Beckett, Greenblatt, and the Possibility of Subversion

             In Stephen Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” he outlines a model for the production and subsequent containment of subversion and disorder in Renaissance drama. He speculates that both colonial and monarchical “power [define themselves] in relation to...threats or simply to that which is not identical with [them]” (26-27), and posits that Renaissance authority would not feel threatened by such displays of subversion because “they are deferred” (43). Indeed, he notes that as readers (and audiences) today “we are free to locate and play homage to the plays’ doubts only because they no longer threaten us,” before concluding with Kafka’s assertion that “there is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us.” This paradigm of subversion and containment seems transferable to any instance of literary innovation (despite Greenblatt’s assertion that “this condition is not a theoretical necessity of theatrical power in general but an historical phenomenon, the particular mode of this particular culture” (45)), as changes in literary form, it seems, are almost always tied to the political potential of the work itself.

            Greenblatt’s model seems particularly useful, in fact, for considering the development of avant-garde literary forms. In Greenblatt’s argument, the success of Shakespeare’s drama lies in the fact that the subversive elements never exceed the limits of the play—no matter how “relentlessly subversive” (45) the plays are, the re-inscription of State authority always imparts, at most, a “radically ambiguous” (43) tone toward subverting that authority. It seems as though the same sort of negotiation needs to be made with the development of avant-garde literary forms—for a literary work to have any radical potential it would need to be at least minimally recognizable as an artwork to inspire any sort of political action from a reader. We can thus see the output of one of the twentieth century’s most influential avant-garde writers, Samuel Beckett, as making certain concessions to the literary conventions of received forms, even if only to ultimately undermine them.

            In an oft-cited letter to his friend Axel Kaun in 1937, Beckett writes that he “cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today” than to “bore one hole after another in [language], until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through.” He clarifies that “at first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words,” which is his concession that he will have to be content to use language (the very medium in question) to ridicule the “paralysingly holy” and “vicious nature of the word” (172). Nowhere in Beckett’s oeuvre is this mocking attitude more manifest than in his 1953 novel Watt, in which Beckett places the protagonist Watt in a series of interstitial spaces to undermine systems of signification at large.

            Upon Watt’s entrance into Mr. Knott’s house, he begins to obsessively divide his objective reality into its constituent parts. The novel reaches its climax when Watt observes a pair of workmen fix a piano—an event that, for Watt:

was not ended, when it was past, but continued to unfold, in Watt’s head, from beginning to end, over and over again, the complex connexions of its light and shadows, the passing from silence to sound and from sound to silence, the stillness before the movement and the stillness after, the quickenings and retardings, the approaches and separations, all the shifting detail of its march and ordinance, according to the irrevocable caprice of its taking place. It resembled them in the vigour with which it developed a purely plastic content, and gradually lost, in the nice processes of its light, its sound, its impact and its rhythm, all meaning, even the most literal. (57)

Here we seem to get a glimpse at what Beckett expresses to Axel Kaun—all significatory systems are reduced to their sheer materiality, until “all meaning, even the most literal” is lost. However, Beckett falls short in this highly subversive undermining of language by expressing this vision through the conventions of both the novel and, more generally, language itself. Watt, for his part, is reined in by the end of the novel as well—when we last see Watt, he has lost the ability to speak and instead communicates statements such as “Ot bro, lap rulb, krad klub. Ot murd, wolf up, wolf up. Ot niks, sorg sam, sorg sam. Ot lems, lats lems, lats lems. Ot gnut, trat stews, trat stews” (135) from the confines of a mental hospital. Thus in trying to subvert language, Beckett ultimately settles for providing a glimpse at what such a subversion would look like, before returning to a conventional novelistic conclusion.