SOURCE: Johansson, Birgitta. “Beckett and the Apophatic in Selected Shorter Texts.” Samuel Beckett Today 9 (2000): 55-66.

[In the following essay, Johansson explores Beckett's utilization of the apophatic approach, which is the theory that God is unknowable, in his short texts.]

Samuel Beckett's rambling discourses play with boundaries between the sacred and the secular. His protagonists can represent voices that pray, although they may not always be conscious of this. At least, praying does not appear to be their main objective in life, if one can speak of objectives or volition in their case. As Lawrence E. Harvey puts it, “renunciation of personal will” in Watt, for example, “is couched in religious language that suggests the ascetic preliminaries to mystic experience” (Harvey 1970, 364). This is an initial implication of a bond between Beckett and theology.

Scholarly studies such as Laura Barge's, God, the Quest, the Hero: Thematic Structures in Beckett's Fiction (1988), Jean van der Hoden's, Samuel Beckett et la question de Dieu (1997), and Mary Bryden's, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (1998) analyse Beckett's tragi-comic vision of circumstances and of the relationship between human beings and the conceptualisation of God. There are, however, also studies that stress Beckett's idiosyncratic approach to theology. Thus, Gabriel Vahanian attacks Beckett for flaunting his atheism, and for ironising the Christian faith. For him, Beckett's Waiting for Godot represents the notion that God is dead and the corollary to this premise is that here faith is ridiculed. The play is “constructed around the irrelevance of Christian concepts and especially around the nonsensical or quixotic quality of Christian existence”, he states (Vahanian 1957; 1967, 120). In addition, there are scholars, such as T. R. Wright, who present the complex juxtaposition of scepticism and spirituality in Beckett. On the one hand, Wright notices “spiritual cravings and the unaccommodating world” in this play, which deals with “the desperate but unfulfilled desire to be saved” and with the longing for redemption. Beckett's tramps “call out to be saved, to be heard and comforted by an omnipotent and benevolent Father”, he adds. On the other hand, he reveals that Beckett's plays are “pervaded by irreverent, even blasphemous references to biblical myths, in particular that of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ (Wright 1988; 1989, 188, 189, 193, and 197). Wright's stance illuminates the oscillation in Beckett's work between what we, for want of better terms, call “the sacred” and “the secular”.

It is true that Beckett's œuvre shows that human expectations are often thwarted and that our intellectual lives are permeated by vain expectations, but this does not single out a certain group of people and has little to do with Christian ethics. Hence, it would be naive to think that Waiting for Godot, which is symptomatic of his œuvre as a whole, can be classified as a devout text. Beckett rather deals with how human consciousness fails, but is obliged, to handle issues involving the existence of God and the meaning of existence. He shows how earthly trivialities invade the human mind, whereas fragments of thoughts provide it with ontological insights. Similarly, his prose works extend the modernist literary project by experimenting with fragmented narrative techniques or arrangements and by focusing on the workings of the mind. My paper will discuss this Beckettian approach to life in the light of apophaticism or negative theology.

Earlier studies on Beckett and negative theology have stressed the connection between Beckett's texts, negative theology, and the use of silence or of language. Thus, Hélène L. Baldwin studies the concept of silence in Samuel Beckett's Real Silence (1981) and Shira Wolosky examines Beckett's “defense of language as the medium in which, against and through all negation, we go on” in Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan (1995) (Wolosky, 134). Such readings ignore the creative aspect of Beckett's negative theology. My paper will argue that his way of employing the apophatic approach adds a new dimension to mysticism in that it acknowledges and accepts the limitations and restrictions of the human mind, but that it also enables the reader to identify with those Beckettian speakers who are searching for the mystical Other in an endless vicious circle. Here, the discourse hinges on the search and the wait per se, which characterises the limbo in which Beckett's protagonists are usually placed. They employ the methods of negative theology when articulating a never-ending desire for clarity and meaning in life. It is true that they constantly fail and are compelled to start anew, but these failures provide them with certain opportunities, such as accepting their own limitations, receiving fragmented truths about the unnameable Other, and pointing to a dimension beyond the circumscription of language.

The concept of apophaticism, the notion that God is unknowable, indescribable, and unnameable, can be traced back to early theology and the Church Fathers. For example, in The Life of Moses (?early 390s), Gregory of Nyssa sees Moses entering “the very darkness itself and […] the invisible things” and perceiving “the Invisible” (Gregory 1978, 43). Similarly, in his treatise “The Mystical Theology”, Pseudo-Dionysius (sixth century AD) analyses how Moses plunged into “the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing” (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 137). That is to say, the concept of God is beyond comprehension. It represents the mystical Other, whose existence we cannot define or grasp, but if the aim of all knowledge is to classify that which is, then the aim of belief is to accept the concept of God, which is “the infinity beyond being”, preferably by way of unknowing. It is true that for Dionysius both the cataphatic and the apophatic are necessary approaches for an optimal theology, but he advocates the latter approach, since it best alludes to the essence of God, as he puts it in his “The Divine Names”, “The Celestial Hierarchy”, and in letters to the monk Gaius (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 49-50, 108-09, 130 and 150). In addition, St. Thomas Aquinas (?1225-1274) reduces the via remotionis or the via negativa and via positiva to one method of knowing God in his Summa Theologica, Summa contra Gentiles, and Compendium Theologiae. Thomist apophaticism involves removing concepts about God in verbal terms; here, negative theology becomes a corrective to affirmative theology. One cannot form concepts about God. It is not possible for “us to know God”, Aquinas maintains, for “we have no way of knowing what remains unknown to us at the peak of our knowledge”. Furthermore, the greatness of God is unfathomable, and words are therefore inadequate to describe such a Being. On the other hand, he suggests, human beings can know aspects of God, since otherwise they will not be able to appreciate or believe in the divine. The cataphatic or the via affirmativa, which conceptualises God, therefore complements the apophatic or the via negativa in Thomist theology, as it does in Dionysian theology (Aquinas 1987, 19-23).

Beckett's rhetorical style articulates the realisation that everything in the end leads to a state of nothingness and unknowing. What is more important, he deals with how this process develops in the minds of human beings. His approach is ambiguous in that it both sympathises with the human predicament and speaks ironically of the limitations of the mind. It would therefore be incorrect to say that Beckett explores the concept of God per se. As mentioned, he rather deals with the way in which the human mind wrestles with, among other concepts, the concept of God. In other words, he articulates and deconstructs the intellectual circumstances surrounding the human condition.

One prominent aspect of this articulation of the condition of being-in-the-world deals with frustration or failure. That is to say, in his works Beckett maps the way in which human beings search for, but fail to find, a further dimension. He thus examines aspects that often have been neglected in literature so far: the attitudes of those who are searching, but whose search does not come into fruition. Beckett's protagonists lead their spiritual lives in a limbo or a no-man's-land, where an unheroic quest for insight continues, but where there is no final answer to be had. They probably demand too much of their senses or it can also be that their scepticism hampers their search. In any case, the result is that they are plunged into depression. Julia Kristeva's notion of “the speech of the depressed [as] repetitive and monotonous” is enlightening in relation to Beckett's texts (Kristeva 1987; 1989, 33). Her diagnosis about the behaviour of the depressed that follows reminds the reader of many a frustrated Beckettian character.

Faced with the impossibility of concatenating, they utter sentences that are interrupted, exhausted, come to a standstill. Even phrases they cannot formulate. A repetitive rhythm, a monotonous melody emerge and dominate the broken logical sequences, changing them into recurring, obsessive litanies. Finally, when that frugal musicality becomes exhausted in its turn, or simply does not succeed in becoming established on account of the pressure of silence, the melancholy person appears to stop cognizing as well as uttering, sinking into the blankness of asymbolia or the excess of an unorderable cognitive chaos.

(Kristeva 1987; 1989, 33)

The opening lines of “Texts for Nothing” (1958)—one of the more extensive pieces in Beckett's selection of shorter prose with its thirteen monologues—provide an example of this type of discourse. Here, the depressive speaker makes numerous efforts to express his dejection and despondency, and he succeeds to articulate a sense of failure by producing those incomplete or unutterable sentences, interruptions, repetitions, and monotonous melodies that Kristeva discusses in her diagnosis:

Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn't any more, I couldn't go on. Someone said, You can't stay here. I couldn't stay there and I couldn't go on. I'll describe the place, that's unimportant. The top, very flat, of a mountain, no, a hill, but so wild, so wild, enough. […] How can I go on, I shouldn't have begun, no, I had to begin. Someone said, perhaps the same, What possessed you to come? I could have stayed in my den, snug and dry, I couldn't. My den, I'll describe it, no, I can't. It's simple, I can do nothing any more, that's what you think.

(Beckett 1984, 71)

Beckett's protagonists are often, as in this case, entrapped by temporal and spatial confinement. They lead their lives as if they had died and then been resurrected in the textual space which they now inhabit. Here, they ramble on about their existential circumstances and their corporeal and spiritual suffering. This passage plays with contrasts by juxtaposing active and passive expressions interspersed with curbing negations, such as “suddenly”, “no,” “couldn't go on”, “I shouldn't have begun, no, I had to begin.” The sentences in this passage represent, what Kristeva in a psychoanalytic context calls, “recurring, obsessive litanies.” Such an allusion to a series of petitions usually recited by the clergy and responded to in a recurring formula by the congregation in churches or processions is apt in this context, since a liturgical register permeates Beckettian language. His ruptured register may thwart any smooth transitions from the nameable to the unnameable, but it is precisely in this limbo of despair and nothingness that Beckett's protagonists belong. In the eyes of the reader, their way of clutching at illusions or mirages is tragi-comical and moving, but unmistakably human. Striving for coherence and meaning in life, these speakers are reduced to trying, failing, and beginning afresh on a never-ending continuum.

If Beckett's protagonists suffer severe depressions in their Sisyphean predicament, however, they invariably find ways of using their negative stance in constructive ways. For example, negative ways of thinking in Beckett agrees with apophatic notions of God as indefinable, but there is also the idea that negativity and depression contain comic aspects. In my opinion John Calder misses this point, when he concentrates on Beckett's serious approach to “the horrors of human existence [sic]”, since his texts are equally poised between the tragic and the comic. The oscillation between these perspectives produces an alternative rhetorical model when describing existential possibilities and predicaments. The reader may laugh at the unfortunate Malone, but at the same time he or she recognises or, rather, realises truths about the human condition in Malone's monologic discourse. As Martin Esslin puts it, the difference between the classical heroes and Beckett's anti-heroes is that the former are aware of the extent of their crisis or dilemma, whereas the latter “are mostly unaware of the depth of their predicament” (Calder 1986, 12 and 17). Beckett's favourite rhetorical images, the mind and the mouth, are thus tools for expressing the anxieties of our time. His protagonists are figures of thought, which represent mental conditions or perspectives. They are Cartesian in their individualism, since thinking equals being in Beckett, but also in their constant inquiring into their circumstances.

Lance St. John Butler discusses this ontological condition in his Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being (1984). He employs philosophical approaches developed by Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Friedrich Hegel on Beckett's works. In the course of his Heideggerian analysis, he mentions Beckett's preoccupation with the concept of “nothingness”. Butler argues that his

fiction in particular abounds with characters terrified of “nothing”, depending on “nothing”, needing “nothing” in a way that makes it quite plain that this nothing is not just a “not something”. And the state of mind of the Beckettian narrator is rarely specific fear of things within-the-world, but it is not comfort and freedom from everything like fear either; it is Angst.

(Butler 1984, 47)

Butler devotes five pages of his book to discussing this aspect of Beckett's work. He refers to nothingness in Murphy (1938), to the character Mr. Knott [italics added] in Watt (1953), to Texts for Nothing (1958), and to “a scatter of references to nothingness in most of the work” (Butler 1984, 49). This Heideggerian approach to Angst and Nichts is apt, and may be developed in various ways. Bryden, for example, touches on the “desert experience” of Beckett's speakers in her book on Beckett and the idea of God (Bryden 1998, 164). She emphasises the atmosphere of calm suffering that these speakers experience in their sparse circumstances (Bryden 1998, 163-88).

In my opinion, Beckett's recurring preoccupation or obsession with the concept of nothingness can also be a secularised and tentative search for the concept of God. His speakers' cry for nothingness may appear desperate and dry in the light of modern agnosticism and atheism, but it is a powerful articulation of hope, and strikes me as one of the most moving and provocative of prayers. The remainder of my paper will examine Beckett's concentration on nothingness in selected shorter texts to see if it overlaps with questions about the negative theological concept of apophaticism and of the absence of God.

As mentioned, “Texts for Nothing” involves a series of monologues.¹ Here, the presence of life and the absence of God converge in certain eternal questions. Beckett frequently articulates these questions by way of negations. There are negative analyses of the concept of being as in the eighth text: “I'm a mere ventriloquist's dummy, I feel nothing, say nothing, he holds me in his arms and moves my lips with a string, with a fish-hook, no, no need of lips, all is dark, there is no one.” Furthermore, there are reflections on prayer and belief as in the ninth text: “If I said, there's a way out there, there's a way out somewhere, the rest would come. What am I waiting for then, to say it? To believe it? And what does that mean, the rest? Shall I answer, try and answer, or go on as though I had asked nothing?” Beckett also expresses the notion that human beings can never rule out the possibility of living by, through, and for a Deity in the eleventh text: “What am I saying, scattered, isn't that just what I'm not, I was wandering, my mind was wandering, just the very thing I'm not. And it's still the same old road I'm trudging, up yes and down no, towards one yet to be named, so that he may leave me in peace, be no more, have never been” (Beckett 1984, 97, 100, and 107). The unknowable and unnameable figure in this passage can represent the concept of God. He has “never been”, that is to say, he represents Nothingness, and yet the speaker is constantly searching for this elusive figure.

“Texts for Nothing” articulates the idea that although human beings live in a lonely void, they are constantly reaching out for someone or something that is Other. Further down in the eleventh text, for example, Beckett's speaker talks about the loss of contact and the urge to communicate: “I don't speak to him any more, I don't speak to me any more, I have no one left to speak to, and I speak, a voice speaks that can be none but mine, since there is none but me” (Beckett 1984, 109). This inevitable urge to communicate in Beckett can represent a conscious or unconscious urge to pray. Such an urge includes the constant but vain search of the ultimate expression for the meaning of existence. As the speaker puts it:

No, something better must be found, a better reason, for this to stop, another word, a better idea, to put in the negative, a new no, to cancel all the others, all the old noes that buried me down here, deep in this place which is not one, which is merely a moment for the time being eternal, which is called here, and in this being which is called me and is not one, and in this impossible voice, all the old noes dangling in the dark and swaying like a ladder of smoke, yes, a new no, that none says twice, whose drop will fall and let me down, shadow and babble, to an absence less vain than inexistence.

(Beckett 1984, 109-10)

Nothingness and absence are thus two concepts that express the inexpressible in Beckett. Human language, with its possibilities and its limitations, demands explanations, but Beckett's apophaticism tells the reader that the inability and the refusal to explain and to depict can provide a more truthful picture than any description. If we accept that notions of “Being” or of “God” can best be expressed by silence, for example, then this admission provides us with further insights about these elusive concepts.

The apophatic or negative approach will enable us “to make possible a deeper birth, a deeper death, or resurrection in and out of this murmur of memory and dream”, to quote the speaker in the twelfth text of “Texts for Nothing”. It will help us see the invisible, or as the thirteenth text in this collection puts it: “there's a voice without a mouth, and somewhere a kind of hearing, something compelled to hear, and somewhere a hand, or if not a hand something somewhere that can leave a trace, of what is made, of what is said, you can't do with less, no, that's romancing, more romancing, there's nothing but a voice murmuring a trace” (Beckett 1984, 111 and 113). This is probably an apophatic assessment of the Divine in our age. Here, Beckett articulates the Heideggerian or Romantic contention that today we can merely see traces of the Deity. There are allusions to, and echoes of, biblical notions in contemporary Western culture, for example, but the idea of God as the centre is now largely deconstructed and dispersed. In our Derridean age, we are reduced to analysing the remaining trace itself. Beckett's texts often allude to the detrimental effects of such a circumscription.

Furthermore, Beckett's shorter texts “The Lost Ones”, “Afar a Bird”, and “Closed Space” (1984) extend his references to the apophatic.² “The Lost Ones” focuses on the way in which human beings are constantly searching for another indefinable dimension. The first sentence articulates this sense of loss: “Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one” (Beckett 1984, 159). It talks about searching eyes and about souls entrapped in enclosed spaces. In brief, it discusses the ubiquitous concept of longing and waiting in society. Beckett's clinical analysis of the human condition in “The Lost Ones” may not literally revolve around the spiritual poverty or search, but by concentrating on the practical or prosaic qualities of life, he makes it abundantly clear that there is an existential dimension missing here.

“Afar a Bird” includes the enigmatic words: “something divines me, divines us” (Beckett 1984, 195). The ambiguity of these words lies in the way in which the verb “to divine” means “to discover” and “to bless”. Still, Beckett's statement converges in evoking the notion that we may not be alone, after all, and that there may be a force that affects our lives. This presumptive link between humankind and an invisible, unnameable source is, I find, the crucial centre around which Beckett's œuvre revolves. The human search may appear banal and worldly, as in Winnie's self-comforting monologue about the trivialities of life in Happy Days, but it reaches out to an invisible “ear” and “hand”. Beckett employs the deluded voice of Winnie to represent the extensive degree of deception in wordly existence. In addition, however, Winnie's monologue points to our compulsion or urge to communicate and to be seen. This aspect of the Beckettian discourse can remind us of the secular need for communication and intimacy, but it can also remind us of our need for prayer and divine intervention.

To return to Beckett's short story “Afar a Bird”, the expression “something divines me, divines us” is a cataphatic admission that there is an active intelligence beyond ours. Further on in the same sentence, the speaker reveals that “I can see him in my mind, there divining us, hands and head a little heap, the hours pass, he is still, he seeks a voice for me, it's impossible I should have a voice and I have none, he'll find one for me”. Moreover, the reader here learns that the face of the one who divines the world is hidden, which refers to the apophatic notion of the invisibility of God. Additional allusions, this time to an interaction between a Christlike figure, who takes on the sins of the world, and a suffering human being appear in the passage that follows: “he is fled, I'm inside, he'll do himself to death, because of me, I'll live it with him. I'll live his death, the end of his life and then his death, step by step” (Beckett 1984, 195-96). This passage alludes to how the Passion of Christ epitomises the failures and the weaknesses of humankind, but that it also provides meaning to such shortcomings. Christ's sufferings remind us of our own predicaments, but they also comfort us, as Beckett's passage shows. There may be no God on earth, since “he is fled”, but the myth of Christ lives on. The statement “I'll live it with him” suggests that human suffering is inevitable and inextricably linked with the Passion, but that it becomes bearable through this notion of sharing the pain with fellow sufferers.

Stirrings Still and “What is the Word” make up parts four and five in As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (1990). In these his last two texts, the preoccupation with limitations in this worldly existence, with repetition, with longing, with searching, with waiting comes to a head. As I see it, the concepts of absence and of nothingness are the underlying essential concepts behind all these various activities. The fact that the speaker here addresses, denies or curses an absent force, which cannot be expected to appear and which is nothing, but which never ceases to be the object of desire and longing, suggests a concern with the apophatic.

Stirrings Still is atypical of Beckett in that it deals with a human being, whose spirit moves to a point “high above the earth” (Beckett 1984, 113-14). It is typical of Beckett, however, in that it concentrates on the interaction between a human being and the quest for a further dimension. As the speaker informs us, it “was […] in the guise of a more or less reasonable being that he emerged at last he knew not how into the outer world” (Beckett 1990, 121). Stirrings Still also alludes to how a search for further spiritual dimensions can be made visible by using negatives, such as dwelling on the concepts of “darkness”, “death,” “decay”, and “despair”. For example, references to the “fleeting dark of night” here reminds the reader of the dark night of the Spanish Carmelite St. John of the Cross (1542-1591). The latter dark night is a metaphor for the darkness of the soul, which the Christian has to experience, before he or she can enter the condition of divine light in a spiritual sense. As in the apophatic tradition, human language fails to define the human condition in Beckett's shorter texts, but the protagonists may approach its meaning by acknowledging aspects of “limitation”, “negation” and “renunciation”, which are inevitably part of the human condition. The mystery of this search can thus be experienced as the “dark night of the soul”, in John of the Cross, or as absence, as in Walter Hilton (c. 1340-1396). Human life becomes a long wait for deus absconditus, and this tallies with the fact that the concept of “waiting” is the warp and woof of Beckett's œuvre.

The last shorter text that Beckett published, “What is the Word,” reminds the reader of a modernist poem and articulates the way in which existence, perception, and inspiration peter out and leave a void in the twilight zone of old age. The last few lines read as follows:

glimpse—
seem to glimpse—
need to seem to glimpse—
afaint afar away over there what—
folly for to need to seem to glimpse
                              afaint afar away over there what—
what—
what is the word—
what is the word [.]

(Beckett 1990, 134)

From a theological point of view, this passage exemplifies how some of Beckett's final words play with the dichotomy between the apophatic and the cataphatic. Our need for verbalising and visualising an absent Other, which attracts us, but which, we think, constantly eludes and evades us and the futility of these attempts crystallise in the fragments “need to seem to glimpse” and “folly for to need to seem to glimpse”. This stanza-like text again stresses the way in which human beings cannot but pose questions, which never lead to any conclusive answers, about the characteristics and the whereabouts of, say, God.

The recurring term in this prose poem, “the word”, is ambiguous. It alludes both to the Johannean metaphor “the Word” as Christ—one aspect of a triune God—and to the secular meaning of language and the notion of the creative word. The sacred aspect of the question “what is the word” involves the idea that God is absent, unknown, and unnameable from a human perspective. As my paper has shown, these adjectives “absent”, “unknown”, and “unnameable”, constantly recur in the writings of Beckett. The apophatic approach therefore throws light on the mechanics behind the Beckettian discourse.

Notes

1. Samuel Beckett's “Texts for Nothing” were originally published in French in Nouvelles et textes pour rien (1958). They were then published in the USA in an edition which also included “The Expelled”, “The Calmative”, and “The End”, entitled Stories and Texts for Nothing (1967).

2. Samuel Beckett's “The Lost Ones” and “Afar a Bird” were originally published in French as Le Dépeupleur (1970) and Au loin un oiseau (1973), and “Closed Space” was included in Pour finir encore et autres foirades (1976). These texts were subsequently published in English by John Calder in Beckett's Collected Shorter Prose 1945-80 (1984).

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