Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature

3 From the Sublime to the Ordinary: Stanley Cavell’s Beckett

chapter three “Beckett shrugs his shoulders at the possibility of philosophy today.” So claims Theodor Adorno in his rather abortive “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen.”1 And yet, perhaps because of this very act of shoulder shrugging, the works of Samuel Beckett seem to have fired the imaginations of a great many philosophers .DiscussionsofBeckettfeatureprominentlyinthewritingsofsuchthinkers as Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Blanchot, Alain Badiou, and, of course, Theodor Adorno, and current work in Beckett studies has been dominated by contemplating , clarifying, and extrapolating these philosophical readings.2 A recent book by Richard Lane, Beckett and Philosophy, is divided into two sections, one mapping out Beckett’s significance for an array of French philosophers and one mapping out the same territory in German philosophy. Tellingly, there is no third section on Beckett’s significance for Anglo-American philosophers, even though his works have drawn comment from leading thinkers like Stanley Cavell and Martha Nussbaum.3 Indeed, since the publication of Must We Mean WhatWeSay?fortyyearsago,Cavell’sessayonEndgamehasattractedtheattention of only the smallest handful of commentators—a fraction of those who have written on Adorno’s essay on the same subject. This chapter takes some steps toward redressing this imbalance by teasing out some of the implications of Cavell’s position. i I want to start by taking a few caveats from Simon Critchley, one of the select few philosophers to have taken Cavell’s reading of Beckett seriously. Critchley begins his philosophical discussion of Beckett with the following words of warning: From the Sublime to the Ordinary Stanley Cavell’s Beckett 86 s ta n l e y c av e l l a n d t h e c l a i m o f l i t e r at u r e The writings of Samuel Beckett seem to be particularly, perhaps uniquely, resistant to philosophical interpretation. . . . His texts continually seem to pull the rug from under the feet of the philosopher by showing themselves to be conscious of the possibility of such interpretations; or, better, such interpretations seemtolagbehindthetextwhichtheyaretryingtointerpret;or,betterstill,such interpretations seem to lag behind their object by saying too much: something essential to Beckett’s language is lost by overshooting the text and ascending into the stratosphere of metalanguage. . . . It might well be that philosophically meditated meanings are precisely what we should not be in search of when thinking through Beckett’s work.4 Critchley characterizes the danger besetting those of us who try to read Beckett philosophically as “saying too much and saying too little, saying too little by saying too much.”5 This is a warning we would do well to heed. A satisfactory approach to Beckett, it seems, must navigate between a Scylla and a Charybdis: on the one hand, the temptation to conclude that Beckett’s works are essentially meaningless; and on the other, the compulsion to read into them layers and levels of supposedly “deeper,” pseudo-philosophical, metaphysical meaning .Itisbetweenthesetwoextremes—distantcousins,Isuspect,ofskepticism and metaphysics—that Cavell’s reading of Beckett tries to plot its course, while acknowledging both the temptation and the compulsion that would lead it astray. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Cavell’s reading of Beckett is its insistence on taking Beckett as literally as possible.6 Cavell steers deftly between the argument that Beckett’s plays are meaningless and the argument that they haveasupposedly“deeper”metaphysicalmeaningbypointingoutthatasoften as not, Beckett’s characters mean exactly what they say. Endgame is suffused with a property that Cavell terms “hidden literality” (MWM, p. 119), as in the following: Hamm: Did you ever think of one thing? Clov: Never. or Clov: Do you believe in the life to come? Hamm: Mine was always that.7 This is what Cavell calls “Beckett’s uncovering of the literal” (MWM, p. 120), and it is directly related to the claims he makes about the ordinariness s ta n l e y c av e l l’s b e c k e t t 87 of Endgame. As Cavell puts it, “The sort of method I try to use consistently in reading the play, [is] one in which I am always asking of a line either: What are themostordinarycircumstancesunderwhichsuchalinewouldbeuttered?Or: Whatdothewordsliterallysay?”(MWM,p.121).Thisstrategymightreasonably beexpectedtostaveoffthethreatofskepticism,butIfindthatitdoesratherthe opposite. Faced with an assertion like “Beckett’s plays mean nothing more and nothing less than what they say,” a skeptic (or, for that matter, a bemused undergraduate ) might reasonably respond with the...