UNDERSTANDING
LANGUAGE GAMES IN THE SHORT
FICTION OF JORGE LUIS
BORGES AND SAMUEL BECKETT
Literature
Survey
Sambuddha Ghosh,
M.Phil, Department of English
Jadavpur University
Introduction
The project I propose to undertake finds itself situated
within what we might call the broad domain of a reading of “micronarratives” in
literature after the seeming aftermath of European modernity. It will examine
the shorter fiction of two authors, Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett to
arrive at a certain postulation of their textual strategies which foreground
the role of language in literature. The basic motivation behind such a project
was to view the act of postmodern writing as dealing with dispersed realities,
where the author abdicates his sacrosanct position as the figure of authority
who mediates between his work and the body of readers he seeks to address.
“Writing”, for the postmodernist writer is no longer a complete exercise of the
free will. It consists of multiple fragmented subjectivities and a random
dispersal of constituent pieces that might be thought to constitute such
subjectivity and a deliberate evasion of the self in a domain of applied
objectivity (with the painful awareness that this objectivity can never be
brought to its logical conclusion).
The methodology to be followed would draw largely from the
body of post-structuralist thought that has invaded the domain of literary
studies since the last four decades, following the “linguistic turn” in
Critical Theory that abandoned the (broadly speaking) liberal humanist
understanding of texts. I would first like to deal with three key terms in my
thesis, trying to pinpoint the ideological predilections that situate them in
literary discourse:
(i) The epithet
“Postmodern”: Perhaps the term
“postmodern” is the one which would require the most qualification. By the
term, I broadly mean the movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies
and associated cultural movements which have come to dominate the aftermath the
Second World War in Europe and finds its theoretical underpinnings in the works
of theory after the demise of Structuralism as shown through the works of Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francoise Lyotard, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean
Baudrillard, Giles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and the Tel Quel group of critics.
The publication of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(1979) may be regarded as one of the events which brought a methodological
break from the clutches of an all-encompassing European modernity. (Lyotard 1984) Another of Lyotard’s essays,
“Answering the question: What is Postmodernism?” (1982) has been considered by
the critic Peter Barry as an appendix to Lyotard’s book. (Barry 2010) Lyotard’s famous definition of “postmodernism” can be
summarized in his phrase “the incredulity towards metanarratives” of progress,
essential human freedom and perfectibility. Difference, multiplicity and
pluralism are to be seen as the hallmarks of the term which are pitted against
“the idea of a unitary end of history and of a subject.” (ibid.)
The degree to which I accept Lyotard’s explanation is
variable at discrete points. Innovation and artistic experimentation, while
being essential features of the postmodernist project are not postmodernism’s
alone. The quest towards novelty, as Habermas had proclaimed, was already
contained within the project of modernity for post-Enlightenment Europe. A group
of relatively less audible voices in the discourses of the humanities have
already announced the demise of postmodernism. New coinages were introduced by
Andrew Hoborek in his introduction to an issue of the journal Twentieth Century
Literature titled “After Postmodernism” in 2007— Raoul Eshelman
(performatism), Gilles Lipovetsky (hypermodernity), Nicolas Bourriaud (Altermodern), and Alan Kirby (Digimodernism, formerly called Pseudo-modernism). (Hoborek 2007) These developments point to the
fact that theoretical indicators of the movement can be treated as historically
grounded, which would expand and push the limits of its scope so as to
accommodate works of an immediately preceding generation who anticipated most
of its impending possibilities for development. The notion of the “dialogic” as
introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin becomes useful in this context. Both Borges and
Beckett’s work can be considered as being in constant dialogue with their
successors, grounded within the common historical matrices of postmodernity. (M. Bakhtin 1981) The “dialogic” can also be
thought to be in consonance with Eliot’s idea in “Tradition and the Individual
Talent” (Eliot, Tradition and Individual Talent
1917) that "the past should be altered by the present as much as
the present is directed by the past". All literature, as indeed is all
language, is dialogic in the sense that they are ever-changing, fluid and
always relational in nature. Therefore, for me, to consider Borges or Beckett’s
works under the umbrella of the “postmodern” is not an aberration but a
meaningful exercise.
(ii)Language Games: The term here is used broadly in the
sense used by Lyotard. Stated in its most rudimentary form, Lyotard used the
term to describe diverse set of linguistic utterances which are used in varied
contexts. The formal conditions of the enunciation assist in “situating” the
utterance in time and space. Utterances can be classified into different groups
“in terms of rules specifying their
properties and the uses to which they can be put – in exactly the same way as
the game of chess is defined by a set of rules determining the properties of
each of the pieces, in other words, the proper way to move them.” These
enunciations, as Wittgenstein had observed, do not find their signification from
something intrinsically inherent in them, but according to the specific
conditions in which they are used and re-used. Different contexts of
enunciation are objects of implicit or explicit contracts between the players
involved in the “game”. Even small changes in the rules alters the structure of
the game as a whole—the “game” becomes a different game. No game can take place
in absence of rules, and each linguistic enunciation is a discrete “move”
within the game. (Lyotard 1984) Bakhtin
in “The Problem of Speech Genres” had also posited something similar—the
“linguistic utterance” as the basic unit of the individual speaker is never
construed within vacuum; they gain their meaning only when placed within
dialogue. (M. Bakhtin 1986) And each
dialogue, we must remember, is a game played between two (or more) speakers
based on a set of rules implicit to the society in which these speakers belong.
How is the “being” of language brought out
by “language games”? As Lyotard had stated, any “move” within the game can be
made for the sheer pleasure of linguistic invention, “of turns of phrase, of words and meanings, the process behind the
evolution of language on the level of parole. But undoubtedly even this pleasure depends
on a feeling of success won at the expense of an adversary – at least one
adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted language, or connotation.” In
both of these authors, “language games” are precisely what take place to hold
up a mirror to language for language in the construction of literature.
(iii)Micronarratives: Just as a metanarrative could be defined as
"a global or
totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience", micronarratives are more modest, localized structure
embedded within, and generally lost to the overarching presence of the
metanarratives. These are products of a stance of historical pluralism that
allows space of rupture and local colour. Although Lyotard did not use the term
with respect to shorter forms of narratives, I find the term particularly
suited to the texts I am about to examine. These texts are largely
self-sufficient and are aptly legitimized by distinct (and differing) forms of
language games which are valid only within the particular text(s) in which they
take place.
With these
preliminary qualifications then, we might begin. The project will try to
examine four particular aspects of such “language games” considered of importance
by the author. Although all four of these aspects are perhaps significant to
both the fiction of Borges and Beckett, particular emphasis will be laid on two
aspects for the fiction of Borges and two for Beckett. The two textual
strategies to be followed for Borges are likely to be:
a.
The foregrounding of literary language as something different
from other forms of language in terms of its self-referential nature; in other
words, the construction of literary infinity with due emphasis on
points where thematic projections of infinity become metaphors for literary
infinity.
b. The act of writing
as a “game” of linguistic
‘play’, taking into account the willfully fantastic meanderings within the
ideological labyrinth of language and forcing language to take on a variety of
textual functions at once.
With Beckett, the textual strategies are
likely to be:
c.
The radical
exhaustion of language
through an endless proliferation of words —their duplication, modification and
destruction— as denoting the unstable condition of a fiction that pursues its
own limits.
d.
Trangression
and madness as necessary
aspects to the enterprise of literature through a “double-negation” in the
order of signification, challenging the integrity of the experiencing subject
as well as the coherence and logical flow of the literary text. This will
finally lead to textual silence and non-being on part of the author.
1.
The Construction of Literary Infinity
In Michel
Foucault’s “Language to Infinity” is recounted an exemplary tale from Homer’s
Odyssey: Odysseus, on his way home, is faced with a seemingly never-ending
series of menaces which threaten him with death. Yet each time, he escapes this
well affirmed certitude, the close to obligatory stance that Death presents
him, through an intricate description of the ways in which he is able to avert
death. And even so, the moment Odysseus begins to speak of his own guile to avert
them, the dangers return, ready to push him over the line that separates this
life from the next. The delicate balance that is maintained in the epic between
life, death and the illusory power of language remains, for Foucault, an apt
illustration of the “infinite resourcefulness of speech”. The gift of language
that the gods grant the mortals help them, as it were, to infinitely defer the
moment of impending death that is about to engulf them. And this is all the
more evident when Odysseus faces a country bard who sings his tale to him, but
one in which his death, perhaps in no less grandiose a manner, is recounted. It
is as if Odysseus, through the web of language is brought before himself by the
power of narration through the selfsame language; and this is a self he cannot
(or would not agree to, at least for the present) recognize. Therefore, he in
turn informs the country bard of his own true identity, affirming his own life
that has not yet reached its end. And finally, it becomes a matter of no less irony
when we, readers, discover that Odysseus’ tale was to made immortal by the
songs of this very bard, for whom, the hero is already as good as dead and his
deeds have become legendary. For Odysseus, the hero who remembers the tale of
his own life, the bard’s tale is a worthy counterpoint wherein his impending
death in the real world is averted through language and his fictional death,
though yet unforeseen, seems to outlive his ‘real’ death. (Foucault, Language to Infinity 1977)
Language,
when faced with death—which is also the symbol for its extinction within the
human consciousness—inevitably defers death. It looks inward, and is thus
self-reflexively turned towards the point where it first began—from a birth
preceded by a necessary death—and was stretched through life up to this point.
The process is endlessly renewed until the whole of our being tends to become
trapped within an endless maze, a labyrinth of language from which there is no
escape. Perhaps it is not incidental that the “essence” of language is an
originary breach in the order of its signification. Any act of signification
consists of one signifier pointing to an endless series of other signifiers
pointing to yet another series ad infinitum. Therefore, as Derrida has pointed
out, all human enunciation is essentially a ‘reduplication’ and to carry the argument one step forward,
all language is auto-representational in nature in so far as it always fails to
unveil meaning completely; but paradoxically, positions itself so as to assert
its own ‘being’ in the interim.
1.1 A
Foucauldian Genealogy of Representation
Perhaps our
attempts at infinite meanderings within this arbitrary prison-house of language
can be better understood if a Foucauldian genealogy of Representation can be
drawn. Representation in the “Classical” Age, for Foucault, was identical to
thought. To think was to represent the vast order of objects—their
transformation into the order of ideas was another name for thought. The nature
of representation relied on arbitrary correspondence between the abstraction of
things in the “real” world and those in the order of thought. Foucault provides
example of a map of a city street. The lines, designs and colours on paper
cannot be seen as identical to the streets that were being represented. They
are merely representations of an abstracted form of those tangible “real”
streets. From the particular street, an abstraction (the first representation)
of a street has being drawn in the human mind, which is again represented on
paper. The redoubling nature of such representations was however, not something
which Classical epistemology made much of. For example, how could one know that
the idea of a street was not the street itself? How was it to be treated as an
adequate representation of the “thing” that it represented? Not, for Foucault, through a separation of the
street and its representations, since to do so would require thought, which,
for the Classical age, was synonymous with representation. There is no escape
from the paradox of this order. Therefore, the only alternative left to the
thinker is situated within the order of “intuition” or “belief”. An idea must
necessarily foreground its “represented” quality in order that we know that it
is a representation. No amount of deduction can lead us to this inference, and
we must helplessly rely on intuition and belief. Only a self-referential stance
would unveil the constructed nature of the idea.
The key to
the Classical episteme was then, the idea—a mental representation of something
other than itself. In so far as all forms of human knowledge relied on the idea
to understand reality, it was unanimously granted that ideas (and by extension,
language) were only vehicles to understand causality in the natural world and
conversely, it was only a higher order function possessed by human beings, as
it were, to “process” reality. Therefore, language was denied a “being” of its
own which would develop as part of a historical process and for the Classical
episteme, language had no fundamental role in furthering human knowledge. (Foucault, The Return of Language 1989)
It was with
Kant (though Foucault acknowledges that he was a historical product of a larger
movement in Western philosophy) that the first decisive “turn” in occurred for
understanding the nature of representations. The process at work which allowed
an idea to become a representation of a real order was examined and questioned.
Ideas were no longer deemed to be ‘unproblematic’ vehicles of reflection. It
was seen as essential, as Kant did, to understand what constituted an idea and
its power to represent and to what degree it was successful in doing so.
Presenting the first doubt did not however, presuppose that Kant was trying to
refute that ideas, as representations, were necessarily invalidated in their
production of human knowledge. In all probability, Kant acknowledged that most
branches of human knowledge still relied on representation as a mode of
expression. However, Kant’s doubt sought to explore if representation could
have its source in something else. (Foucault,
The Place of the King 2002)
1.2 The Transcendental Subject and the
Return of Language
Kant had
located idea as having their origin in the human mind. The human mind, for him,
was part of an epistemic entity, which he called the “transcendental subject”. It
was not possible for human beings to know the order of things as they are “in
and of themselves”. Schopenhauer too had defined Kant’s transcendental idealism
as a “distinction between the phenomenon and the
thing in itself, and a recognition that only the phenomenon is accessible to us
because "we do not know either ourselves or things as they are in
themselves, but merely as they appear." The order of ideas, which is
supposed to represent the world to us, can only do so through the constraints
of language. Language is the means by which all knowledge is historicized,
which also brings our attention to the fact that language itself is a
contingent historical entity. But although every form of knowledge may be
traced to their respective historical origins, for Kant, the normative validity
of all knowledge presupposes a form of transcendence that is although not
objectively perceptible, can be deduced through intuitive reasoning.
But there
occurs a decisive change by the beginning of the nineteenth century whereby
language is rescued from its mere vehicular function. The paradigm shift occurs
in the nature of knowledge-formation which had eclipsed language and its
multivalent profusions during the Classical age. For Foucault, it was primarily
the role of "discourse, which ensured the initial, spontaneous,
unconsidered deployment of representation in a table. When discourse ceased to
exist and to function within representation as the first means of ordering it,
Classical thought ceased at the same time to be directly accessible to
us." This was the threshold which distinctively separated Classicism and
Modernity (although Foucault uses the terms only suggestively)—the point where
language ceased to function only as representation to "provide a
spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things" but "rediscovered their
ancient, enigmatic density" (Foucault, The
Return of Language 1989). Although this "freeing" of language
can take up many major forms such as techniques of formalisation specific to
philology, one might also think of the "being" of language as
autonomous. Since it has been freed from its subordination to ideas, the
"truth" of language becomes an articulation of its own being. It
speaks independent of a human subject and forced to turn on itself infinte
times over. Whereas Nietzsche had posed the genealogical question: "Who is
speaking?", Mallarme tries to show this very aspect of language:
"...what is speaking is, in its solitude, in its fragile vibration, in its
nothingness, the word itself- not the meaning of the word, but its enigmatic
and precarious being." (Foucault, Language
to Infinity 1977)
1.3 The
Autonomy of Language: Borges and Literary Labyrinths
It is
perhaps useful to begin the discussion on Borges from the point where Foucault
describes the infinity envisioned by literary language in terms of Borges’
story “The Secret Miracle”. (Borges, The Secret
Miracle 1970) The story describes the life, works and death of Jaromir
Hladik, author of the “unfinished” drama entitles The Enemies, or Vindication
of Eternity. On the discovery that most of Hladik’s works very based upon
Jewish sources and that his study on Jakob Bohme had a remarkable “Jewish”
emphasis, Hladik is sentenced to death by the Gestapo and is delivered his
death sentence in a few days’ time. Faced with the certitude of his death days
away, Hladik asks for one more year of life from his God to complete his play.
The work is a dramatic unfolding of events in the life of one Baron Romerstadt
who encounters a few unknown, but secret enemies who seek to destroy him. By
the end of the second act, Romerstadt has already learnt that these people are
secret conspirators and is forced to kill one of them. Mention is made of one
Jaroslav KUbin who had, at one time, pressed his attentions on his sweetheart
Julia von Weidnau. Incoherencies increase, and by the end, Romerstadt learns
from one of the “strangers” that he himself is the miserable amnesiac Jaroslav
Kubin. The descriptions that begin the play (“A clock was striking seven, the
vehemence of the setting sun’s rays glorified the windows, a passionate,
familiar Hungarian music floated in the air”) reverberate identically through
the incidents that take place (or are only imagined to take place) by the end.
The first lines of the first act of the drama are again reiterated by one of
the actors and Romerstadt replies in the exact words as he had done during the
first act—the drama, evidently, never took place or if it did, it was validated
only within the space of Romerstadt’s circular delirium and not outside it.
Hladik’s
play, in fact, mimics the tale of his life and his impending death. The play,
composed entirely in Hladik’s mind in hexameters in the moments before facing
the firing squads, hold up a mirror not to his own life, but to the authorial
articulations of it. Borges’ third-person narrator narrates the story of
Hladik, the writer condemned to face the firing squad who finishes a tale
moments before his death; one where the main character, Romerstadt infinitely
stretches out the moments that constitute the length of the play, just as for
Hladik the moments that lead to his death are stretched to a year to allow him
to finish his play. The two literary constructs act like mirrors facing
mirrors, where the self-referentiality of one is reflected back onto the other
through a circular delirium that is Hladik’s and yet not Hladik’s alone. The
autonomy of language here is projected at the level of a singular conundrum—during
the year which passes as a raindrop
trickles along Hladik’s cheek and the smoke of his cigarette vanishes
into thin air—which allows language, the domain of endless repetition as well
as guile, to stand at a distance from both of its enunciators. The last epithet
Hladik finds remains an enigma even to the mind of God, the seat of omnipotence
and eludes the structural limits of both tales, as Hladik is executed in the
moments following the appointed time of his death.
The last
epithet, of course, forms the domain of the unknowable for both the authors and
their readers. It is the miniscule moment of absolute autonomy granted to
language itself, which enunciates, as if from its magical vicissitudes, itself.
It is not unlike another example that Foucault provides, the account of a
singular night where Scheherazade tells the story of the circumstances that led
her to oblige her listener Shahriyar (and readers) with a thousand stories. It
is as if the stories, which were contained exactly within the space of a
thousand nights, needed this one night where the language of Scheherazade’s
narration, indeed all narrative language by extension, could reveal the truth
of itself by self-reflexively turning back on itself through self-expression. The
night is a miniature of the entire work and is a mirror in which the entire
work is reflected infinitely, as it describes itself as already preceding the
act of narration—it is simultaneously a part of those ancient tales of wondrous
delight. This is the disconcerting presence that unsettles the entire construct
of linguistic artifice—it is, to borrow Derrida’s phrase, the unreachable
centre that governs “the structurality of the structure”. It is at the same
time “within the structure and outside it”:
“The centre is at
the centre of the totality, and yet, since the centre does not belong to the
totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its centre
elsewhere. The centre is
not the centre.” (Derrida 2001)
In a
retrospective sense then, the nature of the linguistic edifice is an essential
conflict between en the “metaphysics of presence and absence”, between being
and non-being. In both Scheherazade’s “story” of the circumstances that led to
her recounting of the One Thousand and One Nights, and the “last epithet” that
eludes even the mind of God is nurtured the seeds of a rebellious language.
Other stories
such as the celebrated “The Library of Babel”, “The Book of Sand”, “Death and
the Compass” and “The Aleph” reiterate thematic projects of infinity which
could be considered as a metaphor—I would say a textual decoy—for representing
linguistic infinity. A structural analysis of them would be likely to reveal
Borges’ own reading of the conundrums of movement and stasis by the Eleatic
School of Thinkers, most notably Parmenides and Zeno of Elea. They are notable
commentaries on his part on the nature of space and time and our understanding
of the universe.
2.
Writing
as “Game”
While the
broad objective of my project is to accommodate the notion of “language games”
in all the texts I am about to examine, certain stories by Borges seem to
overtly project the act of writing as a game. Of these the most iconic is of
course, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, which most critics have
regarded as perhaps the most decisive and groundbreaking production in Borges’
literary career.
2.1 “Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote”
Published in
1939, it determined a large part of the trajectory Borges was to follow in his
later works. In their anthology, Literature
of Developing Nations for Students, Elizabeth Bellalouna et al (Bellalouna, Milne and Lablanc 2000) have
identified the story as anticipating the overall movement of postmodernism in
the art through an enactment of the parodic use of language. (Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote 1970)It
is the tale of the ambitious author Pierre Menard, who attempts a rewriting of
Cervantes’ work. The finished part of Menard’s work however—just two chapters
and the fragment of a novel—incredibly reiterates Cervantes’ text word for
word, without altering a single punctuation. The story radically challenges
commonplace ideas regarding the power and authority invested in the figure of
the authors. It asks of its readers whether all texts are endless repetitions
of what has been already said before; “a raid on the inarticulate/ With shabby
equipment always deteriorating” (Eliot, East
Coker 1963), to use Eliot’s phrase. Was Menard an impostor? Not so,
according to the narrator of the tale. Between the three hundred years that
separate Cervantes and Menard is contained the polysemic nature of his work.
Instead, the narrator concedes that although Cervantes’ text and that of Menard
are exactly identical, the latter is “almost infinitely richer”. Menard has
played a paradoxical game whereby he was motivated to use two antithetical
principles:
a)He would
attempt to modernize whatever struck him as too archaic in Cervantes, including
dialect, description and local colour.
b) He would
try to accommodate such innovations, as far as possible, within the oeuvre of
Cervantes’ language,. So as to keep it
unchanged
The incredible
product that is born is the story that simultaneously inhabits two different
times and places at once. But what is asserted through this half-sarcastic,
tongue-in-cheek game of sorts is the immemorial nature of classic that is Don
Quixote. Menard, without altering a single comma, has thus succeeded in
transforming Cervantes’ work through a radical metamorphosis that has not
altered the tale in the least.
2.2 Mirrors
Facing Mirrors: “The Garden of Forking Paths”
Physical
labyrinths are perhaps easier to decode, for they are endowed with the quality
of “being”, i.e. presence—physical labyrinths are constructed from tangible
boundaries, beyond which they do not exist. But fictional labyrinths are
dubious because they are built out of authorial peevishness into a realm of
incertitude. “The Garden of Forking Paths” (Borges,
The Garden of Forking Paths 1970)begins with an allusion, as the critic
Ethan Weed has pointed out, to Liddell Hart, “the apocryphal historian”. Hart
is a historical person, “who has written various books on European wars, but
apparently none of them are called Historia de la Guerra en Europa. In
1930 he published The Real War, a work on the First World War, and in
1934 the same work was republished as A History of the Real War 1914-1918.
(Weed 2004)False leads pervade the story
at various levels, but these are not played out by the author as a joke on the
reader, but to engage him within a dialogue with the text. The other important
allusion the story holds is to the Chinese labyrinth of “Hung Lu Meng”:
“The Hung Lu
Meng is an enormous Chinese novel from the 18th century, and its story sounds
as if it were taken from a Borges fiction. It circulated first in manuscript
copies containing eighty chapters, but without an ending.” (Weed 2004)
Through a host
of such allusions, Borges carries the endless play of texts referring to other
texts, which in turn refer to yet other texts. The core of the labyrinth is
thus pushed further and further from the reader, yet at a distance that remains
titillating. Tsui-Pen’s labyrinth within the story becomes a metaphor for
signification, containing figures who are doubles for each other
(Tsui-Pen-Stephen Albert, the narrator and his antagonist, Captain Richard
Madden). The entire story is a riddle placed, the answer to which is never
revealed. The microscopic embodiment of such a riddle is of course, given in
Albert’s metaphor of a riddle on a game of chess, the answer to which would be
the word “chess” itself; hence it is carefully evaded. The linguistic game at
hand always posits immediate answers to be pursued and worked out to their
logical conclusions; but the final solution is always something other than
itself. This is the game which the narrator adopts while communicating to his
immediate boss, the name of the town about to be bombed. But inspite of all his
attempts to communicate, the narrator is never sure whether he has been able to
penetrate the final mystery, as it were, “the enigma of all enigmas”.
2.3 Simulations
Borges’
story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ opens up another avenue of enquiry into the
nature of represented spaces: the problem of scale. The story is a short
paragraph, so it is useful to quote it in its entirety:
“…In
that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the
entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied,
and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of
the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following
Generations, who were not sofond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears
had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness
was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In
the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map,
inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of
the Disciplines of Geography.” (Borges, On
Exactitude in Science 1999)The Map which is constructed by the labors of
the cartographers in the story is unique in the sense that it represents the
“real” space of the Empire through a point-to-point exactitude. As a problem
for geography, when the scale of a cartographic representation is fixed, the
represented space of the map grows independent of the other variables involved
in the analysis; But Borges magnifies the scale to make the representation
exactly like the object it represents. This begins the problem the Map poses for
the human perception and understanding: space is not simply space when
represented through a point-to-point exactitude; it falls within the domain of
simulated spaces.
Jean Baudrillard, in his treatise, Simulacra
and Simulation, has pointed out that in or times, meaning has solely been
exiled to a system of signs, symbols and icons. Human experience is a
simulation of a supposed “reality”. Yet it is never possible to uncover that “reality” beneath
the domain of the simulacra, Baudrillard writes: “...The simulacrum is never
that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is
none. The simulacrum is true” (Baudrillard 1998)
Baudrillard
believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our
lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being
rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Baudrillard called this
phenomenon the "precession of simulacra". In the story, the tattered
ruins of the Map points to an example of simulacra. Divorced from the order of
its origin, the real geography of the Empire, its claim to reality is of the
same order as all other signs within its universe (“Animals” and “Beggars” who
inhabit the landscape). Therefore, the need for any further representation
through the “Relics of Geography” has already become unnecessary and
irrelevant. Consequently, the map that is reproduced through point to point
exactitude is now indistinguishable from the landscape—a terrain of hyperreality
has pervaded the landscape (or the Map)—the simulacrum has become the
“real”.
3. The
Radical Exhaustion of Language
In his essay
on “The Literature of Exhaustion”, John Barth assumes an elegiac, or at best a
placatory stance to contemporary literature when he laments the increasing
number of “turn-of-the-century” novels being produced after the manner of
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Dickens, writing “only in mid-twentieth century
language” about contemporary incidents and characters. Taking up a remark
attributed to Saul Bellow that to be technically up to date was the foremost
task of the writer; Barth tries to show that narrative history has already
reached a point where any turning back might yield nothing but a heap of
exhausted possibilities. He applauds the fiction of writers such as Nabokov,
Borges and Beckett as the ablest for his generation to have stepped in the
shoes of Kafka and Joyce. (Barth 1984) In
my thesis, I would like to argue that Barth’s position evokes a paradox central
to most of twentieth century’s literary theorizing—at one point, he applauds
the quest for radical innovation in authors such as Beckett or Borges, but at
other points, celebrates the figure of the author as the sole connoisseur of
literary value. Beckett’s innovations, in my view, broadly belong to the
“other” side of all debates about literary construction. Perhaps I will be
required to elucidate my point further.
3.1 Meaning in Absentia
“The pure
work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding his initiative
to words, which are mobilised by the shock of their difference; they light up
with reciprocal reflections like a virtual stream of fireworks over jewels,
replacing the perceptible breath of the former lyric impulse, and replacing the
poet’s passionate personal directing of the sentence” (Mallarme, Poetry in Crisis 2004), writes Mallarme in Crisis in Poetry (1896). The function of
poetic language, he contends is not representational, still less is it
expressive, reflecting the ideas of its author. The writer is now concerned
with mobilizing the “shock of [a word’s] difference,” which can only mean its
difference from itself and, thus, its capacity to signify beyond a writer’s
communicative intention. “‘I say flower,' Mallarmé writes, 'and outside the oblivion to which my
voice relegates any shape, insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically,
as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet” (Mallarme, Selected Poetry and Prose 1982) The
word “flower” corresponds to flowers in the real world, but only imperfectly
so, because by “flower” is signified the idea of the flower and not a flower.
Words bear no, or at best only an arbitrary relation to the “thing” they
signify. Everyday use of language bypasses this independence of the word, but
literary language remains fascinated by the gap that remains between the word
and the thing. The word bears meaning because it is something “other”, a
negation of the “thing”. But at the heart of literary language is a further
recession because it deals with the gap between these two orders of
signification, both of the word and the thing. Literary language is thus based
on a double-negation, floating within the interim space of two different orders
of signification.
For Blanchot in The Infinite
Conversation, writing holds this relationship between the self and the word
in terms of a conversation. Speech, throughout its own course, radically,
repetitively, eternally reinvents itself through its relationship to the
infinity of meaning. “Meaning” however, in the “space of literature” is
signified only in absentia. "The prodigious absent, absent from me and
from everything, absent also for me" that Thomas the Obscure speaks of is not a being or an
authority but the continuous shift of myself outside myself, by means of which
there comes, although always pending, the "pure feeling of his existence." (Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation 1993)
If every experience of literary composition can be regarded as a
foregrounding of meaning in absentia, the selection of signifiers in chains of
literary signification might well as be random. Yet what is absent is also
present via negativa. The pinning
down of meaning to stable signifiers limits the ‘play’ of literary discourse.
The absence of meaning can be regarded as a supplement in Derridean terms which
would come allegedly secondary to; to what is more "original” and
“natural”. But the act of supplementarity itself is an indefinite process
because the supplement “is a plenitude replenishing another plentitude”, within
and without the whole that it supplements. The scope of the “whole” is infinity
in the realm of meaning, but the very presence of the supplement points to a
lack within the whole. We are reminded of that familiar sloka from the Isha Upanishad which runs,
“That is infinite, this is
infinite;
From That infinite this infinite comes.
From That infinite, this infinite removed or added, Infinite remains Infinite”
From That infinite this infinite comes.
From That infinite, this infinite removed or added, Infinite remains Infinite”
3.2
Orderly Disorder or Regulated Chaos: “Lessness”(1969) and “Ping”(1966)
“Lessness” was published in 1969 and is a story which is one
of its kind, that takes the exercise of linguistic selection as one based on
randomness or pure chance. Random permutations of sixty sentences make up the
structure of the story, with its two halves being only two of the 8.3 x 1081 possible
orderings of these sentences. (Drew and Haahr
2002)The fact that the published text of the story is only a small
subset of the infinitesimal range of possibilities point to the gigantic store
of articulations that remains unwritten within the course of the story. (Beckett, Lessness 1995)
As
the text describes a small grey body standing upright among ruins under the
grey sky, memories of a distant past are constantly accepted, denied or
effaced. The series of sentences are highly resonant in reverberations of
rhythm, alliteration and assonance, but perhaps such a rhythm is unavoidable,
since Beckett begins with a carefully selected range of original sentences from
the very beginning. A section from the
story can perhaps reveal the extent of its regulated chaos:
“Figment light never
was but grey air timeless no sound. Blank planes touch close sheer white all
gone from mind. Little body ash grey locked rigid heart beating face to
endlessness. On him will rain again as in the blessed days of blue the passing
cloud. Four square true refuge long last four walls over backwards no sound.
Grey sky no cloud no sound no stir earth
ash grey sand. Little body same grey as the earth sky ruins only upright. Ash
grey all sides earth sky as one all sides endlessness.”
Edith Fournier first demonstrated that
the 60 sentences in “Lessness” could be grouped according to 6 thematic
categories, which Philip H. Solomon has designated as paradigms. These are (a)décor (b)body (c)ruins (d)refuge
forgotten (e)time past and (f)time future. (Solomon)The architecture of the text presupposes the presence of temporality
within the space of the story, which also points to the unchanging nature of
time where the protagonist remains trapped within a limbo.
The markedly aural pattern of arrangement
points to the chance arrangement of sentences. But meaning is produced and
reproduced through the gap between the ordering of the present arrangement and
the randomness of other (absent) possibilities which are not actualized in the
story. Similar formations abound in “Ping” (1966) (“Bing” in French) (Beckett,
Ping 1995) that was originally
supposed to be a piece of monologue within “The Lost Ones”. As one of Beckett’s
“closed-space tales”, “Ping” is a cryptic tale following the pattern of random
arrangement in “Lessness”, but one in which such randomness is not carried out
to the point of mathematical precision. Maria Helena Kopschitz (Kopschitz 1987)presents a radical analysis of the text where she
breaks up the story into each of its constituent sentences (70) and analyses
them through patterns of recurrent repetition. The “plot”, as Kopschitz
realizes, following Ralph Freedman, is “an instance of awareness”, bearing
“traces of symbolism through its thematic use of colour” The source of the greatest
enigma is the question of how one is to read the titular word “Ping”, repeated
33 times throughout the story without no definite semantic association to
anything other than itself, forming the core of the story’s refusal to make itself
amenable to meaning. Beckett himself once explained “Ping” as “a recurrent
twang (pizzicato) punctuating icecold monotone”[1]. Perhaps the earliest attention to the problem of reading the
story was provided by David Lodge in his essay “Some Ping Understood”. (Lodge 1979) But Lodge’s approach was at best
a struggle to situate the story in terms of conventional lines of reading the
plot in terms of realistic framework. He understands the story as presenting
the “the struggles of an expiring consciousness to find some meaning in a
situation which offers no purchase to the mind or to sensation”, but as
Gontarski points out, the questions evaded by Lodge are properly to be regarded
as “narratological ones”:
“We have
then, not just the psychologically complex but narratologically transparent
image of a self imagining self imagining itself, often suspecting that it is
being imagined itself”. (Gontarski 1995)
In these
late stories in Beckett’s career, the narrator remains in most cases unnamed
and is placed in the interim space that separates conception and writing. “The
psyche weaves this or that thought out of itself; for the mind is invention;
under the compulsion of necessity”. “Ping” and “Lessness” are but the more
extreme examples of the “elegantly formalized
bricolage” that Beckett had used in his Molloy trilogy.
4.
Transgression and Madness
It is perhaps self-evident that two of
the terms mentioned above will begin from a Foucauldian understanding of the
two concepts. Yet, we must also remember that Foucault studied these concepts
separately—“A Preface to Transgression” (Foucault,
A Preface to Transgression 1977)formed part of Foucault’s studies on authors considered
icons of transgression for the times, namely Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, and
Georges Bataille. A study of transgression effectively reveals the origins of
Foucault’s stance as an anti-humanist and also the theoretical position which
has helped in shaping much of the broader discourse of post-structuralist
thought. In 1961, Foucault’s book A
History of Madness tried to understand the categorization, segregation and
(necessary) repression of madness in Europe of the “Classical” Age (the Age of
Reason) not just on the exterior but more at the level of discursive practices.
Yet the experiences of transgression or madness as historically constituted
were studied by Foucault in terms of literature. Perhaps this is the link which
would help us in bringing them together.
Since the humanism that pervaded much of
Western critical thought in the aftermath of the Enlightenment was understood
by Foucault as a repression to the “will to power” that was characterized
through transgression, Foucault turned to the prose of Marquis de Sade, which
could step outside the limits of propriety to expose most of the social, moral
and civil codes that characterized a necessarily ‘bourgeois’ state after the
French Revolution. For Foucault, Sade’s “philosophy of the bedroom” was taken
up in the 19th and 20th century as a philosophy of
transgression that posited sexuality as its primary force. In Nietzsche,
Foucault found the twofold division between the Apollonian and the Dionysian
ethos of creation. The Apollonian fixes the limit of our self and culture through
the “illusion of form” while the Dionysian represents the dynamic and chaotic
realm of flux and motion that the Apollonian seeks to control. The “crossing
over” from one ethos to the other is best demonstrated in the history of
Western art. It is the “field”(champs), to borrow, Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase,
which has seen the constant struggle between these two different modes.
Foucault designates sexuality as the ultimate metaphor for the transgression of
the Apollonian realm into the Dionysian symbolized through the literature of
Sade, Nietzsche and Bataille, who explore the limits of madness beyond the
“dialectic of good and evil” in form of a spiral where each antithetical form
brings into play its “other”. (Foucault, A
Preface to Transgression 1977)
4.1
The Thought of the “Outside”
In an interview following the publication
of The History of Madness in 1961,
Foucault had mentioned Maurice Blanchot as the “what motivated and guided me
[him] as a certain form of the presence of madness in literature”. (Foucault, Dits et Écrits 1954–1988 1994)
Blanchot’s readings of Sade, Bataille, Holderlin and Artaud had influenced not
just Foucault, but also Deleuze and other poststructuralists to a possible
relation between speech and silence, as well as literature and death. In The Book to Come, Blanchot writes “…what
is first is not the plenitude of being, it is the crack and the fissure, the
erosion and the tear, intermittence and the gnawing privation”, (Blanchot, The Book to Come 2003) referring to
the rarified space in literature that reveals itself only through the gradual
withdrawal of the subject into a realm of absence an non-being. When the author
releases himself to the interminable in the order of language, he has entered
the domain not of integration, but that of a dispersal of his
subjectivity. This, Peter Pal Pelbert
writes quoting Blanchot, “is the work as an experience which ruins all
experiences and places itself underneath the work, “a region[ … ] where nothing
is made of being, and in which nothing is accomplished. It is the depth of
being’s inertia (désoeuvrement).” (Pelbart 2000)
For Deleuze, there is an “outside” in all
of us, the subjective realm of infinite possibilities. “As long as the outside
is folded, the inside is coextensive with it”, he writes. But once the passage
to the outside is opened, we are at the risk of opening up the subjective field
to self-disavowal, madness and death. In The
Logic of Sense, he compares the works of Lewis Carrol to those of the
schizophrenic playwright Antonin Artaud, to illustrate the imperious desire
that invades every thinker to tear apart the “flat” surface of sense into a
form of “schizophrenic depth” through the articulation of words into a
multiplicity of “bodies-without-organs” (BoW), a term derived from Artaud’s
radio-play, To Have Done Away with the
Judgement of God. Schizophrenia becomes a cultural metaphor for thought,
which makes Deleuze ask whether it is at all possible to think without the
experience of liminality and madness. (Deleuze
2004)
4,2
The Order of Silence(s): Texts for Nothing
If “Ping” and “Lessness” had demonstrated
forms of regulated chaos in Beckett,
Texts for Nothing (1-13) (Beckett, Texts for
Nothing (1-13) 1995) achieves something perhaps not seen earlier.
Written in conventional arrangement of grammar and syntax, these texts reveal
the relationship between creativity as it develops over a span of time and that
of the disintegration of an artist’s subjectivity. Many of the texts are
conceivable in forms of dialogue. Each of the texts dwell on small vignettes
that combine description and are connected through the affirmative and negative
interjections, “yes” and “no”. The progressive use of “yes” and “no” leads to
the negation of what has just been affirmed before. This dual position is in
consonance with the implication within the texts that there remains no meaning
of meaning:
“‘No, something better must be found, a
better reason, for this to stop, another word, a better idea, to put in the
negative, a new no, to cancel all the others, all the old noes that buried me
down here . . .’” (Text 11) (Beckett, Texts for
Nothing (1-13) 1995)
Intertextuality abounds throughout the
space of the Texts ranging from the wryly humourous literary joke, the cliché
(‘cock and bullshit’) or through an elegant, sardonic synthesis that combines
music hall and vaudeville traditions. What is woven again, into the fabric of
the texts is the logic that perhaps they are not meant to be fully understood. Hannelore
Fahrenbach and John Fletcher have maintained that these texts “girate
anxiously towards a meaning which can never be reached and constitute perhaps
the only possible epic a contemporary poet could write, in that their chief
subject of concern is with the difficulty of literary creation in a world of
cosmic absurdity. In their acute contradictions, ranging from an oxymoron like
‘a voice of silence’ (121) to whole sentences cancelling affirmations
previously confidently made, they repeatedly suggest that life itself has no
meaning, that chaos (like cruelty in the world of the Marquis de Sade) is not
the aberrant exception, but the rule.” (Fahrenbach
and Fletcher 1976) Brian Finney refers to Beckett’s letter to a friend
in 1937 where he asks why that terrible arbitrary materiality of the
word's surface should not be permitted to dissolve...?" (Finney) In these texts, Beckett almost
succeeds in passing over the semantic order of words.
What
the texts finally succeed to show is the gradual disintegration of the artistic
consciousness over time from a rational "counterpoint
to an “insane “one. The process takes a
decisive turn when the poet refuses to acknowledge him as “the poet” but as X.
His recession into “non-being” as Blanchot had shown, leads him to question
everything else around—the notion of all essence—him. By Text 10, the
protagonist has already started to “give up”:
“Give up, but it’s all given up, it’s
nothing new, I’m nothing new” (Text 10)
Text 12 shows the complete estrangement
of the self from the world and also from himself. While there are still faint traces of being
in the past, “’believing
in me, believing it’s me . . . with a voice . . . the power to move now and
then’ but soon such a hope is dissolved in the nearness to the end he desires:
“Nothing matters any
more because the end, which is all I yearn for, is near: what a blessing it’s
all down the drain, nothing ever as much as begun”
By Text 13, complete disintegration has
been achieved and “being” has been completely effaced. Although Fahrenbach and
Fletcher’s reading locates this effacing in the “universal problem of the contemporary
alienated poet”, this present thesis would like to interpret it as symptomatic
of the artist’s madness and non-being that finally culminates into ineffable
silence.
Thus with a broadly
poststructuralist methodology, this thesis hopes to show the shorter fiction of
Borges and Beckett could achieve at least a prefigurement of postmodern
aesthetics by highlighting instability and displacement within the order of
language within the ambit of literary production.
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