“NICHTSNICHTSUNDNICHTS”: BECKETT’S AND JOYCE’S TRANSTEXTUAL UNDOINGS

Abstract

In 1937, Samuel Beckett wrote to Axel Kaun that his language appeared to him like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at behind it. This view seems to reflect kind of essentialism which Richard Rorty rejects as the way in which scientists, scholars, critics and philosophers think of themselves as cracking codes, peeling away accidents to reveal essence, stripping away veils of appearance to reveal reality.4 But to those things behind Beckett subtly added parenthesis (oder das dahinterliegende Nichts). The paradox of his enterprise was that in order to tear apart veil of language and reach this absence of behind it, he had to weave it first. He did so with help of masters in art of creating illusion of diversity such as James Joyce, but also Marcel Proust, Arthur Schopenhauer, Fritz Mauthner, and many others. With advantage of hindsight, it is possible to investigate first decade of Beckett's literary career in retrograde direction, taking back his words in five steps, in order to arrive at textual doings undone in very first sentence of his first story, Assumption.5. Mauthner's NichtwortIn word was no beginning is first note on page 269 of Joyce's notebook VI.B.41, containing several notes on German philosopher Fritz Mauthner' s Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache.5 Mauthner' s linguistic scepticism is based on idea that thought and language are inseparable.6 Language is a set of metaphors, according to Mauthner, and since words are based on memory, they are unsuited for communication, for everybody has different memories.8While Joyce was reading Mauthner in 1938 (more than a decade Wyndham Lewis's criticism in The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man) he found an answer to Gracehoper's famous question to Ondt: why can't you beat time?** (FW, 419.7-8).9 The same question was formulated somewhat differently in Mauthner' s Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache: is our world, way it represents itself in our language, so extremely spatial? Why do we find our bearings faster in three-dimensional space than in unidimensional time? Mauthner' s answer is simple: our visual faculty also serves as a space organ. Because our sense of hearing does not equally serve as a organ.10 Some excerpts among Joyce's Mauthner notes in notebook VLB. 46, made in 1938, are derived from a section in Beitrage concerning adverbs: Adverbien - Raum und Zeit,11 containing a subsection on Raum, Zeit und Kausalitat. Mauthner contends that language cannot create concepts and therefore spatial terms are needed to qualify time. When a spatial adverb is used to denote time, we often fail to recognize metaphorical use. Such an adverb can in turn denote causality. Although it is merely a linguistic detail, metaphorical transition from spatial to temporal to causal notions leads directly to most fundamental questions of human understanding, according to Mauthner. Joyce noted down after = because (notebook VLB. 46, page 50), corresponding to passage in Beitrage where Mauthner argues that it would be wise to express idea of cause exclusively with temporal adverbs, at least if Hume and other skeptics were right in saying that notion of cause is projected onto concept of time.In third chapter of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus already pondered ineluctable modalities of visible and audible, echoing Lessing's notions of Nacheinander and Nebeneinander. During seventeen years of Work in Progress Joyce seems to have developed and trained this time organ (notebook VI.B.46, page 50) in order to find a less exclusively spatial form of expression, combining Nach- and Nebeneinander to create impression of simultaneity by means of linear medium of written word. In this respect, Samuel Beckett remarked in his German diaries:Long discussion about theatre and film, which Eggers condemns, calls at best intellectualism. …