Slow Going
This paper was written for and first given at the Critical
Beckett conference organised by the School of French
Studies of the University of Birmingham, 26 September 1998. It
is copyright Steven Connor, 1998
The stage directions for Beckett's television play Ghost
Trio specify that the door which leads off the room to a
tunnel stage right and the window to stage left should be
`imperceptibly ajar', an instruction that gave the set designer
for the first production agonies of scruple. This stage direction
might suggest an exquisite variation on the whiskery old gag:
`When can't you tell that a door is not a door? When it's
imperceptibly ajar'. This is the aspect of slowness which
interests me most of all in Beckett; the slowness of things
happening, as it is put repeatedly in The Lost Ones, `by
insensible degrees'. No other writer has joined his rhythm so
unflinchingly to the rhythm, and duration of insensible elapse,
to the ordinary mystery of what Beckett in his notes on Winnie's
forgetfulness calls the `incomprehensible transport' from one
moment to another, the inability either to coincide with the
passing of time, nor to be able to arrest it. Again and again,
I will have to keep coming back to this point, in the face of my
own attempts to make slowness apprehensible and comprehensible.
An academic paper is one of many devices that we have for
gathering up time, and making an artefact of it. In order to say
what it is I want to say, I will have to keep pointing to the
underlying conditions in which that artefact is constructed,
namely the conditions of time passing.
But very largely, this paper will end up being about little more
than what it sounds like, alas. It will be about the experience
of slowness. What I mean to try to get at, but will be happy to
have managed merely to get amid, is the experience of going
slowly, of slowly going.
Let me attempt to distinguish the two: going slowly and slow
going. Going slowly has a good reputation. It can connote care,
attentiveness and a fullness of response, a refusal to be rushed
past or deflected from one's purpose. Going slowly is at the
heart of that that process of delaying, holding back from
immediate gratification, which is at the foundation of selfhood
and of culture; the toleration of frustration in the interests
of a greater yield of pleasure or value. Going slowly has
traditionally been associated with the possibility of being able
to be, as opposed to the modern forms of becoming. Slowness has
traditionally meant the examined life; it has meant culture
itself. The impulse to slow down, to linger, to retard, is there
throughout Beckett's work: for example in the section of
Company which follows the movement of a second hand around
a watch face. It's there, too, in those recommendations to pause,
or hold back, which are found throughout that text:
`Gently...Doucement'. Slow and steady wins the race. Inch by
inch, life's a cinch. Going slowly ought to give us time to keep
pace with our lives, ought to allow us to watch our step, to hear
the feet however faint they fall. Slowness has the reputation of
allowing us to take control over our lives, to take our time.
But in the condition I am going to keep on calling slow going,
there can be no convergence of the one who undergoes and the one
who perceives the time of elapsing. There can be no deliberation.
We cannot live at the rate at which we nevertheless must live.
Life, and the exceptional moments of a life, the moments after
which nothing was ever the same again, will all in the end be
`come and gone in no time'. No time means the immeasurable,
unexperiencable drift of accretion and degradation, the
insensible process, that one cannot live slowly enough to live
knowingly, because then one would be getting ahead of oneself,
living more quickly than the process which lives itself out in
our living. Going slowly is something we attempt to do to time;
slow going is what time does to us, through us. The metaphor
Beckett offers for this process in Proust is decantation.
This word going is itself often at the intersection of the
two kinds of duration. Going slowly implies a kind of going on:
persistence, or progress. Slow going will always turn out to have
been a going out. (`How goes it? Thanks, it's going.') Beckett's
work allows, even seems to require of me, some acknowledgement
of this slow going. But it does not see round the question of its
own slowness, is not in charge of the meaning of its slowness.
It does not thematise its slow going, or when it does, it cannot
itself any more be or be undergoing the process of slow going
(except of course, and necessarily, unknowingly). Slowly going
on, in a way that will be more than a slowing down, but will turn
out to have been `darkward bound', a slow and sure going out. We
cannot apply a measure to this movement of slow going, because
it is itself the only scale against which to measure the refusals
and remissions of elapsing time of which the hectic interval of
human life is composed.
The sublime of magnitude has been converted in our era to a
breathless sublime of speed. Speed accomplishes the attentuation
of mass and extended substance. The rule seems to be, the
smaller, the faster. Modernity marvelled at itself in the form
of the Great Eastern; postmodernity has the nano-engineered
processor based on a single molecule. Samuel Beckett participates
in this miniaturisation; instead of epics and monuments - A
la Recherche du temps perdu, Finnegans Wake, Beckett
scaled down. But miniaturisation is not accompanied by lightness
and speed in Beckett's work. He is perhaps the most important
inaugurator of a mode of aesthetic defection from speed. It seems
to be precisely the uninterpretability of slowness that has made
it so important in the art of that - what is the wrong word
exactly? - rearguard, that avant-garde which, finding itself
humiliatingly outstripped by a culture in which acceleration has
become the dominant value, began to look for ways of turning from
speed or promptness, or punctuality; an art that wanted to try
to stop being on time; hence musical minimalism, and especially
the excruciating phase-experiments of Steve Reich, and the rent,
discontinuous fabric of the work of John Cage and Morton Feldman,
and the confrontation with slowness of Michael Snow's
Wavelength. Slowness is not representable. Representation
is an effect of punctuality, or promptness, of the ravelling or
puckering of time. Slowness testifies to asynchrony, a failure
to meet up, or come together. Speed is inflammatory, infectious.
It makes demands of me, it tugs me out of my time and into its
time, its more than time. It calls me into its synchronicity,
telling me I will be able to be able to be at speed, to be at one
with what breaks exultantly with mere being, to be merged with
its ecstatic going out from the mere condition of going on. Slow
going is always the failure to be there, to have been there, in
that condition of slow going that will have been going on, as we
so serenely say, all the time.
Slowness is slow by comparison with the right speed; slowness is,
always, of course, relative slowness: slowness relative to
expected or desired promptness or despatch; relaxed slowness
relative to hurry or pressure to speed up. We mistake the
experience of slowness as a simple negative measure; if only
things could go more quickly, in the queue, during pain or
unhappiness. But slow going is not quite this. It is the
experience of a loss of temporal relativity; when things are
going slowly, the scale of measurement itself begins to elongate,
to attenuate, to dissolve. The extreme sense of measure, the
inhuman measuredness of much of Beckett's work, its quality of
calculated slowness, is itself perhaps a protest against the
erosion of measure that begins when slowness gathers. It is a
protest of going slowly against the process of slowly
going.
For even to explicate slowness is of course to speed it up; to
save one the necessity in future of going through it all again,
so intolerably slowly. It is to summarise: as B says to A in
Rough for Theatre II, summing up `is all we ever do'. Two
words repeatedly scratch that itch to economy, the desire for
summary in Beckett's work: `so on'. These words answer the need
to pucker up the agony of unrelieved elapse into something
calculable and roughly predictable: `So on infinitely until
towards the unthinkable end if this notion is
maintained...'
Brief respite. Where are we in this paper? Somewhere near the
beginning, to be sure, but already with intimations of what it
will be like to be in the middle, and where we are going to be
by the end. As I sit typing these words, I am both before and
ahead of this moment (this moment being in point of fact 6.25 am
on Friday 25th September). Actually it is not; I decided to tell
you the time at which I wrote these words a minute or so after
I had actually written them. In fact, I can tell you exactly when
the thought occurred to me to go back to what I had already
written and record the time I had written it, because I made a
note of it. It was just after having typed the phrase (wait, I'm
just popping to the end of the paragraph to find it again, OK,
I'm back) what was then envisaged as the
first sentences. These words were first written two
minutes later at about 6.27. So, by the time we get to that
phrase it will be about 6.27, though in fact as I write
these words (these actual words `these words'), it is
already 6.32). So, then, let us finally strike out towards the
past that this parenthesis has now strewn in its own path: I
asked where are we in this paper? I have a pretty good idea of
how I will get to this point and what will succeed it (actually
I have stopped the clock several times in order to visit what was then envisaged as the first
sentences, and to play around with what I have in mind as its
end.
None of these games have meaning except by virtue of the
fundamental condition, as unseizable as it is inescapable, of
elapsing. No matter how I limp or sprint, or no matter what
complex origami I effect on the sequence of its composition, time
will have passed, quickly or slowly, quickly and slowly. I cannot
get in step with this elapsing for which I am always too fast or
slow, and which is neither the time of writing, nor the time of
reading. All I can do, and cannot anyway but do, is to disclose
it as the geologically shifting ground of all my fidgettings of
protention and retention. I wanted, sitting at my desk, to
predict what the speed of that passing might be (it's 6.37 now,
by the way), but I couldn't. Its condition of taking place is its
horizon of possibility, an horizon that, no matter how I struggle
to watch myself, to write the time in which my writing (and then,
when I gave this paper, my speaking, and then again, as I marked
the paper up for the web, and now, again, as I revise that
version for print publication, my writing again), to get in step
with the time of my speech, I cannot get myself into the field
of my vision, any more than Winnie can see her own face. I seem
always to be out of step with the time that not only passes, but
passes away (passes away from and through me).
Here is Jean-Fran‡ois Lyotard reflecting on
the difficulty of conceiving what he calls a phenomenology of
elementary time. Like Beckett, he is interested in trying to
grasp what it would be like simply to be, in time, without
any attempt to grasp, hold, or reserve the experience for later
use or contemplation. The French word maintenant, he says,
recalls to us `how much maintenance there is in the least
instant'. Lyotard goes on to suggest that time must be
apprehended, which is to say minimally represented, or held in
memory, in order to be experienced:
The constitution of the present
instant...already demands a retention, even a minimal one, of
various elements together, their `constitution' precisely. This
microscopic synthesis is already necessary for the slightest
appearing. For plunging into the pure manifold and letting
oneself be carried along by it would allow nothing to appear to
consciousness, nor to disappear from it for that matter,
appearing not even taking `place'. This place is due to a
synthesis, that of apprehension, which as it were hems the edges
of the pure flow and makes discontinuous the pure continuum of
the flow while making continue the pure discontinuity of its
supposed elements. In short the river needs a bank if it is to
flow. An immobile observatory to make the movement apparent. {2}
One could reverse that final judgement:
Lyotard says that we need to pinch time to perceive its passage.
We need to put our hand into the current, to feel its onward
pressure from the resulting turbulence. There needs to be
something nontemporal inserted into the flow of time for
temporality to come into being. But we might as well say that the
hand recognises that it is stationary only because there is
passage, because of the difficulty of holding its position
against the current. We can only ever stop time because of its
passage. The static observatory does not create the passage; the
passage creates the possibility of the observatory that can never
be in the right place at the right time. I spent some
considerable time in a book I wrote millions of years ago reflecting on the ways
in which Beckett gathered, folded over and resynthesised time,
especially in the Trilogy. I was tempted then to see atemporal
repetition as a triumph over the tyrannical fantasy of present
time or linear passage. The book and the querulous young person
who wrote it, were both in the grip of a Bergsonian attitude
towards time, which had perhaps transmitted itself through the
work of that most loyal of Bergsonians, Gilles Deleuze.
Bergsonian was my desire to track and preserve the building
continuities, and unarrestable accumulations and recurrences of
time in Beckett's work. When no time is wholly distinct from any
other time, there is, to be sure no static presence, but time
nevertheless seems to form an ideal plenitude. I am committing
myself here to apprehend the force in Beckett's work of what
could be called a dissociative rather than an accretive duration,
of the tense we could call the present discontinuous; the
ordinary, fundamental, terrifying topple of Time's slow foot into
the next moment, the disfazione (unfolding, unworking,
working out, falling out, dissolution, decomposition) of sheer
elapse that is nothing as dramatic and determinate as collapse
or relapse, the pitiless passing away, in soft and imperceptible
torrent, that passes understanding.
When Lyotard says, commenting on his evocation of the
synthesising apprehension of time, `you see that we have got into
phenomenology', he is acknowledging the ways in which
phenomenology has helped to explicate the ecstatic nature of
temporality, the way in which the comportment to a future and the
relation to a past tugs at the instantaneous present, thus both
dividing being from itself and giving it its emergent unity in
division. `I project myself toward the Future in order to merge
there with what I lack; that is, with that which, if
synthetically added to my Present would make me be what I am',
writes Sartre. {4} Living in
time thus both draws us out of and into ourselves. This
ecstatic relation to time, this being in and out of time, is one
of Heidegger's equiprimordial conditions. We are all, and all of
the time, in and out of time, our inability to be thoroughly in
time our way of being in it. Such ecstatic projections of being
into becoming however depend upon speed, by which I mean upon
variations in speed; to be ahead of yourself is to go faster than
you are in fact going. Even to slow things down is really to live
faster than one is living: since, to slow down, to apply the
brakes on living, one must get ahead of oneself, take the measure
of one's headlong plunge into futurity, in order to rein it in
and hold it back.
Speed and slowness have new possibilities and poignancies in a
world of storable and reproducible time, such as film and music,
which allow us simultaneously to preserve stretches of time (we
may never know the tempo of Mozart's symphonies, but we know
exactly the speed at which Billie Whitelaw performed Not
I, alas) and to manipulate these recorded stretches, speeding
them up and slowing them down. In fact, recording is a kind of
master-mechanism for Beckett's work in prose and drama after the
Trilogy. For recording allows a certain kind of play between
actual and possible speeds and durations. Recording allows one
both to reproduce and to change the speed of a playback. It
suggests the possibility of going both faster and more slowly -
Krapp winding through to the place he wants in his tapes, and,
once there, lingering on it in fond longing. This possibility is
enacted in what Krapp does with the word which embodies this
possibility, the word `spool'. There is no better picturing of
the regular process of at once going on and going out than the
spool of tape unreeling itself at the end of Krapp's Last
Tape. As the tape is played, it is transferred from the left
hand spool to the right. The more one has gathered on the right,
the less remains on the left. Going on can only be accomplished
by going out, winding on by reeling off. After all the complex
envelopings and pocketings of times within times, all the
topological loopings together of past and present in Krapp's
Last Tape, the play exposes us to the pure elapsing of
moments. The unspooling tape is Beckett's answer to the accretive
rhythm of the fort-da. In these moments of unspooling, we seem
to be brought into the immediate experience of something going
on, of a time both losing momentum, and gathering it as it runs
out. But this is not in reality pure exposure to elapsing. It is
itself a kind of turbulence: a painful imposition of slowness
that interrupts the continuum of ordinary time, delays the return
to non-theatrical time that will come at the end of the
performance. It is at once the collapse of representation -
nothing is here being represented except what is happening, the
slow reeling away of the seconds; and yet it is still a kind of
staging of time, which is to say the introduction of a
complication, or turbulence into slow going. A pinch of time is
taken up between finger and thumb, though we recognise that time
has been taken in this experience of being exposed to the pure
elapsing of time only after it has finished.
One of the most striking responses in Beckett's work to this
apprehension of elapse is in the attempt to control and determine
its own speed, the aim being partly to resist the corrosive
effects of pure passage, to trick duration into rhythm, and
partly to ensure that the work had a chance of staying as close
as possible to a pure and unmediated process of taking place. The
issue that preoccupied Beckett most of all in his direction was
not characterisation, or setting, or even tone, but speed of
delivery. The director has an opportunity to synchronise the time
of the work with the time of its performance that is not
available to the writer of prose, of the writer of drama whose
works are primarily read rather than seen.
But Beckett's prose writing can also be observed attempting to
control its own pace, to synchronise itself with its own (not
really its own, that's the point) time of taking place:
Ah, says I, punctually, if only I could say. There's
a way out there, there's a way out somewhere, then all would be
said, it would be the first step on the long travellable road,
destination tomb, to be trod without a word, tramp tramp, little
heavy irrevocable steps, down the long tunnels at first, then
under the mortal skies, through the days and nights, faster and
faster, no, slower and slower, for obvious reasons, and at the
same time faster and faster, for other obvious reasons, or the
same, obvious in a different way, or in the same way, but at a
different moment of time, a moment earlier, a moment later, or
at the same moment, there is no such thing, there would be no
such thing, I recapitulate, impossible. {1}
Walking and telling are always closely articulated in Beckett's
work, and this passage tells s brief story of a story told
through the taking of steps. If only, the narrator says, there
could be a first step, a first word, in the direction of a
destination, then the whole thing, the whole journey, the whole
story, would become available to be travelled and told. The
narrator would like there to be a way out of time through the
storying of time, through the projection of a perspective
according to which the first of a sequence of steps could be
visible as, and known in advance to be, the first. If a
particular punctual moment could be seen in this way, it might
be possible to match the time of the telling to the time of the
passage told of. Indeed the passage that unbuds from this
apprehension magically begins to deliver the very sense of
measure or metre that the narrator requires; `faster and faster,
no, slower and slower, for obvious reasons, and at the same time
faster and faster, for other obvious reasons, or the same,
obvious in a different way, or in the same way'. Beckett seems
to have drawn the time told and the time of the telling into
simultaneity; but the telling is always out of step with what it
tells. When the narrative pulls itself up with that first `no'
(`faster and faster, no, slower and slower'), is it because it
has got ahead of itself, or because it is lagging behind itself?
Something pulls the narrative back, requiring it to acknowledge
that what seems like acceleration is in fact deceleration, and
then that both of them are effects of perspective. The reader is
invited to move at the same pace as the words, measuring slowness
and speed against each other. The same moment can be experienced
as both slow and fast, because it is always possible to view the
moment from the perspective of before and after (with so many
steps already taken, each new step will seem slow; with so few
left to take, it will seem fast). What allows the weaving of this
rhythmic ecstasy is a necessary averting from the elementary
elapsing which is always, like the tortoise in the fable, too
slow either to be outstripped or caught up with. `The same
moment, there is no such thing, there would be no such thing, I
recapitulate, impossible.' Is this a recapitulation of the
judgement that there is no such thing as the `same moment', or
a self-demonstrating statement of the impossibility even of
recapitulating? In the tiny gap between the alternative readings
`I recapitulate that it is impossible' and `it is impossible for
me to recapitulate' lies all the force of time's negligible,
ineluctable passage, for which narrative will always have been
too quick and too slow. The narrative prefers to show us this
noncoincidence rather than to tell us of it, but cannot show it
except by its very inability to show it, by its disclosure of the
time that will slowly have built, or wasted, as the narrative is
taking place. No matter how Beckett's elementary narratives
attempt to live in and live out the tense of the present
discontinuous, that time can never be got into the
narrative.
The literalising of temporal ecstasis has become the norm for us,
in a world in which the dream of a permanent now is carried by
the collapsing together of live transmission and recording, in
the maintenance of the maintenant through technologies which
ensure that nothing slips out of date and everything is for ever.
Our capacity to inhabit a permanent, undecaying instantaneousness
is the mark of the otherworldliness of our world. Beckett's
convoluted temporalities, in which nothing is ever over and done
with, everything can recur or be revived, and in which past,
present and future are looped inextricably together, anticipate
and mirror the refusal of narrative typical of this world. I once
suggested that narrative is always phenomenologically conditioned
by the fact that it occupies and is exposed to `real time', and
therefore must always cope with the danger of interruptedness,
with the possibility, which it can never fully legislate, that
reading can be broken off, or broken into by other concerns
(boredom, hunder, sexual desire, death). To cope with the
contemporary culture of interruptions, narrative has generated
its own syntax of interruptions, taking the condition of its
exposure to temporal contingency and making it a necessary part
of its being. Thus hypertext, while seeming to surrender itself
to the discontinuities introduced into the reading by the choices
of the reader, in fact weaves interruptedness into its own
fabric, making chance into its choice, and making accident its
own.
If hypertext, anticipated as it is by the temporal convolutions
of writers like Proust, Joyce and Beckett, is an attempt to find
in discontinuity itself a higher, more stable form of continuity,
then the opening of Beckett's work out of this continuity into
the condition of slow going represents a breaking open of
discontinuity itself; not the breaking of the familiar continuity
of time by the familiar kinds of modernist and postmodernist
discontinuity and temporal paradox, but the rupture of
discontinuity by the principle of continuous elapsing.
Beckett's prose fiction attempts at once to score, or to stage
time, and to expose itself to this disarticulating continuity of
elapse. These temporal agonistics centre upon punctuation. There
are, we may say, four epochs of punctuation in Beckett's work.
There is the classical or traditional epoch, in which all the
resources of punctuation are used. This extends from Dream of
Fair to Middling Women to Murphy. With Watt
comes Beckett's discovery of the extraordinary capacities of the
comma, to create a kind of counterpoint between the sheer going
on of the sentence, with no awareness of its likely end, and the
interruptions, resumptions and folding over that the comma gives.
This is followed, most notably in How It Is and the
`cylinder pieces', by a suppression of any punctuation at all.
It may seem as though the attempt here is to deliver us to a pure
flux, or temporal manifold, by suspending the effort at filtering
or articulation of time. In fact, however, the effect is to
highlight the immanent temporality of syntax itself; as in
`Penelope', for which similarly extravagant claims have sometimes
been made, we take responsibility for punctuating the
unpunctuated prose, for gathering, stretching and releasing the
fabric of time. In recoiling from the condition of unpunctuated
duration, however, we must always disclose it.
The feeling that many have of an opening out or flowering in
Beckett's late prose - the so-called second trilogy, for example
- is due very largely to the resuscitation of syntax, and of the
verb in particular, and the consequent relief at the possibility
of knitting together the gaps which yawn and claw in earlier
work: `And now here, what now here, one enormous second, as in
Paradise,, and the mind slow, slow, nearly stopped...The words
too, slow, slow, the subject dies before it comes to the verb'
(CSP, 76).
The question of punctuation is in fact thematised in The Lost
Ones, Beckett's definitive evocation of slow going. What is
it that is most inhuman about The Lost Ones? It is the
absence of any events. What we are given is a process in the
frequentative mode. Nothing that we see, or hear reported of life
in the cylinder is actually happening, or can be ascribed to a
particular occasion. Everything has happened in just the same
way, and will continue to happen in just the same way as it is
now surmised to be happening. There are no absolute, unique or
once and for all events. Everything, it appears, can be undone,
or qualified. What counts is only the slow going - slow going on,
slow going out - of the cylinder and the report that could be
given of it, seen in the long run. At the same time, narrative
strains to come into being, strains to congeal into punctual
moments; the unequivocal first and last moments in a putative
sequence. We know that there must be such moments in any
sequence. There must be a first tiny tremor in the earth that
produces the earthquake, a first uncountermanded malignity from
which the fatal carcinoma blooms. These events are absolutely
punctual, epochal, marking an absolute break from what has come
before, and a microscopic enunciation of an enormous and
irrevocable change. But they can never be known in themselves,
they have no here and now, since their meaning is inundated by
what they portend or, in the case of last events, begin to
conclude. They are events that will have been the first and will
have been the last, seen from the perspective that both belongs
and does not belong to them. The narrative is held together by
the tension between the merely stochastic nature of the
phenomena, and our desire for there to have been a definable
beginning and end: was it that time, or was it another
time?
The Lost Ones is the most explicitly scientific work of
a writer who we know (from the `Whoroscope' notebook kept in the
early 1930s, and now in the University of Reading Beckett
Archive) familiarised himself in early life with certain
developments in contemporary physics. It is a work which
painfully brings together the unrepresentable dimension of
entropic decay, the process whereby, in a closed thermodynamic
system, the random differences of speed and location which make
the energy of the molecules available for work, will inevitably
tend to equalise, leaving the system inert and functionless. In
one kind of model, the universe is no more than such a closed
thermodynamic system. Not only is it bound to end in time, the
fact of time only has meaning in terms of the slow approach to
the condition of heat death. As is well known, James Clark
Maxwell, posited a universe consisting of two chambers, connected
only by a trap-door. He imagined a being, or demon who, merely
by operating the trap door to separate positively charged
particles from negative, would preserve infinitely the capacity
of the system to generate electrical potential, and therefore
work. Human beings have cast themselves in the role of that
demon; as the alien element in the system that makes it possible
negentropically to hold time back. The demon presence in The
Lost Ones is the narrating voice, or even, since we're in a
hurry here, as usual, narrative itself, which is at once the
unconscious and unjudging witness of the phenomena of the
cylinder, and the agemcy which, by positing purpose, movement and
outcome in the cylinder, seems to hold back the movement of time
towards the ending of time, seems to bend pure succession into
a swirl of persistence, a kind of rhythm or temporal shape other
than that of coming apart. It is narrative itself which
constitutes what Ilya Prigogine has called a `dissipative
structure' in the otherwise chaotic succession of events.
In one crucial episode, the narrating consciousness postulates
the idea of a way out of the cylinder. The 2nd law of
thermodynamics applies only to closed thermodynamic systems. If
a new source of energy could be introduced into the system, or
the system revealed as a sub-system of some larger system, the
inexorable progress towards decay could be halted; the river
could flow upstream. If there could exist a way out of the
cylinder, then there would be the possibility of some new source
of life and variation in it, something to hold together its slow
unravelling.
From time immemorial rumour has it or better still
the rumour is abroad that there exists a way out. Those who no
longer believe so are not immune from believing so again in
accordanced with the notion requiring as long as it holds that
here all should die but in so gradual and to put it plainly so
fluctuant a manner as to escape the notice even of a visitor.
Regarding the nature of this way out and of its location two
opinions divide without opposing all those still loyal to that
old belief. One school swears by a secret passage branching from
one of the tunnels and leading in the words of the poet to
nature's sanctuaries. The other dreams of a trapdoor hidden in
the hub of the ceiling giving access to a flue at the end of
which the sun and other stars would still be shining. Conversion
is frequent either way and such a one who at a given moment would
hear of nothing but the tunnel may well a moment later hear of
nothing but the trapdoor and a moment later still give himself
the lie again. The fact remains none the less that of the two
persuasions the former is declining in favour of the latter but
in a maner so desultory and slow and of course with so little
effect on the comportment of either sect that to perceive it one
must be in the secret of the gods. (CSP, 162)
The story goes that, watching technicians testing the image
quality of Quad, the most hectic and raucous piece that
Beckett ever wrote, for reception by monochrome receivers, and
running the tape through in slow motion and in black and white,
Beckett suddenly exclaimed: `My God, it's a hundred thousand
years later!' Seeing the hectic bustle of the performance he had
already recorded transformed into the slow, dim shuffle,
suggested to Beckett a fast-forward to a time when everything
will have nearly gone. What this story captures is what it must
allow to escape, namely the condition of pure elapse, the great
oxymoron of temporal existence, which is to say all existence,
of progression into degradation. The thing that has always
surprised me about this story is Beckett's surprise at his own
discovery. How could he not have realised that the stuttering
hurry of the choreographic system he had set up in Quad
would have exactly the same outcome as in the cylinder of The
Lost Ones? How could he not have anticipated from the
beginning the idea of a slow decay of the system he had set up,
just as in Play, for which he suggests an exact repeat in
performance, only slower and more diminished in energy. One
answer might be simply that, amid all the complex repetitions,
the loopings together of beginning and end that makes of
Beckett's work a kind of dynamic entirety, there is a dimension
of unknowingness, of being merely amidst the process of going on,
that cannot finally retard or accelerate. There are knowledge,
memory, struggle and resistance, not to mention the miniature
convulsions of time caused by laughter; but there is no
accumulation of these goods, in the midst of the unpausing going
on, and going out.
The Lost Ones may perhaps be taken as a proleptic summary
of the whole of Beckett's work, considered as a system closed
upon itself, and therefore inexorably, but by insensible degrees,
proceeding towards exhaustion and saturation. If the entire
effect of that work is to act as a kind of interval, a turbulent
suspension in the senseless and insensible unspooling of things
in general, it also acknowledges that unfolding, that
unrepresentable background from which turbulence derives its
energy, and which it may be, in the end, its larger end to have
assisted.
And what have we been about here, rereading and replaying that
work so obsessively? Passing the time, which would have passed
anyway.
Notes
1. Texts for Nothing, Collected Shorter Prose
1945-1980 (London: John Calder, 1984), p. 101. References
hereafter to CSP in the body of my text. Back to Text
2. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Conversations on
Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 159. Back
to Text
3. Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and
Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). Back to
Text
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in
Phenomenological Ontology trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London:
Methuen, 1958), p. 127. Back to Text
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