s e gontarski what it is to have been bergson and beckett on movement multiplicity and...

8/10/2019 s e Gontarski What It is to Have Been Bergson and Beckett on Movement Multiplicity and Representation

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What it is to have been: Bergson and Beckett on Movement,

Multiplicity and RepresentationS.E. Gontarski

Florida State University

Te analysis of Becketts work offered here suggests that the Bergsonian spirit hismetaphysics, his anti-empirical emphasis on intuition, his critique of language andrepresentation, his emphases on image and the act of perception and his exteriorizationof memory, all of which infused much of modernism infused Beckett and his work aswell. Writing to his condant, Tomas McGreevy, on 31 January 1938, Beckett offerssome faint praise of McGreevys essay on Jack Yeats, telling him that he has provideda clue to the kind of people who in the phrase of Bergson cant be happy till they havesolidied the owing. Krapp may be one of those people, one who struggles to arrest the ow of dure with concepts or symbols. Metaphysics is therefore the science which claito dispense with symbols, Bergson tells us in Te Creative Mind , or as the narrator ofBecketts seminal, liminal Watt has noted, perhaps reluctantly disclosing something ofan aesthetics, No symbols where none intended.

Keywords: Beckett / Bergson / memory / representation / nothingness

I can at turns imagine a nought of external perception or a nought

of internal perception, but not both at once, for the absence of oneconsists, at bottom, in the exclusive presence of the other.

H B ,C REATIVE E VOLUTION 303

I have nothing to say, and Im saying it. J C , L

N (1949)

. . . the kind of people who in the phrase of Bergson cant be happy tillth h lidi d th i g


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66 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Numbe

In his critique of the Eleatic paradoxes in Matter and Memory(1897, 1910), HenriBergson takes issue with Zenos proof of the impossibility or the illusion ofmotion since Zenos famous paradoxes consist in making time and movementcoincide with the line which underlies them, in attributing to them the same sub-

divisions as to the line, in short, in treating them like that line (191). Earlier inthe reworking of his doctoral thesis,ime and Free Will: An Essay on the ImmediateData of Consciousness (1889, 1913), he focused on the paradox of the race course whereby, in Zenos analysis, a runner could not traverse the course, might not infact even be able to begin the circuit, since the course is innitely divisible and sothe distance from start to nish is subject to innite divisibility. Bergson countersthat Te mistake of the Eleatics arises from their identication of this series ofacts, each of which is of a denite kind and indivisible , with the homogeneous space which underlies them (113). Tat is, what Zeno takes as an inscription coeval with movement, Bergson sees as a metaphor, a representation of that movement.In some ways, Bergson admits, such reasoning represents common sense or whatBergson calls an element of convention (CM 10), as Zeno carries over to themovement the properties of its trajectories [that is, the divisible line or course],but much of Bergsons analysis suspends such common sense whose aim is practi-cal solutions to problems, scientic or philosophical. A decade after Matter and Memory , in Creative Evolution (1907, 1911), his critique of the Eleatics is evenmore explicit, calling the paradox an absurd proposition that movement is made

of immobilities (335), and so the Eleatic paradoxes all involve the confusion ofmovement with the space covered, or at least the conviction that one can treatmovement as one treats space, divide it without taking account of its articulations(CM 170). Bergsons thesis is startlingly simple: If movement is not everything,it is nothing (CM 171). Denial of mobility is for Bergson not only a denial ofmotion, but a denial of change itself. As Bergson recounts in the autobiographi-cal Introduction to the last of his books, in the rst of two Introductions to thecompilation of lectures and essays calledTe Creative Mind (1919, 1946), thisinsight into the nature of time and its measurement was his initial, his primaryintuition as a student, one on which he built an entire career:

Ever since my university days I had been aware that duration [or simply time butnot its measurement] is measured by the trajectory of a body in motion and thatmathematical time is a line; but I had not yet observed that this operation contrastsradically with all other processes of measurement, for it is not carried out on an aspector an effect representative of what one wishes to measure, but on something whichexcludes it. Te line one measures is immobile, time is mobility. Te line is made, it iscomplete; time is what is happening, and more than that, it is what causes everything

to happen. Te measuring of time never deals with duration as duration. (CM 11)

Zenos argument is further betrayed Bergson tells us by language which


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Bergson and Beckett on Movement, Multiplicity, and Representation 67

in the whole nonetheless (193), and All real change is an indivisible change, henotes in his second lecture on Te Perception of Change (CM 172). Bergsonsposition on language may be something akin to anti-nominalism, or close tothat nominalist irony that Beckett calls for in his German letter of 1937, or as

Mrs. Williams notes in the theatrical fragment Human Wishes, Words failus (Disjecta 160).

Bergsons lifelong critique of Zeno also engages issues of the relativity ofmotion, as he moves from mathematics to physics in ways that suggest (or evenanticipate) Einsteins Teory of Special Relativity of 1905, or perhaps the inter-section of Einsteins formulations with Zenos paradoxes. His clarication of Mat-ter and Memory in An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903, 1912) asserts early on thatMy perception of motion will vary with the point of view, moving or stationary,from which I observe it (21). Of the Eleatic paradox called the Stadium, further-more, Bergson describes the terms thus, given: a moving body which is displaced with a certain velocity, and which passes simultaneously before two bodies, one atrest and the other moving toward it with the same velocity as its own. During thesame time that it passes a certain length of the rst body, it naturally passes doublethe length of the other (CE 258, n. 2). Zenos conclusion that a duration [thatis, movement, or time, or change] is the double of itself, [is nally in Bergsonsretort] a childish argument (258, n. 2). Zenos error, in all his reasoning is . . .that he leaves real duration on one side and considers only its objective track in

space (258, n. 2). For Bergson, Zenos sophistry is a profound attack on change,the consequence of motion. Such a critique brings us up against the Bergsonianrst principle: a very brief analysis of the idea of duration will show us both why we attribute instants to duration and why it cannot have any (CE 190).

For Bergson, then, representation is of a piece with Zenos trajectory and so afalsication of motion, becoming or lifes ow. Both matter and its representationsare then severally, in themselves, false issues without perception, which relies on what Bergson calls a picturing in consciousness (13), and which nally is alsoaction, or at least, my perception displays . . . the eventual or possible actions ofmy body ( M & M 22). Matter and so the universe, for Bergson, is an aggregateof images. And by image we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealists call arepresentation, but less than that which the realists calls athing an existence placed halfway between the thing and the representation ( M & M 9). Images are perceived when my senses are open to them, unperceived when they are closed (17). Tat center for perception, consciousness, differs fromthe material organ of the brain, but, the brain is an image like others, envelopedin a mass of other images ( M & M 41) and so is already the theater of very variedmolecular movements (22), which molecular movement is perception, which inturn denes consciousness; that is, perception is the birth of consciousness. Tebody brain included of course is thus within this aggregate of images itself


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the bird has mastered nihil in intellectu, but is unable to complete the insight:Tese rst three words the bird managed well enough, but the celebrated restric-tion was too much for it, all you heard was a series of squawks ( Malone Dies218). Te parroted fragment retains its own insight, however; nothing in the mind

may be enough to gloss at least Murphys monadic, if not solipsistic, mind, thenarrators description of which was not an impoverishment, for it [Murphysmind] excluded nothing that it did not itself contain. Nothing ever had been, was or would be in the universe outside it but was already present as virtual, oractual, or virtual rising into actual, or actual falling into virtual, in the universeinside it ( Murphy107). Tat virtual in Bergsons world seems to fulll the roleof imagination, so that one might imagine Murphys mind with the universealready contained, that is perceived, or his imagining it in various states. Te nar-rator suggests Murphy thus privileges a single, absolute image, his consciousness,on which the arrangement of all other images and image clusters depends, thelatter of which only represent duration. Tat is, besides the system that Bergsondescribes as that of the realist or scientist, where an aggregate of images [is]governed, as to their mutual relations, by xed laws, in which effects are in strictproportion to their causes, and of which the character is an absence of center. . . ( M & M 26), what the narrator of Dream of Fair to Middling Women calledBalzacs chloroformed world of clockwork cabbages (Dream 119). Tat critiqueof Balzac and his world is not just literary criticism, but an attack on a way of

knowing, a system of epistemology. Murphy, and perhaps the Unnamable andHamm, on the other hand, partake of an alternate system focused on perceptions,that is to say in which these same images [the aggregate of images above] seemto depend on a single one among them, around which they range themselves ondifferent planes, so as to be wholly transformed by the slightest modicationsof this central image (Bergson, M & M 26); consciousness, and its molecularinterplay through perception, is the central image to which all other images relate(Bergson, Metaphysics 26). Te Unnamables doubts about his relationship to hisplanetary avatars, Malone in this case, centers on such an issue of epistemology,on whether he knows them (or him) from the inside or the outside, on who is, inHamms phrase, Bang in the Center! ( Endgame 27): Malone is there. Of hismortal liveliness little trace remains. He passes before me at doubtless regularintervals, unless it is I who pass before him. No, once and for all, I do not move.He passes, motionless (Te Unnamable 292). A slight disturbance or alterationin Hamms relative position, for example, realigns or throws off the (or his) entireuniverse: Put me right in the center! ( Endgame 27). Beckett may have focused ongeometry and called Hamms preoccupation Pythagorean in his 1967 staging ofthe play, but Hamms preoccupation suggests a Bergsonian epistemology as well.

Hamm: Back to my place. . . . Is that my place?


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is perhaps Clovs principal insight in Endgame , the little trail of black dust heobserves behind him (81). What Krapp fails at is the experience of being thatBergson calls dure, because Pure duration . . . excludes all idea of juxtaposi-tion, reciprocal externality, and extension ( Metaphysics 26). In his attempt to

understand, to know being or its most immediate example, Krapp nally remainsfettered by what Bergson calls habits of mind ( Metaphysics 27). Te tapes donot offer the convergence of images that would access pure dure but representa quantity of moments. Te fallacy is the confusion or conation of the Oneand the Multiple; more tapes or more representations on tape do not add up to alife, do not constitute fuller understanding of what Bergson calls an undividedpresent (CM 180), just as additional grains of millet add nothing to the sense oridea of heapness. Insight into the One, or into that silence that underlies Allthat Beckett references in his 1937 letter (Disjecta 172) and irts with most of hiscreative life, would require intuition and the breaking of habit, the impossibilityof which is at least represented by Krapps inability to resist bananas and drink,his continued need to represent the experience of being in language, on tape, andhis preoccupation with concepts. Krapps means of knowing is analytic ratherthan intuitive, the latter of which Bergson also calls metaphysics. At best, oneof the images that might have formed a multiplicity, that of the woman in thepunt, is singled out and so displaces or excludes others. Krapps enterprise, whichis at base epistemological and ontological, collapses, as does his material being. It

may be little more than coincidence that one of Bergsons images inTe Creative Mind for memory, and so being, is reminiscent of or evokes the tape recorder:two spools with a tape running between them, one spool unwinding the tape,the other winding it up (19293). But Bergson immediately rejects this imageof accumulation, o tell the truth, it is neither a winding nor an unwinding,for these two images evoke the representation of lines or surfaces whose partsare homogeneous to and superposable on one another (193). Krapp seems tohave sullied his spools with language, accepted the representation, as the tapecaptures only a series of moments or still points, and so is itself testimony of hisfailures. aping is, or should be, an unnecessary exercise: In reality, Bergsontells us in Creative Evolution, the past is preserved by itself automatically. Inits entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thoughtand willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which isabout to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fainleave it outside (CE 7), or again in Te Creative Mind , Te past preserves itselfautomatically (180). Krapps taped rendition of the past, its representation, isinauthentic, little more than a series of snapshots. Endgame may as well outlinesuch failures of representation, or more generally language, in Hamms narra-tive attempt to remember, even as the play itself sounds very like a meditationon motion and hence on time and change: to Hamms What time is it? Clov


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like time stopped, Something is indeed taking its course ( Endgame 32). TisHamm intuits, despite evidence to the contrary.

More important, perhaps, is that such a critique of representation suggestssomething central to Becketts late work, to his theatre, to Becketts idea of theater,

particularly the late theatre, and to his late prose, as he abandons narrative and attimes intelligibility in favor of perception and the image. Late works likeCompany or Tat ime , to take just two examples, are indeed explorations of memory, butoften memory extended into space, memory as external and material, and so oftenunrecognizable as an image of being to the protagonists. Teater is by denitionspatial, where even images, those mental bridges, occupy space since they arematerial or partake of the material, and so there is an inherent static quality totheatre, an arresting of dure. Even ideas or memories play in theatrical space, as what appears to be something approaching the pure interiority of consciousnessor the stream of consciousness is often externalized especially in Becketts latetheatre as memory materialized. In rifonovas analysis of Bergson she notesthat, Te image, then, is important since it reveals the origin of consciousness asconscious perception, but insofar as conscious perception differs only in degreefrom unconscious perception. Te image does not reveal the qualitative differ-ence between matter and mind, which consists of the minds capacity to preserveimages, in its capacity for memory (81). InTat ime, externalized voices takeon an interrogative function over such an issue, repeatedly asking, When was

that, or Was that the time or was that another time as they respond to what areessentially snapshots of memory (Collected Shorter Plays 388). At best, such exten-sion or spacialization of memory into theatrical (or narrative) space memoryobserved externally and materially offers immobile points of memorys mobil-ity, moments of time stopped in a process of continuous motion and change, or,in works like A Piece of Monologue andFilm, snapshots themselves; they canproduce only what Bergson calls a counterfeit of real movement which fails toevoke the instability of the real ( Metaphysics 44). Hence Becketts gures areuniformly perplexed at what purports to be memory or the real, even materializedas snapshots, since they are unrecognizable by consciousness as the felt experienceof being or self. It is the minds or memorys participation in matter that seems toperplex the perceivers on stage.

From such a perspective of the image, then, there is no distinction in con-sciousness between what we might call the corporeal and the incorporeal. Te twogures of Ohio Impromptu, not named but functionally described as Reader andListener, are as alike in appearance as possible (Collected Shorter Plays 445) evenas one is apparently spirit, one material, but not to consciousness. Te image of theone is as the image of the other, as we perceive both on the screen of consciousnessin images that partake of both the spirit and the material. Tat is the nature ofthe image in Bergsons terms Te plays impact lies not in the curious narrative


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issue ofFootfalls similarly is not to decipher which of the images is corporeal and which not that is, why the stage remains empty in the brief but essential fourthact but in the multiplicity of haunting images. Te empty stage thus alreadycontains it all. (Collected Shorter Plays 403). Such an analysis of Becketts work

as offered here is not designed to suggest that Beckett consciously or necessarilyfollowed Bergsonian models, but that the Bergsonian spirit, his metaphysics, hisanti-empirical emphasis on intuition, his critique of language and representa-tion, his emphases on image and the act of perception and his exteriorizationof memory, all of which infused much of modernism, infused Beckett and his work as well. Writing to his condant, Tomas McGreevy, on 31 January 1938,Beckett offers some faint praise of McGreevys essay on Jack Yeats, telling himthat he has provided a clue to the kind of people who in the phrase of Bergsoncant be happy till they have solidied the owing (Letters 599). Krapp may beone of those people, one who struggles to arrest the ow of dure with conceptsor symbols. Metaphysics is therefore the science which claims to dispense withsymbols (191), Bergson tells us inTe Creative Mind , or as the narrator of theseminal, the liminalWatt has noted, perhaps reluctantly disclosing something ofan aesthetics, No symbols where none intended (Watt 254). Watt too, however,may be among those trying to solidify the owing. Te web site of the Radical Academy summarizes Bergsons Metaphysics, his Intuitionism thus:

For Bergson, concepts solidify reality; they stop the owing stream of the life ofreality; they x it between rigid outlines, much in the fashion that the camera freezesreality on the surface of the print. According to Bergson, concepts deform reality.Reality, in its continuous movement, is richer than any concept. (ContemporaryPhilosophy)

It is thus not so much a matter of Becketts writing through or even against Berg-son as such or appropriating Bergson in some unacknowledged way, as Beckett writing through consciousness and perception and exploring such issues throughthe only consciousness he could know, his own, and that only through whatBergson thought of as the rigorous method of intuition, breaking his own habitsof mind in the process, a process at which many of his characters inevitably fail.

Bergson was the primary scientist and philosopher of consciousness in Franceand the English speaking world in the rst half of the twentieth century, and atthe very least he outlined the central preoccupations of modernism. He was thusunavoidable. Tere is at least one reality, Bergson tells us, which we all seizefrom within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own person in itsowing through time, the self which endures (CM 191). Beckett may have bestdescribed this self which endures to friend and painter Avigdor Arikha in aletter of 11 Nov. 1958. Arika apparently asked if Beckett was working. Notyet was the reply after Dublin I hope ry to tell one more time what it is to


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Works Cited

Atik, Anne. How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett . London: Faber, 2001. Print.

Beckett, Samuel.Collected Shorter Plays . New York: Grove Press, 1984. Print.

. Company . New York: Grove Press, 1980. Print.

. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment . Ed. Ruby Cohn. New York, GrovePress, 1984. Print.

. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Eds. Eoin OBrien and Edith Fournier. Dublin: Black CatPress, 1992. Print.

. Endgame: A Play in One Act Followed by Act without Words: A Mime for One Player . New York:Grove Press, 1958. Print.

. Footfalls.Collected Shorter Plays . 23843.

. Te Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 1: 19291940 . Eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and LoisMore Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.

. Krapps Last ape.Collected Shorter Plays . 5363.

. Malone Dies . New York: Grove Press, 1951 & 1956. Print.

. Murphy . London: Routledge, 1938. New York: Grove Press, 1957. Print.

. Ohio Impromptu.Collected Shorter Plays . 28488.

. Tat ime. Collected Shorter Plays . 22635.

. Te Unnamable . New York: Grove Press, 1953. Print.

. Watt. New York: Grove Press, 1959. Print.Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. rans. Arthur Mitchell. 1911. New York: Te Modern Library,

1944. Print. Cited as CE .

. Te Creative Mind . rans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. Print.Cited as CM .

. An Introduction to Metaphysics . rans. . E. Hulme. 1903. Cambridge: Hackett, 1999. Print.

. Matter and Memory . rans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. 1910. New York: ZoneBooks, 1991. Print. Cited as M & M .

. ime and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. 1889. Mineola: Dover,2001. Print.

Cage, John. Lecture on Nothing.Silence . Middletown, C : Wesleyan UP, 1961. 10927. Print.

Contemporary Philosophy of the Spirit: Intuitionism. Center for Applied Philosophy: Te Radical Academy, n.d. Web. 25 May 2010.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guatari. A Tousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . rans. BrianMassumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Print.

Mori, Naoya. Becketts Windows and the Windowless Self.Samuel Beckett oday / Aujourdhui ( AfterBeckett / Daprs Beckett ). Eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houpermans and Bruno Clment. No.

14 (2004): 35770. Print. rifonova, emenuga. Matter-Image or Image-Consciousness: Bergson contra Sartre. Janus Head

( )


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