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by Marjorie Perloff
excerpt from
WITTGENSTEIN'S LADDER:
Degradation, loss of subjectivity, the emptying out of being,
death: these topoi, drawn from the TRILOGY and the early plays and
still largely accepted by Beckett commentators, have not surpri-
singly, been read retrospectively into WATT. The protagonist's
anguish has been viewed as a variant on Sartre's nausée, Mr.
Knott's house has been described as the place where "there are no
more questions, orders, explanations," given that "life is rendered
inanimate or scaled down from the human or animal to the vegetable
level," and in an up-to-date Lacanian study, Thomas J. Cousineau
declares:
[WATT's] portrayal of a rational individual humiliated by an absurd world
is only a special case of a more fundamental concern; the true center of
WATT, of which the concern with rationality is merely the visible trace, is
the suspicion, apparent in all of Beckett's fiction, that humans are inhabited
by a false consciousness. Their true subjectivity, the support of their capa-
city for authentic action, has been suppressed; in its place we find a sur-
rogate self, distorted and made unreal by the alienating culture whose mark
it bears. (My [Perloff's] emphasis)
What I find curious in such assessments of Beckett's fiction
is that the "darkness of our time," as Wittgenstein calls it in the
1945 preface to the INVESTIGATIONS, is left largely unspecified. The
"alienating culture" Cousineau speaks of is presumably the culture
of late capitalism; the reduction of human beings to a vegetable
state is presumably the human condition "after the catastrophe"--
after Auschwitz, in Adorno's famous formulation. But the world of
WATT, and by extension of the TRILOGY, is, I shall argue here, "dark"
(and also "light") in a much more specific way than such readings
would admit. Its characters are victims, not so much of the "human
condition" or even of the "alienating culture" in which they find
themselves, as of a crisis of language, a crisis that occurs when
the very possibility of making connections between public and private
discourse breaks down, as it did in the years leading up to and during
the Second World War.
Source of text: Marjorie Perloff, WITTGENSTEIN'S LADDER: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1996) |
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