Beckett and the Project for Existence

It is an odd project to undertake, to wonder whether one exists. Once that’s been established – if it ever can be  – it is even more disconcerting to explore the terrain just beyond where one ends and where others, if they exist at all, begin. Ontology remains an exercise for the humanities, attempted often by philosophers and less frequently by biologists¹. No extant technology can demarcate a bright line between brain and mind, leaving the question of existence (ironically or appropriately enough, depending on your sense of humor) simply a cerebral exercise². 

For Renee Descartes, thinking was sufficient: If humans are sentient beings, then coming to that realization through cognition proves existence. Exploring the terrain beyond the constricting “I” and “I think”, the void between I and the Other, Descartes left for others. Stephen Dedalus, traipsing along Sandymount Strand in James Joyce's noonday sun, took two steps past Descartes, in the direction of disproving solipsism. First, Dedalus saw things — the nearing tide, a rusty boot — and, unable to escape vision, figured, well, the things he saw must exist (at least in the mind). But how to know whether they exist outside the mind? Dedalus recalled that Aristotle, by knocking a sconce (candleholder) against a body, knew it existed. And there's the second step in escaping solipsism: If you kick a rock, you'll stub your toe, and so the “I” must have a border, a container that’s damaged when it collides too forcefully into an Other.

Joyce’s contemporary Samuel Beckett demurred, rejecting Descartes, Dedalus, and Aristotle. Beckett wouldn't take the “I” for granted and, in Texts for Nothing, depicted a mind (maybe) kicking and thrashing against its own thoughts, occasionally coherent, dubiously aware, but existing (again, maybe). For the uninitiated, it’s hard to give a satisfying summary of Nothing, whose effect depends on its having no narrative to summarize (those wary of the postmodern project, look elsewhere).

Nothing is 13 untitled fragments; asking whether the narrator is the same throughout the whole would be missing the point. From text #8: 

“Well I’m going to tell myself something (if I’m able), pregnant I hope with promise for the future, namely that I begin to have no very clear recollection of how things were before (I was!), and by before I mean elsewhere, time has turned into space and there will be no more time, till I get out of here.”

From #8 again:

“But that other who is me, blind and deaf and mute, because of whom I’m here, in this black silence, helpless to move or accept this voice as mine, it’s as him I must disguise myself till I die, for him in the meantime do my best not to live, in this pseudo-sepulture claiming to be his.”

The fragments of Nothing eschew enough rules of English syntax to leave the reader grasping for a foothold, narrative or otherwise. Texts for Nothing is only a work of fiction in English because it is packaged as such: the words are English; the punctuation is English; the spacing and page layout are in keeping with English prose conventions and its publisher calls it prose. But what is sensible, what the eyes can see on the page, is illusory: the text gives the illusion of being a short story in English, but it lacks the internal requirements of characters, actions, temporality.

Individual sentences, if their “I” and “you” and “him” refer to corporeal subjects, might be comprehensible. But there’s no evidence, within the limited confines of the text, to support a belief that I or you or any voice I’m hearing exist.  Does implied temporality — here, a monologue from a narrator who appears to exist in time — imply materiality? These thoughts we’re reading are written down, take up physical space and ink and paper, and survive the writer and any reader. Is this enough to prove the mind’s existence?

When Descartes wrote or spoke, “I think, therefore I am,” by vocalizing his existence through words, he still had to rely on the physical, transferable (from mind to paper or voice) nature of words to make his point. Beckett attempts to annihilate this dependency by forcefully containing words to the mind, disintegrating the physical body. But he can’t annihilate language. What we’re left with is text, and text can’t speak; the “I” of Nothing is only a cruel irony, not a presence. Nothing is not an answer to the mind/body dilemma; it is a clever nothing that apes existence, for the purpose of nothing. It is Beckett at his best.

I first read Nothing many years ago, but was moved to revisit it when a friend was recently diagnosed with depression. The diagnosis came as a surprise to him. He wakes daily to his body, exists at any moment only with the help of his brain. That his depression — rooted in his brain, if the materialists are to be believed — eluded his notice for so long is a cruelty of the mind/body regime. Beckett’s Nothing is a mind that is yet somehow something less than a mind (because a text unburdened by a conscience cannot “speak” in the way a person might). But depression is an artifact of a mind that is somehow more than a mind where, as best as I can understand it as a non-clinician and non-sufferer³, it appears to the victim that he has a mind he can control and another, more sinister, mind that he cannot. When my friend told me of his diagnosis, I thought of Beckett, of Nothing, because, as a representation of mind, it is the perfect fraud. And I worried for my friend, who now worries that the mind he’d come to depend on to build a life was an ersatz mind, not worth its weight in brain matter.   

[1] The classical provenance of the mind/body problem was, of course, scientific, but during an age where philosophy and science were one discipline. Today, most scientists are materialists, holding that everything in the mind has its analogue in the materials of the brain, even if we don’t yet understand fully how the brain works.

[2] Even Daniel Dennett, one of the most well-known contemporary theorists of mind, holds his doctorate in philosophy, not neuroscience. I must, however, at this point beg ignorance of much of neuroscience.

[3] And where, to be honest, most of my knowledge comes from William Styron’s Darnkess Visible, because of course.