Beckett Minimalism

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Beckett, Minimalism, and the Question of

Postmodernism
Article in Modernism/modernity · November 2012

DOI: 10.1353/mod.2012.0091
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·4·
BECKETT, MINIMALISM,
AND THE QUESTION OF
POSTMODERNISM
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett, 1983
Art indicts superfluous poverty by voluntarily undergoing its own . . . Along

with the impoverishment of means entailed by the ideal of blackness . . . what
is written, painted, and composed is also impoverished: the most
advanced arts push this impoverishment to the brink of silence.
Theodor W. Adorno1
This chapter addresses a simple question: is Beckett a postmodernist writer? Of

course the question is not so simple at all, for it begs a number of other tricky
questions that get only more complicated as we address them: how am I defin-
ing modernism and postmodernism? What does the post in postmodernism
signify? And in any case, Beckett’s work does not suffer from not fitting easily
into either of these categories or periodizations, so who really cares? Yet all the
same, it seems that if postmodernism has any analytical value as a category,
a style, or a “cultural dominant” applied to literature (in Fredric Jameson’s
appropriation of Raymond Williams’s term), then Beckett is a crucial test case,
following as he does perhaps the most exemplary of prose modernists, James
Joyce, and producing a body of work which is very much unlike that of his
famous predecessor and compatriot/co-exile, as well as that of the subject of
his youthful scholarly interest, another quintessential prose modernist, Marcel
Proust. Beckett clearly, and not just temporally, comes after these modernists
and their moment. His defining war is the Second, not the First. His childhood
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132 silence nowhen
was not that of the fin-de-siècle; his abandoned homeland was the Republic of
Ireland; his exile was so famously marked by the change of language in order
to achieve what he called “the right weakening effect” in a clear attempt to
escape the style of Joyce in the language of Proust, and thus attain a style all
his own. If post simply means after, then Beckett is perhaps the first great post-
modernist. But we all know it is not so simple.
Postmodernism as American Avant-Garde

It has been argued that postmodernism is essentially an American phenom-
enon. According to Antoine Compagnon, the French understanding of the
Modern derives from Baudelaire and Nietzsche, and the “Baudelairean modern,
melancholic and dandified, includes the postmodern as an awareness of the
end of history and a refusal of the modernist logic of overcoming, with its dia-
lectic of progress that recasts old religious messianisms.”2 Thus for the French
(and we should never forget that most of Beckett’s major works were written
in France, in French), Beckett has never been considered postmodern—but
then, this tells us nothing about his relation to an Anglo-American under-
standing of modernity.3 Let’s accept this claim for the moment: postmodernism
is American. Why?
In one of the earlier yet most astute discussions of postmodernism, After
the Great Divide, Andreas Huyssen provides a compelling account of the devel-
opment of the American avant-garde in the 1960s. According to Huyssen it
is first of all essential to distinguish the historical avant-gardes in Europe from
modernism. The modernist writers and artists followed the nineteenth-century
development of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake)—of aesthetic autonomy—
deriving from Kant and Schiller but reacting against Romantic conceptions of
art’s organic relationship to nature and society and its (revolutionary) politi-
cal vocation (as, for example, in the Parnassians). Modernism was a reac-
tion against the breakdown of traditions and systems of belief resulting from
the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, the industrial revolutions, urbanization,
and so forth. The increasing leisure time of a growing class produced a need
and thus a market for art through which the very notion of art, artist, artis-
tic production, and consumption were changed. The growth of this market
was partially masked by the ideology of autonomy. Art was released from its
courtly, ritual, and religious roles in a breakdown of the system of patronage,
and thus the artist became free, his work serving only artistic ends. Yet at the
beckett, minimalism, and the question of postmodernism 133
same time the value of his work was determined by a market, the work under-
stood as an object of consumption. In radical contrast to this autonomization,
the historical avant-gardes—for example, Futurism, Dada, Constructivism,
early Surrealism, and above all Marcel Duchamp—contested precisely this
autonomy within the arena of art, and in doing so, actively rejected the ‘insti-
tution art’ and the society that produced it. The avant-gardes in the 10s and
20s (following a politicized prehistory in the nineteenth century) had as an
enemy the institution of art as a tool of bourgeois legitimization, and were thus
political and anti-bourgeois through and through. As Peter Bürger puts it, “the
[historical] avant-garde intends the abolition of autonomous art by which it
means that art is to be integrated into the praxis of life” (Bürger, 53–4). Two
notes: first, while Dada practitioners and the like reacted against “institution
art,” they were not reacting against a consolidated “culture industry”—since
one did not yet exist as such. They were a reaction against an ideology of art
and the society whose interests it served. Also and relatedly, one source upon
which to draw in reaction to nineteenth-century High Art was ‘popular cul-
ture’, meaning the practices deriving from still surviving popular traditions of
song, visual art or artisanal tradition, and so forth.4
Now, America, argues Huyssen, did not have an avant-garde element to
its Modernism since art was not a tool of bourgeois legitimization. On the con-
trary, in a way, art itself, as such, was somewhat radical in America, or at any
rate did not pose a threat to the social status quo in the same way. The modern-
ists, undifferentiated from a non-existent avant-garde, thus served more or less
to establish a High Art ideal. So it is only in the immediate post war era, in
Eisenhower America, that art is institutionalized, along with a smug sense of
comfort and international legitimacy in America, and it is against this situa-
tion that the American avant-gardes react in the 1960s—that is, Pop Art, Op
Art, Minimalism, Performance Art, Conceptual Art, and so forth. However,
this avant-garde movement in America was different, claims Huyssen, in that
(a) the media and the culture industry were consolidated to an unprecedented
degree—and thus many mass industrial products could be mistaken for ‘popu-
lar culture’ in the older sense of the term (Huyssen 165); and (b) in the cli-
mate of the Cold War (McCarthyist silencing of the organized left, among
other issues) these movements had no coherent politically adversarial orien-
tation. “While postmodernism [that is, the American avant-garde] rebelled
against the culture and politics of the 1950s, it nevertheless lacked a radical
vision of social and political transformation that had been so essential to the
historical avant-garde” (169).5
134 silence nowhen
Avant-garde art sought to eliminate the distance between art and life,
by transforming both (for example, Russian Constructivism, while it lasted,
or Surrealism). But, “rather than aiming at a mediation between art and life,
postmodernist experiments soon came to be valued for typically modernist
features such as self-reflexivity, immanence, and indeterminacy.” Thus “post-
modernism was in danger,” according to Huyssen, “of becoming affirmative
culture right from the start” (170). Pop artists, most exemplarily Andy Warhol,
were trying to eliminate the distance between art and popular culture—thus,
between art and life, in some more or less ironic sense—but what were these
specimens of popular culture, these Campbell soup cans and Marilyns and the
like, if not mass-produced consumerist products in the service of capitalist
expansion, or rather, their images: the spectacle (of the commodity) as com-
modity? There is only so far a little irony about this identity between art and
the commodity (that is, the market) can take you. In the end, art—if it still
exists—can have almost no meaning except, at best, that little bit of irony, at
worst, pure affirmation of that state of affairs in exercises in narcissism (the
artist as media star), in the expansion of the art industry and rising profits from
art, in 70s drug culture, and so forth.
“The problem with postmodernism,” concludes Huyssen in a now familiar
thesis, “is that it relegates history to the dustbin of an obsolete épistémè, argu-
ing gleefully that history does not exist except as text, i.e., as historiography”
(172). The critical element of thought born of history and its narratives is
lost. And the “Great Divide” between High Art and mass culture (still non-
contemporaneous feudal culture on the one hand or kitsch) essential to nar-
ratives of modernism is no longer relevant to the postmodern. The relation
to the historical avant-garde is established here, and the difference as well.
America’s avant-garde is Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and so forth,
and this is also the onset of postmodernism.
Now, if postmodernism is America’s depoliticized avant-garde moment,
then it seems all the more irrelevant to Samuel Beckett. However, one of the
first great proponents and ideologists of postmodernity, Ihab Hassan, virtually
defined the term around the work of Beckett in the 1967 book The Literature of
Silence: Henry Miller & Samuel Beckett, and subsequently in The Dismemberment
of Orpheus (1971; 1982) and the essays in The Postmodern Turn (1987), some of
the key critical texts of postmodernism. In a list of dichotomies, Hassan tries to
characterize postmodernism in the “Postface” to the second edition of Orpheus
in 1982, all the while maintaining a sort of differentiation between the avant-
garde and the modern related to that I have just discussed. His catchword for
postmodernism is, at this point, “indeterminance,” a mix between indetermi-

nacy and immanence, the ultimate effect of which is “open, playful, optative,
provisional (open in time as well as in structure or space), disjunctive, or
indeterminate forms, a discourse of ironies and fragments, a ‘white ideology’
of absences and fractures, a desire of diffractions, an invocation of complex,
articulate silences” (271). On the contrary, modernist works were defined by
determinacy, form, purpose, design, hierarchy, mastery, presence, metaphysics,
and so forth. If we grant that there is legitimacy and coherence to all of these
qualities being subsumed under a concept or category of the postmodern (and
the modern), we are still left with the fundamental question: why? What has
led to this breakdown? Hassan demurs in positing a cause, not out of some
putative post-structuralist questioning of causality, but more because it wasn’t
clear to him in 1982.
Greenberg’s Modernism
Without going further into a sketch of the by now well-known history of the
postmodern (see Anderson 1998), I want to go back to the liminal moment
around 1960 when the American avant-gardes developed into what will be
called by so many “postmodernism.” However, rather than referring to the
Duchamp-Cage-Warhol axis,6 I want to focus on exasperation and exhaus-
tion, “apocalypse by reduction,”7 and the other great art movement of the
60’s, Minimalism.
As early as 1939 Clement Greenberg had expressed his influential account
of modernism (or what he calls “avant-garde”) in the famous article “Avant-
garde and Kitsch.” It is here that he first discussed the genesis of the abstract
in the inevitable move of modern artists towards reflection on the essential
materials of their various media, in an imitation of “the disciplines and pro-
cesses of art and literature themselves” (1986–1993, I: 8). More clearly stated
sixteen years later:
It seems to be a law of modernism—thus one that applies to almost all art that
remains truly alive in our time—that the conventions not essential to the viability of
a medium be discarded as soon as they are recognized. The process of self-purification
appears to have come to a halt in literature simply because the latter has fewer con-
ventions to eliminate before arriving at those essential to it.8
Leaving aside for the moment this comment about literature, as far as paint-
ing is concerned, this is where Greenberg’s famous flatness thesis comes in:
136 silence nowhen
“flatness alone [is] unique and exclusive to pictorial art” he writes in 1960
(“Modernist Painting” in Greenberg 1986–1993, IV: 87). Thus Cubism rather
than Surrealism is the legitimate Modern Painting, as is its extension into
Abstract Expressionism. Another interesting assertion from that article: “The
essence of Modernism lies . . . in the use of characteristic methods of a dis-
cipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order
to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence” (IV: 85) Modernism as
self-critique, autonomy, purity, and [formal] competence.
Again I seem somewhat far from Beckett, but the wonder years of Jackson
Pollock (1947–1953), as well as the first triumphs of Abstract Expressionism in
Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko in the late 40s, correspond exactly, though
unrelatedly, to Beckett’s tremendous “frenzy of writing” (as Knowlson [323],
citing Beckett himself, dubs the period 1946–53) that produced the Nouvelles,
the Trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone meurt, l’Innommable), and En attendant
Godot. So too do related developments in the visual arts—and Beckett was a
keen amateur of the visual arts—in Europe and the European tradition: works
and writings by Lucio Fontana, Joseph Albers, Alberto Burri, Yves Klein, and,
in France, the American Ellsworth Kelly. Moreover, my reason for mentioning
Greenberg’s famous thesis is a recent and powerful reading of Beckett which,
though it makes no reference to Greenberg, presents a compelling reading
of Beckett in precisely this light: Pascale Cassanova’s Beckett l’abstracteur
(1997), recently published in English translation as Samuel Beckett: Anatomy
of a Literary Revolution (2006). Dismissing a certain strand of Beckett criticism
in a few pages, Casanova argues that Beckett is the writer who realizes literary
abstraction (equivalent to Greenberg’s modernist imperative, but here hap-
pening contemporarily rather than earlier). And refreshingly she focuses not
on the most famous plays, Godot, Fin de Partie, and Happy Days, nor on the
great four-novel sequence (Molloy through Comment C’est), and certainly not
on the English language novels, but on the later prose works, culminating in
Beckett’s last masterpiece, Worstward Ho (1983), which she claims
is not the evocation of a nihilistic stance or the representation of ontological tragedy,

but a kind of ultimate poetic art: Beckett delivers his theory of literary abstraction in
practice and elaborates an abstract text at the very point when he explains how he
writes it. (2006, 26)
Worstward Ho is a “pure object of language which is totally autonomous” (26).

Without going further here into Casanova’s exhilarating argument, it is clear
that she has come up with a radically new way of understanding Beckett,
and that she places him firmly within a tradition of modernist purism or self-
purification. And this form of purism in Beckett is certainly a form of mini-
mal or minimalizing art, which is not (yet) to say minimalist, but, as Carla
Locatelli for example has explored, “subtractive” in method (Locatelli 1990,
x); a search, in Beckett’s words, for the “meremost minimum” (WH 9) of rep-
resentation, of art. What unfortunately lacks in Casanova (as in Locatelli) is a
good account of why this happens historically, in a broader sense than merely
literary history, about which she indeed has much of interest to say.
Beckett and Painting

Beckett’s own personal interest in painting and the visual arts is well known,
and equally well known to Beckett scholars is that none of the artists I have
just mentioned were celebrated by Beckett, if he even knew of their exis-
tence. Beckett’s writings on art and artists, both the pieces collected in Disjecta
and the discussions, primarily with Tom McGreevy and subsequently with
Georges Duthuit, that we see in the letters, are fairly broad in range, but
engage a very different set of artists than the up-and-coming New Yorkers
whom Greenberg would celebrate and who would become part of the famous
shift of the center-of-gravity of the art world from Paris to New York, or their
European counterparts that I mentioned above.9
Beckett’s art knowledge was not “learnèd” or scholarly, but empirical, the
fruit of “tramping unweariedly through museums and haunting exhibitions”
(Mercier, 88) in Dublin, London, Paris, and particularly across Germany in
the winter of 1936–7. Beckett seems to have had good historical taste, but
more interesting here is his home-grown appreciation of, and strong opin-
ions about, contemporary art as famously expressed in the three “dialogues”
with Georges Duthuit of 1949. The contemporaries most highly celebrated by
Beckett in his critical writings and letters are certainly Bram van Velde and
Jack B. Yeats, in addition, perhaps, to Klee, Munch, Karl Ballmer, Braque,
and a few others. He has more ambivalent feelings about Picasso, Matisse,
Rouault, Bonnard, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and others, for reasons pertaining to
his definition of modern painting articulated in “Peintres de l’empêchement”:
“le premier assaut donné à l’objet saisi, indépendamment de ses qualités, dans
son indifférence, son inertie, sa latence . . . ” (D 135). 10 The indifference
of the object of the painting, as a pole of the philosophico-artistic relation
of subject and object, is key here, and accordingly Beckett expresses a sort
138 silence nowhen
of wariness of “abstracteurs de quintessence” including Mondrian, Lissitzky,

Malevich, and Moholy-Nagy, who in their different ways, and in different peri-
ods, abandon the representational object altogether. Beckett also eliminates
surrealists from his definition, since they are less concerned with the relation
to the object than with the relationship among conventional and unconven-
tional objects (“questions de répertoire”). Beckett seems to insist that a sort
of abstraction occur in painting, from the given object to the indifference of
object, but that for this to happen, an object must in some sense remain; thus
his rejection of pure abstraction. Indeed, as Vivian Mercier suggests, much
of Beckett’s enthusiasm for contemporary art revolves around Expressionism
(including Fauvism).11 This also seems true in the interest he communicates to
McGreevy regarding the Brücke group (particularly Nolde, if less so Schmidt-
Rottluff, Kirchner, and Heckel) and related artists, above all Ballmer and
Willem Grimm, during his tour of Germany in 1936–7.12 Beckett’s concern is
thus with the interior relationship, within the artist, to the world of objects,
filtered through an often obsessive concern “with his expressive possibilities,
those of his vehicle, those of humanity” (D 142).
In any case, painting—art—as a matter of expressive vocation, to take
terms quite literally, is central to Beckett’s understanding of art in general, as
in the famous statement in the dialogue on Pierre Tal Coat where he speaks
of an art that prefers, instead of “going a little further down a dreary road,”
rather “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” (D 139).13 The quota-
tion is famous, perhaps too much so. What it means is quite complicated.
Why is there nothing to express? Because there is nothing new under that sun
which, having no alternative, shines on, all the same?14 How has the painter
no means or power to express when everything from easels and brushes to
ceramic urinals is ready to hand? And what do desire and obligation have to
do with all this?
To answer these questions, assuming, despite the tone of the dialogues, that
Beckett is being quite serious in stating his position, it is necessary to draw back
a bit and think more generally about the situation of modern art. A good fram-
ing of the narrative of modernity in which I want to place Beckett, along with
certain of his contemporary visual artists, is provided by J.M. Bernstein in his
recent book on modern art, Against Voluptuous Bodies. According to Bernstein,
“Modernism is modern art’s self-consciousness of itself as an autonomous prac-
tice” (AVB 3). This autonomy, however, is not exactly the triumph it might
have seemed to nineteenth-century priests of art for art’s sake, but “a conse-
quence and so an expression of the fragmentation and reification of modern
life” (ibid.). So far, this is a well-known story. But Bernstein, following Adorno,
wants to be much clearer about what is lost over the course of the era of reason
triumphant, through the industrial revolutions, mass migrations and urbaniza-
tion, the loss of communal and spiritual traditions—in short, the process of
disenchantment and alienation that we call modernity. “What has been excised
from the everyday is the orientational significance of sensory encounter, sensory
experience as constitutive of conviction and connection to the world of things” (ibid.).
In response to the triumph of abstract rationalization in science, in the market,
in the organizational structures of modern work, life, and culture—whereby,
according to the argument of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, rational control
has reached an extreme and regressed back to myth—art’s task is to recuperate
or rescue particular, embodied experience, prior to its domination and concep-
tualization by instrumental reason and “identity thinking” [Identitätsdenken].15
Skipping back to the issue of the artist’s relationship to the object, that
is, the question of realism and its alternatives, I again cite Bernstein, who
contends that “realism is not primarily a matter of making likeness of the
world but a complex matter of the fitness of the wholly human powers of art
in relation to a particular, human, and secular social world.” He continues,
“Modernism, as the forsaking of realism, is hence the record of the sorrow of
the world, its lack of human worldliness. Only this explains why modernism
must be an art of failure. . . .” (AVB 12–13). A rejection of realism; sorrow and
failure; a misfit between man and world—or a world of men as misfits: clearly
we are approaching the world of Samuel Beckett.
Beckett’s world, or worlds, is of course ours and not ours, Ireland and
France as much as anywhere/nowhere. It is so as a matter of necessity, all
fictional worlds being secondary ontologies with greater or fewer points of
salience that map onto our (primary) lived worlds.16 But what stands out as
most characteristically “Beckettian” in this respect is a minimalist reduction
of recognizable elements—settings, objects, characteristics—which opens his
works onto a greater domain of pertinence, all the while rendering interpreta-
tion almost always impertinent because it always fills in the gaps17 with unwar-
ranted external material from our worlds, expressing our concerns. This is one
important aspect of Beckett’s peculiar, minimal, elliptical style, and of its dif-
ficulty of interpretation.
For Adorno, modernist art like Beckett’s is a response to the situation of
modernity, itself a product of the dialectic of enlightenment whereby sensuous
140 silence nowhen
particularity has been sacrificed to the abstract universal. However, the proper
response to this sacrifice is not saturation in sensuous particularity—which ide-
ologized and technicized is precisely what we get through Technicolor, Dolby
sound, digital 3-D computer imaging, and so forth—that is, not the particular
but its simulacrum. The right response is rather the dark truth of the poverty
of experience offered up unwaveringly (as in the Adorno epigraph). This is
Beckett’s “art unresentful of its insuperable indigence” (D 141) and from this
understanding come the minimal abstractions of Beckett’s great works, but
also, here, his celebration of visual art that realizes the modern impossibility
of realism and elaborates this impossibility as a subjective relation to thing-
ness (choseté), as resistance of the medium and ultimately as a questioning of
(artistic) subjectivity.
In this context if we return to the famous statement in the “Three
Dialogues,” we can understand better the expressive aporia. The artist has
no lyrical or organic connection to nature, to his fellow men, or even to his
own self to which he can give expression. His tools—traditional forms, the
very stuff of his art—have revealed themselves to be impotent. Thus, if he
has any sense at all, he has no desire to do this, to undertake the expression
he nonetheless feels compelled to. Why compelled? Here Beckett honestly
responds, “I don’t know.” The answer is, because he is an artist. Is it genetic,
or some psychological imbalance or mania? Who knows? But as a man who
feels existentially that his vocation is artistic expression (rather than quantity
surveying or teaching French, for example), but is also convinced that he has
nothing at his disposal to help him realize this urge, his choice is to go on,
despite impossibility, and to fail, “as no other dare fail” (D 145).
In Bernstein’s account, Abstract Expressionism is an unsurpassed pinnacle
and end of modernist painting because it achieves an “unowned” sensuous par-
ticularity, a non-subjective expressiveness (AVB 157) that achieves “meaning
beyond or without discursive redemption” (AVB 120).18 I think Beckett could
certainly have appreciated this. Indeed (as Vivian Mercier suggests) Bram van
Velde’s work advances, from more Expressionist work in the 1920s, towards
a sort of overlap with Abstract Expressionism from the late 1930s on. I am
not aware of Beckett’s knowledge of this quintessentially American modernist
movement, but it is certainly kindred in its concerns with van Velde’s work,
as with Beckett’s own.19 However, I am not interested in establishing a link
between Beckett’s aesthetic and that of the Abstract Expressionists except
insofar as both can be related to the general problem brought out most clearly
in debates around Minimalism.
Minimalism
In strict art historical terms, Minimalism refers primarily to “sculpture or three-
dimensional work made after 1960 [or rather, in the 1960s], that is abstract—
or even more inert visually than ‘abstract’ suggests—and barren of merely
decorative detail, in which geometry is emphasized and expressive technique
avoided” (Baker, 9). Minimalism—or minimalisms—“challenged prevailing
aesthetic forms and served to propel a redefinition of the ‘object status’ of a
work of art into conceptual terms as [artists] redefined the structure, form,
material, and production of the art object, as well as its relationship to space,
other objects, and the spectator” (Goldstein, 17–18). The style has its origins
in Suprematist (e.g. Malevich), De Stijl (e.g. Mondrian), and Constructivist
(e.g. Tatlin, Rodchenko) abstract painting and sculpture, and is associated
with a number of key artists: those focused on geometrical, non-expressive
work often in industrial materials like Donald Judd, Tony Smith, and Ronald
Bladen up to Richard Serra and beyond; and those deriving more obviously
from Duchamp and focused on the indistinctness between art and normal
or found objects like Carl Andre and Dan Flavin, as well as others who do
not fit so well into this distinction, notably: Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and
Sol LeWitt.20 More broadly speaking, though, minimalism is “a movement,
primarily in postwar America, towards an art—visual, musical, literary, or
otherwise—that makes its statement with limited, if not the fewest possible,
resources” (Strickland, 7). This definition allows Edward Strickland (a musi-
cologist) to link together minimal trends in painting, sculpture, music, poetry,
and prose in an overall cultural movement, an interpretative move with which
I am inclined to agree. But the application of the term “minimalism” to litera-
ture, while compelling in response to certain contemporary and subsequent
works by nouveau romanciers as well as a certain American tradition, has in
fact not been extensively developed. It is generally defined as “a poetics that
holds that spareness, tautness, understatement, and reduction are emblematic
of poetic authenticity” (Preminger, 788). As far as prose goes, the only exam-
ple given in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is—Samuel
Beckett (although more general discussions, for example Strickland’s, often
mention Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others).
Beckett’s style is certainly spare, taut, and reduced—or rather, is character-
ized by a process of becoming ever sparer, tauter, and more reduced over the
course of forty some-odd years after the purgative madness of Watt (finished
1945, published 1953) up to “Stirrings Still” (1988) and the other final pieces.
142 silence nowhen
Indeed, as Locatelli discusses, the last third of Beckett’s career is characterized

not only by subtraction and reduction, but by self-reflexivity about this pro-
cess of reduction in the works themselves. For example—and one can chose
almost at random—“Comme tout serait simple alors. Si tout pouvait n’être
qu’ombre. Ni être ni avoir été ni pouvoir être. Du calme. La suite. Attention.”21
The meta-commentary rushes in to control the abstraction at the point of its
approach to nothingness—a control most masterfully staged in Worstword Ho.
Prior to this Beckett had long exercised a practice of aesthetic self-denial—of
conventional elements of drama and prose fiction, or rather (since such ele-
ments as character, setting, plot, and so forth cannot be entirely eradicated)
of their plausibility or believability. As is well known, Beckett will not allow
“suspension of disbelief” but rather invites disbelief by drawing attention to
artificiality, but it is crucial to see how this self-reflexivity is motivated, or at
least abetted, by the minimalizing reduction. Fin de partie/Endgame provides
examples that are typical. When Hamm says “A moi . . . Ça avance . . .” /
“Me to play . . . we’re getting on . . .” (FdP 89, E 125) this is a meta-theatrical
comment which fills a void created by abstraction or subtraction of a hitherto
seemingly crucial dramatic element: plot. The same goes for Clov’s famous
remark (and reassurance to the audience): “Quelque chose suit son cours” /
“Something is taking its course” (FdP 26, 47; E 98, 107). The minimalism
of plot and the self-reflexivity go hand in hand. The same can be said for
character—“Mais vivement la saisir là où elle s’y prête le mieux” / “But quick
seize her where she is best to be seized” (Mal vu mal dit 17–18; Ill Seen Ill
Said 15); for setting—“Imagination dead imagine. A place, that again. Never
another question. A place, then someone in it, that again” (CSP 169); and of
course for meaning—“What is it meant to mean?” (from Happy Days in CDW
156). The famous and comic self-reflexive commentary of Beckett’s narrators
and dramatic characters is doubtless not only a result of this minimalism, but
is certainly interrelated.
Whatever its general applicability, minimalism as a critical or stylistic term
was first developed with respect to sculptural or three-dimensional art in the
60s (and subsequently) in what will become known as a postmodern interpre-
tation. As Peter Schjeldahl recalls of his experience in the 60s, “here was an
art (was it art?) that existed in relation to me and that I, in a sense, created”
(205). This is what Greenberg protégé Michael Fried will condemn early on as
the theatricality of the “literal object,” the modernist imperative in his eyes
being a renunciation of theatricality, the art object’s indifference to the sub-
ject.22 Theatrical art is dialogic and spatial; meaning is given by the perceiver
in the encounter within the specific exhibition space because the object itself
has no meaning; “the work and the situation it creates . . . exhausts itself in
its effect on the beholder” (AVB 131). Thus we see the confluence of Cage,
Rauschenberg, and the Black Mountain School with Minimal Art towards
aleatory performance, art without any regulative criteria of value. For Kantians
like Fried and Greenberg, this is a disaster, and ultimately as foreign to the
aesthetic as, say, gastronomic experience.
In Minimalism, Greenberg’s inevitable move towards painterly flatness
and abstraction was wedded to an avant-garde, Dada questioning of the
institution of art and, finally, to the elimination of the last of the holdovers
from the classical (or rather romantic) conception of art: artistic intention.23
Minimal art content, minimal artistic effort: art, if art, only minimally. This
was not a development that Greenberg, for one, condoned though he grudg-
ingly admitted that it had to be taken seriously.24 Minimalism, seen at the
time as distinct from Pop Art, fuses to a certain degree with it in retrospect
(as foreseen by Greenberg in 1967) insofar as both move towards Conceptual
Art and Performance Art, calling into question and destabilizing the object,
the subject, the institution of art, the relation of art to popular culture, and so
forth, and exemplifying, in the failure of political optimism of the 60s around
the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement and so forth, the per-
vasiveness of the society of the spectacle, the indefatigable power of capital-
ist cultural appropriation, and a subsequent cynicism and disengagement; in
short: “what is called postmodernism in culture might as well, within the art
culture, be termed the Age of Minimalism” (Schjeldahl, 210). With Fried, we
might call this the age of theatricality, or even of Post-Art.
Now painterly minimalism is not strictly speaking Minimalism since
Minimalism proper is a rejection of the painterly in any respect as a move
towards indistinction of object and art, something theorists claimed painting
could not attain to (as in Donald Judd’s manifesto “Specific Objects” of 1965).
However, it emerges as a rejection of the metaphysical pretensions and pathos
of abstract expressionism (as in Rothko) and the psychological and physical
expressiveness of Action Painting (in Pollock) towards a sort of neutral or inert
abstraction, first in Frank Stella and Agnes Martin and exemplarily in Hard
Age “Post-Painterly Abstraction” that eschews the spiritual-transcendent tra-
dition of the monochrome25—examples include Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis,
and Kenneth Noland (the overlap between Abstract Expressionism and mini-
malist painting, such as it is, is traditionally called “colour field painting”).
John Perrault writes, “What is minimal about Minimal Art, or appears to be
144 silence nowhen
when contrasted with Abstract Expressionism or Pop Art, is the means, not
the end . . . [involving] a minimum degree of self-expression” (Battcock, 260).
It is “an art whose blank, neutral, mechanical impersonality contrasts so vio-
lently with the romantic, biographical Abstract-Expressionist style” (Barbara
Rose in Battcock, 274–5). Barbara Rose connects Abstract Expressionism back
to Malevich and “the search for the transcendent, universal, absolute” and
Minimalism with Duchamp and “the blanket denial of the existence of abso-
lute values” (Battcock, 275)—reminiscent of Beckett’s description of Joyce’s
purgatory and its “absolute absence of the Absolute” (D 33).
A hinge here is perhaps Barnett Newman, whose work, as Strickland
argues, tends to Post-Painterly Abstract minimalism, though his critical writ-
ing and even his titles drip with portentous depth (for example the tremendous
Vir heroicus sublimis of 1951). Many of Newman’s contemporaries and imme-
diate successors, not only among minimalists, but famously including Andy
Warhol, certainly saw a connection between his work and minimalism. Robert
Morris describes Newman’s work as “the least allusive . . . least metaphysical
painting . . . the most direct.”26 Jean-François Lyotard writes of Newman’s
paintings from Onement 1 (1948) through Vir heroicus sublimis (1951):
If we examine only the plastic presentation which offers itself to our gaze without the
help of the connotations suggested by the titles, we feel not only that we are being
held back from giving any interpretation, but that we are being held back from deci-
phering the painting itself; identifying it on the basis of line, colour, rhythm, scale,
materials (medium and pigment) and support seems to be easy, almost immediate. It
obviously hides no technical secrets, no cleverness that might delay the understand-
ing of our gaze, or that might therefore arouse our curiosity. It is neither seductive nor
equivocal; it is clear, “direct,” open and “poor.” (Lyotard, 83)
For Lyotard this is an example of sublimity, the pure, minimal sublimity of

“taking place,” that is, occurring. “What is sublime is the feeling that some-
thing will happen, despite everything, within this threatening void, that some-
thing will take ‘place’ and will announce that everything is not over. That
place is mere ‘here,’ the most minimal occurrence” (82). Commenting on
the famous “zip” in Newman’s work, and especially in the 60s sculptures (for
example, Broken Obelisk of 1961), Lyotard writes that “Being announces itself
in the imperative”—a minimal command to “Be!” (88).
Lyotard is a key voice in the revival of the sublime in twentieth-century
aesthetics, which often, as in Lyotard, is presented as a return to, or close read-
ing of Kant. Without delving too deeply into this tradition, I will simply refer
most basically to the Kantian account of the sublime as the failure of mental
representation and thus the revealed inadequacy of the imagination in the

face of natural or mathematical magnitude or natural dynamism, a “negation
of flawless or harmonious aesthetic synthesis” (Wellmer, 163) which seems
to be a failure, but which ultimately reveals, despite the horror at the abyss
that opens up in representation (Kant, 115), “the superiority of the ratio-
nal vocation of our cognitive powers over the greatest power of sensibility”
(114)—that is, a triumph of supersensible reason over nature, of “the mind’s
sublimity above nature” (123). We cannot sensibly comprehend infinity or
Mont Blanc, or even St. Peters, but all the same we can think them, name
them, by virtue of a supersensible power, as indeterminate ideas of reason. The
sublime, indeed, is merely a matter of mind, and not of nature, and for that
reason is ultimately less important for Kant than the beautiful (since it does
not eventually reveal a harmony between mind, nature, and moral law), but
its curious mixing of pleasure in un-pleasure, of terror or incapacity saved by
reason and therefore enjoyed, has proven quite appealing to twentieth-century
thinkers of the aesthetic.
Now, for Lyotard, the sublime is an experience of the non-presentable
which both demands and is denied sensible expression. It is an experience that
cannot possibly be subsumed under a concept of the understanding, of reason.
And this neo- or post-Kantian sublime is for Lyotard a mark of the postmod-
ern, a term which according to his postscript to the Postmodern Condition is
not temporal but a matter of tone. Thus he even claims that the postmodern
precedes the modern as an aspect of its movement. Without committing to
this and related claims in Lyotard’s aesthetic, I nonetheless want to take his
description of Newman as marking an overlap between Abstract Expressionism
and Minimalism. The sublime fact of being, shorn of symbolism, allegory,
anthropomorphism, and the like, is certainly the goal of Minimalist work in
Judd and Morris, as well as in Frank Stella’s famous “what you see is what you
see” (qtd. in Meyer, 7).
Here I want to return one last time to Bernstein’s take on late modernist
art. This minimal sublime situation sought so earnestly by Judd and others
was precisely what invited the “theatrical relationship” of the spectator to
the object bemoaned by Fried. Fried criticizes this theatrical effect for in fact
being all that there is in the creations of Smith, Morris, and others. “Literalist
art” is a theatrical art-effect “without the art itself” (“Art and Objecthood” in
Battcock, 134). And Fried insists that this aesthetically empty literality is not
a matter of sheer objective presence, but rather “of latent or hidden natural-
ism, indeed anthropomorphism” (129).27 Now, Bernstein counters that Fried
146 silence nowhen
has effectively identified the symptom but misdiagnosed the problem. The lit-
eralist, minimal works’ “very simulation of artistic fullness and their insistent
emptiness can feel like a particular and horrifying fate of the human, as if all
that remained was the wholly empty form of the human, the general idea of
anthropomorphism without a content to fill it” (AVB 132–33). He contin-
ues, “might we not think of such works as aesthetically performing (through
the use of geometric forms, repetition, and machined materials) the claim
of Enlightenment rationalism, its demythologizing animus, while in being so
emphatically aesthetic, never simply fully rationalized things, mere objects?”
(AVB 133). Thus the empty presence of minimalist works is (part of) their
critical claim on us. These sculptures and paintings, like Beckett’s minimal
works, express the nothing to express, and in Adorno’s sense, thereby indict
our own emptiness via the aborted anthropomorphism. Or to put it differently,
the minimalist style presents gaps or an appeal which incite ever more engage-
ment, but this engagement ultimately fails to connect and reveals itself as
nothing but pure, subjective auto-affection—unless, crucially, it then leads to
self-interrogation of our projected selves, or relation to the world, and so forth,
and we find this, too, to be empty. Thus the works present us our emptiness.
The shared empty, almost inexpressible presence in Newman and the early
Minimalists is what I want to claim for the ethico-aesthetic thrust of Beckett’s
work. It is not purely aesthetic, nor is it merely discursive—the gloss on the
work that has become so important in art since the 60s. It is palpable to view-
ers in the encounter with the work—the object, sculpture, painting, or play.
Aesthetically expressed emptiness as ethical and philosophical claim (and not
simply “nothing,” as Beckett insists to Duthuit).
Of Newman, Greenberg wrote: “Newman happens to be a convention-
ally skilled artist . . . but if he uses his skill, it is to suppress the evidence of
it. And the suppression is part of the triumph of his art, next to which most
other contemporary painting begins to look fussy.”28 This predicament brings
me back to Beckett, for the use of prodigious skill to suppress this skill for the
sake of an ever more minimal art, utterly lacking in the Absolute, seems both
to describe Beckett very well, as well as to place him squarely in a modern-
ist tradition different from that of the avant-garde Dada-ist inspired anti-art
of the Duchamp-Cage-Warhol axis (or a Duchamp-Cage-Ad Reinhard-Yves
Klein performative axis). Beckett does not want to destroy art for the sake of
a new life, or cynically, out of some nihilist gesture, or in some post-modernist
hermeneutic sense to draw attention to the “role of the reader,” or viewer, as
it were, in generating meaning. Rather, following Theodor Adorno, I would
say that Beckett wants to use the utmost ability and knowledge of tradition to
continue to create art in a shattered world in which none of the “old answers”
remains valid (“Ah les vieilles questions, les vieilles réponses, il n’y a que ça!” /
“Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!” as Hamm
says in Endgame. [FdP 54; E110]). He thus presents them in their invalidity
and engages the reader/viewer in a process of meaninglessness. Nullifying and
silencing convention and the tradition, Beckett constantly undermines his
own project. But, according to the Unnamable’s pensum: “il faut continuer,
je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer” / “. . . you must go on. I can’t go
on. I’ll go on” (I 213; T 418). This urge is not, or not just, the bare, biological
self plodding on despite it all, and not just the merely self-reflective, formal
credo of the artist at the end of tradition (as delineated in Casanova), but
also an affirmative, although not exactly triumphant, endorsement of art, of
the almost hopeless but still minimally valid project. It is an art which proved
to Adorno, for one, that such a thing was still possible after Auschwitz;29 an
artwork (like Fin de partie / Endgame) possible, indeed necessary, as a minimal,
fractured, irrecuperable monad separated from society, and useless for politics,
pleasure, entertainment, therapy, or what have you. But this very fracturedness
was in a way the starkest realism, and this irrecuperability, this uselessness,
was in a way the most useful thing for a society in need of the most searching
critique of its own current damaged state.
In a key definition that weds a Marxist conception of art praxis to a Modernist
conception of artistic autonomy, Adorno writes in the Aesthetic Theory:
Art . . . is social not only because of its mode of production, in which the dialectic
of the forces and relations of production is concentrated, nor simply because of the
social derivation of its thematic material. Much more importantly, art becomes social
by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art.
By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with
existing social norms and qualifying as “socially useful,” it criticizes society by merely
existing . . . (AT 225–6)
In this brilliant dialectical move, Adorno retains insights of nineteenth-cen-

tury materialist and idealist conceptions of the artwork: materialist both in the
sense of an economical-historical understanding of the social phenomenon
Art, and in the sense of the formal or generic specificity of the individual
work; idealist in the Hegelian sense of the essential mediation of concept and
spirit, and in the aestheticist sense of art on a spiritual remove from the con-
cerns society. Beckett, for Adorno, exemplifies this difficult balance between
148 silence nowhen
autonomy and engagement. His art, as critics have always noticed, does not
explicitly engage the times, does not name the catastrophe, though the text
has, as has been asserted time and again, “the power . . . to claw” (D 107).
Adorno gives an account of how this is true by providing a more sophisti-
cated understanding of the artwork. And the negative utopian element in art
becomes clear. “Through the irreconcilable renunciation of the semblance of
reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of
the unreconciled” (AT 33). That is, Endgame, or Worstward Ho or what have
you, does not provide an obvious answer or escape, does not flesh out the mini-
mal, damaged subject—does not makes us feel better, or make things easier to
bear, or help us forget, or help recuperate sensuous particularity and provide
us with a glimmer of utopian happiness through beautiful semblance. And
it is precisely in renouncing any false reconciliation of the state of affairs, of
society after Auschwitz or Hiroshima or Vietnam or this recent famine or that
emerging genocide, that art holds fast to a promise of real reconciliation in the
midst of the damaged and unreconciled world: not by some utopian escape,
which in its simple negation remains tied to the logic of repression, but by the
formal, aesthetic engagement of the truth of this world and articulation of an
aesthetic truth that is non-discursive, or non-“communicatively rational.”30
As Minimalism became more accepted and mainstream by the late 60s,
it lost much of its confrontational and critical power: the power of the larger,
industrial “specific object” (Donald Judd) to engage the viewer in a challeng-
ing dialogue was lost to monumentalism in Serra and beyond (to a post-mod-
ern sublime of magnitude, for example, in Anish Kapoor), or the concept
of Minimalism was generalized beyond any coherence in its over-application
to various media and formats (for example, Robert Smithson and landscape
minimalism, or Jackie Winsor and Eva Hesse); the conceptualism present from
the beginning in the Dada strand of the Minimal took precedence and led in
new directions towards a regime which is still ours; Philip Glass’s enormous
commercial success led to a sort of New Age repetitive post-minimalism that
no longer had anything to do with the original conceptions of Young or Riley;
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s objectivist, minimal novels and films suffered from his
subjectivist, sex-fantasy turn; and so on. The arts decidedly entered into a new
regime, the epoch of a new cultural dominant—the postmodern—which like
any dominant has its aesthetic highs and lows, even if its criteria of value are
exceedingly difficult to identify—or rather, to distinguish from pure market
values. Performativity, poly-vocality, multi-perspectivism, heterogeneity, pas-
tiche, eclecticism, double coding, fragmentariness, anti-realism, the melting
of formal and generic borders, “indeterminance,” “ontological uncertainty”

(McHale) and so forth—many of these values or qualities are not so much
different from modernist techniques per se, but different in tone—celebratory,
affirmative, playful and “liberating” (Hutcheon). But Samuel Beckett, while
somehow still remaining fresh and challenging, simply kept doing what he had
been doing all along, producing in the face of this changing Zeitgeist ever more
minimal masterpieces like Imagination morte imaginez and Film (1965), Assez
and Bing (1966), Sans (1969), Le Dépeupleur (1970), All Strange Away (1976),
Company (1979), Mal vu mal dit (1981), and Worstword Ho (1983). This aston-
ishing commitment to a lost cause, the late modernist cause of impossible
expression, is what makes Beckett such a remarkable figure: one of the few
persistent voices in the unfinished project of failed modernism.
Lateness
This discussion leads me finally to the question of late modernism and indeed
of the concept of lateness itself. By now the existence of such a period, the late
modern, has more or less been established, not least by Fredric Jameson in his
book A Singular Modernity. There, however, he describes the late modern as a
period of the full-fledged reign of the ideology of modernism, only tentative
and finding its form in the works we normally call modernist. Late moderns
would then be those like Nabokov who are well aware of the modern tradi-
tion and exploit it, explode it, and yet celebrate it precisely as a dominant.
Jameson then is more interested in sketching the theoretical and ideological
outlines of this period than the aesthetic. And one of the heroes, or at least
protagonists, of this period is none other than Adorno, about whom Jameson
earlier wrote a book entitled Late Marxism. From as early as 1934 Adorno had
been concerned with articulating a concept of aesthetic lateness in his writings
on Beethoven. However the lateness in style of great artists is far from being
some fully achieved wisdom, some unconcern for public reception and the
like that characterizes establishment figures finally able to express themselves
unhindered. On the contrary,
The maturity of the late works of important artists is not like the ripeness of fruit. As
a rule these works are not well rounded, but wrinkled, even fissured. They are apt to
lack sweetness, fending off with prickly tartness those interested merely in sampling
them. They lack all that harmony which the classicist aesthetic is accustomed to
demand from the work of art, showing more traces of history than of art. (B 123)

150 silence nowhen
This not unnoticed fact has often been explained, continues Adorno, by
bringing the works closer to documentation, that is, biography. Yet Adorno
claims the essence of the late work is precisely the opposite, whereby “every-
thing individual is both shrunken and saturated with the ideal unity of its
species” (B 160). This argument, which Edward Said late in his life adopted
and made his own, is based in Adorno on a very detailed and complicated
engagement with the last works of Beethoven (which Said helps to clarify
for those of us with imperfect knowledge of music composition and theory).
Adorno concludes his brief discussion, “the late style is the self-awareness
of the insignificance of the individual, existent. Herein lies the relation-
ship of the late style to death” (B 161). Above (Chapter 2) I develop this
line of thinking with reference to Beckett’s pessimism and the influence of
Schopenhauer on his thinking, but for the moment I want to conclude that
this lateness is not necessarily biographical; that is, if lateness comes with
age, with the approach of death, then an artist like Beckett became an old
man during the war, in his 30s; he was “old young” like Mercier and Camier,
and indeed most of his characters. His entire mature work, I would argue,
is late in Adorno’s sense. One suspects then that lateness is another myth
of modernism, but I would want to show that it is modernism, rooted his-
torically and etymologically in the now and associated with the new, which
is indeed essentially late. Bernstein writes about late modernist painting,
which he calls painting in the absence of painting, that is, painting which
eschews representational means of relating us to our world: “what matters
about [this] painting is not representational but categorial, an inscription of
a way of bearing the burden of the absence of experience, the default of sen-
suous particulars, the excision of bodily happiness . . .” (AVB 10). According
to Bernstein, this is a persistently modern trait. Adorno argues compellingly
in the Aesthetic Theory that modernism (pace Ezra Pound and the Futurists)
was never about the new and the future, so much as about escaping the old,
and coming to new terms with entire past tradition (AT 21). In this sense,
the modern is always late. And this is how, in unwaveringly pursuing the
minimalizing gesture of the modern, Beckett produces an art which is not
only late in style, but even at this late date continues to be art, continues to
challenge and complicate all of the traditional categories of aesthetics even
as society and culture seem to have left him far behind. For Said, this late-
ness was tied with a pathos of modernity: his figures are Giuseppe Tomasi di
Lampedusa, Richard Strauss, Luchino Visconti, and Adorno himself. Beckett

is not quite the same in ways that need to be explored, but in any case, he
exemplifies what Jameson claims about Adorno: a persistently necessary and
productive lateness. That this style is minimal I think I have shown. And
that it is fundamentally at odds with the postmodern, however positively or
negatively we understand that term, also seems clear. My main point, then,
would be that his persistent importance and difficulty should teach us some-
thing about the reigning dominant.

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Beckett, Minimalism, and the Question of

Article in Modernism/modernity · November 2012

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Art indicts superfluous poverty by voluntarily undergoing its own . . . Along

This chapter addresses a simple question: is Beckett a postmodernist writer? Of

Duncan McColl Chesney - 9781453911020

Postmodernism as American Avant-Garde

postmodernism is, at this point, “indeterminance,” a mix between indetermi-

is not the evocation of a nihilistic stance or the representation of ontological tragedy,

Worstward Ho is a “pure object of language which is totally autonomous” (26).

Beckett and Painting

of wariness of “abstracteurs de quintessence” including Mondrian, Lissitzky,

Indeed, as Locatelli discusses, the last third of Beckett’s career is characterized

For Lyotard this is an example of sublimity, the pure, minimal sublimity of

representation and thus the revealed inadequacy of the imagination in the

In this brilliant dialectical move, Adorno retains insights of nineteenth-cen-

of formal and generic borders, “indeterminance,” “ontological uncertainty”

Duncan McColl Chesney - 9781453911020

Duncan McColl Chesney - 9781453911020

Duncan McColl Chesney - 9781453911020

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