The Beckettian Absolute Universal

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 2, spring 2003 ERIC LEVY The Beckettian Absolute Universal In Beckettian mimesis, there are no definitive conclusions, in the sense of either termination or comprehension. Instead of termination, there is only the tedious >continuation= (The Unnamable, 363) of that which cannot be stopped (>one can=t go on one can=t put a stop= [How It Is, 90]), because that which continues is >finality without end= (Molloy, 111): >at the same time it is over and it goes on= (Molloy, 36). Instead of comprehension, there is the persistence of confusion: >always the same thing proposing itself to my perplexity= (Texts for Nothing, 121). In this context, to end is to initiate movement towards >yet another end= (>For to End Yet Again,= 15). To end is to confirm the inevitability of resuming: >I knew that all was about to end, or to begin again, it little mattered which, and it little mattered how, I had only to wait= (Molloy, 161). Nothing ends, because the prevailing predicament never changes: >and always the same old thing the same old things= (How It Is, 107). Nothing is understood, because experience provokes the same perplexity: >all is inexplicable, space and time, false and inexplicable, suffering and tears, and even the old convulsive cry, It=s not me, it can=t be me= (Texts for Nothing, 113). The impossibility of concluding, in the dual sense of termination and comprehension, is spectacularly expressed in the quintessential Beckettian metaphor concerning the reciprocal estrangement of speaker and auditor (or consciousness and its own content): >one who speaks saying, without ceasing to speak, Who=s speaking?, and one who hears, mute, uncomprehending, far from all= (Texts for Nothing, 134; my emphasis). An analogous metaphor involves the reciprocal estrangement of sight and its object: >perpetually looking at something while at the same time wondering what that something could possibly be= (Malone Dies, 282). This emphasis, in Beckettian mimesis, on unrelenting confusion constitutes a stunning inversion of metaphysics, traditionally understood. Where, according to Etienne Gilson, the task of metaphysics is >to grasp, beyond all particular sciences, the conditions that make knowledge itself possible,= in Beckettian mimesis the fundamental task is to struggle endlessly with the conditions that make knowledge impossible: >always the same thing proposing itself to my perplexity= (Texts for Nothing, 121; Gilson, Unity, 5). More precisely, the fundamental task is to ensure the continuity of conditions that make knowledge impossible and perpetuate >[d]ear the beckettian absolute universal 661 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 2, spring 2003 incomprehension=: >The essential is never to arrive anywhere= (The Unnamable, 325, 338). Yet, the knowledge here to be thwarted ultimately concerns self-knowledge: >no one here knows himself it=s the place without knowledge= (How It Is, 123). The Beckettian predicament is to have no identity but awareness of nonidentity , no being but awareness of inexistence: >the knowing non-exister= (Texts for Nothing, 134). But, at bottom, this predicament is an >imposed task= (The Unnamable, 314) or project whose purpose is >the alleviations of flight from self=: >Simply to find within himself a palliative for what he is, through no fault of his own= (The Unnamable, 367). The need to have no identity derives from the ineradicable guilt attached to identity: >to be is to be guilty= (Texts for Nothing, 95); >the lifelong charge against me= (Molloy, 35B36). The proximate cause of this guilt is the pain of experience, whose unrelenting intensity invokes the notion of punishment for existence: >I was given a pensum, at birth perhaps, as a punishment for having been born perhaps= (The Unnamable, 310). In this context, self-pity becomes self-exculpation. To be obsessed with the pain of experience is to repudiate responsibility for suffering it: >it=s not my turn to know what, to know what I am, where I am, and what I should do to stop being it= (The Unnamable, 413). To brood on the sense of punishment is to confirm innocence (>punished for having been punished= [The Unnamable, 394]) and ignorance of fault: >what is required of me that I am tormented thus= (How It Is, 63). But the strategy requires tireless vigilance regarding the...