SOURCE: Kennedy, Andrew. “Beckett and the Modern/Postmodern Debate.” Samuel Beckett Today 6 (1997): 255-65.

[In the following essay, Kennedy argues that although Beckett's plays have postmodernist elements, they are fundamentally different from true postmodern works.]

Our general topic (at the Strasbourg colloquium, April 1996) invited paradox. For the title itself invokes a set of binary critical terms that Beckett never used, and might well have abhorred, as he had a clear perception of the superficiality and cramping effect of critical terms.¹ Moreover, Beckett critics have also tended to avoid our current terminology of ‘isms’: a quick check through a representative collection of books on Beckett shows that the postmodern debate itself tended to be avoided—except by Ihab Hassan, note 7—until the appearance of the New Casebooks critical collection on Waiting for Godot and Endgame in 1992, illuminatingly edited by Steven Connor and one of my starting points here.² Even studies of Beckett's late work—the work that does cross and cross-fertilise the era usually referred to as ‘postmodern’—tend to avoid this terminology, fearing an intellectual quicksand. Thus Enoch Brater prefers ‘minimalism’ as a keyword, and Jonathan Kalb the ‘avant-garde’, covering more in time yet less in controversy than ‘postmodernism’.³

At this point I must confess that I have used the term ‘postmodern’, once, in the concluding remarks of my own Beckett book:

The spiritual and linguistic complexity of Beckett (with its roots in modernism, as we have argued), comes into collision, at certain points, with a brasher, at once more superficial and more technological ‘post-modernist’ culture (a somewhat ill-defined term for literature, used here only as a pointer).⁴

For this moderate comment I was duly reprimanded by a reviewer⁵ who objected to “Kennedy's sense of Beckett as essentially a Modernist, conveyed by his claim that ‘in Beckett's work we are entering types of vision and form no longer of our time.’” The context of this reviewer's rebuke included a welcome tribute to Beckett's late work and performance art but also, more controversially, an implication that if you want to be ‘with it’ you must be ‘postmodern’, and include Beckett in the great postmodern family.

Having got involved in a larger argument through such marginal cross-fire, I would now point—very selectively, with Beckett's work as my focus—to certain macro-contexts of the modern/postmodern debate. There are, roughly speaking, two main directions in the debate: one regarding postmodern writing as a continuation and intensification of modernism; the other drawing a sharp line between the two ‘isms’ both as period and even more as modes of writing. The first view gives me little trouble conceptually, for once you accept that Beckett was continuously renewing his own modes of writing—for instance, the fundamental structure and language of his plays—the name you give to that series of radical artistic transformations is secondary. Beckett's own avantgardist urgencies carried his work, away from the shadow of Joycean titanism in Finnegans Wake⁶ through stages of astonishing renewal, to the minimalist purity of performance poems in the final phase—“making it new,” on the moving platform of verbal art. Such a pattern of innovation went with interconnected changes in vision du monde and modes of writing, without allegiance to any particular artistic movement or ‘ism’ whatever. The other direction, which sees a cataclysmic change in our culture after modernism, and wishes to see Beckett as a representative figure in that cultural earthquake, is much more dubious, especially when we are confronted with specific critical judgements, as we shall see.

One of the problems in the postmodernist debate is a fondness for critical ping-pong played across a wire net of binary oppositions. Almost inevitably, sometimes they score, sometimes they miss. Take some samples from a well-publicised table of dualistic definitions, given by Ihab Hassan.⁷ Some of these influential twins might well be tried out on Beckett and found illuminating; remember that the first term comes under Modernism, the second under Postmodernism, and that the first has connotations of ‘boo’, the second of ‘hurrah’—in the author's context. Thus we have: ‘Narrative/grande histoire vs. antinarrative/petite histoire; determinacy vs. indeterminacy; transcendence vs. immanence; purpose vs. play; logos vs. silence.’

Here I am actually helping Hassan by selecting only Beckett-friendly terms. There are other, more ambivalent, oppositional terms: ‘God the Father vs. The Holy Ghost, and hypotaxis vs. parataxis’ which challenge the critic of mythology and poetic language respectively. But then there are many oppositional pairs I really would not find illuminating at all in discussing Beckett (except perhaps by way of inversion): ‘Symbolism vs. Dadaism, metaphor vs. metonymy; design vs. chance; depth vs. surface’ and so on. The last pair of opposites is particularly interesting as Beckett held⁸ that design or shape is essential even when descending into ‘anarchy’ (the mess); and I hold that ‘depth’ and not ‘surface’ is the key attribute of Beckett's work whether we attend to vision, structure or language.

Consider the vision first, that of the suffering language animal. What we need here is not so much new knowledge as focussing on Beckett's memorable dramatic metaphors sharply enough for them to be ‘present’ (to use a now precarious term). Focus on the purgatorial figures: Lucky in Waiting for Godot condemned to linguistic torture as his initial pseudo-metaphysical eloquence is broken up into isolated aphasiac monosyllables—a ceaseless word-torrent until violently stopped; Hamm and Clov, in the windowless, de-created universe of Endgame, respectively hugging the bare wall and running errands—to ceaseless verbal accompaniment; Winnie, buried in her mound of earth, reciting fragments of half-forgotten lines from the classics so that her body-mind can decay with no pain—in another ceaseless speech-flow; the chattering adulterous triangle in the after-death pseudodrama of Play—likewise unstoppable; and the initially un-intelligible, then gradually revelatory, high-speed babble of Mouth in Not I. Are not all these figures—and others we could add—inhabitants of the most memorable Purgatory since Dante? The vision is both traditional and hyper-modern: for it locates images of man as fallen, diminishing and linguistically suffering creatures while placing them in a no-place—displaced, extra-terrestrial—after the loss of the central values of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian culture: God, meaning, goal-seeking coherence, language as logos. And the loss is felt—a tragic sense of life—in a sustained tragicomic tonality: from the trousers of the suicidal Estragon and Lucky's breakdown speech to the elegantly dying woman's final curse in Rockaby.

All this is a world away from the postmodern reading of Waiting for Godot—and Lucky—as celebrating the liberation from the prison-house of modernist language. That is argued by Geoffrey Nealon in a provocative article.⁹ Starting from Wittgenstein's notion of ‘language games’—and gathering supportive quotes from Lyotard, Derrida, Feyerabend, and even Levinas—this critic attacks the metaphysical rigidities of modernism, allegedly exhibited by Vladimir and Estragon through their dependence on Godot as ‘metanarrative’. By contrast, Lucky's speech is claimed to be a “thoroughly postmodern language game that moves at the limit of what has been thought” (48). At that point the argument gets entranced by its own notion of postmodern liberation—extracting thought from the text without analysing the language—and proceeds to apply Derrida to Waiting for Godot as a play that presents an “affirmation” which “then determines noncentre other than as loss of centre.”¹⁰

Inescapably, the article scorns those critics who have given what is called a modern reading of a postmodern play. Several critical points here (including the one on Lucky's speech as the abandonment of Western metaphysics) are not all that different from a supposedly late modernist reading.¹¹

But the polemical twist in the argument, with its over-emphasis and categorical modern/postmodern divide, can be seen to epitomise three related fallacies: (1) that there is some kind of total or final cleavage between the modernist “metaphysical rigidities” (does that include Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, early Eliot?) and the postmodern celebrators of multiplicity; (2) that Beckett can thus be placed simply in the second ‘camp’; (3) that there is no sense of loss in (the) play, in Lucky's speech. Really?

When we come to structure, the second aspect, we may find similar discrepancies between Beckett's dramatic practice and postmodernist theory. Take those two appealling concepts, ‘openness’ and ‘play’, either of which can be used—and has been used¹²—to illuminate the structure of a Beckett play. Whether we focus on the repeated cycle of run-down in the two acts of Waiting for Godot and Happy Days together with the fused one act of Endgame, or on the fugue-like rhythmic units, with elaborate repetitions and variations, in all the later works from Play to Rockaby, we find, in play after play as well as cumulatively, a meticulous ‘shaping’—a never abandoned traditional discipline, an aesthetic pattern (not a concept favoured in the postmodern debate). If a play is to suggest an ongoing, never-ending, potentially infinite series, Beckett invents a precise structure to suggest that, enacting a kind of asymptotic curve. And if such a pointer to ‘infinity’ is to have an ambivalently speculative metaphysical dimension—in other words, placing characters in a putative Purgatory or Hell, as in Happy Days and Play—then exact stage metaphor, that mound of earth, that triad of urns, works within a kindred structure to set the imagination of reader and audience alight.

As critics we would be virtually unanimous in some such emphasis on ‘shaping’ in the entire dramatic work. Beckett himself insisted—in one of his rare interviews¹³—that the challenge was to find “a new form,” “a form that accommodates the mess” (or “the chaos”) of the world we happen to be living in, and he rejected the notion of “no form.” On reflection, that would amount to a rejection—at least in writing for the theatre—of a free flow, or of random, aleatory patterning, creative accidents or shuffled sequences—these being much nearer to the postmodern notion of open structure. If anything, we can now see that Beckett's open structure tends towards a subtly hyper-defined shaping in both the proportions and the timing or pacing of elements in the play—for performance. Hence all the notorious disputes over free or relatively free performances—including the posthumous London battle over Footfalls.¹⁴ Another paradox is that Beckett moved away from the rich plurality and endlessly proliferating experimentation of Joyce (who is more ‘postmodern’ in these terms than Beckett) towards ever quieter, smaller ‘pure’ structures to carry the progressively—or regressively—diminishing burden of language. By contrast, the Healon-type celebrators of postmodernism are hankering after ‘free for all’ post-aesthetic games.

To be fair, Steven Connor succinctly states in his introduction:

These experiences of shapelessness and purposelesness are given powerful and distinctive shape by the extra-ordinarily austere and disciplined dramatic structures in the two plays Godot and Endgame.¹⁵

And connecting this perception with the broader contexts of Beckett versus theory in a postmodern culture, Connor writes:

Beckett's relationship to theory is perhaps the same as his relationship to rationality more generally; his work attempts to undermine rational comprehension from within rationality, turning logical structures against themselves and using words (since there is no choice but to) to express inexpressibility.

This brings me to Beckett's dramatic language—the third aspect. Let me recall the surprising appearance of Lucky as a postmodern celebrant, as his speech is said to be trans-gressing the limits of an inherently violent coherence in objective metadiscourses.”¹⁶ My different assessment of Lucky's speech as aphasiac (leaning on the very interesting line-by-line analysis of Anselm Atkins, 1967) also saw it as a dramatisation of the breakdown of language—a movement from pseudo-metaphysical articulateness to the pitiful repetition of the words that remain.¹⁷ What is at work in and through that speech is a kind of negative creativity, releasing verbal energy despite entropic rundown. There is a release of illumination, as in the traditional via negativa of mystics, beyond language, towards the unnamable. A paradoxically rich poverty of thought and language in an art of ‘lessness’—“less is more”—includes less and less reliance on syntax and the syntagmatic powers of language. Instead, the words break, and the broken speech is patterned for performance.

I dissent, then, from the view that sees a Beckett play—starting with Waiting for Godot—as an instance of playing celebratory ‘language games’ (incidentally, Wittgenstein's concept is doctored or postmodernised in the article cited). There is constant play in Beckett's dialogue and patterned monologues, but it is a play that can be quite clearly distinguished from the mannerist and/or parodic ‘verbal games we play’ in the theatre of—respectively—Pinter and Stoppard.¹⁸

On the contrary, the sustained duologues of the pseudocouples in two early plays manifest a human need and concern on the relational level and co-operative verbal interaction on the linguistic level. The intricately textured monologues of the later plays then move further inward, groping towards ‘still points’. That inwardness has affinities with what Yeats called “soul-speech” (though that was long ago: in ‘the old style’ of the post-romantic world and Symbolist poetics). It asks the words that remain to stay still, and asks the reader/listener to attend, quietly and without an overload of conceptualisation or even linguistic energy, to what is being said in that particular moment of almost silence. Correspondingly, there is a movement away from the polyphonic texts of the early plays to the much more univocal (but not monistically dominant) texts of the later plays.¹⁹

From Not I (1972) on, Beckett developed a completely new type of drama (“the performance poem,” to use Ruby Cohn's term) that seems to eliminate dramatic interaction or interplay, the dramatis personae we have known in some two thousand five hundred years of drama. This degree of experimental radicalism may well be seen as the ultimate outcome of Beckett's life-long avantgardist determination to “make it new,” each time. Each new playtext goes on—in a paradox of forward/backward movement—beyond anything done before in his own work and (as far as one can see) in existing drama generally. But this radical experimentation need not be confused with ‘postmodernism’ in the polemical sense defined above. For there are, in each of the late plays too, prominent existential, structural and linguistic features that will not match the expectations associated with the term—and ideology—of the postmodern.

Existentially, the vision of the suffering human being keeps recurring, with intimations of something that it is difficult to name—that is the point, since it gropes towards or around the unnamable.²⁰ Yet at times ‘something’ can be heard, named. In the fragments of self-revelatory utterance, in the barely intelligible speech-flood of Mouth, for instance; unable to speak most of her life, unable to utter the self-assertive pronoun ‘I’ now, she nevertheless gives voice to certain perfectly audible, coherent and visionary phrases—‘God is love’. It is the method of “these fragments I have shored against my ruins” (though Beckett might not have wished to be compared with Eliot, except for The Waste Land). As significant as the broken illumination released through fragments, is the energy released by—the total theatrical and poetic impact of—these dramatic soliloquies. In Not I we witness the anguished, physically straining, struggle by Mouth for utterance, ultimately for meaning, out of a general dumbness that sounds like paralysis; in Rockaby it is the Woman's staccato elegy, with its rocking rhythm—over and under the meaning of the words uttered—that embodies a strange and awesome fusion of cradling and dying.²¹

Structurally, the late plays display a formal intensification, the subtle yet palpable imprint of “the shaping imagination.” Mouth's five times repeated terror-stricken recoil from uttering the pronoun ‘I’ corresponds to virtual sections (though the text is non-stop and unmarked). These sections are perceived by the ear ‘as if’ variations on a theme in a piece of music. Each section offers its own variation of a cluster of motifs—short but charged phrases like ‘God is love’, again—which carry semantically, indeed spiritually, significant disclosure. Thus, out of the originally unintelligible speech-flow, something like an ordered aesthetic pattern emerges, which articulates the inarticulate in a direct, iconic mode. The repetition with variation—a technique characteristic of all the performance poems—gives extra verbal energy to that process of gradually illuminated ‘intelligibility’, especially in performance. The panting rhythm of the play can then be perceived to mime the frightening physical convulsions of speaking against a pathological handicap—speaking at all. In Rockaby the short lines are grouped into four sections, divided and linked by the repetition of the word “More”—the word actually spoken by the dying woman (as distinct from her pre-recorded speech). These groupings, clearly marked both in the printed and the performed text, work both semantically and musically and give the little play an almost classical transparency.

Stylistically, it is—once more—a certain ‘purity of diction’ that marks these late texts, a prominence of the lyric mode mediated by one voice. Any word-count would reveal the abundance of mono- and disyllabic words, on the whole taken from the Anglo-Saxon word-stock with traditional poetic overtones. When the prominence of such a vocabulary—such a style register—is broken, the reader or the audience will surely attend, see and hear the difference. We note, for example, Mouth using the word “supermart” (1973 ed.,10) with its quaint mixture of the contemporary and the nonce word, or abstract words like “the machine … so disconnected” (9), and her tongue's “contortions” (11) or a hyper-literary phrase like “lest it elude her” (echoing Winnie's ‘old style’ from Happy Days). Similarly, in Rockaby, where the speaker's language is even barer and sparer, in the lyrical mode, the dying woman's breach of purity (in one sense) in her final curse—“fuck life”—is certainly heard.

Beckett's development of supreme economy in the use of words, in the final plays, may ‘only just” be seen as the culmination of his youthful discontent with the traditional uses of language, starting with the Joycean insistence on “hieroglyphics” in “Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce” (1929) and going on to contemplating a radical dislocation of ordinary language, to the point of dissolving “the terrible materiality of words,” with its Grammar and Style (German letter to Axel Kaun, 1937—see note 6). But it is a culmination it would have been hard to predict from those particular linguistic manifestos. (They have clear modernist analogues, but they might, at a stretch, also be seen as approximating certain postmodern goals). The direction taken is radical—away from Joycean multiplicity and dislocation, towards infolding, deceleration and “poverty” of words. This tallies with the pattern of ‘lessening’ in all Beckett's work. It is a direction towards “fundamental sounds,” used to express (in a word Beckett placed in negative if ambivalent brackets in the Dialogues with Duthuit)²² images of human significance. To put it another way, the creative ‘fallout’ from Lucky's aphasiac breakdown speech (the collapse of metaphysics and grammar) included those isolated, lyrical words: “the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull …” They reemerge in the final plays, spare and bare, and insistently shaped, out of catastrophe, towards a fundamental soundness: “… not in the ears at all … in the skull … dull roar in the skull … and all the time this ray or beam …” (Not I, 8).

These perceptions are not new, but stated in the present context they bring into relief once more the difference—that much-loved word—between Beckett and certain tenets of the post-modern cultural scene, especially its theory of poetic language. To risk a brief summing up: while Beckett's work is marked by qualities admired by most postmodern critics—especially metaphysical uncertainty or indeterminacy and ceaseless innovation in form and language—those qualities go well beyond the ‘postmodern’ as an era or as a mode of writing. At the same time, all Beckett's work—with a focus on his drama here—is rooted in both traditional and modernist aesthetic urgencies. Above all, each and every play is shaped with an inner coherence of its own vision, form and language—almost a modern version of decorum, if that term is not too offensive to a postmodern critic.

Beckett's total work for the theatre transcends the twinned modern/postmodern debate, with unexpected cross-connections and disjunctions. As the debate already risks turning into a sterile collage of post-Beckett abstractions, we must make those influential twins work towards further illuminating the actual texts and performances of a Beckett play.

Notes

1. In “Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce,” Beckett's well-known contribution to Our Exagmination (1929): “The danger is the neatness of identifications,” i.e. false analogies and simplifications, dualities … and “stuffing a system into a contemporary pigeon-hole.” Also discussed in Linda Ben-Zvi, Samuel Beckett (Boston, 1986), 22.

2. London, Macmillan, 1992—a collection of criticism that also includes an extract from my Samuel Beckett (Cambridge UP, 1989), labelling my critical approach as ‘liberal-humanist’, a term I would wish to qualify. Steven Connor's Postmodernist Culture (Oxford, Blackwell, 1989), is a comprehensive and very stimulating study of our subject, and a source for this paper. See also Connor's Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford, 1988). Corrective note: I have underestimated the number of Beckett books with a ‘postmodern’ approach. Porter Abbott lists at least five such studies in his excellent Beckett Writing Beckett (Cornell UP, 1996), 25., n. 6; but they are mostly on Beckett's fiction, including Carla Locatelli's Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett's Prose Works after the Nobel Prize (U of Pennsylvania P, 1990), which I read with great interest. Abbott's argument overlaps with mine, especially in his cautious approach to regarding Beckett as ‘postmodern’. A more general critique of the literary postmodern is presented by Charles Russell in Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism (Oxford UP, New York, 1985), 243 ff.

3. Respectively, Beyond Minimalism (Oxford UP, 1987) and Beckett in Performance (Cambridge UP, 1989). Kalb is vehemently opposed to the postmodern terminology, 154-7.

4. My Samuel Beckett (note 2), 155, with back reference to 2, 7, 11-12, 14, 32, 47 and 112. Cambridge University Press commissioned the book to cater for the needs of a first reader, and their terms excluded both ‘academic polemic’ and Beckett's late work.

5. Audrey E. MacMullan, “Waiting in the Wings” in The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 2 Nov., 1990.

6. See Our Exagmination (note 1) and Beckett's later counter-statement in his ‘German Letter’ to Axel Kaun, 9-7-1937, in Disjecta, edited by Ruby Cohn (New York, 1984), 51-54, 54. Here Beckett is already distancing himself from Joyce's Finnegans Wake, seen as “the apotheosis of the word.” See my concluding section, 9 below. See also Linda Ben-Zvi (note 1), 30-1.

7. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature (1971), rpt. New York, 1982—which adds the “Postface” that contains the table I am recycling here. Ihab Hassan is also the author (among many works) of The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York, 1969).

8. See one of Beckett's rare interviews, with Tom Driver, in Samuel Beckett: A Critical Heritage, eds. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London, 1979), 218-19: “What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. […] it only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that admits the chaos and does not try to say the chaos is really something else.”

9. “Samuel Beckett and the Postmodern: Language Games, Play and ‘Waiting for Godot,’” reprinted from Modern Drama, 31 (1988), 520-28, in Steven Connor's New Casebooks collection (note 2).

10. Nealon, in Connor, 31, quoting the celebrated essay by Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), 292.

11. See my discussion in Six Dramatists in Search of a Language (Cambridge UP, 1975), 139-40.

12. In Ruby Cohn, Just Play (Princeton UP, 1980). That Beckett's plays present a closed structure is argued by John Peter, in Vladimir's Carrot (London, Andre Deutsch, 1987, Ch. 6,—briefly questioned in my “Beckett's Agnostic Landscapes,” Theater Three 9, (Fall 1990), 90.

13. See the interview with Tom Driver, note 8 above.

14. The ‘battle’ over the production of Footfalls directed by Deborah Warner, London, February 1984, which was condemned by Edward Beckett, as executor of Beckett's will. My indirect involvement in this conflict made me realise the degree of precision Beckett expected in performance (in this instance posthumously).

15. New Casebooks collection (note 2), 3-4.

16. Nealon, in Connor, 49

17. See note 11.

18. I draw on my own study in Dramatic Dialogue (Cambridge UP, 1983), Ch. 5, esp. section 4, and in “Natural, Mannered and Parodic Dialogue,” The Yearbook of English Studies 9 (1979), 28-54.

19. I develop a fuller context for this point in my paper “Univocal vs. Polyphonic Theatre” for the IFTR Conference, Puebla, Mexico (June 1997) and in an earlier study, “Mutations of the Soliloquy,” in Robin J. Davis and Lance St. John Butler (eds.), Make Sense Who May: Essays on Samuel Beckett's Later Works, (Gerards Cross, U.K., 1988, Barnes & Noble, N.J., 1989), 30-35.

20. Cf. note 6 above and Six Dramatists (note 11), 125, 135. The topic is illuminatingly discussed by Marius Buning in “Samuel Beckett's Negative Way: Intimations of the via negativa in his late plays,” in David Jasper and Colin Crowder (eds.) European Literature and Theology in the Twentieth Century (London, Macmillan, 1990), 129-143.

21. Compare Nacht und Traume (1982) where a hand is slowly offered and taken with a gesture of compassion.

22. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London, 1949, 1965): “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express […] together with the obligation to express” (103).