Fortnight Publications Ltd.

No, He's the Last Great RomanticAuthor(s): Paul DaviesSource: Fortnight, No. 283, Supplement: Beckett (Apr., 1990), p. VIIIPublished by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25552379 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 18:21

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Fortnight Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Fortnight.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 141.101.201.171 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:21:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

comfort in the thought that it may be shared by 'billions'.

So we watch a Beckett play, knowing that

nothing will happen, nothing can happen?just as we live our lives, knowing that Godot will

not come and that there is no cure for being on

earth. But we do not abandon life, any more

than we walk out of the theatre. In this quiet and

courageous fortitude we honour our humanity. In this way we encounter the joyful paradox

of Beckett: his apparent despair enhances our

lives. Through laughter, through the beauty of

his words and through our community of suf

fering, Beckett celebrates man. Beckett the

humanist.

Michael Patterson is reader in Theatre Studies at the University of Ulster and has published many studies on European theatre

No, he's the

last great

romantic

| BECKETT probably didn't care much, ul

sjm^L^L^*^ timately, what his

>^^^^^^^^ critics and reviewers

m^L^L^L^jBaaw sa^ aDOUt ms work.

^^^|KT^T ^ut n*s reputation ^^Hfc^,

seems to have been [ fl^^^^EV^jf formed less by his

^^^^^Lw writings themselves

^L^L^L^L' '

man by an historical

^^^^^HAa accident and a crude

^^^^ K^^^^ form of existentialism

^^^^^^^^^^^H implicity many mmmmmm*m*****^**^** comments about him

in the media and by academics.

The accident was that much of Beckett's

best work?covering a good third of his writing career?wasn't known about at all until the

sudden success of Waiting for Godot in 1953

brought him to general notice and into favour

with publishers. All the critical notice took off from that play, and his other writings?apart from a handful of plays?are still unknown to

most people except aficionados and academ

ics, even though Beckett once said that his

novels and prose?not the drama?were "the

serious work". The emphasis on existential

pessimism and the absurd which underlies many books and broadcasts about Beckett probably also stems from the immediate context of

Godot's first production?the French alterna

tive theatre?not really from the play itself. To

call Godot nihilistic and to assume that his other works will bear the same description is

nothing short of sentence before trial, and that

on the most slender of evidence.

Beckett's work tells a different story?

especially his writings in the 70s and 80s, which have been read even less than the rest

(though we can hope that the coming decade

may change this). To go on seeing Beckett as a

pessimist and absurdist means we can never

really meet his best work: it denies his real

strength, his address to the subject of the human

imagination and what it means for us to lose

touch with it. This is a matter far older than

existentialism, and has to do with the dark and

terrible spheres of human life as well as the

meaning of love and knowledge. The notion

that comes closest is that Beckett's works are

about 'survival', their bleakness lightened with

humour and compassion. This is true, but it's

such a small portion of the truth about Beckett

that it still confines a writer who sought to

breach all confines.

Beckett was an artist, and art really takes

over when the needs of survival are at least

temporarily fulfilled?it's the creative possi bilities of our imagination that marks the differ ence between humans and animals. Beckett's

most powerful myths describe a spiritual as well as physical peril: in Imagination Dead

Imagine (1966) and The Lost Ones (1970) we are shown to what human life is reduced if the

imagination is banished, ignored, or talked of

as though it's idle amusement or an illusion to

divert us from the supposed 'meaninglessness' of our state. He asks us, in the clearest terms,

what it would be like not to have imagination?

"Imagination dead imagine"?and presents an

horrific vision of desiccated, imprisoned life

and redundant, bored consciousness. This is

the end of the road which the culture of mate

rialism prides itself on inviting us to go down, even claims is the 'intellectually honest' one to

take. Beckett wasn't convinced: his myths and

images are as terrible, their purpose as radical, as William Blake's prophecies. The Romantic

poets saw also how it would be if our sense of

meaning were lost?some of it has been, and it

makes Beckett's voice all the stronger.

Beckeitt's later works are full of references

to the "eye of flesh"?staring but not seeing,

bloodshot, too dry to blink, an eye which reg isters the outside world but lacks its comple

ment, the mind's eye, which links our sight of the universe with insight into it. The 'eye of

flesh' is Beckett's symbol for the conscious

ness of our society, up to now dominated by the

physical and the rational, without enough nourishment from the imagination which gives

meaning to those two planes. The idea that

nothing other than the physical and rational

exists is only as old as materialism itself, but

Beckett's picture of its consequences is noth

ing other than a picture of hell.

So Beckett's negations are not those typical of nihilism, but of Romanticism. John Keats'

famous ideal of "negative capability" is a fac

ulty of true imagination, the inspiring abeyance of that "irritable reach after fact and reason"

which is the crippling obsession of our ration

alistic and mechanistic world-picture. This is

why Beckett, in his magnificent twilit novella 111 Seen 111 Said (1982), says "Close for good that filthy eye of flesh" and turns instead to the

mind's eye which not only Beckett but his Romantic predecessors Shelley, Blake and

Coleridge took to be the true and inclusive

agent of human perception. Coleridge called

the imagination "the marriage of spirit and sense"; Beckett describes the "eye of flesh" as

a "widowed eye"?-physical vision bereaved,

the dead partner imagination. Blake said:

We are led to believe a lie

When we see with not through the eye Which was born in a night to perish in a night.

Beckett's inheritance from Blake and others is

a renewed warning that that very lie is the

materialist's claim that the physical world is all

there is and that imagination is just... imagi

nary. In 1931, at the beginning of his writing life, Beckett wrote that "the only reality is

provided by the hieroglyphics of inspired per ception. The conclusions of the intelligence alone are merely of arbitrary value." His men

tion of hieroglyphics suggests he thought that ancient sources were as important to art as

recent ones. This he has in common with the

Romantic poets, with Novalis and with Yeats, who were openly indebted for their inspired perceptions to the mystery traditions of east

and west that together have become known as

the Perennial philosophy. At the same time as writing about the fate of

ideas, Beckett could get close to the destinies of

his characters. We find them in awful symbolic states: crippled, unable to speak, impotent, buried in sand, incapable of relating to people, short of will-power. His later works all link this

condition with death of imagination. It's only with the faculty by which we can truly imagine that we can also find who each of us potentially is and become that person. So Beckett, like

Blake, shows that developing the imaginative

faculty, individually and collectively, is impor tant for our future.

This is the political significance of Beckett, whose writing has often?again wrongly? been described as irrelevant to politics. If the

extent of our self-knowledge is denied by a

world-picture that excludes imagination, we

find ourselves paralysed. Without imagina

tion, for Beckett, there is no going on.

PAUL DAVIES teaches English at the

University of Ulster and has written a thesis on Beckett's prose works

\i

Fortnight gratefully acknowledges the assistance

of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in the preparation of

this supplement.

vra

This content downloaded from 141.101.201.171 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:21:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions