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The resistance of Samuel Beckett's writing to interpretation is as stubborn as the author's refusals to interpret his work for inquisitive critics and readers. In conversation with Gabriel d'Aubarede in 1961, Beckett stated his position concerning the temptation to organise his writing under any overarching banners of meaning:
(d'Aubarede) Have contemporary philosophers had any influence on your thought?
(Beckett) I never read philosophers.
(d'Aubarede) Why not?
(Beckett) I never understand anything they write.
(d'Aubarede) All the same, people have wondered if the existentialists' problem of being may afford a key to your works.
(Beckett) There's no key or problem. I wouldn't have had any reason to write my novels if I could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms.
According to Beckett, the critical drive to interpret his challengingly obscure writing in terms of a conceptual 'key' or 'problem' is mistaken. Why is Beckett so vehement? His exclamatory tone is more of a comic denial at the hands of an intrusive cross-examination than a reliable admission of ignorance, as the dialogue takes on the tone of a mock-trial. So anxious does Beckett seem that his exasperated reply to d'Aubarede's enquiry squashes 'problem' and 'key' into one. He appears to say that there is no 'problem of being'. Furthermore, the dialogue contains a contradiction. 'Reading' and 'understanding' involve two different kinds of attention. Although not mutually exclusive, 'reading' involves the sorts of attention which encompass a text's form, mode of address, and content, and can explain how a text is, whereas 'understanding', of which interpretation is a particular province, involves an attempt to achieve and transfer some knowledge of a text's content into another, more direct language, seeking to elucidate the 'truth' of the text and why a text is.
Beckett's seeming ignorance of philosophical matters bears some resemblance to Socrates's self-consciously antinomial statement that all that he knew was that he knew nothing. If one claims to know nothing, it follows that one knows something. In fact, to claim that one knows nothing is an oxymoron, unless 'nothing' is understood inversely as something. In this way, the pseudo-ingenuous contradiction actually points towards the rhetorical ingenuity of the speaker. By explicitly describing his knowledge in negative terms, Socrates implicitly declares the proficiency of his knowledge to deliberately mislead his audience.
Beckett's fervent denial that his work has a 'key or problem' it wishes to communicate to its audience suggests the way in which some attempts to read a text in terms of understanding its meaning or message can prove reductive. Such a reading, as d'Aubarede suggests, looks for a moral to the story, a 'key' to unlock the knowledge a text supposedly delivers to its reader. Rather than admitting that his writing contains such knowledge, however, Beckett remains firmly defensive concerning such strategies which try to produce affirmative answers to critical questions, such as 'what is this text about?, 'what does it mean?'. Martin Esslin comments that contemporaries of Beckett, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, differ from him in that they present their sense of the irrationality of the human condition in the form of highly lucid and logically constructed reasoning.
Unlike Sartre and Camus, writers who are commonly grouped with him under the umbrella titles 'existentialist' or 'absurdist', Beckett explicitly refuses to admit to the supposed profundity that critics are eager to assign to him. But it is a refusal which has earned him faint praise. Many studies of Beckett's writing have aimed to understand Beckett's writing in terms of a proposition in the form of 'this text means x', perhaps understanding such meaning as a 'key' to knowledge. Such critical approaches seem to assume, as Sartre does, that
Whatever connections he [the reader] may establish among different parts of the book [...] he has a guarantee that they have been expressly willed. As Descartes says, he can even pretend that there is a secret order among parts which seem to have no connection.
It is precisely with such a 'secret order' in mind that Lance St. John Butler supposes that 'Beckett is working the same ground as the philosophers', and David Hesla wishes to provide a 'box of aspirin' to the interpretive headache which Beckett's work apparently gives the beleaguered critic. For Hesla at least, Beckett is guilty of deliberate esotericism before being proven innocent.
This dissertation will not be coming up with any such 'cure' for the complexity of Beckett's writing, however alluring such an instant verdict may be. It will rather try to articulate the differences between reading and understanding, and will use the distinction as a heuristic device for approaching Beckett's later work. In so doing, I will consider the ways in which Beckett's texts try to evade such methods of reading which dwell upon the discovery of affirmative meaning alone, such as displaying the same pseudo-ingenuousness as Socrates in claiming that they mean 'nothing', rather than something. I argue that through such evasion, Beckett displays his own form of ingenuity in challenging such readings which try to understand a text in terms of a 'key' or message.
As Beckett himself indicates in his dialogue with d'Aubarede, his work might not 'understand' or accept meaning in the nature of providing knowledge. Hence to read a Beckettian text with the preconceived aim of understanding it would be to fail to differentiate between reading as a form of attention, and understanding as a discovery of knowledge. Beckett's texts themselves frequently deny that they have any such knowledge to offer. For example, in Play the three figures on stage are described as the 'victims' of the 'inquisitor' (the spotlight) which relentlessly seeks 'the truth' (in W1's words). W2 attempts to explain the mistaken belief that there might be some vision of reality, secret or otherwise, contained within the play for the attentive spectator, 'inquisitor' or 'victim':
No doubt I make the same mistake as when it was the sun that shone, of looking for sense where possibly there is none.
Beckett is asking us to take his work on 'face value', as no more than the 'fundamental sounds (no joke intended)' he once suggested it to be. Vivian Mercier suggests that such a resistance to affirmative interpretation might be pursued in the name of comedy, under a general mockery of any search for 'the unattainable' including 'the philosopher's quest for "truth" [...] or for something theoretically easier to find, such as an agreed terminology...'. In the case of reading and understanding, such an 'agreed terminology' is necessary between author and reader, at least on an implicit level, if there is to be any possibility of making sense of what is written. It is precisely an 'agreed terminology' of what it is to make sense which Beckett at once presupposes and challenges. Another paradox.
However Beckett's own reliability as a witness to the possible meaning of his own writing is at best dubious. The preamble of Film begins with several seemingly conceptual indications of the aim of the ensuing work:
Esse est percipi. All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being. Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception.
Due to the teasing references to Berkeley's maxim 'Esse est percipi' and the allusions to Heideggerian ideas of 'being' and 'non-being', Beckett proffers a conceptual bait, only to reel in the line with the abrupt statement that 'no truth value attaches to the above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience'. Our hope of having discovered the 'key' to Film is profoundly disappointed by such an abrupt volte-face.
Beckett seems to suggest, contrary to his conversation with d'Aubarede, that in this instance reading does not equate with understanding. The reluctance to deliver a singular 'sense' of what is written invites comparison with Keats's idea of 'negative capability' which involves an acceptance within the artwork, and on the part of the artist, of 'uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.'. Associated with this idea was that of 'disinterestedness', of the ideally impersonal nature of the artist. Walter Jackson Bate comments that this 'disinterestedness' aimed to indicate,
the futility, in a universe of uncertainties, of the brief, assertive postures we assume
an idea commonly associated with Beckett's early work. Kenneth Muir has a slightly different interpretation of the idea when he writes that since Shakespeare 'does not attempt to prove anything in his plays', he fulfills, for Keats, this 'disinterestedness'. Negative capability is thus associated not only with a resignation of artistic personality and the anticipation of an unambiguous meaning, but also with a relinquishing of artistic didacticism, and, the concomitant of this, the dropping of a concern to communicate general 'truth'. It is in this respect that we can draw an analogy with Beckett's refusal to admit to a 'key' or 'problem' predicating his writing. Such a refusal seems to undermine the availability of a common ground of 'truth' in a text, however much a critical approach which conflates reading with understanding seeks to discover its 'key'.
Through this resignation of authorial intention, our ability to claim to understand a text's 'meaning' is compromised. In his lecture series Joyce/Beckett, Eric Griffiths suggested that both authors articulate a locatedness of thought-process, that is one of particularity, rather than a universal system of ideas. We might wish to add to this that Beckett also proposes a locality incapable of location, that is a concentrated attention to uniqueness and detail, such as Molloy's preoccupation with his stones, which refuses to locate any 'truth' within its bounds other than that of idiosyncrasy. The very lack of attention Beckett pays to whether the reader makes sense of the characters' utterances thwarts any attempt to understand the 'key' to the text. Again, the reader has no 'agreed terminology' from which to approach an understanding. In the following extract from That Time, 'A' draws the reader's attention to the particularities of the demonstrative pronoun 'that' but also lapses into forgetfulness in the attempt to reach after its more general location with respect to the conceptual noun 'time' :
that time you went back that last time to look was the ruin still there where you hid as a child when was that
'A' is able to remember the particular 'ruin' but is unable to pinpoint this moment within the universal continuum of time. The curiosity expressed in 'when was that' reads against an acquiescence which relinquishes 'irritable reaching after fact and reason'. The particularity of the memory becomes swamped by the inadequate attempt to concentrate upon more general concepts within which an 'agreed terminology' must be grounded.
However, this can also work in the reverse direction. Winnie's apostrophe (supposedly to a god) in Happy Days becomes forgotten in favour of the more localised task of filing her nails:
[She raises hands and holds them open before her eyes. Apostrophic.] Do something! [She clasps hands.] What claws! [She turns to bag, rummages in it, brings out finally a nailfile].
Winnie's inability to concentrate on her declaration of despair points towards a wider reluctance to engage in 'reaching after fact and reason.' Despite the lure of discovering reasons lying behind (or above) her bizarre situation, Winnie is nevertheless distracted away from the stage directions to the concrete particularity of her fingernails.
So the deliberate refusal of Beckett's texts to locate or concentrate upon affirmative meaning does not accord with Keats's analysis. Muir echoes Keats's negative capability when he writes that 'To tell the truth is the only didacticism we should expect of a dramatist'. However, 'truth' in itself is understood as an agreed term of precisely the sort Beckett wishes to challenge. He jokily comments upon this further in Three Dialogues:
My case, since I am in the dock, is that van Velde is the first to desist from this estheticised automatism, the first to submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation, in the absence of terms or, if you like, in the presence of unavailable terms, the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.
However, the reliability of Beckett's seemingly candid thoughts on the nature of the artist must be held up to question in respect to his later statement at the end of the third dialogue, and at the end of this particular statement, that 'Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken.' We might well suspect him of insincerity, of failing not only to tell the whole truth in the dock, but of failing to tell any truth at all. Clearly we cannot take Beckett at his word, yet this is precisely what he demands when he crushes the reader's attempt to go beyond the surface of the text, when he pleads that he is mis-taken by the reader. A further paradox. Nevertheless, the aim of Beckett's earlier writing seems to be to question the possibility of an 'agreed terminology' of understanding among individuals whose experience is dominated by 'the incoercible absence' of such universal relations in respect to the minutiae of everyday life, such as filing nails or eating turnips. In respect to Beckettian texts, any interpretation which explains away such idiosyncrasies in terms of 'this text means x' neglects the way in which these very idiosyncrasies warn us against such 'looking for sense where possibly there is none' to be found.
Beckett's conflation of reading and understanding in conversation with d'Aubarede is typical of the deliberate inconsistency he employs. If his audience fails to pick up on the contradiction involved in at once 'never reading' and 'never understanding', such a failure exposes the absurdity of an interpretation which constantly tries to make sense of what is being read. It is a strategy that Christopher Ricks has called the 'Irish Bull', which according to the Oxford English Dictionary is:
A self-contradictory proposition; in modern use, an expression containing a manifest contradiction in terms or involving a ludicrous inconsistency unperceived by the speaker.
Yet as Ricks points out, whether or not such inconsistency is inadvertent or not on the part of Beckett is a crucial question. If deliberate, such insincerity makes it hard to believe Beckett's claims that there is no 'key' to be discovered to his writing. His vehement denials and self-conscious contradictions could just as easily be rhetorical mischief, as a candid confession.
So, considering the failure of Beckett's writing to provide us with an affirmative meaning, it might be claimed that his later writing attempts to deny absolutely the possibility of such certitude. His earlier writing, such as Murphy, Waiting for Godot or Endgame, contained some degree of apparent content, such as the vigil for Godot, however futile and idiosyncratic such a purpose may be. In contrast, his later writing, especially his shorter prose, apparently contains within it no equivalent purpose other than its own denial that it means anything at all. While the narrator of The Unnamable reluctantly ends by 'going on', the last gasp of the narrator of Worstward Ho mocks his inability to do other than 'no' go on, as well as punning on the possibility of his reader achieving a '[k]no[w]-how' of his esoteric narration. As such, Beckett's later prose, frequently described as poetic rather than narrative, seems to wish to negate even the struggling positivity of his earlier writing.
However, considering the doubtfulness of Beckett's own sincerity on his wishes to avoid writing a literature which contains a 'key' of affirmative knowledge, we might suspect him of protesting too much, of trying to convince us that he means nothing instead of something. The constant aim of Texts for Nothing appears to be the negation of all that is positive, all that is differentiated in any way. However, such negation is constantly interrupted by the persistence of affirmative terms of 'sense'. The narrator steadfastly tries to convince himself that 'there is no one, it's understood, there is nothing'. Yet by acknowledging the fact that 'it's understood', with the inclusion of the apostrophe refusing to commit him to a frank 'is', the narrator implicitly admits that there 'is' something, rather than 'nothing', to be understood.
The title of the narrative suggests that it is giving itself away for free, as well as touting itself for no particular purpose, in contrast, perhaps, to James Joyce's collection of poems entitled Pomes, Penyeach. Such a problem with the attempt to negate its own market value is one which pervades Texts for Nothing. The reader begins to suspect the narrator of trying to offer us a version of the via negativa, that is, a form of negation which is an inverse expression of affirmation, much like our Socratic antinomy. For example, such unconvincing negation is met with in the paradoxical and problematic attempt to naysay the existence of god:
Here at least none of that, no talk of a creator and nothing very definite in the way of creation.
The attempt not to talk of a creator by uttering the contradictory 'no talk of a creator' recalls the same paradox underlying Socrates's claim that all he knew was that he knew nothing. The strength of the negative 'no' is not enough to draw the reader's attention away from the active 'talk' of the statement. Similarly, the use of the conjunction 'and' to indicate the perceived equivalence between 'no' and 'nothing very definite' exposes the unsuccessful attempt to cancel out 'somethingness' and difference through negation and antinomy. Although the narrator aims at the 'nothing[ness]' of 'no talk', especially concerning a creator or a creation, the act of naming a 'creator' paradoxically highlights the constant attempt to locate a something in order to locate the contrasting concept of nothing. As T. S. Eliot wrote in 'Baudelaire', blasphemy, and arguably negation of any kind, is possible only to one who is trying to negate their own reluctantly positive belief:
Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.
The intellectual enigma is picked up later when the narrator exposes the impossibility of defining 'nothing' without differentiating it from something else:
wipe it out, all you have to do is say you said nothing and so say nothing again.
The act of saying 'you said nothing' is an act of saying something, which requires another negation of saying you said 'nothing again'. The fruitless effort to wipe out all traces of something only leaves yet another murmuring 'trace' (page 61) trying to negate the previous statement, and it is something rather than nothing which continues to resonate.
The attempt to wipe out meaning through negation is also hindered by the existence of the 'creator' of the narrated voice. The narrator complains that:
it's the same old road I'm trudging, up yes and down no, towards one yet to be named, so that he may leave me in peace, be in peace, be no more, have never been.
Having complained earlier that the author refuses so much as to 'dignify me with the third person, like his other figments' (page 23), the separation between narrator and creator becomes confused. Is the 'I' who is 'yet to be named' the narrator, suggesting that the 'he' is the author? On the other hand, is the 'I' in fact the author who wishes to be left in peace by his fictional creation, (or, indeed, his overly inquisitive critics)? Such 'uncertainties, mysteries, doubts' concerning who it is who wishes to 'have never been' serves to emphasise the somethingness of the created fiction, its refusal to rest 'in peace'. Instead of convincing us that it really is 'for nothing', the concern to identify and locate the narrator highlights the 'irritable' somethingness of the writing. The reiterated saying of nothing becomes like a double negative which only serves to cancel itself out:
what a blessing it's all down the drain, nothing ever as much as begun, nothing ever but nothing and never, nothing ever but lifeless words.
In the attempt to restate the claim that there has been 'nothing ever as much as begun', the repeated 'nothing' turns back in on itself. The use of the negative relative pronoun 'but' draws attention to the antinomial structure underlying the supposedly 'lifeless words', indicating not their paucity, but rather their ability to produce positive paradox out of double negation, contradicting their guilty attempt to negate their own significance. The calculated attempt to negate and deny does not succeed in washing the text 'down the drain', but rather perpetuates its intrigue, its 'irritable reaching after fact and reason', and the reader's ongoing attention not merely to 'the shape' of the narration 'but' also to its capacity to be understood.
So, as much as the project of Texts for Nothing seems to be to proclaim its own worthlessness, the inconsistencies involved within the narration also indicate the possibilities of rhetorical ingenuity such apparent ingenuousness can afford. Beckett does not simply use negation as a way of confirming certitude in the manner of the via negativa. On the contrary, the overly simplistic negation exposes the manner in which we might aim falsely to subsume an uncertain reading under an easily available term of affirmative understanding, such as transforming the lack of affirmative 'sense' into an inverse (non)sense of its own. As Christopher Ricks remarks, the oxymoronic aspect of Beckett's contradictions also point towards the role of the reader in their reception:
Like any other form of oxymoron, the bull raises sharp questions about stupidity, about the moronic. An oxymoron (Greek 'pointedly foolish', sharp + dull) ought at least to prick us into wondering which way the sharpness may be pointing.
As much as indicating the apparent esotericism of the author, contradiction also highlights the culpable eagerness of the reader to ignore the inconsistencies in a text in favour of an easier verdict of understanding. This line from Texts for Nothing recalls the inconsistency underlying Beckett's apparent equivalence of reading and understanding in conversation with d'Aubarede:
It has spoken, it will always speak, of things that don't exist, or only exist elsewhere.
By altering the negativity of 'don't exist', to the deferred positivity of 'exist elsewhere' through the ambiguity of the conjunction 'or', the comparison being drawn initially strikes us as one of equivalence or indifference, the possibility that things do exist 'elsewhere' being the equivalent of them not existing at all. However, the contradictory craftiness of 'or' also allows us to read the comparison as one of difference. Just because things 'don't exist' here, that does not mean they don't exist 'elsewhere', just as reading might not necessarily lead to understanding. Beckett is using the expectation of meaning in his favour here. That is in order to play with our guilty drive to understand, his writing deliberately withholds its implicit contradictions through a superficial denial that it means anything at all. By concentrating solely on the 'sense' of the negative 'don't' at the expense of the more deferentially positive 'elsewhere', it is easy for the reader initially to subsume the meaning of the sentence under the negativity of 'don't exist.' So, if Beckett's later prose aims to draw our attention to this process of reading, rather than understanding, what implications does this have for how these texts should be approached?
The anticipation of things making sense is deeply funny in Beckett's early writing as it affects the reader as much as, if not more than, the characters in the texts. For example, when Molloy becomes accustomed to carrying pebbles around in his pockets and taking them out every now and again to suck them, his persistence in this habit despite alternative sustenance, and his mathematical deliberations over his actions at first strike us as inexplicable but eventually draw us, as readers, into this process to the extent that we begin to share his concerns. Our ability to attend to the text in the accustomed way of understanding according to an 'agreed terminology' becomes compromised, necessitating an adjustment in the definition of understanding being applied in order to be able to concentrate on reading. We no longer have recourse to an extrinsic concept of general truth in order to explain Molloy's curious behaviour, but must instead join his idiosyncratic world of stone-sucking. Strangely enough, as Hugh Kenner comments, this 'dark world of sheer speculation' which characterizes Beckett's early writing paradoxically makes it more comforting to the reader, albeit more difficult to read, since it consistently refuses to explain away its idiosyncrasies in terms of an impersonal rationalization.
In terms of such meaning, however, Beckett's later prose is practically unreadable. The reader cannot even 'speculate' upon a common ground of understanding. Like Mr. Knot of Watt who plays chess not to win but merely to rearrange the pieces on the board, Beckett changes the rules of the game. He himself explained his views on art in terms of 'indifference', as Leslie Hill terms it, a refusal to dwell upon its import for any length of time: I take no sides. I am interested in the shape of ideas. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine: 'Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.' That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.
In being interested merely in the 'shape of ideas' rather than in any claim to diagnostic truth or universalism they may have, Beckett prevents his own indifference to making sense from sliding into a deferred, positive '[non]sense' of its own. His refusal to concentrate upon anything other than the 'shape' of a statement such as Augustine's amounts to a refusal to 'take [...] sides' concerning its content, and this is precisely the form of attention which Beckett demands of the reader.
So, rather than engaging in a debate pertaining to the content, or 'truth' to recall Kenneth Muir's interpretation of negative capability, Beckett's artistic project seems to be one of challenging the domination of content in favour of 'the shape of ideas'. However, this 'shape of ideas' should not be conflated simply with form, and understood as the opposite of content. Rather, the 'shape of ideas' lies somewhere in between the poles of form and content, between reading and understanding.
Unlike other modernist writers, Beckett seems totally unconcerned with making any gesture towards a realist style, such as that of his mentor James Joyce. Although his first novel A Dream of Fair to Middling Women falls into the vein of Joycean realism, Beckett's dominant aspiration is more towards abstraction or minimalism, to extend the analogy with painting. While Joyce is a Magritte, Beckett is a Mondrian. Rather than amplifying the resonance of words in the manner of Joyce, Beckett is concerned with diminishing them to a monotone. For example:
Same flat tone. You were once. You were never. Were you ever? Oh never to have been! Be again! Same flat tone.
The closely juxtaposed 'never' and 'ever' echo, illuminating how with the removal or addition of a single letter, the sense of the wishful 'Oh never to have been!' can be altered to the wistful 'Oh ever to have been!'. The structure of difference underlying the sense of words can become deflated to the 'same flat tone' simply by playing a little graphemic game with the 'shape' of the letters. As the narrator of Texts for Nothing remarks, 'it's the end gives the meaning to words', and the failure to differentiate between the end of the meaning of 'never' and the beginning of the meaning of 'ever', indicates the way in which this extract aims to blanch each chromaticism that it creates, to continue the musical analogy, leaving only its 'shape' behind. It is this 'undifferentiated speech', as Blanchot has termed it, which characterizes Beckett's later prose. It is a speech which refuses to distinguish itself since as Beckett suggests, any content, literary or otherwise, may have no more than random significance:
I am not a philosopher. One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that is simply a mess.
To what is Beckett asking us to pay attention? Since 'what is in front' of one appears chaotic and inconsistent, the available terms of the 'mess' must necessarily be utilized. According to him, there is nothing else. Our accustomed interpretation involves 'looking for sense', for something which can be distinguished in terms of general truth. Yet, such habits of interpretation founder in the face of Beckett's later prose. Instead, Beckett asks us to adopt a new form of attention, one which accepts its failure to discover sense.
In his comparative study of Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett The Stoic Comedians, Hugh Kenner suggests that Joyce brought the development of the novel to a dead end by writing, following Flaubert, a definitive novel of 'competence'. Kenner proposes that in contrast,
Beckett's first strategy is a strategy of survival. If it is impossible to carry competence further, he will see what can be done with incompetence.
The inability to understand anything more significant than the 'mess' in front of one is precisely the 'incompetence' which Kenner identifies, and one which Beckett has described in terms of a 'syntax of weakness', that is, one which aims towards its own self-erasure. Thus for Beckett, the role of the artist is to 'fail as no other dare fail'. Such a failure either to distinguish or extinguish the flow of creativity is commented on earlier in Three Dialogues:
B. - The only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat is a certain order on the plane of the feasible. D.- What other plane can there be for the maker? B.- Logically none. Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road. D - And preferring what? B.- The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.
Having made this apparently impromptu admission on the nature of the modern artist, Beckett then responds to Duthuit's next comment with nothing but silence, exposing the wry edge to his seeming sincerity. However, at the risk of 'looking for sense where possibly there is none', Beckett's statement does seem to tie in with his comments on the 'mess' and the incompetence of the artist to do anything other than commentate upon it as partial or half-truth.
An art which seeks to disturb this 'plane of the feasible' by refusing to deliver general truth is one which continually turns away from itself, preferring to try to extinguish itself to a monotone than distinguish itself through any claim to knowledge. For example:
A faint voice at loudest. It slowly ebbs till almost out of hearing. Then slowly back to faint full. At each slow ebb hope slowly dawns that it is dying. He must know it will flow again. And yet at each slow ebb hope slowly dawns that it is dying.
Clearly this extract is not concerned with what is being said so much as how it is said. Just as to 'one in need of silence', a voice in the dark comes as a 'torment', so for the failing artist must the artwork be reduced to 'a faint voice at loudest'. However, the syntactic ambiguity of the phrase 'hope slowly dawns that it is dying' contains a lack of grammatical differentiation. Is it the 'ebb' of the sound which is 'dying' or is it the hope of silence which is 'dying'? This exemplifies Beckett's deliberate failure to communicate the significance of the artwork, leaving only the 'shape' of the idea and the faint ebb of its sound behind. In this way, the failure of the modernist artist to work 'on the plane of the feasible' suggests a failure which embraces artist, artwork, and reader alike.
Yet crucially, even in the face of such failure on all sides, the 'obligation' of the artistic endeavour remains. Worstward Ho opens with:
On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.
'Say on' seems in some sense to gloss 'On', that is, to be able to continue is to be able to utter one's own persistence. To 'Be' is to 'Be said on', until to be able to carry 'on' is 'nohow' possible. But in the negation of uttering 'nohow on' the narrative is proclaiming its own capability to continue, it has 'Said nohow on' and so it must '[k]no[w]how' to persevere in looking for 'terms' to describe its own reluctance to continue. Beckett's challenging refusal to pay attention to easily available terms of affirmative understanding resembles a struggling persistence which refuses to apologise for its own failure, and far less to acquiesce to the culpable attempt of critics to ignore such failure and foist a 'secret order' onto it.
As Beckett points out in Three Dialogues, his incompetence to express himself 'on the plane of the feasible', his refusal to pretend 'to be able', is also a form of creativity. Just as new knowledge may be founded on its ability to differentiate itself from other forms of understanding, so may a new way of reading be founded on a theory of art which allows the artist to fail in portraying an affirmative meaning. For the narrator of Texts for Nothing, there is finally
nothing but a voice murmuring a trace. A trace, it wants to leave a trace, yes.
Again, the negative relative pronoun 'but' draws our attention not to the 'nothing' but to the something which, although it is only a 'trace', is capable of 'murmuring' a 'yes', the word which Joyce called 'the most affirmative in the word in the language'. Despite the narrator's final, despairing wish for it all to 'be ended', both reader and narrator are forced to acknowledge that it still 'murmurs' on.
Such obstinacy also indicates the intentional ingenuity of the author. In its refusal to be dignified with the third person, Beckett's later prose works frequently show up its author not as, in the words of Stephen Bloom,
like the God of creation [remaining] [...] within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
but rather as the ingenious rhetorician playing hide-and-seek behind the ingenuous veil of the text. For example, Lawrence Harvey reports Beckett's earnest confession that:
I can't let my left hand know what my right hand is doing. There is a danger of rising up into rhetoric. Speak it even and pride comes.
However, as the narrator of Texts for Nothing admits, rather than a none, 'There has to be a one, it seems, once there is speech'. He asks:
Why did Pozzo leave home, he had a castle and retainers. Insidious question, to remind me I'm in the dock.
The self-conscious reference to Waiting for Godot reminds the reader of the fiction's 'creator' who, echoing Three Dialogues, feels himself to be 'in the dock' over the demand to understand the character of Pozzo. Despite his pleas to the contrary, the author seems all too aware of what each of his hands are doing, and of the impossibility of creating a fiction of 'pure figment', 'unalloyed' to any non-fictional 'reality', to use the example from Ill Seen Ill Said. The author's contrived ingenuousness is shown false. His ingenuity is shown true.
Similarly, the narrator of Texts for Nothing fails in his goal of meaning 'nothing' or remaining silent by his histrionic anxiety about not ending before he has uttered all he can:
But there is not silence. No, there is utterance, somewhere someone is uttering. Inanities, agreed, but is that enough, is that enough, to make sense?
Rather than being 'nothing new', rather even than 'giving up' (page 50), the narrator is forced to admit that 'there is not silence' but 'utterance'. As the voice of Texts for Nothing worries, his copious negativity utterly fails in its goal of monotony, despite aiming towards 'ever the same murmur, flowing unbroken, like a single endless word and therefore meaningless' (Page 40). However, similarly to Socrates's self-consciously rhetorical antinomy, it is this very failure at once to 'make sense', and to achieve 'silence' which draws our attention to the rising ingenuity of the author.
It might be said that like Hamm of Endgame, this dissertation hesitates to end in any traditional manner. For to come to a positive conclusion about Beckett's writing would be to contradict the way in which it explodes the idea that there is a coherent understanding that requires revelation. It is this shoulder-shrugging aspect of Beckett's work which perhaps leads Hugh Kenner to suggest that Beckett is 'the comedian of the impasse', that is the comedian of paradox, failures and subterfuge. But, we might well ask, to recall Beckett's incomprehension of and refusal to read philosophy, why he expects his readers to be any more persistent? Why, instead of getting the joke so clearly intended, they have not dismissed his writing as so many 'fundamental sounds'? A final paradox to prick us into thinking, like the narrator of Texts for Nothing, that we should never 'forget the question-mark' which lies at the end of any attempt to understand the 'key' to Samuel Beckett.
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