Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett

7 The Oversight of Ceaseless Eyes

7 The Oversight of Ceaseless Eyes You're sure you saw me, you won't come tomorrow and tell me that you never saw meP That desperate line from Godot seems, in the recessive distance, if anything more forlorn and, in the context of recent thought, just about doubly absurd. For even if Didi were seen, as he (dubiously) appears to be, he is after all only an appearance, and what does the seeing amount to-what does it mean?-if we can't quite count on an identity, an I that goes with the me, an autonomous self or ego, as the stable subject of sight. The issue is recurrent in Beckett, explicit in other plays, where in all the rushing words the void keeps pouring in, as with the retrospective subject of That Time, which, "never having been" in the first place, is "never the same but the same as what for God's sake did you ever say I to yourself come on now (Eyes clase.) could you ever say I to yourself in your life...."2 Well, then (eyes apen), should one speak of the object? And even if that were stable, says a more theoretical voice, "exemption from intrinsic flux in a given object does not change the fact that it is the correlative of a subject that does not enjoy such immunity. The observer infects the observed with his own mobility. "3 This may sound like an echo of Heisenberg in the language of Lacan, but it is once again from Beckett, in the precocious essay on Proust. If the garrulous nothing of Waiting far Gadat was an aporetic enactment amid the slippage of the signifiers, the slim volume of Proust-with its "contempt for the vulgarity of a plausible concatenation"-was an already exhaustive preface to poststructuralist themes and the specular obsessions of the discourse of desire. The loss, the lack, the rupture, all of it is there, the break in origins and the originary trace, and-in the "gaze [that] is no longer the necromancy that sees in each precious object a mirror of the past" (Is)-the terror of separation and uncertain signs. "Moreover, when it is a case of human intercourse, we are faced by the problem of an object whose mobility is not merely a function of the subject's," but even more irreparably than the allure of "otherness" implies, "two separate and immanent dynamisms II3 I I4 / Sails of the Herring Fleet related by no system of synchronisation. So that, whatever the object, our thirst for possession is, by definition, insatiable" (6-7). If the desire for possession is bound up with the gaze ("the eyes with gazing fed": from Shakespeare 's sonnets to feminist/film criticism), there remains the troubling question-suggested not only by Marcel gazing at the sleeping Albertine, but also by Didi (with the look of being looked at) gazing at the sleeping Gogo-as to who is really doing the seeing in the specular play of an absence that is the principle of sight. "You don't have to look." "You can't help looking." "True." Never mind who for the moment; looking at what? As the tramps gaze over the forestage in the exchange of ceaseless eyes-veering wildly in their imaginings from "the very beginning" (the primal scene?) to "the last moment" (the one before or yet to come?)-they see "A charnel-house! A charnelhouse !" which seems to arise through the maw of the audience from the recursive deadliness of thought itself. "What is terrible is to have thought" (Codat 41). And if you think of it it's appalling, the more you think, feeling it coming all the same, the end or the beginning ("The very beginning of WHAT?" [42]), as Didi said at the outset, "(With emphasis): AP-PALLED." You can't help looking, true, but any way you look at it, it can't be seen because, as Gogo says after peering into his boot, staring "sightlessly" before him, "there's nothing to show" (8). And there's the rub, which leaves us-like the claim of Hamlet to what "passeth show"-with the equally ceaseless problem of interpretation, that estranged enterprise of the mind, somewhere between "the luminous projection of subject desire" (Proust I) and the desire to make (objective) sense of whatever it is we see or, even more so, what we don't; or what with more or less hysteria, like Gogo waking from...