Meat, Bones, and Laughter without Words: Finding Bergson's Laughter in Beckett's Act without Words I

Meat, Bones, and Laughter without Words Finding Bergson’s Laughter in Beckett’s Act without Words I Christopher Morrison Afew years after Samuel Beckett rose to international fame with Waiting for Godot,1 Ruby Cohn wrote in Samuel Beckett : The Comic Gamut: “Since Bergson in Le rire bases his analysis of the comic largely on the comedy of manners, it is not surprising that his framework best fits this Beckett book. Of the three domains, situation , character, and language, it is mainly upon the last that Beckett’s comic effects depend.” In her analysis of early Beckett works, Cohn finds evidence to back up this assertion: “Bergson’s linguistic breakdown is almost sufficient to explain the comic of More Pricks.” Of Part III of Watt, she writes, “Beckett avails himself of certain Bergsonian comic linguistic tools . . . [and] makes use of Bergson’s favorite example of linguistic ambiguity, the pun.” Yet, as Cohn moves toward the late 1940s to discuss Beckett’s more mature works—his “first burst into French”— she finds that “the Bergsonian comic roster virtually disappears.”2 And from that page and year forward, 1962, any serious scholarly discussion of the influence of Bergson on Beckett also virtually disappears. A look at the relevant entry in The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett suggests why. At first the editors, C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski, acknowledge that Bergson’s taking of Descartes’ famous Je suis une chose qui pense, and substituting his own Je suis une chose qui dure “[asserts] the primacy within consciousness of duration. This would be central to [Beckett’s] thought.” In the end, however, Ackerley and Gontarski dismiss Bergson: “[A]ttempts to associate SB with Bergson founder on one rocky reef: SB’s total rejection of vitalism.”3 Despite Cohn’s assertion that Bergson was concerned mainly with 90 C H R I S T O P H E R M O R R I S O N text, and despite the general passing over of Bergson’s theories by Beckett scholars, an understanding of Laughter (Le rire)4 in combination with la durée is—at the very least—an important critical tool for a director of Beckett approaching the entirely pantomimed Act without Words I.5 To explore this thesis I will (1) provide an overview of salient aspects of Bergson and his philosophy; (2) connect him to Beckett; (3) point out some salient points in Laughter; (4) apply it to Act without Words I; and (5) use what I have shown as a heuristic to comment on the directorial choices in the Beckett on Film 2001 version of the play by the Czech director Karel Reisz. In the years following the publication in Paris of the French philosopher and Nobel Laureate Henri Bergson’s L’Evolution créatrice (1907), and particularly its English translation Creative Evolution (1911),6 Bergson ’s theories of “duration” (la durée) and l’élan vital, which dealt with the value of inner contemplation and intuition, in A. F. Losev’s words, “resounded throughout the world.” Richard Lehan goes further: “Bergson ’s influence, direct or indirect, on modern literature cannot be denied or de-emphasized. . . . [T]he Bergsonian construct generated a realm of discourse from which modernism, as a literary movement, was inseparable .” Writers such as T. S. Eliot attended Bergson’s lectures at the Sorbonne , fell under the spell of “the first philosopher to take Time seriously ,” and were enchanted by the revitalization of the role of intuition promulgated in Bergson’s writings and teachings. Only a decade or so later, the philosopher’s reputation had declined to the extent that detractors began to refer to Bergsonianism derogatorily as the “time-cult.” Yet writers such as Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Frost, psychologists such as Jean Piaget, and the French existentialist movement of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus all owe a considerable debt to the man of whom Wyndham Lewis wrote in 1927, “more than any other single figure [he] is responsible for the main intellectual characteristics of the world we live in.”7 As Anthony Uhlmann has shown, Samuel Beckett made use of Bergson ’s philosophy in his movie Film to...