key: cord-0061075-vl3isxk7
authors: Boxall, Peter
title: Afterword
date: 2020-07-15
journal: Beckett and Politics
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_18
sha: 55919fc031171e840f7e1a44c6a9830f47ff4124
doc_id: 61075
cord_uid: vl3isxk7

The afterword offers a closing reflection on the question of Beckett’s politics, in the context of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic. It argues that the pandemic exposes a junction between the ontological and the political, a junction that lies too at the heart of Beckett’s writing. The task of understanding Becket’s politics—the task to which the essays collected here are devoted—requires us, the afterword argues, to identify the terms in which Beckett’s writing negotiates the channels and conjunctions between the ontological experience of existing and the political experience of living. It offers a reading of Beckett’s short work The Lost Ones, as a means of articulating the ways in which Beckett’s work tests the terms in which political imperatives—the demands of justice, of equality, of democracy—are mapped on to the bare conditions of being, terms which the experience of the pandemic compels us to rethink.

the local. Those of us with access to the internet, to Twitter and rolling news, have become accustomed to studying data that allows us to see the pandemic at a global scale. We look at maps of the world scarred with gruesome red patches representing concentrations of infection or death. The darker the red, the deeper the wound, the denser the contagion. We look at tables giving updated figures of the infected and the dead, also choosing to represent death in red. We look at graphs which express numbers of new infections and deaths as a curve, broken down by nation. Each nation has its own curve, the curve itself a simple linear manifestation of complex nonlinear forces-political systems, welfare provision, personal freedom versus state control. We carry these data with us, these schemas of a global pandemic, as we look at events unfolding around us, as we try to frame them or find a national scale at which to calibrate them. For us in the UK, this task has become intertwined with the spectre of 'herd immunity'. 1 The UK government went out on a limb to adopt an immunity strategy, in accordance with which we allow the virus to spread, at the cost of the vulnerable, in order to provide immunity to the healthy majority. As I write, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is in intensive care with Covid-19, a powerful manifestation of the fact that the herd is comprised of individual people, people who might, even, be oneself. We watch our political leaders act on the data we look at in maps, in tables, in graphs and then we step outside for our hour of daily exercise (still permitted in the UK, for now). We give passersby a wide berth, exaggerating the distance to indicate goodwill, care for others expressed as a removal from their zone of influence. Two metres adjudged to be how far beyond ourselves we reach. We marvel, if we live in a town or a city, at the becalmed streets. The businesses lying dormant, storefront after storefront displaying a scrappy blu-tacked piece of paper bearing the emboldened heading 'Covid-19', followed by small print expressions of regret, and the injunction that we should take care of ourselves. We look at the sky, on cloudless days, the blue unmarked by contrails, the roads of the air erased.

We try to match our local experience of life, to the policies enacted by governments, to the data displayed in graphs and spreadsheets, and we feel that we are living in a new world where these scalar relations have become estranged, a different world, the world of after, all else recast as 303 before. Every conversation, with loved ones, with friends, with strangers, begins and ends with this, the perception that the world we once knew bears no relation to the world that we are trying to live in now. As Arundhati Roy puts it, pandemics have historically 'forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew' (np). The coronavirus outbreak, she says, marks just such a break, opening 'a portal, a gateway between one world and the next'. This is the gap, between before and after, across which I reach, as I offer some closing reflections on Beckett and politics. Does the concept of the political, as understood in the essays that are collected here, match up with the political as it shows itself to me now, as I write in the midst of the pandemic, or as it appears to the reader of this book, in its possible aftermath (aftermath: new grass growing after mowing, green shoots)? Do the terms in which Beckett understood the political, or in which the political inscribes itself in his writing, survive the kind of transformation that the pandemic brings about, the shifted relation it inaugurates between the individual, the nation and the world? I see friends and colleagues around the world asking each other for guidance on what book to read, what music to listen to, what film to watch, as we look to our collective past to find a guide to an alienated future (I, for what it is worth, am looking with a peculiar kind of trepidation at a copy of The Magic Mountain and wondering, will it help?). Does Beckett's work, and the forensic terms in which Beckett's work is anatomised in this book, offer one such bridge, one such junction between then and now?

If the answer to that question is yes, it is so because the pandemic has exposed a faultline that runs through political life, dividing the particular from the systemic-the faultline that lies too at the ground of Beckett's political imagination. When we act as political subjects, our actions are shaped in accordance with the particular temporal and spatial pressures that operate upon us, that determine the meaning of those actions at a local level, even as that localism is situated within ever-widening fields of force. To live is to feel the friction of particularity. But the pandemic, in demanding that we institute a collective defence of life, suspends that particularity, removes that friction, exposes us to a systemic logic in which the specificity of political life itself shades into the generality of species being. Some of the most insistently recurring televisual images produced by the virus so far are the montages of iconic city centres around the world, all empty, all still. Here's Times Square in New York, here's Piccadilly Circus in London, here's St Peter's Square in Rome, here's Tahrir Square in Cairo. There is something haunting about the recognition that the same phenomenon, the spread of a virus, has brought all of these separate places, with their embedded histories, to a standstill. And in all of these places, the absent people, the people locked away in their separate chambers, are undergoing versions of the same experience, even if those same experiences are wildly different depending on your wealth and your circumstances. The particular pressures that shaped their and our lives, that set the clocks, that determined where we should travel, who we should meet, have been suspended; we are no longer living as differentiated subjects, but as one of the herd that might, in terms of the UK's misguided policy, expect one day to be immune. Isolation from the community as a function of one's belonging to the herd. The task of each day is no longer political but has become instead biological, or ontological. We feed ourselves, clean ourselves, exercise ourselves, feed our young. We jog on the spot. We wait for the moment when the clocks will be restarted, when the school term will recommence, when the pub will reopen; and while we wait we give ourselves to an abeyance, in which living has become a kind of existing.

The pandemic, in opening Roy's portal from one world to the next, brings out of hiding this relation between the particular and the systemic-a relation in which the particularities of our lives are laid over a systemic substrate which both endorses them and cancels them out. As the father in Cormac McCarthy's The Road comments, in witnessing that novel's apocalyptic event that ends one world and ushers in another, 'in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made' (293). Once the features of the world are erased, one can see the mechanism of world itself; and if Beckett's work might offer one way of conceiving of a bridge between before and after, one world and the next, then this is perhaps because his writing, too, proceeds as a form of revelation through erasure. The pandemic scrapes away the particular surface to reveal a generic understructure, the undifferentiated raw material of being; Beckett's works, his plays, his novels, his pieces for television, all proceed in the same fashion. Who could read Endgame now, or watch it on YouTube, and not see it as a representation of self-isolation? '[He turns the telescope on the without.] Let's see. [He moves the telescope.] Nothing … nothing … good … good' (130). Who could read or watch Waiting for Godot now and not recognise afresh the quality of that waiting, the waiting in abeyance in which the removal of the features of the worldthe calendar, the place names, the specificities-casts you away on the desert island of the world itself. Let's go. We can't. We're on earth, there's no cure for that. All mankind is us.

We might recognise our current predicament as it is foreshadowed in Beckett's work-the predicament from the midst of which I am writingbecause Beckett's work is built on the faultline between particular and the systemic that the pandemic unearths. But, of course, this recognition does not itself amount to a politics. Indeed, it is perhaps Beckett's proximity to this faultline that has made it so difficult to articulate a politics in his writing, as it is difficult for us to orient ourselves to the current pandemic with an existing political compass. The effect of the move from the particular to the systemic is not to reveal our political condition so much as to set it aside, to trivialise politics or the merely political by approaching a systemic condition that is in some sense apolitical, prepolitical, or suprapolitical. In view of the labours unfinished of Testew and Cunard, it is established beyond all doubt, in spite of the strides of physical culture, the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling, regardless of the penicillin and the succadenea, that man wastes and pines, for reasons unknown, that he shrinks and dwindles, in spite of the tennis. The job of the writer, Beckett says famously in 1937, is to remove the ornaments, the local distractions of 'culture', so that this systemic truth, this substrate, might come to view, the bare bones of living and dying. 'More and more', he writes in a letter to Axel Kaun that has taken on the status of a mantra in Beckett studies, 'my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it' (Letters I 518). Our writerly task is not to heighten or dignify our language games, to enshrine the communities they conjure, the forms of relationality they summon, but rather to degrade them, to dismantle the linguistic medium itself, to 'drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through' (Letters I 518).

In suggesting this alternative in 1937-between the 'something' or the 'nothing' that underlies the veil of language-Beckett rather neatly predicts the terms in which his work would predominantly be read in the first two waves of the critical industry that was established in his name; terms which, in both cases, rest on the perception that Beckett's work is in some way inimical to politics, that it somehow reveals a substrate to being as an alternative or an antidote to political life. The first wave saw that Beckett found, beneath the trivialities of social and political life, a distinct 'something'-a plastic depository of being. 'The human condition', Alain Robbe-Grillet writes, 'is to be there', a condition given its exemplary form in Beckett's drama. 'The dramatic character is on stage, that is his primary quality: he is there'; 'at last we would see Beckett's man, we would see Man' (111). The second wave, drawing its momentum from a post-structuralist or deconstructive suspicion of the metaphysics of presence, took rather the opposite view. What Beckett found when he drew back the veil of language was not something at all, but was rather nothing. As Steven Connor writes, in dialogue with Robbe-Grillet, Beckett's drama should not be seen as a 'humanist theatre of presence', but is rather 'stranded in the not-yet or intermission of waiting', in which the stage space 'is never itself, but always a representation of itself, anticipated or remembered, which is to say, non-present' (120). Not something, but nothing.

It is the third wave of Beckett criticism-the wave which reaches its full maturity in the essays collected here-that seeks to negotiate between these poles of something and nothing, in order to generate a politics from the disjuncture in Beckett's work between the particular and the general, between the local specificities that characterise cultural life, and the systemic matrices that underlie them. For the critics who have contributed to this wave, it is not the case that Beckett's work involves the eradication of the word surface-of the material particularity of language and life-in order to expose an underlying condition, consisting either of something or of nothing; or at least it is not simply so. The local, the material, the political, is not burned off to expose the universal, the transcendental or the systemic (understood as a revealed humanism, or as the emptying throes of a deconstructive language). Rather, the particular and the systemic, the granularity of enworlded being and the smooth conditions that underlie that enworlding, are put into a vibrating relation with one another-a relation that, by virtue of its vibration, instantiates a Beckettian politics. The centres of gravity that are identified in this collection-language politics, biopolitics, geopolitics-constitute the most fully developed critical expression of the forms in which Beckett's writing tests the bonds between the specific and the nonspecific. Language, body, place, these are not emptied out, universalised, negated; rather, the ties that hold literary language to its specific instantiations in the world are at once asserted and denied, as Watt finds that events are both attached to their plastic manifestations and divorced from them. Reading Beckett through this prism, one finds oneself in the predicament suffered by Watt, when he tries to fathom the 'incident of the Galls', the father and son team who come to Mr. Knott's house to tune the piano. 'What distressed Watt in this incident of the Galls father and son', the narrator says, was not so much that he did not know what had happened, for he did not care what had happened, as that nothing had happened, that a thing that was nothing had happened, with the utmost formal distinctness. (73) When Beckett puts language and body and place together-when he imagines a mind, in a body, in a place-he makes a thing that is nothing happen, he encloses nothingness in words. If Beckett is a difficult writer, then his difficulty resides in large measure in this, in the fact that his writing does not suppress but relentlessly reveals the terms in which it brings nothing into contact with something. For readers of his work-as for Watt, struggling with his contemplation of Mr. Knott's notness-these terms are 'hard to accept'. We cannot accept that Beckett attaches nothing to something, the nonspecific to the specific, in the way that Watt cannot accept 'that nothing had happened with all the clarity and solidity of something' (73). It is difficult to accept, because it threatens to reveal on the one hand that the density of the somethings that we live for are shadowed by the vacuity of a nothingness that underlies them, and on the other that the purity of the nothingness in which our most pristine ethical imperatives are embalmed, the nothingness that we want most to be disinterested, is contaminated always by its attachment to the somethings in which that nothingness is realised. We cannot accept it but, like Watt, we find ourselves returning to it, living through it, as Watt revisits the incident of the Galls, 'in such a way that he was forced to submit to it all over again, to hear the same sounds, see the same lights, touch the same surfaces, and so on, as when they had first involved him in their unintelligible intricacies' (73).

If there is a Beckettian politics, and if his work offers a bridge from the last world to the next, then it is found in this movement of not being as it is threaded into the unintelligible intricacies of being, this dense amalgam of something and nothing in the warp of the world that it brings to thought. As I write, in the very midst of the transition from before to after, I find myself thinking almost constantly of this movement, this amalgam. I spent my hour's exercise this gentle springlike morning walking in a nearby park with my partner. The park is ringed by a path that is popular with joggers, and as we walked we watched runner after runner pass us by, keeping a respectful distance. Some of them we saw twice, as they lapped us in our sedate pace, and it was hard not to be struck by the redundancy of the sight, the futility. We are all unplugged, it seemed to say, all waiting in abeyance, and as we wait we service the hardware in case there should come a time when it will be needed again. It was hard, for me at least, not to see this turning ring of runners as a version of the searchers in The Lost Ones , the searchers who skirt the wall of the cylinder, forming a 'slow round' in which they 'slowly revolve in Indian file intent on the periphery' (210). It is hard not to see, in the spectacle of the pandemic, in the montages of becalmed cities from every continent of the globe, a vision of our global population as Beckett's 'little people of searchers' (223), moving busily around their cylinder, 'one body per square meter' (204). The pandemic requires us to think systemically, to think globally, to see ourselves not in our particularity but as members of the herd, as the narrator's view of the cylinder requires, he says, a 'perfect mental image of the entire system' (204). We are led to think of ourselves not as individual agents, but as exchangeable elements in the spread of a virus, and so the magic that allows us to grant a specific gravity to our own particular movements or actions, our morning jog, our afternoon's writing, suddenly expires. Observing the population of the park, the distribution of runners and walkers, the frisbee throwers, diablo maestros, children on bikes with stabilisers, feels like observing the searchers in the cylinder, ascending and descending their ladders, turning clockwise and counterclockwise in the cylinder's various zones. The movement of the searchers is dictated, the narrator says, by a series of conventions which, 'in their precision and the submission they exact resemble laws' (207). The systemic view of the cylinder makes these laws appear arbitrary, as Swift's Gulliver finds the customs and mores of Lilliput, seen from his lofty perspective, to be laughably arbitrary. When we think at a global scale, as the narrator of The Lost Ones requires us to, as the experience of the pandemic requires us to, we lose faith in the very particularities, the unintelligible intricacies, that such a global perspective is employed to preserve. Our political distinctions and niceties come down, in the end, to whether we are big-endians or little-endians.

But if this is so, if global thinking in The Lost Ones trivialises whatever the local political imperatives are that compel these searchers so relentlessly to search, it is the case too that the total view of the cylinder contains within it a peculiar seam of invisibility, a nonbeing woven into being that grants their searching an ethical and political grace. However hard the narrator strives to see whole-the 'entire space', he says, is 'uniformly luminous down to its last particle of ambient air' (215)the narrative produces pockets of darkness, of nothingness, that assert themselves as an effect of the very effort towards sight. 'From time immemorial' the narrator says, in a phrase that again leaps out at us quarantinos, 'rumour has it or better still the notion is abroad that there exists a way out' (206). There persists a mythical belief in the cylinderthe residue perhaps of religious faith-that what we see is not all there is, that there might be an outside to the cylinder, that the world might still consist of a contingent relation between what we know and what we don't know, what has happened already and what has not happened yet, a relation between something and nothing that gives the searching of the searchers a rationale. The response of the narrator to this faith, to this 'fatuous little light' which keeps such hope alive, is of course to eradicate it. One 'sect' in the cylinder believes that the way out is hidden in one of the tunnels, the other that it is accessed by a trapdoor in the ceiling; but the narrator says that, over the endless reach of historical time, with imperceptible gradualness, the population of searchers slowly comes to accept that there is no way out, that all is known, that the world we see with the aid of the lit air is all that is the case. 'Of these two persuasions', the narrator says, 'the former is declining in favour of the latter but in a manner so desultory and slow and of course with so little effect on the comportment of either sect that to see it one must be in the secret of the gods' (206-7). 'Thus by insensible degrees', he goes on, 'the way out transfers from the tunnel to the ceiling prior to never having been'. The total seeing to which the narrator aspires does not admit of a way out; but the beauty of The Lost Ones , its central discovery, is that the global seeing that denies the poetry of the invisible, that abolishes the province of the not yet which grants a political urgency to our striving, produces the very outside, the very freedom from the known, that it refuses. The voice itself, in tracing the imperceptible decline of religious belief, in offering us an account of the 'insensible degrees' by which the population secularises itself, casts itself into the very condition-the insensible, the imperceptible-that he sets out to deny. In offering us a view of the cylinder as a whole, the voice is cast outside of its domain, passing through the rubbery walls that declare themselves to be sealed. 'In the cylinder alone are certitudes to be found', the narrator says 'and without nothing but mystery' (216); but in making such a claim, in granting himself access to the mysterious outside, the narrator breaks the seal of that wall, shows it not to be smooth and impenetrable, but rather to be porous and leaky. The trap door in the ceiling, like the doors and windows in Beckett's late miracle Ghost Trio, is not shut, or not simply shut, but is 'imperceptibly ajar' (Complete Dramatic Works 408). The movement of the voice itself, in its very refusal of the consolations of doctrine, takes us across this imperceptibly open channel between what there is and what there is not, between Watt's something and nothing. As a young Beckett puts it, in his dialogue with Georges Duthuit, the artwork, like the cylinder of The Lost Ones , is a 'total object, complete with missing parts' (Proust 101).

It is this capacity, across Beckett's work, to unearth the faultline which joins the seen with the unseen, through a blank refusal to enshrine the unseen in mythical or enchanted forms, that constitutes his politics. It is not the case that the searching of the searchers, as they climb their ladders or circle the perimeter of the cylinder, is revealed to us to be futile, any more than the global seeing granted or forced upon us by the pandemic renders futile the jogging of the runners in the park this morning. What The Lost Ones reveals to us is a disconnect between the local forces which drive our actions and the systemic conditions which underlie them. Beckett's work does not scrape those local forces away to reveal the underlying conditions, but rather opens an imperceptible passage between living and existing, between the political and ontological, in order to watch as literary thinking negotiates between these cardinal points of being. It is in this sense that his writing remains urgent to us now, as urgent as ever. His work is not a despairing verdict on the futility of searching; it does not disdain those searchers who strive to find the purpose of their being not in their own persons, but reflected in those others for whom and with whom they live. On the contrary, it is a passionate injunction to us to think and imagine a relation between that searching, and the historical conditions that determine it. 'None looks within himself', the narrator says of his searchers, 'where none can be' (211); and this is another of those lines that strikes us, as we lock ourselves inside our houses, as we exercise doggedly in the park, as we attend to the mothballed upkeep of ourselves and our loved ones. Isolation has brought us up against a newly overwhelming recognition that our being is not isolated, that we rely for our self-perception on the perception of others, that to be is to be perceived. The spread of the virus has recast the way that we think not only about our relations to each other within our community, but about the nature of geopolitical relations between nations, about the ways that nations are part of a collective, systemic global condition. It is one of the recurring responses to this transitional moment between before and after to observe that, when the pandemic is 'over', we cannot return to the way things were, to how it was. As the Secretary General of the United Nations António Guterres has recently argued, the pandemic requires us to radically reconceive the nature of borders, between the local and the global, between the north and the global south, as we can no longer maintain the pretence that our own local imperatives, the rules governing our own climbing and searching, are insulated from those that obtain elsewhere. We cannot suppress the virus only 'here', but have to suppress it everywhere, otherwise it will simply reappear as people move from place to place because, as we can see now more clearly than ever, all humankind is us. 'Ending the pandemic everywhere is both a moral imperative', he writes, 'and a matter of enlightened self-interest' (np).

The narrator of The Lost Ones says of the rules that govern behaviour in the cylinder that 'it is enjoined by a certain ethics not to do unto others what coming from them might give offence' (222). The bleakness of The Lost Ones, as well as its gleams of comedy, stem from the realisation that we don't understand this ethic of reciprocity, that we cannot situate it or fathom its historical logic, any more than we can codify Guterres' 'moral imperative'. But what The Lost Ones leaves us with, what Beckett's work grants us, is an access to that disappearing relation between our own local actions and the world historical forces that sustain them-the very relation that in our own moment, as in all moments of political transformation, calls with the greatest urgency to be rethought.

The Complete Dramatic Works

Recovery from the Coronavirus Must Lead to a Better World

I'm an Epidemiologist". The Guardian

The Magic Mountain

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction

The Pandemic Is a Portal