Although this is an essay about literature and politics, rather than a poem, I submit it in response to Mara Eastern/Andy Townend’s Poetry Rehab Lockdown prompt. https://wordpress.com/read/post/feed/31982590/872204662

 

 

The work of Samuel Beckett is pervaded by what some literary critics have called ‘encavernment’. His plays and prose present us with a cast (perhaps caste?) of largely anonymous characters, who are either confined to a highly restricted physical environment—speechless, disembodied, buried up to the neck, living in trashcans—or trapped in a cycle of pointlessly repeated minimalist behavior patterns—like the tramps/clowns in Waiting for Godot.

Beckett never considered himself an absurdist writer in the manner of Eugene Ionesco. He insisted that his work was realism, although it obviously broke sharply with the realism of the plays and novels of the previous century. There are no rhinoceroses on the loose in his work but plenty of elephants in the room.

Beckett’s work is realist on two levels. First, it does to some degree reflect a real, prevalent, and largely overlooked underbelly of society, in which quality of life is severely restricted and suffering and abuse so rife that they have become the norm. This world had rarely appeared in literature before, except in sentimentalized portrayals.

The depiction of the darker side of life is of course much more common today, but tends to be aestheticized in a manner quite contrary to that of Beckett’s stark mode. Beckett’s work still stands out in a world awash with artworks and popular culture that wallow in and relish a subculture of exclusion that few of their authors or curators have experienced directly. Beckett, by contrasts, presents a sharp—at times almost mathematically precise—pared down depiction of the social psychology of such exclusion.

For all the weirdness and unusual staging devices—or perhaps because of them—a play such as Endgame can be read as a fairly straightforward representation of the ‘workings’ of a dysfunctional family unit. In fact, it is precisely because it strips down the furnishings that a Beckett play can show this more clearly than Ibsen or Strindberg, for example. Reading Ibsen as working-class teenager in the 1970s, my own initial naïve reaction was to envy the bourgeois world the playwright aimed to disembowel. No-one could ever covet the situations in which Beckett’s characters are cast.

There is, however, another deeper level on which Beckett’s writings address issues fundamental to the modern and contemporary world. The deepest and most restrictive cavern of all is that of the Western individualistic Cartesian conscious self, tucked into a comfortable yet smothering environment hedged in by property, proper names, and possessive pronouns. “Stuff” as it is called euphemistically (or “shit” more dysphemistically) in the prevailing US-English-derived international argot.

We live in a world in which everything is self-enclosed and owned and yet, within this highly restricted environment of ‘my muesli, my I-phone, my TV shows, my yoga classes, my guns, my presidential candidate, my values and opinions, my pills’, we see ourselves illusorily as being more extensively than ever connected with a much wider human community.

There is a passage in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker, the most private work of that eminently unlikeable yet prototypically postmodern soul, in which the author bemoans the contrast between his own expansive love of humanity and the fact that he himself is so universally despised.

This is normally put down by modern commentators to Rousseau’s own personal psychopathology (personalizing again), but it is in fact a reflection of a peculiarly contemporary and widespread malady of the human soul that has its roots in the turmoil of a revolutionary (and, lest we forget, extremely bloody) French republic, of which Jean-Jacques was the secular patron saint.

Recent terrorist attacks have inspired a flurry of Facebook users around the world to drape their avatars in the tricolor and declare Je suis Paris, a phrase which, taken literally, means nothing, and means next to nothing in practical moral terms. Critics of this evidently facile and shallow (albeit well-meaning) show of solidarity have noted its underlying selfishness. Sympathy is invariably restricted to well-to-do victims in developed countries with whom the virtual or actual international jet-set can easily self-identify. Hence Je suis…, giving an added frisson of universality by the show of superficial familiarity with French.

No-one bothers to acquaint themselves even slightly with the many languages and rich cultures of central Africa to express solidarity with the people of Mali or Chad. Many of these same people never speak to (let alone help) their neighbors, routinely turn a blind eye to everyday injustices in their own country, and are wary of wealth redistribution and refugees. And many of them, no doubt, like Rousseau, feel isolated and unloved and secretly bitter that their abstract love of humanity always goes unrequited, their encaverned sense of entitled amour-propre ‘liked’ occasionally, but ultimately unshared.

In parts of the Christian New Testament, Jesus/Yeshua/Isa is reported as saying “Love thy neighbor” ….. He does not say “Love everyone,”—an impossible task. Nor does He say “Love thyself and thy immediate family.” We are, rather, enjoined to love the people with whom we cross paths in our everyday lives, whoever they may be. Rousseau evidently failed to do this in his private life and all too many of us are still all too keen to follow his example.

One of the more amusing and insightful of the many subplots in Robert Musil’s satirical epic novel of prewar Vienna The Man without Qualities concerns a sex-murderer called Moosbrugger. The characters in the novel whom we would now describe as bleeding-heart liberals are obsessed with reaching out to this ‘monster’ in his prison cell and engage in endless erudite debates as to the true nature of his soul and go through various bureaucratic hoops in an attempt to arrange a meeting with him. These very same characters dabble faddishly in anti-Semitism—a dangerous but fashionable trend at the time—and see no conflict between their liberal humanitarian values and their concern about the ‘Jewish problem’. (Take note Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher.)

When they finally meet Moosbrugger, after a long comic anticlimactic build-up, the murderer is gruff and unremarkable. Evil, as Hannah Arendt argued, turns out to be banal. Nor is there any glimmer of shared humanity buried in it. One is reminded of Lord Longford’s relationship with Myra Hindley.

What Musil is telling us, of course—and it is still very, very relevant today—is that, while we are bound up in the seemingly so important projects of our own restricted social set and our even more restricted selves, we fail to reach out to those with whom we truly share our lives (fantasizing about hanging out with serial killers, while fearful of the nice Jewish or Muslim family living next door) and we thus fail to see the bigger historical picture, which, in the case of Musil’s characters, is the impending global war.

Another work from roughly the same historical period and geographical region that deals with similar themes is Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I have always read this classic mini-novel as a satire on the bourgeois family and the rational self and found it extraordinarily funny. Through his transformation into a giant insect, Gregor Samsa is made aware, like Beckett’s characters, of the unbearable confinement of his Cartesian self, while the members of his cramped stuffy nuclear family (designated by the writer in abstract generic terms, ‘the father, ‘the mother’, ‘the sister’) fuss protectively around him, as though something mildly embarrassing but not that much out of the ordinary had occurred, as if he had ‘gone Goth’ or come out as gay. The result is as touching as it is absurd.

What all these three authors—Beckett, Musil, Kafka—share is a technique of somehow locking their characters into themselves or down into the narrow confines of a familiar world that is at once comforting and uncomfortable. Beckett does this by literally restricting their movement and ability to exercise free will; Kafka through a sort of grim surrealism; Musil through the ongoing irony that the characters are living on the edge of an historical cataclysm of which they, but not the author or his readers, are blithely unaware. The effect, in all three cases, is to throw into sharper relief the way in which the modern and contemporary enclosure of the self and the untruths it drapes itself in order to perpetuate this, is, in the final analysis, psychologically unbearable, morally ambiguous, and unsustainable in social or environmental terms.

Two Beckett plays, in particular, Eh Joe and Not I, distill this insight almost to its absolute minimum. These pieces, which are—mercifully—as brief as they are intense, both present a monologue delivered by a disembodied female voice, although the point of view is that of a silent male actor who hears her talking in his head. The monologues, so far as we are able to pick out a narrative from the monotonous yet somehow strangely mellifluous stream of disconnected phrases, tell stories of suicide, spousal neglect and the loss of a child.

It is interesting that both of these plays are almost unbearable to watch and rarely staged. It is easier, it would seem for audiences to sit through hours of fraught melodrama or revenge tragedy, box-sets-ful of mafia violence and medieval torture, streaming media coverage of terrorist atrocities—all of which are extremely exotic and rare in real life—than to listen, for just five minutes, to a lone female actor calmly recounting everyday pain as if it were inside their own heads.

Until we learn to do this, I fear that we will all continue to be encaverned, locked into ourselves, locked down in an apparently comforting but ultimately discomfiting illusory world, and violence will prevail.