Beckett after Wittgenstein by Andre Furlani

Author:Andre Furlani [Furlani, Andre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004130 Literary Criticism / European / General
ISBN: 9780810132184
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2016-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

To cast the doubt was dramatically a chance not to be missed, not to be bungled either by resolving it. That’s what I felt in any case. I know creatures are supposed to have no secrets from their authors, but I’m afraid mine for me have little else. (Beckett 2014a: 435–36)

At the very time when Beckett was perfecting it as a structural principle of his drama and fiction, vagueness was being vindicated in posthumous works of Wittgenstein that he possessed. They could engage him in part because Wittgenstein demonstrates that vagueness is not necessarily disabling, not a synonym for ambivalence or ambiguity. “As soon as one wishes to employ exact concepts of measurement for immediate experience, one bumps against the peculiar vagueness in this experience,” Wittgenstein states in the Philosophical Remarks. “And it appears to me now that this vagueness is not something preliminary, which more precise knowledge will later eliminate, but is rather a characteristic logical peculiarity.” He concludes: “The words ‘approximate’ and ‘incidental,’ etc. have indeed only relative meaning, but they are yet necessary and they characterize the nature of our experience” (Philosophical Remarks XX 211).9

Where deconstruction detects indeterminacies and reception theory hermeneutic gaps, Wittgenstein sees, and Beckett stages, the exercise of a normative communal competence which continues to operate even after justifications have been exhausted. Time, place, character, and incident are systematically vague in Waiting for Godot, but they are not finally aporetic. How vagueness orchestrates action is a theme of a play that asks one not to interpret the indefinite but to experience and attend to its logical as well as to its affective uses.

The notebook he prepared for his 1975 West Berlin production of Warten auf Godot includes inventories of allusions to the sky, appearances of Pozzo’s whip, acts of recollection, appeals for aid and their paltry success, and Estragon’s moments of sleep; longer than any of these is the entry under “Doubts confusions” (Beckett 1993b: 333–43). It reads like a catalogue unraisonnée of a play that, he told his company, “strives at all costs to avoid definition” (87). The author was not privy to any secrets, insisting at every production (he assisted at six of them before directing the play) that he did not know who Godot was (ibid.). Yet this uncertainty regarding the play’s pivotal character enabled Beckett to write the play, just as it provides the single impetus to Vladimir and Estragon. Vagueness is an incentive as much as an often immitigable state. Beckett identified “perhaps” as the most important word in his theater (see Knowlson in Beckett 1993b: xix). Introducing excerpts of the play on French radio prior to its premiere in 1952, Beckett insisted of its characters that “I have only been able to know a little about them by staying very far away from the need to understand” (Beckett 2011: 316).10

Pozzo is not usually cited as an authority, yet at his most vehemently eloquent he is the self-professed pupil of the erstwhile intellectual Lucky. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic thrives. In

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