SOURCE: van Peer, Willie. “Beckett's ‘First Love’ and Cynical Philosophy.” Samuel Beckett Today 7 (1998): 407-17.

[In the following essay, van Peer places “First Love” within the philosophical tradition of cynicism.]

My interpretation of “First Love” forms part of a larger argument, that sees all interpretation, contrary to present-day fashionable theories, as a quest for truth, guided by specific methodological rules. There is no space to expound on this matter here, so let me restrict the issue with a reference to an article where I have developed this matter in more detail; see Van Peer (1998). As a brief illustration, however, I would like to point out one of the specific methodological rules we employ when we interpret a work. I am sure that we all follow some of these rules, and that if we didn't, our colleagues would not take our work seriously. This creates a strange schizophrenia in current literary studies: theoretically the existence of rules is vehemently denied, but when it comes to practice, nearly all scholars scrupulously stick to very traditional rules. One of these is quite evident in the materials to which we have access surrounding the story at hand. These contain the editorial history of Beckett's story, including an account of the different extant versions. We learn in Notes on the Texts, for instance, that the phrase “to put it wildly” in the first English and American editions of “First Love” contained an error, which was later corrected to “to put it mildly”. Why should we take these materials into account? Why shouldn't we be free to use any edition of the text whatsoever? Or why shouldn't we remain comfortably in the dark about these different textual variants? We should look at these materials, I surmise, because we adhere to an important rule of interpretation, the rule namely that one has to base one's interpretation on a full and non-deficient token of the text. I cannot make sense of this enterprise other than that.

Julie Bates Dock and her co-authors in PMLA have recently documented a nice illustration of the kind of biased interpretations that get produced when this methodological rule is ignored or violated. They convincingly show how many feminist interpretations of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story “The Yellow Wallpaper” are based on editions that deviate from the author's own intended text—and of earlier editions. For instance, after declaring that there is ‘something queer’ about the house in which the newly married couple have arrived, the female character remarks, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage”. The text editions that follow Lane's, which reproduces the 1933 Golden Book version of the story print the following: “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that.” As Julie Bates Dock and her co-authors point out: “Omitting ‘in marriage’ radically transforms the line. […] More important, these two changes distort the author's focus: Gilman is bashing marriage in particular, not men in general” (Dock et al. 1996, 55). The conclusion from Bates Dock's exercise will be clear, I hope. In spite of all assertions to the contrary, the community of literary scholars is still dedicated to certain rules of conduct in interpreting literary texts. If it were not, there would be no point in arguing about interpretation at all.

But back now to Beckett's text. What can or should one say about it? At a first level, one observes two characters, one (the male) internally focalized, the other (the female) only externally characterized, interacting with each other. Their behaviour is somewhat unusual and may cause surprise, if not aversion in the reader. But what does the story mean? My proposal is to situate the text within a specific literary or philosophical tradition, and to work out its Sitz im Leben from this general analysis. Although superficially the work narrates a somewhat bizarre concatenation of non-events, at a deeper level I see the text as taking its place in the Western tradition of cynicism. I am using the term ‘cynicism’ here in its philosophical meaning, indicating the movement or the way of life named after Diogenes of Sinope (second half of the fourth century BCE), more specifically after his nickname, Kuon, the dog.¹ To the cynics, in the opposition between “nomos versus physis (‘custom’ or ‘convention’ versus ‘nature’)”, preference was to be given to physis, to nature (Höistad 1973, 629). The aim of human life is happiness, and this is achieved by becoming self-sufficient: to live in accordance with nature, exemplified in the numerous (mostly apocryphal) stories about Diogenes, such as the one in which, when Alexander the Great promised to grant him whatever favour he requested, Diogenes replied: “Stand out of my light.” My interpretation of Beckett's text boils down to the hypothesis that the characters, their behaviour, their motives, and their emotions are a direct heir to the cynics' worldview. But there is more to it: the hypothesis also asserts that Beckett's texts in general, and “First Love” specifically, aim to express and pass on the cynical philosophy.

This interpretation of Beckett's work can also be related to the personality of the author. This is not to revive the debate over authorial intention,² but I believe that in interpreting literary works we should take the author's intentions into account—which is not the same as accepting them as a verdict. It seems to me that Samuel Beckett, the man, comes close to being a twentieth-century cynic, and the recent biographies by Anthony Cronin, Lois Gordon, and James Knowlson provide ample support for this view. He did not cling to money, success, or outward appearance, or to fine etiquette, “balls” being a favourite Beckett word. Such a man need not, by the way, be unattractive: Susan Sontag called him the sexiest man she had ever met. He did not seek status or prestige, and cared little for his reputation. He was fearless (and joined the Resistance during the war), yet pessimistic and misanthropic. One is reminded also of his preference for the things in his mind over the disturbances of what he called “this bitch of a world”. He saw his fame as a curse, the 1969 Nobel Prize award a “catastrophe” (in Suzanne's, his wife's, words): he anonymously gave away the money it earned him. He had little respect for institutions, and all favours by him were given solely on the basis of individual friendship. Yet he was not a traditional saint. The numerous love affairs, and Cronin's account that he preferred masturbation to ‘the real thing’, show his cynic attitude also in this.

Now compare all this with the method singled out by the cynic in classical antiquity, “actively to dissociate himself from any influence, external or internal, whose ties, responsibilities or distractions might fetter his individual freedom” (Urmson & Rée 1991, 67). Material prosperity is approached with downright hostility, property is seen as the source of all evil. Life should be lived at the level of the bare minimum necessary for existence, stripped of all conventional values of status, power, class, influence, or reputation. The cynic had to be ready to face insult to keep his emotional resistance against conventional culture fit. Diogenes Laertius relates of Diogenes: “He once begged alms of a statue, and, when asked why he did so, replied, “To get practice in being refused” (VI, 49; 51).

It is clear, then, that in real life Beckett the man displayed many characteristics of the cynical sage. That in itself does not suffice to interpret his texts, but it does help us to figure out the relation between author and work at a deeper level.

Indeed, Beckett's works, including “First Love”, also testify to the cynic attitude. According to the cynics, precepts of virtue came from the personal example of the cynic's life and from “illustrations of the uninhibited behaviour of animals and the example of Heracles of virtue in endurance. But Cynics were principally characterized by a fearless, shameless freedom of speech in criticism, a mordant wit and repartee”, (Urmson & Rée, 68) as the cynic “was something akin to a god, and something akin to a beast” (ibid.). That seems most applicable to the protagonist of “First Love”: human existence shrivels until it attains dog-like qualities. Eating is like swallowing down whatever you can find to feed yourself. Beverages are uninteresting unless alcoholic. All characters are homeless, or if they have a home it is nothing but a den, a mere shelter against the enemy that nature can be. Clothing is unimportant, looks are irrelevant, excretion a natural and simple part of life, nothing to be ashamed of, sometimes even something to revel in. And in this list, love, too is reduced to canine proportions. It is stripped of all idealism and romanticism; it is virulently anti-platonic, anti-petrarchan. It is love, as dogs love each other: transient, though intense; free and fast, obscene only for the non-dogs.

Here I would like to briefly comment on an aspect of Beckett's work that I think deserves some attention. One may recall that some scholars have advanced a ‘Christian’ interpretation of Beckett's work. Especially after the first performances of Waiting for Godot, some critics saw Christ-like figures in the characters. Maybe this is no longer a fashionable interpretation of Beckett's works, but there is a sense in which such interpretations are less far-fetched than it may seem nowadays. Research by New Testament scholars has revealed the extent to which the sayings of Jesus stand in relation to the philosophical traditions of his time. They have also been able to reconstruct the sayings of the historical Jesus, allowing the reconstruction of the Book of Q,³ a hypothetical, but highly reliable collection of the sayings of Jesus that must have circulated prior to the writing of the gospels. Over the past decades, it has become apparent that the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth form part of the movement of the Cynics. Let me quote from Burton Mack's recent study of the Book of Q:

The crisp sayings of Jesus in Q1 [one of the variants of the Book of Q] show that his followers thought of him as a Cynic-like sage. Cynics were known for begging, voluntary poverty, renunciation of needs, severance of family ties, fearless and carefree attitudes, and troublesome public behaviour. Standard themes in Cynic discourse included a critique of riches, pretension, and hypocrisy, just as in Q1. The Cynic style of speech was distinctly aphoristic, as is that in Q1. And Cynics were schooled in such topics as handling reproach, nonretaliation, and authenticity in following their vocation, matters at the forefront of Jesus' instructions in Q1.

(Mack 1993, 115)⁴

Hence it must be clear that those critics favouring a Christian interpretation were not altogether off the track: Beckett's texts are indeed similar to the original kernel of cynic philosophy in the early Jesus movement; the interpretation runs into difficulties when Christianity is applied wholesale to them—then discrepancies do appear. But to say that Beckett's work evokes a Christian spirituality—insofar as this is qualified as the views and methods of the cynic sages—is, I would argue, a good approximation of truth.

Perhaps readers find this interpretation rather general or somewhat vague, and still underdetermined by textual evidence. Those readers are right. Let me therefore come down now to some more concrete textual evidence corroborating my interpretation. I will enumerate these under the heading of some four different themes (using the term in a rather loose sense).

The first, and most evident, theme that speaks for the cynical interpretation, is the theme of vanitas: the idea that life is vain, and that our actions are irrelevant. The cynic wants to confront his audience with the futility of our aspirations and the emptiness of human strife. In “First Love”, this theme opens the story, with the comparison between the living and the dead. The latter are said to be in a much better position: “The living wash in vain, in vain perfume themselves, they stink.” The dead are to be envied, their company sought, we are told by the protagonist: “My sandwich, my banana, taste sweeter when I'm sitting on a tomb.” The theme also resonates in the protagonist's own epitaph, where it says that he “hourly died”. In all this, the protagonist takes on a detached viewpoint from which he surveys human vanity, and declares: “their little gimmick with the dust is charming.” Human action is largely irrelevant to the cynic, of course. The protagonist makes no secret of his position: “Lie down, all seems to say, lie down and stay down.” And he adds: “The mistake one makes is to speak to people.” When it really comes to speaking, however, the usual patterns of communication break down, heard in the protagonist's ruminations that it is “incredible the way they repeat what you've just said”, concluding: “that's what you get for opening your mouth.”

A second theme that presents itself is that of the outsider: the cynic is conscious of being a misanthrope, and wants to be one. I hope it will be clear without further elucidation that this theme pervades the whole story. The protagonist does not belong to any group; he is expelled from his family home. Initially, he had a wish to stay. “But they refused”, the story says twice. And that was that: “One day, on my return from stool, I found my room locked and my belongings in a heap before the door.” Those belongings aren't much, presumably, though at this point I must confess that there is at least one thing in the text that is problematic for my interpretation. That concerns the money the protagonist inherits after his father's death. It seems not really to fit the general scheme of a cynic to just keep the money for old age, as he states. The money certainly is a detail that is difficult to incorporate in my view that the story evokes a cynic's world view, perhaps not even so much the fact that the character still has the money, as his motivation for keeping it: we do not expect cynic philosophers to plan their old age and retirement.

To come back to the theme of the outsider: the female protagonist has no relatives or friends either; she is visited regularly, but apparently because she works as a clandestine prostitute. In short, both protagonists in the story are outcasts, as indeed most of Beckett's characters are. We may see in this theme a correlation to the semantic field of detachment, as it has been described by Fokkema and Ibsch in their study of European Modernism (Fokkema & Ibsch, 1988). This detachment is certainly applicable to the male protagonist, who overtly refuses to attach himself to any other being (except perhaps for the memory of his father), and is incapable of remembering even the most basic facts about other humans. He even does not know his love's name: “She also disclosed her family name, but I've forgotten it”. And since he does not like her first name, Lulu, he simply changes it into Anna. Can one be more detached?

Another theme often associated with cynicism is that of scatology and intentional obscenity: remember the story of Diogenes publicly masturbating in a square in Athens. There is no lack of this in Beckett's story: explicit descriptions of the protagonist defecating, the exuberant love invocations in the cow-shed among the nettles and the cow shit, in which the protagonist inscribes his beloved's name with his finger, the description of how it feels to relieve oneself in bed, and more sexually tainted, his confession of being “at the mercy of an erection”, or the double entendre: “it is with the heart one loves, is it not, or am I confusing it with something else?”

One could interpret this preoccupation with scatological themes from a psycho-analytic perspective, describing it as a form of regression. That certainly is an option, and there can be little doubt as to the protagonist's profound regression taking place in the story. Such an interpretation, however, may add little if it is not simultaneously able to explain why the character regresses in the first place. The interpretation I have advanced, by contrast, is in a position to do so, and therefore is more parsimonious than a psychoanalytic approach. The reason why the story contains so much regressive material lies, I propose, in the intimate relation cynicism entertains with regression. Regression seems to be an integral part of cynical philosophy from ancient time onwards.

A very powerful theme in this story is that of demystification of love, or of anything deemed of high value in our culture at large. What are the first words that the beloved utters? “Shove up!” But then the male lover is not very gallant either: “I asked her if she was resolved to disturb me every evening.” This sounds more as the kind of thing that gets said in fights between partners who have been together for some years, than the kind of interchange one expects between new lovers. She is also the opposite of most fictional loves: she is reported to have “fat thighs”, has a squint, sings out of tune, and prostitutes herself. The male's emotions are far removed from those associated with courtly love too, for instance when he assures us: “I considered kicking her in the cunt.” The protagonist pronounces his own verdict on love when he asserts: “What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion.” The musings of the male protagonist regularly take the form of explicit misogyny, as when he says of women: “When at their wit's end, they undress.”

At this point it is worth mentioning an intertextual relationship that Beckett's story entertains, and which may further clarify the extent to which his is an effort at demystification. Beckett's text forms the antipode of Petrarch and Dante, especially of the latter's Vita Nuova. Remember that Beckett studied French and Italian, and that the works of Dante were a source of inspiration to him all his life. In the Vita Nuova, the central topic is that of the first encounter with the beloved. The differences with Beckett are very deep, of course: while the whole episode lasts only a couple of months in Beckett's case, Dante's first meeting with Beatrice will be the beginning of a life-long dedication to love, tenderness, and poetry. In both texts, the lovers' meetings are iterative, and the protagonists hear ‘voices’ in their head (Dante, 59, 79); “I heard the word fibrome, or brone …”. In Dante, memory is an important vehicle to communicate to the reader what he has gone through; in Beckett, on the contrary, the reader faces dramatic forms of amnesia. In Beckett, there is a strong predelection of the protagonist for the dead. But such an affinity is also recorded in the Vita Nuova: “Dolcissima Morte, vieni a me e non m'essere villana; però che tu dei essere gentile, in tal parte se' stata!” (Dante, 101).⁵ Death, in Dante's work, is the deepest relationship to the (mortal) love one can have. Compare, for instance, the first encounter of the protagonists in this work:

ne l'ultimo di questi die avenne che questa mirabile donna apparve a me, vestita di colore bianchissimo, in mezzo di due gentili donne, le quali erano di più lunga etade; e passando per una via, volse li occhi verso quello parte ov'io era molto pauroso, e per la sua ineffabile cortesia […] mi salutò molto virtuosamente; tanto che me parve allora vedere tutti li termini de la beatitudine. […] e però che quella fu la prima volta che le sue parole si mossero per venire a li miei orecchi, presi tanta dolcezza che, come inebriato, mi partio da le genti […]

(Dante, 26-28)⁶

Here we have all the ingredients of courtly love, inscribed in the description of the first meeting of the two lovers. The retreat from his surroundings will now be the occasion to record the incident and further write about Beatrice. Compare this to Beckett's scene:

Is it on my account you came? I said. She managed yes to that. Well here I am, I said. And I? Had I not come on hers? Here we are, I said. I sat down beside her, but sprang up again immediately as though scalded. I longed to be gone, to know if it was over.

(“FL” [“First Love”], 21)

The retreat from her follows here too, as in Dante, but her name will now be written, remember, in cowshit. The contrast can hardly be more dramatic. Sure, this is not the first time that courtly love has been debunked. Already Francesco Berni (1497-1535) did so, and so did Cervantes when he had Don Quijote finally meet his Dulcinea (after his descent into the cave of Montesinos), only to have her ask him to lend her some money. But Beckett's demystification takes place in a serious context, not in a comic one. Or does it?

There certainly is a level at which the text can be seen as undermining the credibility of our everyday categories, and as such it resembles comedy: since human toil is ridiculed as irrelevant and megalomaniac, it acts as a mirror comically distorting our self-image. In this sense, Beckett is essentially a comic writer. (I can testify that I burst out laughing on several occasions when reading “First Love”.) This may be the source of the sympathy that readers develop for Beckett's characters, in spite of their repugnant behaviour or their alienating ideas. In Beckett's work, entrenched categories and established views are attacked straight between the eyes, and are given a proper shake-up. For me, personally, reading the story as a comedy is one of the easiest ways to render it meaningful and accessible. But the odd thing is that there usually is not much to interpret in comic texts: they are perhaps the purest cases where we can dispense with post hoc interpretation altogether. Comic texts allow us to follow Susan Sontag's maxim—to erotically enjoy rather than to interpret unproblematically: one surrenders to the body, and enjoys.

What I have proposed here is that to read Beckett properly is to read him in the tradition of cynic philosophy.⁷ This may not be a very systematic philosophy, and it certainly has its limits, but in Beckett's hands it exploits the major stratagems for making us see the world in a new way. What are the roots of cynicism? According to Schischkoff (775) these are a sense of failure of life, a certain self-styled arrogance, and an invincible resentment against life as it is lived by the majority of us. It seems to me that much of this applies to Beckett's oeuvre, thus being a rich resource for the cynic way of life. Beckett's characters are full-grown, often also old, dogs. The reader is a young dog, sniffing and following the old dogs' trails. The result is: comic relief.⁸

Notes

1. For further information on cynicical philosophy, see Branham & Goulet-Cazé, Largier, Navia.

2. But see Barnes, Iseminger, and Stecker for reappraisals of authorial intention.

3. Q, from the German Quelle, ‘source.’

4. For further references asserting the interrelationship between collections of Cynic sayings and the collections of traditions about Jesus, see Bracht Branham & Goulet-Cazé (229), and the literature mentioned there.

5. “Sweet Death, come to me and do not fret—you have to be gentle like the place you come from.” (All translations are mine.)

6. “On the last of these days it happened that this fair lady appeared to me, dressed in the purest white and walking between two distinguished ladies older than she; and striding through the street she turned her eyes to the side where I watched shyly, and in her ineffable eminence […] saluted me so sweetly, that it then appeared as if my gaze had reached all limits of beatitude. […] and since this was the first time that her words moved to come to my ears, I tasted such ecstasy that, intoxicated, I turned away from people […].”

7. A similar interpretation may be found in Rosen.

8. I would like to thank the organizers of the Groningen workshop for their kind invitation to exchange ideas on this topic. I am especially grateful to Henk Hillenaar, Hanneke Hoekstra and Robert Scholes for critical remarks on my paper.

Works Cited

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