

the sorites paradox is written into the mathematical “harmony” of the universe and exemplified in the Pythagorean series of triangular numbers, n(n + 1)/2: Universe a harmonious disposition of numbers, based on the perfect number 10 [. . .] [t]he sum of first four natural integers (1+2+3+4 =10) [. . .] extended indefinitely it takes the place of a formula for the sums of series of successive natural integers — 3,6,10,15,21, etc., which were therefore called ‘triangular numbers.’ (tcd ms 10967/16r, 10967/21v; cf. ackerley, Demented 5.4)

an unwitting hippasos, the narrator/narrated conceives of his universe through a wilful blindness to the irrational, proceeding upon a logic that paradoxically sub-verts any possibility of progression. like the clown who is unaware that his trousers have fallen to his ankles, he trips ahead with a burlesque measure. yet Beckett does not promulgate a rationalist art; on the contrary, his narrator/narrated’s strategy begins to resemble that of the artist described in Beckett’s 1938 essay “les deux besoins” (“the two needs”):deux besoins, dont le produit fait l’art [. . .] la route réflète [sic] mieux que le miroir [. . .] Pythagore, divine figure dont la construction dépend d’un irrationnel [. . .] côté et diagonale, les deux besoins, les deux essences, l’être qui est besoin et la nécessité où il est de l’être, enfer d’irraison d’où s’élève le cri à blanc, la série de questions pures, l’œuvre. (Disjecta 55−56; essay unpublished until 1983)

two needs, whose product is art [. . .] the road reflects better than the mirror [. . .] Pythagoras, divine figure where the construction depends upon an irrational [. . .] side and diagonal, the two needs, the two essences, the being which is need and the need for being, hell of irrationality raising the stuck cry exhausted, the series of pure questions, the œuvre.




the narrator/narrated’s art straddles diagonal and side, his indifference to the irrational dimensions to his “old line of march” (diagonal) existing alongside his need to commit to his reasonable zigzag (side). in the “hell of irrationality” the mute “i” attempts to surpass his own “stuck cry” by making Pim sing. yet Pim’s art is born out of the perverted “reason” into which it is inscribed, and these absurd travails are, of course, very funny. the dark irony of the situation is compounded when democritean fragments resurface in the discourse, intimating the existence of a materialist reality that subverts the idealist tropism of the “i” towards “the other above in the light,” thereby conducting the axes of side and diagonal into a more perilous and conflicted end.

Antithesis: Keeping It Real, Democritus (via Heraclitus)

Pythagoras son of mnesarchus pursued inquiry further than all other men and, choosing what he liked from these compositions, made a wis-dom of his own: much learning, artful knavery.

Pythagoras was the prince of imposters. (heraclitus, fragments 25, 26; Kahn 39, 41)

at the end of part 1 the narrator/narrated’s Pythagorean and Platonic specula-tions are momentarily checked when an image of his earlier identity (“one blessed day”) is qualified, “saving the grace of heraclitus the obscure” (41; 1.193). the mention of heraclitus imperils a confident Pythagoreanism and the continuous identity between “i” and “ancient voice.” not only did heraclitus reject Pythago-ras’s “knavery” and consider him an “imposter,” but their cosmologies are also mutually exclusive. in his “Philosophy notes” Beckett notes heraclitean ethereal fire, in which the world is periodically dissolved and recreated. the deity is not a thing but motion itself, Becoming. this Becoming produces no Being, just as the Being of Parmenides produces no Becoming. the law of order in heraclitus’s uni-verse is the primacy of strife as the father of all things: “the ‘flux of things’ is a ceaseless strife of opposites and this strife the father of all things . . . Becoming is unity of opposites” (tcd ms 10967/25r). the cosmological template of alternat-ing tormentors and victims in How It Is suggests a heraclitean presence, fused even with empedocles’ universe of warring “love and hate.” the mythical struc-ture of Beckett’s narrative similarly evokes in the split between the voices “above in the light” and “quaqua” (in the mud) anaxagoras’s foundational myth of the mind-body dualism. this split also reflects anaxagoras’s “link between the physi-cal and moral periods” as inventor of the Nous: “intelligence (nous) acts as origi-nating principle, formative principle, essentially different from homoiomeriae, self-moved, reason, superessential, a manner of cosmic deus ex machina” (tcd ms 10967/35r).

in How It Is the oppositional structure of such a “strife of opposites” is imagined to be the solution to the problem of a singular identity: “these two aspirations warring in each heart” (187; 3.284). yet Beckett also recognized that for heraclitus there was no fixed and continuous identity: “for him it is not possible to step down twice into the same stream” (tcd ms 10967/25r). like the undermining of a consistent ratio by the paradox of the sorites logic, the heraclitean law impels the “divine forgetting” or discontinuity of being. should it be otherwise, the purity of




11 this procedure was subsequently reproduced in an early one-page holograph sketch (reprinted in stan gontarski’s Intent of Undoing) for what would become Beckett’s dramatic piece Come and Go. gontarski notes that Beckett’s formal structure is built upon the transferral of gossip (159−60) and the movement of characters a, B, and c is organized into a consistent ten beats.

12 in Demented Particulars chris ackerley furthermore contends that in preparation for writing Murphy Beckett acquainted himself with Burnet’s two books on early greek philosophy, Bailey’s Greek Atomists and Epicurus, and various studies of heraclitus, Pythagoras, and democritus.

the exchange at each encounter between tormentor and victim becomes corrupted: word will spread throughout the circle, and not only will the quality of the opposites be jeopardized, but the dialectical opposition of the psychodrama will blur and the set itself will tend towards a single identity.11 opposites must remain opposites so that “no one here knows himself it’s the place without knowledge whence no doubt its peerlessness” (159; 3.151).

for heraclitus cosmic change unfurls within definite relations: “this rhythm of events [. . .] is the only permanent, the destiny, the order, the Logos of the world” (tcd ms 10967/25r; W 36). heraclitus’s logos theory of fire as the breath of life is similarly remembered in the constant becoming and fading of the “i” of How It Is. however, while the clockwork regularity of alternating opposites in How It Is evokes the cosmos and logos theory of heraclitus, the come and go of universal Becoming is retarded through the persistence of life in the “i” below. the vertical ascent and descent of material transformation in the heraclitean cosmos thus gives way to what was for Beckett a more compelling antithesis to the Platonic cosmology: the atomism of democritus.

images and allusions to democritean materialism recur throughout How It Is, although their specificity and concentration is greatest in parts 1 and 2, with the ending of part 2 echoing the tropes introduced in part 1. such figures include atomism, post mortem consciousness, the world as infinite and recycled waste, and fire atoms as the primary indivisible substance of consciousness, perception, and being. democritus’s materialist philosophy traced human life to its begin-ning in sludge (mixed earth and water). alice and Kenneth hamilton (1−13) briefly suggest that this is the source in How It Is for “slime” (19; 1.97, 61; 1.281, 103; 2.172), the “warmth of primeval mud” (9; 1.38). although feldman finds no support for this theory because of its absence from the “Philosophy notes” (59−60), Beckett’s exposure to the world of democritean refuse can be traced to his reading of robert Burton’s chapter “democritus [ Junior] to the reader,” located at the beginning of The Anatomy of Melancholy.12 Burton in fact opens The Anatomy by summarizing democritus’s “Paradox of the earths motion, of infi-nite Worlds, in infinito vacuo, ex fortuitâ atomorum collisione, in an infinit[e] wast[e]” (1), and Beckett’s first entry regarding Burton’s Anatomy in his Dream Notebook is a description of democritus as a “little wearish old man” (104).

Beckett layers his images with dense philosophical substrata such that his bur-lesque take upon the dantesque inferno is the comic mask of a philosophical satire:sleep sole good brief movements of the lower face no sound sole good come quench these two old coals that have nothing more to see and this old kiln destroyed by fire and in all this tenement

all this tenement of naught from top to bottom from hair to toe and finger-nails what little sensa-tion it still has of what it still is in all its parts and dream

dream come of a sky an earth an under-earth where i am inconceivable aah no sound in the rectum a redhot spike that day we prayed no further (45; 1.205−07)




13 “all qualitative differences in the universe are merely apparent & a delusion of the senses (pro-eleatics). Unlike the eleatics, he [democritus] accepts reality of vacuum separating atomic plena. ‘naught is more real than nothing.’ non-Being is as real as Being” (tcd ms 10967/75r). this appears in Murphy (246), and its context in Malone Dies is especially revealing in terms of Comment c’est/How It Is: “one of those phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real than nothing. they rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark” (192; my emphasis).

as life wastes away from the “old kiln,” fire passes out of the body, which is transformed into a material shell. Beckett writes with reference to democritus: “he uses ‘tabernacle’ for body, which is also probably Pythagorean. our bodies ‘booths’ at the ‘fair’ of human life” (tcd ms 10967/79v). Beckett used the french “guenille” (44; 1.205), which recalls the abode of the soul, while the english “tenement” suggests the decomposition of the body into the “under-earth where i am.” the “tenement of naught” also echoes Beckett’s recording of democritus’s “naught is more real than nothing.”13 an acceptance of the material reality of the void is complemented by the fact that for democritus the “World [is] composed of atoms that fill entirely the space they occupy, i.e. that are incapable of further compression” (tcd ms 10967/75r). When the body (“old kiln”) deteriorates, its atoms separate, retaining the material reality of their non-being. for democritus, consciousness is enacted by fire atoms: “consciousness of self implies a certain minimal activity of fire-atoms” (tcd ms 10967/76r). When they occupy the tenement of the body, fire atoms animate the conglomeration of other atoms with a mind, for they are the principal agents of perception:Doctrine of Perception: We perceive through our high class fire-atoms. the emanations from things set in motion the fire-atoms of the soul of man. these emanations are the images (infinitely small copies) of the things whence they proceed and their effect on fire-atoms constitutes perception. (tcd ms 10967/75r)

in How It Is the democritean body once perceived through its “fire atoms” the sensations of a world “above in the light”: “the eyes raised to the blue [. . .] the little clouds you could see the blue through the hot stones” (57; 1.263). yet in the section from a world without vision quoted above, the “hot stones” have already fizzled; they are the “two old coals that have nothing more to see.”

the body of the “i” is buried, and its consciousness is dissipating, but it is sus-pended in its subterranean “erebus” (41; 1.192) between life (“above in the light”) and death (hades). “erebus” is in Comment c’est a “four” (40; 1.192), the same word which designated the “old kiln”: “ce vieux four.” Beckett’s french plays on the uncommon theatrical “four” (a flop), while the english reaches for a much more specific reference. erebus is the mythological son of chaos, whose name designates the place of darkness encountered immediately after death by souls on their way to hades. here, via Beckett’s french, it is equated with the “old kiln.” suspended before the ultimate resting place of the soul (hades), the body as erebus translates democritus’s blurring of the division between life and death. J.i. Warren reads democritus’s comments regarding this as following from his desire to avoid a concept of the soul incompatible with his atomism (193−206): fire atoms gradually disperse from the corpse; they are not extin-guished at a finite moment with the soul passing to another realm. democritus employed this distinction to avoid the notion of a transmigrating soul.

the “i” in the mud of How It Is becomes similarly suspended as he continues to suffer in his “old kiln.” he prays for release, for dreams to come and to pass into




another state. the english “old coals” long to be “quenched,” a more emphatic slaking than that called for by the french “éteindre” (44; 1.205; to put out). yet the denial of water and the invocation to sleep and dream suggests a stymieing of the elements’ heraclitean “law of motion” into opposition:sleep and death are due to increase of moisture. “it is death to souls to become water.” Waking and life are due to increase of warmth and fire: “the dry soul is the wisest and the best.” as sleep alter-nates with waking and life with death, so fire is fed by exhalations of water and these are in turn produced by warmth of fire. (tcd ms 10967/26r)

the final sleep is denied; the dream of release is punished: “inconceivable aah no sound in the rectum a redhot spike” — “inconceivable” because as a Beckettian character he is tormented to go on. “aah” registers a shout of pain. there is “no sound” because he is mute. or, alternatively, when his flatulent discourse runs out of puff — “no sound in the rectum” — he gets his shot in the behind. While for marlowe’s edward ii this is the gift of oblivion, Beckett’s “i” comes to learn the fate of the convicted, how it is: “Krim dead are you mad one doesn’t die here” (121; 2.245). the punishment of life is mercilessly renewed with each return of the infernal “little voice,” the breath of Logos that fans images to the eyes: “not the blue the others at the back [. . .] that’s all is left breath in a head nothing left in it almost nothing only breath” (133; 3.14).

the poker’s relentless stoking of life returns eight paragraphs later: “fire in the rectum” (46−47; 1.215). manuscript drafts confirm the more explicit democritean heritage when two paragraphs later in manuscript “ms” the narrator/narrated utters, “c’est un fou rire que j’ai dans le cul comme dans toutes mes parties d’ailleurs” (360; 1.217; “it’s a mad laugh that i’ve got in my arse like in all my parts moreover”). democritus’s mad laugh therefore pervades the parties, Beckett’s french echoing a partir, which he translated within the text’s allusions to the aris-totelian ethics of advancing progress as “goings on.” in Happy Days (written in 1961, the year that Beckett finished Comment c’est), Winnie’s “old joke” is similarly obscure; when questioned about this by alan schneider, Beckett clarified its source: “‘old joke’ not Winnie, rather the joke of being that is said to have caused democritus to die of laughter. to be related also if you like to nell’s ‘nothing is funnier than unhappiness etc.’ same idea in Watt (the 3 smiles)” (No Author 103). in Watt, arsene decries the three laughs to be the “successive excoriations of the understanding, and the passage from the one to the other is the passage from the lesser to the greater, from the lower to the higher, from the outer to the inner, from the gross to the fine, from the matter to the form” (46). these three laughs develop through the first, bitter, to the second, hollow, to the third, mirthless: the bitter “laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh”; the hollow “laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh”; the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh: “it is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs—silence please — at that which is unhappy” (47).

in Obscure Locks ackerley shows how this procedure “reflects classical doc-trines of the tripartite soul (rather than murphy’s description of his mind), ris-ing from the mundane to the divine” (48.3; cf. his Demented 110.5). he quotes Brett’s History of Psychology as an excellent exposition of the idea, without claim-ing that this was Beckett’s source: and as the soul is itself intermediary between Pure forms and the formless, so the process of devel-opment through which it goes is threefold: for there is first the process of moulding the material,




14 ackerley also cites Beckett’s notes from Windelband’s discussion of aristotle’s dianoetic: “the highest perfection of its development is achieved by the rational nature of man in knowledge. the dianoetic virtues are the highest” (tcd ms 10967/109r; W 154).

irrational nature; then the intermediary stage in which concrete embodiments of law are studied; and finally the highest stage in which the laws of nature are made the subject of thought and the mind thinks over the last great law of all things, the good in which they live and move and have their being.” (Brett 1.93; ackerley Obscure, 70)14

arsene’s three laughs also move from the irrational (ethical response) to the intel-lectual (legal concern) to the dianoetic (processes of thought and mind). this strata of different laughs weighs upon how the “i” perceives his own situation: “to that it all comes in the end a panting in the dark the mud not unlike certain laughs but not one” (167).

Beckett’s identification (by way of horace) of democritus as the “laughing philosopher” (tcd ms 10967/78v) contrasts with his identification of heraclitus as the weeping philosopher and is therefore mapped over an aristotelian “becoming.” the reference in text “12” of Texts for Nothing to “the long silent guffaw of the knowing non-exister” (Complete Short 120) is the risus purus that prefigures the narrator/narrated’s fuller dianoetic self-image in Comment c’est/How It Is: “man continues standing laughing weeping and speaking his mind nothing physical ” (31; 1.143; my emphasis). this singular “man” is a composition of his “generations” in which both the past-i and Pim played a part, yet in their coupling the i is endowed with the “ever mute laugh” (39; 1.183). Watt took the dianoetic position; that excited arsene to violence (“down the snout — haw!” [47]), which is now admin-istered at the rear.

thus in part 1, it is not the “i” who deals out the fire of torture/being but the “ancient voice.” While this voice is embroiled within the problematics and aspirations of the Pythagorean-Platonic ratio, it administers its democritean anti-thesis within the reasonable dialogue of the history of philosophy. however, although democritus was anti-theistic, the philosophical mode of exposition is challenged most powerfully by notions generic to christian asceticism, mysticism, and piety, all of which are present in How It Is but beyond the scope of this paper. the body that receives its life through the spirit of a cruel god is not a circumstance foreign to christian theology, even if democritus opposed the transcendental. not only is Beckett mixing his metaphors, but the poet-in-text is entangling the “i” in contradiction, denying this self/character any textual reconciliation with himself.

With its sadistic, albeit knowing, indifference, the abderite’s “comic equivalent of apperception” (ackerley, Obscure 48.3) reanimates a foolish being in the mud who needs to be tormented for his foraging in a sack endowed with transcendence: “the head in the sack where saving your reverence i have all the suffering of all the ages” (47; 1.217). a eucharistic deliverance in the shape of hermetically sealed tins of fish dropped from the heavens is momentarily sidelined — “i don’t give a curse for it” (47; 1.217) — for the lesson of the “red hot poker” two paragraphs earlier is fresh in the mind. the material world is permeated with its dianoetic Logos, and here its laughter is accompanied by a vision of its profane concert in matter and body. this prefigures the scene of Pim’s sacrifice when the celestial tins are devilishly transformed into macaronic claws, misused like the can-opener twisted into the pedagogue’s ploughshare and expressed with humorous afflatus: “howls




15 Beckett revealed to his biographer, James Knowlson, that the image of the hands of the pro-tagonist in his 1980s theater piece Catastrophe was inspired by his own suffering from dupuytren’s disease, a condition that attacks the tendons of fingers causing them to contract, as Beckett said, “like claws” (Knowlson 679). Whether or not he had an intimation of his condition some twenty years earlier i do not know.

16 this suggests an imaginative engagement with the democritean procedure of the “Philosophy notes”: “on the departure of a certain number, sleep. on the departure of the main body, death. death does not destroy the atoms, but only the individual corporation formed by their temporary association” (tcd ms 10967/76r).

of laughter in every cell the tins rattle like castanets and under me convulsed the mud goes guggle-guggle i fart and piss in the same breath” (47; 1.217; cf. 167: “to that it all comes in the end a panting in the dark the mud not unlike certain laughs but not one”).

in the paragraph that contains the “tenement of naught” quoted above, the allusion “from top to bottom from hair to toe and finger-nails what little sensation it still has of what it still is in all its parts” seals the fact that Beckett has democritus in mind, for democritus’s observation that hair and nails continue to grow after “death” led him to believe that consciousness dissipated gradually (see taylor 107). Beckett furthermore attributed to his corpse the more contentious belief that democritus’s post-mortem body continues to perceive: “what little sensation it still has of what it still is.” in the beginning of part 2, the narrator/narrated pauses — “quick my nails a word on them” (65; 2.6) — “quick” meaning at once to enliven and to be alive, to be vigorous and burning. Beckett’s employment of “quick” as verb and noun also deals the nails a sadistic twist. the word entails a sober contemplation of the material plenum — “quick a supposition if this so-called mud were nothing more than all our shit” (65; 2.9) — where the “sup position” introduces the quasi-philosophical reasoning at play. What then appears to be a diversion into the anecdote of the “eastern sage” (65; 2.10) indicates instead a transformation of the factual material of life into art. Philosophical images are integrated once more into a poetics of invention when gotama Buddha is no longer the one who sits beneath his “bo” (65; 2.12) tree waiting for enlight enment. in the imagination of the narrator/narrated, gotama clenched his fists until just before his death, when he saw his nails come out the other side of his hands.15 With his last breath gotama then said to himself “that they’d grow on” (65; 2.11). By the end of How It Is, the “monstrous nails” (133; 3.17) of the “i” point not only to their occupation in Pim’s flesh, but also to the democritean circulation that outlives the flaring up of imagination and memory: “few old images always the same no more blue the blue is done never was the sack the arms the body the mud the dark living hair and nails all that” (135; 3.21; my emphasis). the growth of hair and nails persists even in their denial; these images are sensations in the mind of a corpse-like narrator; when the eyes (“the blue”) are eclipsed they “go on,” like gotama’s and the “ancient voice” itself.

hair and nails are equally present at the end of part 2, when the inexplicable persistence of the voice is immediately followed by “the nails that can go on the hand dead a fraction of an inch life a little slow to leave them the hair the head dead” (111; 2.213). life expires “a fraction of an inch,” engaging the allusions to Zeno: life will never meet its end. Beckett implies that as immortal fire atoms disperse from the body, they move further away from each other such that the loss of consciousness becomes a question of apperceptive degrees.16 yet the




17 Biblical precedents for this are the king in Jonah 3:6, who “was clothed with sack-cloth,” and ahab of 1 Kings 21:27, who “put hair-cloth upon his flesh.” Beckett would have surely been familiar with the story of thomas Becket, the martyred archbishop of canterbury, who wore a long shirt of sack cloth which he wound tightly around his loins and. reputedly had sown tightly onto his body. after he was murdered, his hair shirt was found to be infested with lice, which some church fellows declared a more extreme form of martyrdom than the wounds that killed him.

divine fire of the materialist universe punishes both transcendental fantasies of post mortem existence and celestial hopes of the christian heart, for at a certain distance the fire atoms return: “ah these sudden blazes in the head as empty and dark as the heart can desire then suddenly like a handful of shavings aflame the spectacle then” (43; 1.195).

in one version of the opening of Comment c’est (University of reading typescript 1655/1) the narrator/narrated reflects upon figures and voices perceived suddenly from afar: “il y avait quelque chose et soudain il n’y a rien, pas de peu à peu qui tienne, c’est toute la différence entre le mourant et le cadavre. Oh ratio acervi ruentis!” (250; there was something and suddenly there’s nothing, not stuck in the little by little, it makes all the difference between the dying and the corpse. oh ratio acervi ruen-tis!; my translation). in its earlier version this comment was made by a narrator, not the first person “i,” a distinction erased in the text’s evolution of the narrator/narrated. yet the heritage of the onetime narrator is felt in the “ancient voice,” who elsewhere laces the english of the “i” with the logic of the sorites paradox as expressed by horace in the “epistle to augustus” — “ratione ruentis acervi” (2.1.47; “after the fashion of the falling heap”) — in order to subvert the cosmological thesis of Pythagorean-Platonic consistency: “that hypothesis such an acervation of sacks [. . .] such an acervation of sacks at the very outset that all progress impossible” (179; 3.245, 3.246; my emphasis). Beckett once used the phrase “ratio acervi ruentis” in the “riverside notebook,” reprinted in the Theatrical Notebooks to Endgame: “c perplexed. all seemingly in order, yet a change. fatal grain added to form impossible heap. Ratio ruentis acervi. last straw” (195). in horace’s “epistle” the time taken for a poet to be considered “ancient” is deter mined by the paradoxical sorites logic because “ancient” is a term as vague as Zeno’s “heap.” the series befouls any reconciliation of object and subject, “ancient voice” and “i,” let alone “i” and his habitual speech, memory, and recitation, or even “i” and his Logos “above in the light.” Beckett’s use of Zeno’s paradox of the heap has been extensively commented upon, but the charm of its novelty in the early episode in Comment c’est is the support it lends to democritus’s materialist concern with the shift in perception and apperception between the dying and the corpse.

towards the end of part 1 democritean ideas and the paradoxes of Zeno frequently cohabit within a single image, undoing teleological and neoplatonic delusions. inscribed into allusions to dante’s tripartite universe is this hilarious emblem, which immediately precedes the scene of the “old kiln” and the discourse that further estranges itself from Inferno:seen from behind on my knees arse bare on the summit of a muckheap clad in a sack bottom burst to let the head through holding in my mouth the horizontal staff of a vast banner on which i read

in thy clemency now and then let the great damned sleep here something illegible in the folds then dream perhaps of the good time their naughtiness procured them what time the demons may rest ten seconds fifteen seconds (45; 1.203−04)

obscene and surreal, the “i” sees himself atop his sorites muckheap giving birth to himself through the anus. christian penitents are identified as “clad in a sack,”17




18 the prayer’s consistency with How It Is lies not only in the motif of freeing the damned, but also in the appeal to the holy mother, for when reciting the Psalms earlier the “i” was on his knees look-ing up at his mother, who is the arbiter of “severe love” (15; 1.69). in this case Beckett’s “original” french, “en ta clémence” (44), appears to “quote” no standard french version of the latin poem but rather its anticipated english translation in How It Is, thus illustrating the potential complica-tions attending notions of the original and translation in a bilingual oeuvre.

19 the eternally combustive universe of heraclitus is described in the “Philosophy notes”: “We ‘are and are not’ at any given moment. the ‘way up’ (earth - water - fire) and ‘way down’ (fire - water - earth) are one and the same, forever being traversed in opposite directions at once so that everything consists of two parts, one travelling up, the other down”(tcd ms 10967/26v).

and this burlesque prayer begins with its intercessional plea for atone ment (renewed life above), for an end to suffering in one last long sleep — “in thy clem-ency,” echoing, appropriately enough, the standard english translation of the inter-cessory prayer to the Virgin, “memorare,” popularized by st. Bernard of clair vaux, protector of the poor, prisoners, and the condemned: “noli, mater Verbi, verba mea despicere; sed audi propitia et exaudi. amen” (o mother of the Word incar-nate, despise not my petitions, but in thy clemency hear and answer me. amen).18 yet the heraclitean subject persists, for the narrator/narrated cannot read the message of his former tongue, and when sleep arrives as the “sole good,” the pun (soul/only) registers the fact that it offers no blessed release from this perpetual near death experience. the prayer will fall onto the “muckheap,” the residuum of a life of received orthodoxies amounting to nothing, be they christian, philo sophi-cal, scientific, literary, or whatever. it will be ingested by another “slime-worm” (145; 3.61), thus allowing these narratives to perpetuate themselves. they are a material, but not a spiritual, reality; they do not advance the “soul” towards a destination, for they are undifferentiated from the “muckheap.”

the infinite suspension that marks the sorites paradox envelops all subjectivity and transforms all matter into the same “mud,” circulating like Pantagruel’s watery efflux: “little heap in the stern it’s me all those i see are me all ages the cur-rent carries me out the awaited ebb i am looking for an isle home at last drop never move again” (111; 2.211). the “i” longs to go on if only “to finish to be fin-ished” (113; 2.214) and gathers himself to muster an end: “stop your drivel draw the mud about your face” (113; 2.215). ironically, he here mimics heraclitus’s attempt to cure himself of dropsy by burying himself in dung (see ackerley and gontarski 252). heraclitus’s earthly cure to his watery problem may alleviate his ailment but it will not halt his law of motion, as much as the involuntary muttering of one’s past voices in consciousness. this is concentrated into a truly extraordi-nary vision of temporal paradox:all about pressed tight as a child you would have done it in the sandpits even you the mud above the temples and nothing more be seen but three grey hairs old wig rotting on a muckheap false skull foul with mould and rest you can say nothing when time ends you may end. (113; 2.216)

the heraclitean who covers himself in mud to will his degeneration within the cosmos is as futile as he who hopes for transcendence.19 the realization sprouts an image of “three grey hairs,” three singular hairs, a “wig.” the reference is to Zeno and draws once again on the logic of “the Heap (which kernel of grain by being added makes the heap?) & the Baldhead (which hair falling out makes the head bald?)” (tcd ms 10967/42r). linguistic vagueness is alluded to when three hairs are as artificial as a “wig”: according to the sorites logic, three hairs are equal to a full head of hair or a “wig.” With rococo brush strokes this “wig” is then thrown on




top of a “muckheap false,” and in the english it is rotting. “[f]oul with mould” the skull begins the heraclitean transmission through water to earthly matter: “When fire in man is quenched by damp, reason is lost” (tcd ms 10967/24r). But just as the “old coals” could not be “quenched” earlier, one can never escape the return of the logos as fire and the internalized pedagogical voices of the past intruding upon the present.

in the above paragraph, the import of “when time ends you may end” is more strongly felt with the french version ending with its plosive “peut-être.” the con sis-tency in the image is neither Zeno’s critique of motion nor heraclitus’s phi losophy of motion, but the way that both their arguments are used against Pythago rean rationalism and so undermine the ratiocination of the narrator/narrated. the evoca tion of an end to suffering in this series of images leads into Beckett’s appro-priation of Plato’s cave, the archetypal image in Western philosophy of the flight from ignorance:e then good and deep sick of light quick now the end above last thing last sky that fly perhaps glid-ing on the pane the counterpane all summer before it or noonday glory of colours behind the pane in the mouth of the cave and the approaching veils

two veils from left and right they approach come together or one down the other up or aslant diagonal from left or right top corner right or left bottom corner one two three and four they approach come together

a first pair then others on top as many times as necessary or a first one two three or four a second two three four or one a third three four one or two a fourth four one two or three as many times as necessary

for what for to be happy eyes starting pupils staring night in the midst of day better the fly at break of morn four o’clock five o’clock the sun rises its day begins the fly we’re talking of a fly its day its summer on the pane the counterpane its life last thing last sky (113−15; 2.218−21)

the fly aches to be born into the glorious colors of “all summer before it.” aside from the image’s Proustian dimensions, its philosophical valence registers the fact that the life cycle of the fly, long understood to be regulated by the sun and light, is assimilated into a series of rebirths, and this in turn alludes to Plato’s adoption of the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of the souls:

transmigration of souls (Pythagoras).

souls garaged in a place of reward or punishment. after 1000 years the soul can choose a new lot of life. to choose, thrice, a higher life is to gain access, after 3000 years, to the home of the gods in the Kingdom of Thought. some souls wander indefinitely, falling lower & lower. (tcd ms 10967/83r; my emphasis)

Beckett’s fly, however, is condemned to a wandering, falling fate that undermines the possibility of any “recollection” of its innate ideas. a bugbear to Plato’s trans-migration of souls, it reminds one of the fly of the second century satirist, lucian of samosata, who criticizes Plato’s theory of the soul and its immortality for over-looking the fly’s power of resurrection:When ashes are sprinkled on a dead fly, she revives and has a second birth and a new life from the beginning. this should absolutely convince everyone that the fly’s soul is immortal like ours, since after leaving the body it comes back again, recognises and reanimates it, and makes the fly take wing. it also confirms the story that the soul of hermotimus of clazomenae would often leave him and go away by itself, and then, returning, would occupy his body again and restore him to life. (1: 89)

Beckett suggests the pathos of this situation: his reborn fly ascends to the light, yet as the curtains are drawn across the cave/skull/window pane it is returned to darkness and must renew itself within the body below. as one of Plato’s forlorn




voyagers, having set his eyes upon the eternal truth in the light of the outside world, the fly — and, by extension, the human soul — finds itself condemned to the ignorance of those below. Unlike the “serotines abroad already” (115; 2.227), the “i” will never leave his cave, for the fly is an image of his soul, locked in a democri-tean body, trapped in erebus, half-dead, not quite alive, “dead as mutton warm and rosy” (123; 2.249).

this Platonic imagery also informs the fly’s precursor in part 1, where it is offered in defiance of the democritean four/erebus and heraclitus’s breath of ceaseless change:[. . .] in erebus in the end i’d succeed in seeing my navel the breath is there it wouldn’t stir a may-fly’s wing i feel the mouth opening

on the muddy belly i saw one blessed day saving the grace of heraclitus the obscure at the pitch of heaven’s azure towering between its great black still spread wings the snowy body of i know not what frigate-bird the screaming albatross of the southern seas the history i knew my god the natu-ral the good moments i had (41; 1.192−93)

the soaring frigate-bird or albatross issues out of (voluntary) memory. it is an image of hope for respite from the tedium of the mayfly’s grounding and one’s own navel gazing. the stillness of its wings is no impediment to motion as it glides above the sublime expanse of the sea. the albatross was traditionally thought to contain the souls of lost sailors, and Beckett’s poetic rhyming prose lifts his alba-tross in Comment c’est “au plus haut de l’azur” (40; 1.193) like the rising soul of Baudelaire’s poète maudit, “rois de l’azur” (“l’albatros,” Les Fleurs 11). the image is testimony to a brief flaring of the imagination, apparently animating a memory, even though the affirmation of the heraclitean reality insinuates the proximate and watery dive of this soul (albatross derives from al-câdous or al-gattas, arabic for the diver, via the Portugese alcatraz).

the poetic epiphany is significant for it breaks with the usual way this image of the trapped fly recurs as a metaphor for the poet’s impotence and alienation in the poems “serena i” and “la mouche” (“the fly”) (Poems 22, 45), in Watt (236−37) and “text 6” (Complete 123−24; ackerley and gontarski 199). yet in How It Is the poet’s pathos is registered with a Pythagorean novelty, for ultimately the fly’s momentary vision of the realm of light is obscured when the stage curtains are drawn (“two veils from left and right they approach”) or the lens shutter snaps (“one down the other up or aslant diagonal from left or right top corner right or left bottom corner”). Presented with an image of the hypotenuse, the “i” is again confronted by Pythagoras’s theorem and the real irrational. Undeterred by the surd (√2) once more, he rekindles his Pythagorean strategy of geometric mysti-cism to release himself from his cave of shadows:a first pair then others on top as many times as necessary or a first one two three or four a second two three four or one a third three four one or two a fourth four one two or three as many times as necessary

Pairs of bodies can pile up in imitation of Babel “as necessary,” or they may form the following figure, whose form is reminiscent of a magic square, which Beckett may well have connected with that of dürer’s Melancholia:

4 1 2 3

3 4 1 2

2 3 4 1

1 2 3 4




combined “as many times as necessary” are the four integers whose sum is the number 10, representing Pythagorean harmony:every physical body has a numerical equivalent.

Universe a harmonious disposition of numbers, based on the perfect number 10.

every solid an expression of 4

-- surface -- - - - - - - 3

- - line -- - - - - - - 2

- - point -- - - - - - - 1

(tcd ms 10967/16r)

similarly:early Pythagoreans represented numbers and explained their properties by means of “figures” (as on dice). most celebrated of these was the tetraktys, by which they used to swear, which showed at a glance what they regarded as the most important property of number 10, namely that it is the sum of first four natural integers (1+2+3+4 =10):

.

. .

. . .

. . . .

(tcd ms 10967/21v)

in Murphy neary has a Pythagorean academy in cork, and miss hounihan — “my tetrakyt [sic]!” — is his “perfect ten” (5; cf. ackerley, Demented 5.4). a newto-nian whose discourse is a comic parody of philosophical and literary pretension, neary eventually must conclude that “life is all rather irregular” (152), just as the tetraktys looks rather like a heap. similarly, right up until the dramatic inver-sion at the end of How It Is the narrator/narrated persists doggedly in his own flawed tetraktys logic — “ten yards fifteen yards” — in an effort to replicate the perfection imagined to exist above.

Beckett’s Late Modernism (Resisting Synthesis)

one need not dress Beckett’s philosophers in team colors to see that his philo-sophical imagi nation has used Zeno’s distinction between sense and thought — the “two worlds thesis” (tcd ms 10967/23r) of the difference between thinking and perceiving — to undermine the absurdities of reason propagated by the narrator/narrated’s Pythagorean-Platonic fanaticism. at the same time, Beckett harnesses the import of the paradox to affirm the materialist reality in democritus’s doctrine. this delightfully ironic use of philosophical imagery generates the irrational, or rather unscientific and poetic, dimension of Beckett’s art. mining this vein of philosophical dialectic offers an exemplary case of how Beckett manages to bring an “ignorant” perspective to philosophical discourse: his articulating “i” is a con-duit for philosophical images of which he may have traces of understanding but which he unwittingly confuses. indeed, Beckett has no interest in offering a philo-sophical synthesis within his work, and the internal dynamics of philosophical thesis-antithesis within and between the images of How It Is mark a defining moment in his oeuvre and in modernist literature more generally. not only does he




present the history of philosophy as that of a discipline whose internal contradictions stymie any synthetic knowledge arising from its ratiocination, but his narrator/narrated also deprives his allusions of a clear link to the legitimization or power of affirmation they would derive from the tradition (the monolithic interpretation of intellectual history typified in Windelband’s nineteenth-century primer in philosophy). this paradoxical voice is able to allude to an allusion and thus affirm it, while also systematically freeing itself from the limitations that the content of that allusion might impose upon its literary use.

textual allusions, therefore, no longer confirm the meaning of their sources, but rather register the very breakdown of that possibility. this situation recalls Jacques derrida’s identification in Mal d’archive (Archive Fever) of the nomological function of the archive (Beckett’s “ancient voice”) as the house of power and command. yet for derrida, the archive is situated, as in How It Is, at the beginning of structural breakdown — at the antagonism between the domiciliation of power (its need for a technique of repetition) and a relationship with the outside. in the present investi-gation, i have tried to draw attention to the distance between the absent rule of “ancient voice” (a philosophical tradition coherently articulated), “ill-heard” in the present, and its fracturing within a series of narrative repetitions and bearers of voice. indeed, i have reinstated orders of “archival” law (the “Philosophy notes”) so as to observe their corruption within Beckett’s poetics. furthermore, when the final words of How It Is take the reader back to the novel’s opening, the circular narrative generates a repetition compulsion that infinitely re-enacts its formal estrangement from the unknowable unity of this “ancient voice.” Beckett thus fash-ions a scene of writing that concurs with derrida’s belief that forgetting and distor-tion are necessary to the logic of the archive — the archive is equipped with its own anarchy drive, the archive destroying “archiviolithic” violence.

Beckett thus adopts an “ignorant” perspective with respect to his learning. refusing to relate inherited philosophical orthodoxies within the boundaries of their established coherence, he revels in a novel and unique set of relations whose meaning arises in the stirring of this residual “mud.” more than offering just isolated “occluded” images that point to philosophical aporias (Uhlmann 68−69), How It Is presents the entire history of Western philosophy as an unremitting series of unresolved questions ripe for satire. although any single philosophical image may also be inscribed with whole episodes of philosophical dialectic that are coher-ent, within the logic of their source, the bizarre, often contradictory pattern in which these images now find themselves renders their potential for philosophical truth ludicrous. as a result, the entire history of reasonable discourse within phi-loso phy emerges as one long extended self-contradicting aporia.

Because this late modernist innovation offers no “solution” of its own in reaction to the tradition, it cannot contribute to that tradition’s edification in the manner of eliot or Pound. yet the incessant return of the “ancient voice” that frustrates the desire of the “i” in How It Is to free itself entirely from inherited ideas and forms of thought also typifies the pedagogical trope running through Beckett’s post-World War ii novels, in which Beckett’s narrators become increasingly obsessed with the fact that past voices are usurping their agency over their narratives and con tami-nat ing their speech. here, Beckett’s central concern is the authenticity and origi-nality of his artistic voice. yet the thoroughly hilarious episodes that arise from his




grappling with this problem typify his ability to deploy that dianoetic laughter with respect to his own art, a laughter that revels in the knowledge that he will never employ its idealized “pure” voice of authentic creation, freed of all corrupting tradition.

thus Beckett’s parable of writing out of the residue of “the humanities i had” is the testimony of a writer who once harbored encyclopedic, Joycean pretensions and for whom the act of writing has now arrived at its telos: How It Is renounces the attempt to suppress those voices haunting from the past. Past images from philosophy can now be received and exploited for their plastic qualities: they are the necessary, inevitable stuff with which one works form, depth, and texture into the images evolving before the mind’s eye. this allusive substance, Beckett’s impure “mud,” has, like color, no necessary relation to the image of the objective world or its source in the mind, which it might be supposed to represent. in the manner of his admired cezanne, Beckett uses his creative substance in an entirely subjective fashion. and here, the certainties afforded by a philosophical synthesis are entirely superfluous.

Université de Paris 8

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“Beckett’s Philosophical Imagination: Democritus versus Pythagoras and Plato in Comment...

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Transcript of “Beckett’s Philosophical Imagination: Democritus versus Pythagoras and Plato in Comment...