Beckett’s Words: The Promise of Happiness in a Time of Mourning by David Kleinberg-Levin

Author:David Kleinberg-Levin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474216883
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2015-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

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“There is no future in this.”1 Everything hinges on what, in Beckett’s Play, the little word “this” designates. I shall take it to refer to the linear, irreversible historical continuum. Within the series of events in that continuum, the past is irrevocably past, denied a haunting afterlife, and there is only, as “future,” more of the same. And that is a future without a future, a future that promises nothing new: no redeeming eventuality. What the suffering and misery of Beckett’s characters cry out for is a new beginning, something that would inaugurate a time free of theodicy and of the worldly conditions that have moved people to turn in desperation to a metaphysical dispensation of justice. What on earth are we waiting for?

At stake in the promise of happiness is the institution of justice: the coming of justice here on earth. Always coming, always still-to-come, because it cannot be accomplished in any present time without corrupting and betraying its absolute demands. So justice requires a future-oriented waiting strong in hope. But it also requires a waiting steeped in remembrance, because the past belongs to the victims of injustice, whose claim on their future redemption constitutes our ineluctable historical obligation in living the present. And it also demands no more waiting!

In living the present, we live towards the future. Is there—might there be—a “witness for the future”?2 A “witness” to vouch for the possibility of a different future, that is. I think Beckett’s surrogate characters are such witnesses, sustaining our experience of both plight and hope.

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