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Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe
Michiko Tsushima
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Samuel Beckett
and Catastrophe
Edited by Michiko Tsushima

Yoshiki Tajiri · Mariko Hori Tanaka
Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe
Michiko Tsushima · Yoshiki Tajiri ·
Mariko Hori Tanaka
Editors
Samuel Beckett
and Catastrophe
Editors
Michiko Tsushima Yoshiki Tajiri
University of Tsukuba The University of Tokyo
Tsukuba-shi, Japan Tokyo, Japan
Mariko Hori Tanaka

Aoyama Gakuin University
Tokyo, Japan
ISBN 978-3-031-08367-9 ISBN 978-3-031-08368-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08368-6
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Acknowledgements
After publishing Samuel Beckett and Pain (Rodopi, 2012) and Samuel
Beckett and Trauma (Manchester University Press, 2018), we embarked
on the third project, on Samuel Beckett and catastrophe, and this present
volume is its fruit. In October 2018, we formed a panel with Naoya Mori,
a contributor to this volume, on the theme of catastrophe in Endgame in
the annual meeting of IASIL Japan (the Japan branch of the Interna-
tional Association for the Study of Irish Literature) at Toyo University,
Tokyo. In April 2019, we received a three-year grant from Japan Society
for the Promotion of Science (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research) on the
subject of Samuel Beckett and catastrophe (No.19K00442). In December
2019, the grant enabled us to invite to Tokyo, another contributor to
this volume, Trish McTighe, who, at Aoyama Gakuin University, gave a
lecture that developed into her chapter. Many more academic interactions
were to have followed, but the Covid-19 pandemic severely limited the
opportunities. Despite this ‘catastrophe’, we went on with the help of
many people. We are grateful to all of them, especially the members of
the Beckett Circle in Japan and the overseas colleagues in Samuel Beckett
Society.
Michiko Tsushima
Yoshiki Tajiri
Mariko Hori Tanaka
v
Contents
Introduction 1
Michiko Tsushima, Yoshiki Tajiri, and Mariko Hori Tanaka
Catastrophe and Aesthetic Creation

Tickling Your Catastrophe, or Beckett’s Laughing
Antistrophe 13
Jean-Michel Rabaté
The Not-All Catastrophe in Ill Seen Ill Said/Mal vu mal
dit and ‘Comment Dire’/‘What Is the Word’ 33
Llewellyn Brown
Beckett’s Grey and the Temporality of Afterness 53
Michiko Tsushima
Beckett’s Monadology and the Anti-Catastrophic Aesthetics 73
Naoya Mori
Catastrophes in History
Beckett’s Sense of History in the Age of Catastrophe 97
William Davies
Imagination’s Dead: Beckett’s Catastrophic Realism 117
Jeff Fort
vii
viii CONTENTS
Catastrophe and Everyday Life in Samuel Beckett 135

Yoshiki Tajiri
Ecological Catastrophe and the Role of Art

Slow Violence and Slow Going: Encountering Beckett
in the Time of Climate Catastrophe 155
Laura Salisbury
A Feminist Counter-Apocalyptic Interpretation
of Precarity: Reading Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe
in the Post-catastrophe Age 175
Mariko Hori Tanaka
Gestures of Helpless Compassion: Beckett’s Eco-Poetics
of Extinction 193
Trish McTighe
Index 215
Notes on Contributors
Llewellyn Brown teaches at the Lycée international de Saint-Germain-

en-Laye. His latest publications are Beckett, Lacan and the Voice (2016),
Beckett, Lacan and the Gaze (2019), Marguerite Duras : écrire et détruire,
un paradoxe de la création (2018) and Samuel Beckett et l’écriture des
ruines, de “Mercier et Camier” à “Soubresauts” (2021). He edits the
‘Samuel Beckett’ series of the journal La Revue des Lettres modernes.
William Davies is an Independent Scholar, Godalming, UK. He also
works in secondary education and is an editor of LONGITŪDINĒS
arts and translation magazine. His publications include the monograph
Samuel Beckett and the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2020) and the
essay volumes Beckett and Politics (with Helen Bailey, Palgrave, 2021)
and Samuel Beckett’s Poetry (with James Brophy, Cambridge UP, 2022).
Jeff Fort is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at
the University of California, Davis, and is the author of The Imper-
ative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and
Beckett (Fordham, 2014). He has recently published articles on Maurice
Blanchot, Roland Barthes, and Jean-Luc Nancy, as well as André Bazin
and Agnès Varda.
Mariko Hori Tanaka is Professor of English at Aoyama Gakuin Univer-
sity. She published essays and chapters of collections of essays on Beckett
and other playwrights. She co-edited Samuel Beckett and Pain (2012),
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Samuel Beckett and trauma (2018), Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influ-

encing (2020) and Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett (2021). In Japanese,
she authored two books on Beckett.
Trish McTighe is Lecturer in Drama at Queen’s University Belfast. Her
book, The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama, was published
with Palgrave in 2013, and she has contributed to the journals Modern
Drama, Contemporary Theatre Review and Irish University Review. She
is theatre reviews editor for the Journal of Beckett Studies.
Naoya Mori is Professor of Literature at Kobe Women’s University, co-
translator of James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame into Japanese. He has
pursued Beckett’s lifelong engagement with Leibniz and its influence
on his literary production across genres. He has contributed to Samuel
Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and published many articles and chapters on
the work of Beckett and Leibniz in Japanese and English.
Jean-Michel Rabaté Professor of English and Comparative Literature
at the University of Pennsylvania, co-editor of the Journal of Modern
Literature, co-founder of Slought Foundation, is a fellow of the Amer-
ican Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author or editor of more
than forty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literary
theory.
Laura Salisbury is Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Human-
ities at the University of Exeter and the current President of the Samuel
Beckett Society. Her publications include Samuel Beckett: Laughing
Matters, Comic Timing (EUP) and (with Andrew Shail) Neurology and
Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems (Palgrave). With Lisa
Baraitser, she is co-Principal Investigator on Waiting Times funded by the
Wellcome Trust.
Yoshiki Tajiri is Professor of English at the University of Tokyo. He
has published widely on twentieth-century literature in English, espe-
cially modernism, Beckett, J.M.Coetzee and Kazuo Ishiguro. He is the
author of Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses
in Modernism (Palgrave, 2007) and the co-editor of Samuel Beckett and
Pain (2012) and Samuel Beckett and Trauma (2018).
Michiko Tsushima is Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences at University of Tsukuba. She is the author of The Space of Vacil-
lation: The Experience of Language in Beckett, Blanchot, and Heidegger
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
(Peter Lang, 2003) and Hannah Arendt: Reconciling Ourselves to the

World (in Japanese, 2016), and co-editor of Samuel Beckett and Pain
(2012) and Samuel Beckett and trauma (2018).
Introduction
Michiko Tsushima, Yoshiki Tajiri, and Mariko Hori Tanaka
Catastrophe has been a theme of literature since the word came into the
world. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘catastrophe’ is the
word that originated from the Greek ‘kata’ meaning ‘down’ and ‘strophē’
meaning ‘turning’, so that it signifies ‘overturning’ or ‘sudden turn’.
Therefore, the word has large connotations from a great change in poli-
tics to a natural disaster, or from some huge uncontrollable accident to
ecological and cosmic calamity caused by human activity. Catastrophe also
refers to the denouement of a drama, especially a classical tragedy. The
word was mainly used in this sense, i.e. as a turning point or a reversal of
the narrative in dramatic texts. It was in the mid-eighteenth century that
it began to refer to a disastrous event.
M. Tsushima (B)
University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
e-mail: tsushima.michiko.ga@u.tsukuba.ac.jp
Y. Tajiri
The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
e-mail: momaun@boz.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp
M. H. Tanaka
Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
M. Tsushima et al. (eds.), Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08368-6_1
2 M. TSUSHIMA ET AL.
Samuel Beckett’s works, especially those after World War II, are often
set in a post-catastrophic world, even though what the catastrophic events
were is unknown. Characters who survived some calamity stay either in an
empty space or in a closed space with no other people around. However,
they sometimes mention or hint that the victimised are all dead or dying,
and that they themselves are in a living dead state. How do readers
and spectators respond to their situations? Readers and spectators may
enjoy them as fiction as long as they are situations on stage or some-
where else. But at the same time, spectacles of catastrophe in art and
literature possibly affect their readers and audience who would imagine
them as serious events that may happen to them in reality. While the
reality of catastrophe may be beyond words and indescribable, fictional
works can convey it by analogy. Through art and literature, film and
drama, the unspeakableness of the event can be approached with language
and/or images. The creation of those artworks resonates with philos-
ophy, psychology, history and more recently, ecology. This book explores
how the (post-)catastrophic situations in Beckett can be read through the
perspectives of those various disciplines on catastrophe.
As shown in Catastrophe and Philosophy edited by David Rosner,
in our civilisation many influential philosophies and worldviews origi-
nated from the experience of catastrophes such as natural disasters, wars,
plagues and economic crises. Rosner’s book illustrates, for example, how
Plato’s Republic, St. Augustine’s City of God, Boccacio’s Decameron,
Machiavelli’s The Prince, Voltaire’s Candide, Borowski’s Holocaust stories
and Agamben’s State of Exception are reactions to different catastrophic
situations. According to Rosner, catastrophes ‘fundamentally challenge
[…] basic human “sense-making” capabilities’ (334). Therefore, a great
number of thoughts in the history of ideas can be regarded as attempts to
‘make sense out of catastrophe and reorient themselves in its aftermath’
(xii). In The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Robert Eaglestone observes
that the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, representatives
of postmodernism, are responses to the Holocaust, and in The Broken
Voice, he attends to the thought contained in the ‘broken voice’ of the
Holocaust in literature.
We can situate Beckett’s work in this history of thoughts that arose
out of catastrophes. As is well known, Theodor Adorno regarded Beckett
as a post-Auschwitz writer. For Adorno who famously wrote, ‘To write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (1983, 34), Beckett was primarily a
writer who responded to the catastrophes of the Nazi years. In Negative
INTRODUCTION 3
Dialectics, Adorno writes, ‘Beckett has given us the only fitting reaction
to the situation of the concentration camps—a situation he never calls
by name, as if it were subject to an image ban. What is, he says, is like a
concentration camp […] To Beckett, as to the Gnostics, the created world
is radically evil, and its negation is the chance of another world that is not
yet’ (380–1). Adorno senses in Beckett’s ‘image world of nothingness’ ‘a
carrying-on which seems stoical but is full of inaudible cries that things
should be different’ (1973, 381).
Adorno found in Beckett’s works (esp. in Endgame) models for how
art can respond to historical catastrophes. According to Espen Hammer,
Adorno claims that Beckett explores the catastrophe of the twentieth
century, ‘revealing the state of humanity in a world that no longer
seems to offer unquestionable sources of meaning or existential assurance’
(133). Unlike Strindberg or Brecht, Beckett’s works ‘do not make moral
pronouncements’ or ‘do not tell us how things ought to be’, but ‘assert
“This is how it is”’ (134). In other words, Adorno sees in Beckett ‘histor-
ical “prototypes” (Urbilder)’ (135): in ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’,
he explains that ‘Beckett’s prototypes are […] historical in that they hold
up as typical of human beings only the deformations inflicted upon them
by the form of their society’ (257). Hence, the characters in Endgame
are not ‘figures of historical reality’ but ‘emblems or perhaps allegories
of what human existence now amounts to’ (Hammer, 135). As Hammer
suggests in his interpretation of Adorno, Beckett expresses the truth of
human suffering in the post-catastrophic context, the truth attained by a
kind of knowing which transcends the limits of everyday knowing (16).
To Adorno who ‘stated ambition of viewing advanced work of art as
philosophical and indeed metaphysical truth-tellers’, regarding the notion
of ‘art as a privileged form of expression’ (Hammer, 213), Beckett’s art
is obviously a ‘metaphysical truth-teller’. Adorno believes that advanced,
modern works of art (including Beckett’s works) express human suffering.
But what they express is not sufferings of anyone in particular but
‘the objective suffering behind’, and by expressing it, the works ‘antic-
ipat[e] a reconfigured social order’ (Hammer, 205–6). In Aesthetic Theory
Adorno writes, ‘Artworks bear expression not where they communicate
the subject, but rather where they reverberate with the protohistory of
subjectivity, of ensoulment, for which tremolo of any sort is a miserable
surrogate’ (112–3). This is how Adorno finds in Beckett the raison d’être
of art in its response to catastrophe.
Philosophically linking the concept of catastrophe with aesthetics, Part

I of this volume addresses the way the presence of catastrophe is funda-
mental to Beckett’s aesthetic creation. As discussed above, Beckett wrote
his works in the context of political catastrophes of the twentieth century,
especially the catastrophe of the Nazi years. Although Beckett wrote his
work as a response to his own experience of catastrophes, it does not
merely represent catastrophes as factual events. It presents itself as an art
that radically questions the representation itself and undermines its own
stability. The first four chapters discuss how the relation to catastrophe
forms a structural basis for Beckett’s art from the perspectives of European
intellectual history, psychoanalysis and philosophy.
Jean-Michel Rabaté, drawing on a number of Beckett’s texts such
as his later play Catastrophe, passages from the Trilogy, the opaque
French poem ‘ainsi a-t-on beau…’ and conversations on art with Georges
Duthuit in the 1940s and 1950s, sketches the several levels at which the
concept of ‘catastrophe’ makes sense for Beckett by alluding to various
important works in psychoanalysis, European thought, art and literature.
In conclusion, he contends that Beckett refused to ‘make a strophe of the
catastrophe’ in rejecting ‘the “strophic” great works of art in which death
and loss find a dialectical resolution’ and presented ‘his new aesthetics of
impotence against the sublime power of art still deployed by Joyce and
Proust’.
Llewellyn Brown discusses how Beckett’s work evidences the effects of
a catastrophe by analysing Ill Seen Ill Said/Mal vu mal dit and ‘Comment
dire’/‘what is the word’ from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanal-
ysis. For Brown, a Beckettian catastrophe is located beyond historical and
biographical dimensions: it is at the heart of writing as is described as
‘the hole within language’. Brown argues that it is shown through ‘an
incessant instability haunting language’, or the internally excluded part in
language that disrupts any representation. He examines how Beckettian
language of catastrophe has a radically structural aspect and how it can be
seen as a productive force in aesthetic creation.
Michiko Tsushima, paying attention to Beckett’s grey which marks sites
of a catastrophe that has already happened, explores the relation between
the colour grey and the post-catastrophic temporality of ‘after’ in Beckett.
Referring to Paul Klee’s view of grey and Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of
‘after’ in After Fukushima and ‘Finite History’, she examines the dimen-
sion of grey in afterness in Malone Dies, Ghost Trio, and Endgame. She
argues that Beckett’s work points to the importance of remaining exposed
INTRODUCTION 5
to this dimension, in other words, to the fundamental indecision that lies

at the core of his work. It is the condition of possibility for the openness
to other futures.
Naoya Mori recognises in Beckett’s works his principle of the
‘impossibility of catastrophe’ and argues that it was originated from Leib-
niz’s philosophy. The ‘impossibility of catastrophe’, the phrase found in
his letter to Alan Schneider, means the impossibility of denouement in
drama, but Mori reads in this phrase Beckett’s anti-catastrophic aesthetics
modelled on Leibniz’s monadology. Its adaptation can be found in Beck-
ett’s various works with no beginning and no end in which the unborn
or deceased speak. Mori also maintains that Beckett’s monadology is not
only the aesthetic principle but the ethic of his life.
Part II turns to catastrophe in Beckett’s work in terms of history.
Beckett studies has recently seen a surge of historical research. Following
Sean Kennedy and Andrew Gibson’s work (mainly on Irish history and
post-war French history, respectively), such books as Emilie Morin’s Beck-
ett’s Political Imagination (2017), James McNaughton’s Samuel Beckett
and the Politics of Aftermath (2018) and William Davies’s Samuel Beckett
and the Second World War (2020) provide us with a wealth of infor-
mation about the way Beckett was profoundly engaged with important
historical events in the twentieth century, from the Easter Rising in 1916
to the Holocaust and the Algerian War. When we think of Beckett and
catastrophe, however, we are faced with a fundamental question about
the relationship between history and catastrophe. In a sense, these two
are antithetical because if the former may be considered as an ongoing
process in which we are involved, the latter is something special and
overwhelming that disrupts that process or at least our sense of it.
Morin’s book may give some readers the impression that Beckett was
constantly exposed to significant political events and contexts. One might
be tempted to think that his life was inseparable from a series of catastro-
phes. But Morin does not particularly emphasise the catastrophic feature
of the political history in which Beckett was living. When catastrophe
becomes constant, it loses its meaning as something extraordinary. Then
should we narrow the meaning of catastrophe to indicate only extrava-
gantly disastrous events like the Holocaust and the A-bomb attacks on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or is it better to think that the twentieth
century was truly an unprecedented age of catastrophe and that all those
political events Beckett witnessed or lived through can be regarded as
catastrophes?
In his chapter on Beckett’s sense of history, William Davies clearly sides

with the latter view that Beckett was constantly involved with the twen-
tieth century’s catastrophic events, quoting and endorsing some historians
who emphasise the catastrophic character of the period between 1914
and 1945. Davies points out that catastrophe is both within and outside
of history and discusses how ‘Beckett’s works frequently slip between
belonging within history and outside of it’ in dealing with catastrophe.
In the latter half of the chapter, Davies goes on to trace Beckett’s refer-
ences to the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, which profoundly impacted the
contemporary European intellectuals and discusses how with this catas-
trophe in mind Beckett came to terms with his father’s death and the
chaos in Europe during and immediately after World War II. At the end,
Davies briefly mentions the importance of Beckett’s work in our age of
climate change crisis.
Jeff Fort starts his chapter precisely with this catastrophic problem
of climate change, enumerating the disasters it caused recently. Yet he
goes on to list many other political and social problems that plague the
world at present. The world now is really full of catastrophes! Fort notes
that Beckett’s work is ‘proleptic’ since ‘his vision has manifestly been
realised’ in the world today. He thus alerts us to the alarming actuality
of Beckett’s ‘realist’ vision. Fort then argues that Beckett’s work regis-
ters historical catastrophes without representing them. Underlying this
is the coincidence between the catastrophic subjectivities and the catas-
trophic landscapes that they inhabit. Beckett saw the world as the mad
artist in Endgame saw it—as only ashes. A ruined landscape is envisioned
by ruined or dead imagination. A limit case of this trait can be found in
The Unnamable where there is no distinction between imagination (that
is dead) and the world or between inside and outside.
Yoshiki Tajiri limits catastrophe to A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and the ensuing anxiety of nuclear war in the Cold War period.
He argues that while Endgame shares the popular ‘post-apocalyptic’ sensi-
bility of the nuclear age, it presents everyday life as traumatised and not
resistant to catastrophe. Sceptical of the simple opposition between the
everyday and catastrophe, Tajiri shows how these two are intertwined in
Beckett’s work. He goes on to discuss relevant motifs in Beckett’s work
such as the obsession with the trauma of birth, the significance of the
day, the particular ‘anti-evental’ temporality and the highlighted absur-
dity of the quotidian matters. Finally, he argues that the imagination of
INTRODUCTION 7
outer space as shown in Hamm’s remark in Endgame indicates the rela-

tivisation of the earth (and everyday life on it) in the nuclear age. Tajiri
thus explores the relationship between catastrophe and everyday life in
the nuclear age, and historically situates Beckett’s work in that light.
With the recent rise of the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ and climate
changes, ecological readings have been attempted in the theatre studies;
Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh’s Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd:
Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage finds the
buds of ecological thinking in Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd
(1961). Greg Garrard, who discusses the relationship between nature
and human in literary and cultural production history in his Ecocriticism,
adds Beckett’s Endgame in his essay ‘Endgame: Beckett’s “Ecological
Thought”’, saying that the play ‘foreshadows the ecological catastrophe
to come’ (394), which, unlike the Biblical apocalypse, offers neither ‘the
revelation of truth nor the final triumph of good over evil’ (395). Instead,
the play reveals ‘interconnectedness’ between human and nonhuman both
in ‘the planetary and cosmic scales’ and in ‘the genetic and cellular level’,
which implies ‘kinship in mutual vulnerability’ (394). Responding to such
ecological thought, in Beckett’s Intermedial Ecosystems, the first book on
Beckett and ecology, Anna McMullan explores Beckett’s later works in
terms of the concept of ecosystems.
As Garrard sees in the context of Endgame the ‘ecological: the
intractable war of attrition Malthus perceived between population growth
and limited resources’ (390), Beckett’s observation of the world in the
play came from some chaotic circumstances that the author had seen
during the Irish Independence when he was young and experienced in
the post-catastrophe of World War II in France as has been discussed.
However, whatever catastrophe Beckett imagined when he wrote his
works, it is obvious that his characters are all thrown into some unknown
ruinous environment of post-catastrophe. And they are all vulnerable
and precarious. McMullan, calling Beckett’s later prose and radio drama
‘the closed space texts’, argues that they ‘attempt to define or capture
their objects of observation in a narrative framework which “de-centres”
the human’, but at the same time they ‘evoke with at times uncanny
tenderness the ephemerality and vulnerability of human existence’ (33).
If the very existence of Beckett’s characters is vulnerable and there-
fore unstable after experiencing some unknown catastrophe, their use of
language also lacks stability, always going back and forth, shifting from
one place to another. Undecidability, indeterminacy and in-betweenness
pervade Beckett’s writing with his acute sense of afterness in fractured

ruins. His tone, however, is not pessimistic but satirical and comical. His
distrust towards the post-World War II society is clear in his descrip-
tions of degeneration and degradation of the human and its environment.
His critical views on the post-war environment of the earth damaged
by anthropocentrism are often expressed with irony and parodies. As
Lavery and Finburgh contend, ‘the very presence of life itself is now imag-
ined as “provisional”’ (28), the term Beckett uses in ‘The Capital of the
Ruins’. Beckett holds the view that everything, from animals to vegeta-
bles, to minerals, is fluid. Part III deals with Beckett in terms of ecological
thought, responding to the recent rise of theories of deep ecology.
The awareness of the human existing provisionally and unstably as a
life form is the core of today’s ecocriticism, in which ecological catastro-
phes such as climate change that we often see globally are due to human
activity, broadly resulting from evolutionistic thinking in the course of
industrial and technological development in the age of Anthropocene.
Timothy Morton, the prominent ecologist, warns us that ecological catas-
trophe has already happened, saying ‘The end of the world has already
occurred’ (7). Jürgen Zimmerer also contends, ‘The potentially truly
apocalyptic character of climate change in the future obscures the view
of the ground-level suffering occurring today’ (4).
However, since the climate and environmental catastrophe ‘occurs
gradually and out of sight’ (Nixon, 2), when we face its effect, it might be
too late to return to the pre-catastrophic circumstances. In the situation
where we are slowly heading towards ‘the end of the world’, all we can do
is to think about how we survive still in the suspended unending world.
Laura Salisbury’s chapter discusses how Beckett’s texts show commitment
to staying with catastrophe in the paradoxical temporality that is at once
stuck and ongoing. Bearing in mind Rob Nixon’s idea of ‘slow violence’
and Steven Connor’s idea of ‘slow going’, Salisbury argues that Beckett’s
work can be interpreted as addressing the scene of climate emergency
with that particular temporality opposed to the punctuality of crisis in
which decision and action are possible. She goes on to read The Lost
Ones closely and introduces Lisa Baraitser’s concept of ‘maternal death
drive’ that supplements Freud’s death drive. This concept opens up a
new perspective on the repetition in Beckett that links to attachments
and interdependencies of all life in catastrophe.
INTRODUCTION 9
It can be said that in Beckett’s acute sense of slowness and afterness

in fractured ruins exists his hope for future different from the narrow-
minded patriarchal views in which linear progressive thinking is dominant.
Mariko Hori Tanaka provides a feminist ‘counter-apocalyptic’ reading
of Beckett’s Catastrophe, following proposals by recent ecological femi-
nists such as Catherine Keller, Joanna Zylinska, Elizabeth Grosz and
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Hori Tanaka illuminates the way Beckett chal-
lenges the theatrical convention by ridiculing an incompetent director and
hinting that other inconspicuous and precarious characters collaborate
with one another in creating an art production the director desires yet
secretly defying him, and thus, Beckett leads his readers/audience to be
aware of the wrong of the apocalyptic discourse posited by the patriarchal
society.
Trish McTighe finds in Beckett’s texts his critical views on how art
has been complicit with the Anthropocentric extinction and extraction—
the colonial violence that has brought today’s global eco-crisis. As she
proves in her reference to the scenography of the 1955 Irish premiere
of Waiting for Godot whose stage image reveals the politics of extraction
and the looming shadow of extinction colonial Ireland experienced, live
performance becomes a space for the audience to witness and understand
how the human is complicit with colonial and environmental violence.
Then, McTighe focuses on Beckett’s strategies to show it with two exam-
ples: the Auditor of Not I and the Assistant of Catastrophe, figures
whose humanity is more in doubt than other denuded figures onstage.
The former shows only the gesture of helpless compassion and the latter
cannot help being uneasily complicit with the dominant autocratic insti-
tution. All three essays in Part III thus make clear the way Beckett leads
us to reflect on the ethics and aesthetics of art in this era of precarious
planetary life.
As a whole, these essays in the present volume offer new ways of
reading and understanding Beckett in relation to catastrophe, especially
catastrophes in our world today. Beckett’s post-war works reflect not only
the author’s own experiences of the war and its aftermath but also his
critical imagination of the post-war environment that we now share glob-
ally. He does not simply lament the vulnerability of human beings in a
purely negative manner but contemplates how we, beings operating in a
state of precarity, struggle with pain and go on living (or bearing) in the
worsening post-catastrophic condition of the world.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. (1973). Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New
York: Continuum.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1983). Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1991). ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’. Trans. Shierry
Weber Nicholsen. In Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Notes to Literature, vol. I. New
York: Columbia University Press, pp. 241–75.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1997). Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Davies, William (2020). Samuel Beckett and the Second World War: Poli-
tics, Propaganda and a ‘Universe Become Provisional’. London: Bloomsbury
Academic.
Eaglestone, Robert (2004). The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Eaglestone, Robert (2017). The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Garrard, Greg (2012). Ecocriticism. London: Routledge.
Garrard, Greg (2011). ‘Endgame: Beckett’s Ecological Thought’, Samuel Beckett
Today/Aujurd’hui 23, 383–97.
Hammer, Espen (2015). Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lavery, Carl and Clare Finburgh (eds.) (2015). Rethinking the Theatre of the
Absurd: Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage.
London: Bloomsbury.
McMullan, Anna (2021). Beckett’s Intermedial Ecosystems: Closed Space Envi-
ronments Across the Stage, Prose and Media Works. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
McNaughton, James (2018). Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morin, Emilie (2017). Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Morton, Timothy (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of
the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nixon, Rob (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rosner, David J. (ed.) (2019). Catastrophe and Philosophy. Lanham: Lexington
Books.
Zimmerer, Jürgen (2015). Climate Change and Genocide: Environmental
Violence in the 21st Century. London: Routledge.
Catastrophe and Aesthetic Creation
Tickling Your Catastrophe, or Beckett’s
Laughing Antistrophe
Jean-Michel Rabaté
Catastrophe, That Old Gag

It all begins annoyingly: we follow an irate, obnoxious and arrogant
director who terrorises his secretary; huffing and puffing, he claims to
be in a hurry, yet wants his cigar lit and relit; he lingers on silly details
of colour and gesture, but checks his watch, eager to go to a political
meeting after he is done with his theatrical business. He orders his assis-
tant around while she give instructions to an old man standing on a
podium. They make him try out hieratic poses; his hands join as in prayer;
he bares some flesh despite the cold; his skin needs to be whitened for
This essay uses a few passages, in a modified form, taken from my Think, Pig!
Beckett at the Limit of the Human. The title derives from Page’s words ‘I’ll
tickle your catastrophe’ in William Shakespeare, Henry IV , Part Two, Act II,
scene 1 (894). The same expression is used by Simon Dedalus in James Joyce,
Ulysses (73).
J.-M. Rabaté (B)

Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA, USA
e-mail: jmrabate@english.upenn.edu

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08368-6_2
14 J.-M. RABATÉ
better effect; he must not speak or lift his head; one single projector will
highlight his head when he is exhibited as a living statue or tableau vivant
in a forthcoming official gathering. If the old man is docile, if the eager
assistant follows the orders dutifully jotted down in a notebook, the show
should be a success or at least be greeted by applause from the audience.
One will have recognised in this sketchy summary one of Beckett’s later
allegories, his short play of 1982, tantalisingly entitled Catastrophe.
Why the title? The word is mentioned once only, when the director
is satisfied with the most awkward pose: ‘There’s our catastrophe. In
the bag. Once more and I’m off’ (1986a, 460). Most commentators
have seen the key to the meaning of the play—which was performed
at the Avignon festival in 1982 at the request of a French association
defending imprisoned artists—in the dedication to Václav Havel, the
Czech dissident, later to become the first democratically elected presi-
dent of Czechoslovakia. At the time, Havel, charged as a subversive, was
in jail for his political work with Charter 77. The Protagonist who stands
exposed and mute on a podium calls up the dire fate of Havel who had
been prevented from writing in his cell. Beckett’s Protagonist is made
to strike a pose without any possibility of expressing himself, as we see
from this exchange. The assistant asks tentatively: ‘What about a little…
a little… gag?’ which makes the director explode: ‘For God’s sake! This
craze for explicitation! Every i dotted to death! Little gag! For God’s
sake!’ However, she insists: ‘Sure he won’t utter?’ He replies confidently:
‘Not a squeak’ (1986a, 459). The original French is less ambiguous.
‘Un petit bâillon’ (1986a, 77) means a ‘gag’ in the mouth, which loses
the possibility of being understood as a quip or prank. Nevertheless, a
hermeneutic problem arises. If the director and the assistant are afraid
that the Protagonist speak out in public, why would the use of a gag be
an ‘explicitation’? The play’s dotted i’s seem to contain many submerged
puns—hence, the old man’s shivers: he is frozen in order to ‘freeze’ at the
last minute in a perfect petrification. Does this mean that the dictatorial
director is denouncing or promoting his politics?
We are once more plunged in the sordid world of endless tortures
aiming at eliciting a confession or avowal from a helpless victim, as we
see depicted in Rough for Radio II . There, a similar couple made up of
an ‘Animator’ and a ‘Stenographer’ forces a poet called Fox to confess by
alternating coaxing and blows with a ‘pizzle’. In Catastrophe, the insinua-
tion of torture is limited to the director’s enjoyment at being told that the
TICKLING YOUR CATASTROPHE, OR BECKETT’S LAUGHING … 15
old man shivers in the cold. When the assistant suggests that the Protag-
onist might lift his head, the director rejects this innovation vehemently:
‘Raise his head? Where do you think we are? In Patagonia? Raise his head!
For God’s sake’ (1986a, 460). Beckett slyly alludes to the then recent
Falkland war, a military conflict opposing a dictatorial Argentina sullied by
a ‘dirty war’ against ‘subversives’ and a no less muscular United Kingdom.
In spite of the warning, the gesture to be avoided at all cost takes place at
the end: the old man raises his head and stares at the audience, which is
enough to silence the recorded applause. The stage directions end with:
‘The applause falters, dies. Long pause. Fade-out of light on face’ (1986a,
461).
How can this play help us unpack the concept of ‘Catastrophe’? One
might say that in that play the idea of ‘catastrophe’ is allegorised at three
levels. A first meaning is the exhibition intended by the director: it seems
to be his idea to present an old man standing mute on a stage as a
degraded victim or enemy. The protagonist’s hands twisted by disease
(perhaps contracted in jail); his bald head and his whitened skin debase
him, making him look weak, contemptible, barely human. The political
spectacle that the director organises for his own ends, however obscure,
calls up the sinister Stalinian trials with their absurd accusations and
displays of broken but consenting victims. In fact, it is the entire system
of totalitarian regimes that can be called a ‘catastrophe’ as soon as it turns
into a spectacle. ‘Catastrophe’ is to be understood as a profane apotheosis,
as the deified reification of battered humanity. A second meaning of
‘catastrophe’ is closer to its etymological meaning and refers to a final
reversal. At the last second, the mute victim manifests his agency by his
defiant stare. The ‘catastrophe’ intervenes as the last act in a play whose
condensed logic allows for a single gesture, albeit minimal, to undo all
the rest. Here is the root of Beckett’s ethics of courage and resistance
that Alain Badiou has described powerfully.1
A third level of meaning is implied by Catastrophe. The play was
first performed on a stage in Avignon. It was successful, among other
reasons, because the news reached Havel in his jail and boosted his morale
(Knowlson, 598). However, the French audience was caught up in a bind:
could they clap at the end? Should they express their solidarity with the
defiant protagonist by remaining silent? This was Beckett’s innovative way
of alerting spectators to what can be construed as their ethical or political
role, a role that may come closer to the sense of the ‘consternation’ that
he saw deriving from his own texts than any aesthetic elation.2
16 J.-M. RABATÉ
Beckett’s play mobilises the main meanings I attribute to the term of

‘catastrophe’, a Greek word that has a specific meaning in poetics. Its
first usage was related to the theatrical genre: it entails a sudden reversal,
a ‘turning’ or literal ‘strophe’ going against or down, which somehow
entails a certain stage or a situation that we perceive as theatrical. In the
same way as there is a theatre of war, there will be a theatre of catastrophe.
The ‘overturning’ entails a ‘change’ that does not remain at an aesthetic
level, for it mobilises the whole ethical or political perspective brought to
bear on the spectacle.
The second meaning should be explicated further. There is what
Malone Dies calls ‘catastrophe in the ancient sense’ (1991, 254) when
Malone is lamenting the loss of his stick but reflects that because he is
deprived of the object, he can understand better the concept of the Stick
in itself; he comments: ‘So that I half discern, in the veritable catastrophe
that has befallen me, a blessing in disguise. How comforting that is. Catas-
trophe too in the ancient sense no doubt. To be buried in lava and not
turn a hair, it is then a man shows what stuff he is made of’ (1991, 254).
With this oblique reference to the last circles of Dante’s Inferno, Malone
seems to deplore the absence of a ‘catastrophe’ in the sense given to it
by Greek rhetoricians: an overturning, a conclusion, a close, the event
precipitating the end of a play, whether a tragedy (usually the death of
a hero) or a comedy (usually a marriage, or a sudden happy event). The
term does not appear as such in Aristotle’s Poetics who prefers that of
‘peripeteia’ (reversal of fortune), but it was systematised later as the last act
of a classical play. Stephen Dedalus remembers the term when he evokes
the theme of banishment that he sees recurring in Shakespeare’s plays:
‘it repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe’ (Joyce, 174).
Beckett learned from Joyce the trick of not concluding any novel or play:
any literal ‘catastrophe’ is avoided. All of Beckett’s plays eschew the final
dénouement: there is no final closure or disclosure, no conclusion, no last
‘turn’ of the plot.
This is true of Endgame, whose pathos derives from the sense that all
is over, and that nevertheless the show will go on. This analysis was made
by Beckett who offered it as a key to his friend Alan Schneider when he
directed the play. Beckett wrote to Schneider: ‘“The end is in the begin-
ning and yet we go on.” In other words, the impossibility of catastrophe.
Ended at its inception, and at every subsequent instant, it continues, ergo
can never end. Don’t mention this to your actors!’ (Harmon, 23). In the
same letter, Beckett adds that when the actors say: ‘Keep going’, it means
keeping the ball rolling at any cost, and adds: ‘I think this whole passage…
should be played as farcical parody of polite drawing-room conversation’
(Harmon, 23). Beckett combines the parody of polite conversation with
the startling evocation of a post-Holocaust hell. Here is indeed a ‘com-
edy’ in Dante’s sense, since it includes Hell and all its tortures, while
being quite funny at times.
The main idea is that a ‘comedy’ cannot end; only tragedies can be
said to end with the death of the principal characters. This intuition has
something to do with Beckett’s psychoanalysis in the thirties. If, as we
know, the two years he spent on W. R. Bion’s couch brought about a
sense that he had never been properly born, as Jung explained to him in
London, this new insight provided some relief, and led to a new ‘turn’.
If he had not properly been born, how could he die either? The ques-
tion was posed in Murphy: at the end, the hero dies, but then the novel
continues. Murphy was the first of his ‘unkillable’ characters. Later, in
How It Is , he meditated on the ‘unkillable’ essence of Marquis de Sade’s
victims, always ready to receive new blows, cuts and tortures.
By the late thirties, Beckett had found a main theme that death by
itself is not a catastrophe; rather, the impossibility of dying can be called a
catastrophe. Thus a forever dying Malone echoes this fantasy: ‘Yes, an
old foetus, that’s what I am now, hoar and impotent… has anything
happened, anything changed? No, the answer is no, I shall never get born
and therefore never get dead, and a good job too. And if I tell of me
and of that other who is my little one, it is as always for want of love,
well I’ll be buggered. I wasn’t expecting that, want of a homuncule, I
can’t stop’ (1991, 225). What Beckett’s novels at the time of the Trilogy
and his later plays mobilise even when they insist on bleakness, despair
and post-apocalyptic situations as in Endgame, is that we have to live by
confronting a catastrophe that has already happened. The combination of
Jung’s sudden revelation of the possibility that one can die because one
has not been truly born paved the way for an insight that found a perfect
formulation later. It was the key statement made by Donald W. Winnicott
in his last, posthumous, paper, ‘Fear of Breakdown’, published in 1974.
This fear can be echoed more poetically as Roland Barthes did in his last
book about photography. Meditating on images of people who are now
dead but have somehow been kept eternal thanks to an image, Barthes
avers: ‘I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe
which has already happened’ (96).
18 J.-M. RABATÉ
Barthes was meditating on his own ‘catastrophe’, quite simply his

mother’s recent death. This unfathomable tragedy for him was encapsu-
lated in one photograph of the mother when she was five, a photograph
that he decides not to reproduce in Camera Lucida. All the other
photographs contain the future death of the subjects who posed at the
time. This is the case of the portrait of Lewis Payne made by Alexander
Garner in 1865, when the subject was awaiting his execution. He is both
dead and going to die, for ever. The photograph of the mother would
convey the same message: she is both dead and going to die, which is
unbearable. Barthes generalises by stating: ‘Whether or not the subject is
already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe’ (96).
In fact, Winnicott had already died in 1971 when his wife Clare
published his famous essay three years later. In ‘Fear of Breakdown’, the
main theme is that psychotics have not been able to experience a psychic
catastrophe from their first years. They keep imagining and fearing an
impending breakdown, while it replays this originary lack or absence,
which is worse than a trauma. If they are treated as neurotics, the cure
cannot progress. The solution will be found when the analysis makes them
understand that there is no need to fear, since the collapse or break-
down happened in the past. It took place without being experienced, and
the experience can then be staged through the transferential relation of
analysand to analyst.
Winnicott discusses the case of a schizophrenic patient who told him:
‘All I ask you to do is to help me commit suicide for the right reason
instead of for the wrong reason’. After Winnicott failed to give her a good
reason to commit suicide or not, she killed herself. She had committed
suicide for the wrong reasons, in despair over the absence of a word that
might highlight her plight. Much later, Winnicott understood that he
could have saved her had he told her that she had already died when an
infant: ‘On this basis I think she and I could have enabled her to put
off body death till old age took its toll’ (105). The patient committed
suicide because she had never experienced an earlier psychic death. Unable
to understand what a ‘catastrophe’ meant, she was not mature enough
to feel it in her experience. Her lack of understanding of why she had
been through an early psychic demise was linked to a premature awareness
rendered more acute by her own mother’s panic at her birth. Winnicott
expands this view to include all positions that entail a fear of death, but
remains wary of reducing this block to the birth-trauma as Otto Rank had
done too glibly.3 Beckett had taken cursory notes on Rank’s book, whose
main thesis he may have heard Bion mention. However, Bion appears
closer to Winnicott, whose temporality sketched by in his posthumous
essay implies that the past and the future can be matters of life and death
in the here and now, than to Klein, his alleged mentor. Here would be
the root of the twisted and reversible logic deployed by the concept of
‘catastrophe’: if it holds in store a future anterior in the unconscious,
the ageless Freudian unconscious plays the role of the earth, marked by
countless primeval catastrophes before humanity even began emerging.
Catastrophe, Ecology and Survival

Beckett was interested in the theory that life on earth, in its most varied
geological and biological forms, is not due to gradual evolution but to
a series of violent revolutions commonly called catastrophes. Among the
natural cataclysms that struck contemporaries with such force that they
called them ‘catastrophes’, from the total destruction of Pompei swal-
lowed by hot ashes and lava in 79 AD to the San Francisco earthquake
of 1906, no other disaster impacted the very definition of a catastrophe
as much as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Even Walter Benjamin wrote
a narrative for children about it in 1931.4 Benjamin pointed out that the
destruction of Lisbon was unique, not because of its extraordinary magni-
tude, but because of the moral scandal it represented. The event baffled
contemporary expectations. Lisbon was then one of the main capitals of
Europe and the hub of a colonial empire; it was a Christian city famous for
its riches, pomp and decorum. The shock was such that almost all writers
and thinkers in Europe responded to the catastrophe, from Voltaire, who
wrote a famous ‘Poem on Lisbon’s disaster’, to Kant, who wrote no less
than three essays about the catastrophe in the following year. An untitled
poem in French by Beckett goes back to what he saw in Ernst Cassirer’s
biography of Kant that accompanied the collected works in German he
had acquired.
We know that from a population of about 200,000 people, more than
50,000 were killed, and that more than 80% of the buildings in Lisbon
were destroyed. There was no way one could make sense of the cataclysm
if one followed a religious discourse: the catastrophe took place early on
All Saints’ day, most people were in churches that collapsed on them,
while the red-light district of the Alfama, located much higher, was spared
havoc. Kant, who was twenty-four then, became one of the most vocal
commentators to argue that the catastrophe was due to natural causes,
20 J.-M. RABATÉ
even if he wrongly attributed these to fiery gases arising from the interior
of the earth. Beckett mentions this attitude in a French poem evoking
the sequence of past catastrophes that may have led to the extinction of
the mammoths, and then envisions Kant: ‘Sur Lisbonne fumante Kant
froidement penché’ (‘Kant on still smoking Lisbon coldly meditating’).
Here is the text:
ainsi a-t-on beau

par le beau temps et par le mauvais
enfermé chez soi enfermé chez eux
comme si c’était d’hier se rappeler le mammouth
le dinotherium les premiers baisers
les périodes glaciaires n’apportant rien de neuf
la grande chaleur du treizième de leur ère
sur Lisbonne fumante Kant froidement penché
rêver en générations de chênes et oublier son père
ses yeux s’il portait la moustache
s’il était bon de quoi il est mort
on n’en est pas moins mangé sans appétit
par le mauvais temps et par le pire
enfermé chez soi enfermé chez nous. (2012, 98)
Uncharacteristically, Beckett’s poem unfolds as a single sentence with

numerous interpolations. Its general syntax yields:
Ainsi a-t-on beau […] se rappeler le mammouth […] rêver en générations

de chênes et oublier son père […] on n’en est pas moins mangé sans
appétit par le mauvais temps […]
Or in English:
Thus even if one can remember the mammoth, […] or dream in genera-
tions of oak trees, […] and forget one’s father […] one is none the less
eaten up […]
I will attempt to provide a translation that will not lose the inner rhyme
on ‘beau’ in the first two lines:
thus will one in vain

whether bad weather or good weather vane
locked up at home locked up in others’ rooms
as if it was yesterday remember the mammoth

the dinotherium the first kisses
ice periods bringing nothing new
the great warming up of the thirteenth century of their era
on Lisbon still smoking Kant coolly bending
dream by generations of oak trees and forget one’s father
his eyes whether he wore a moustache
whether he was a good man what he died of
one is none the less eaten without appetite
whether in bad weather or in worse
locked up at home locked upon oneself
Here is a poem of mourning, focusing on Beckett’s father who had died

in 1933 from a heart attack, which corresponds to one sense of ‘catas-
trophe’: the sudden loss of a beloved parent, which, as we know, was
one major factor leading him to undergo a psychoanalytic cure. If one
measures the pain caused by loss by the periodicity of ecology, then
there will be no major difference between first kisses and the thawing
of artic glaciers. The annotations of the poem send us to the second
volume of Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache,5 in
which Mauthner parallels the long period during which languages have
evolved with the teachings of scientific analyses of the earth’s evolu-
tion. There, Mauthner quoted a book by Joseph Alphonse Adhémar,
Révolutions de la mer: Déluges périodiques (1842), in which the French
mathematician had calculated that the earth would know periodic catas-
trophes under the shape of sudden deluges, which were caused by a
sudden switch in the earth’s mass from the Northern to the Southern
hemisphere. As Mauthner explains, quoting Adhémar, there would be
cycles of 15,000 years generated by the fact that the earth has a tilted
orbital axis. The earth comes closer to the sun at given periods, and
there is an imbalance between the poles. They alternate in being colder,
hence the presence of huge ice sheets that then thaw on one side only.
According to Adhémar, since 1248, the Northern hemisphere has been
getting cooler, while the Southern hemisphere is warming up. So he can
predict the next deluge for year 11,748 or so… In fact, Adhémar expands
the vision of natural disasters generating sudden changes that his mentor
Georges Cuvier had developed in his Discours sur les révolutions de la
surface du globe in 1826, but provides a more rigorous calculations of
dates basing himself upon the findings of geology and physics.
22 J.-M. RABATÉ
This context allows us to understand why Kant can appear so ‘cold’,

that is indifferent to the actual suffering of the inhabitants of Lisbon.
Indeed, Kant’s rationalistic point of view had found a good summary in
Voltaire’s famous line about the Lisbon disaster: ‘Of destruction Nature
is the empire’. A new rationalism was in the making, and it would soon
include the meditations of marquis de Sade on the fact that, because
Nature exhibits endless destruction, no limit can be set to a Libertine’s
death drive. Marquis de Sade concluded that destruction was the only law
of Nature that he was ready to recognise. This would justify his repeated
outrage to other people and to civilised morality. Beckett had already
ironised Sade’s infantile wish to ‘outrage nature’ (a phrase he had found
in Mario Praz). In a letter to McGreevy from September 1934, Beckett
praises Cézanne for his paintings of Montagne Sainte Victoire, a land-
scape rendered ‘incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever’
(2009, 222), and comments:
Could there be any more ludicrous rationalization of the itch to animise

than the état d’âme balls, banquets & parties. Or—after Xerxes beating
the sea, the Lexicographer kicking the stone & the Penman under the bed
during the thunder—any irritation more mièvre than that of Sade at the
impossibilité d’outrager la nature. A.E.’s Gully would have thrilled him.
(2009, 223)
Sade’s irritation is here presented a ‘mièvre’. The adjective suggests some-

thing soft and effeminate. In 1934, Beckett compares Sade with Irish
artists who appeal to an anthropomorphised nature, whereas Cézanne
had the strength of presenting it as inhuman. Beckett had found in Mario
Praz’s The Romantic Agony this statement that ‘L’impossibilité d’outrager
la nature est, selon moi, le plus grand supplice de l’homme’ [‘The impossi-
bility of outraging Nature is, according to me, man’s greatest torment’].6
This quote comes from La Nouvelle Justine and is spoken by Jérome, one
of the Libertines, the oldest of a group of ferocious monks. Jérome likes
being whipped or sodomised when engaging in his main activity that is
torturing to death little girls and boys. Jérome is one among many Sadean
anti-heroes who express a demiurgic urge to commit crimes so extrava-
gant that they will have no equivalent in the annals of human debauchery;
they are ready to destroy the whole human race, if not the world.
Meanwhile, other thinkers were busy integrating catastrophe in less
excessive terms. This was the case of Charles Bonnet, who managed to
elaborate at the same time a philosophy stressing the unbroken continuity

of all life, from the lowest plants to the humans, and a theory of nature
regularly regenerated by cataclysms. Michel Foucault gives an account of
this school that he presents as caught up between ‘Continuity’ and ‘Catas-
trophe’ in The Order of Things. Foucault insists that these thinkers remain
in a classical episteme despite the stress they put on catastrophe: ‘In its
concrete from, and in the depth that is proper to it, nature resides wholly
between the fabric of the taxonomia and the line of revolutions. The
tableaux that it forms under the very eyes of men, and that it is the task
of discourse of science to survey, are the fragments of the great surface of
living species that are apparent according to the way it has been patterned,
burst open, and frozen, between two temporal revolutions’.7 Thus, in
Bonnet’s last magnum opus, his Philosophical Palingenesis from 1769, we
get a magnificent picture of a continuous progression among organisms,
from leaves presented as quasi sentient since they breathe when dipped in
water, and thus exchange with the environment, to human beings whose
future is seen with eschatological optimism: there is not much to fear since
they will survive the inevitable future cataclysms by being transformed
into angels! Meanwhile, animals will also move up and will develop some
higher form of intelligence. Each time a new catastrophe occurs, it is
willed by God or Providence and pushes all organisms further on the
scale of evolution. The periodical upheavals undergone by the globe lead
to a positive metempsychosis: a better order will succeed the previous one.
Even after the worst of cataclysms, life survives and regenerates itself, in
an ascending dialectics ranging from the minute germs contained in plants
to the homunculi hidden in the fertility organs of men and women.
A new note was sounded with Georges Cuvier in part because he
was writing after the huge shock brought about by the French revo-
lution. His Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of
the Earth already quoted follows the same logic as Bonnet: changes in
the earth’s geology as well as mutations in animal species are the conse-
quence of regular and massive upheavals that he calls ‘revolutions’. By
a careful observation of mountain tops, of glaciers and river beds, he
deduces that the surface of the earth testifies to serial cataclysms, each
of which destroyed all life. He debunks the Biblical myth of a unique
Flood to argue that there were at least three similar upheavals or earth-
quakes marked by an excess of water or fire. He founds his speculations on
his advanced knowledge of paleontology and comparative anatomy. The
main consequence is that man is a recent creation. The last catastrophe
24 J.-M. RABATÉ
was only few thousand years away, which is confirmed when one notices
that there are no human fossils, whereas there are so many animal fossils.
In fact, as Foucault explains, Cuvier’s logic was entirely different from
that of Bonnet. Cuvier broke with the Classical project of a unified
taxonomia: ‘From Cuvier onward, it is life in its non-perceptible, purely
functional aspect that provides the basis for the exterior possibility of a
classification. The classification of living beings is no longer to be found
in the great expanse of order; the possibility of classification now arises
from the depths of life, from those elements most hidden from view’
(Foucault 1973, 268). The lesson brought by comparative anatomy was
a multiplication of differences and not a stable order. A new science of
biology became possible when it broke away from the foundation in a
Nature considered as an ordered and teleological totality. Cuvier marked
a modern epistemological break with Classical Nature, even though his
general thesis was discarded because of his unabashed biological fixism.
What is surprising in Foucault’s account is not so much that Darwin
is not barely named, but rather that Cuvier’s meditation on sudden revo-
lutions leading to catastrophic upheaval is not even mentioned. There is
a rationale for this avoidance. If Cuvier’s catastrophism was not of the
classical type, as we have seen, if his modernity ushers in the thought of
discontinuity found in the philosophy of Nietzsche, it is because Cuvier
announces Foucault himself. Indeed, the famous last sentence of the
book, predicting the disappearance of man whose figure would be erased
‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (1973, 387), seems to
come straight out of Cuvier. Foucault’s structuralist neo-catastrophism
echoes a century and a half later Cuvier’s scepticism facing the legendary
history of the human. Cuvier had argued that the history of man as a
species could only go back to five thousand years before. To buttress his
figures, he found an unexpected confirmation in Chinese historians and
sages like Confucius. For Cuvier as for Foucault, in the ‘human sciences’
like history and philosophy, there are only revolutions and no gradual
evolution. While Cuvier proved scientifically that some species (like the
mastodon) had been extinct, Foucault heralded the parallel extinction of
the not so ancient regime of thought defined by humanism.
The next step consisted in giving oneself the possibility of calcu-
lating the breaking points that constitute catastrophes. This was the
work launched in the late sixties by René Thom, who had great affini-
ties with Foucault’s genealogy. Thom showed under which conditions
minimal changes in the features of a non-linear system could cause a
sudden unbalance. These small changes generate a modification of the

whole system. Bifurcation points occur in definable patterns following
quantifiable geometrical structures. Here are just a few in the panoply
of catastrophes: fold catastrophes, cusp catastrophes, swallow-tail catas-
trophes or butterfly catastrophes. The first time I read Thom’s papers, I
was surprised to see that he was taking as examples the breaking point of a
wave or the capture of a prey by an animal predator. The richly metaphor-
ical language should not blind us to the fact that Thom and his followers
managed to produce a mathematisation of the small or large instabilities
in any system, whether in mechanics, animal behaviour, astronomy or the
apparently irrational fluctuations of the stock exchange.
More recently, Badiou has read Beckett’s poem ‘ainsi a-t-on beau’ as
an indictment of the enclosure provided by both memory and families.
Launching a dialectic of ‘recouvrement ’ and ‘découvrement ’, by which he
means the covering up of the infinite, and the uncovering of the infi-
nite, he sees Beckett condemning subjects who accept Pascal’s injunction
to ‘remain in a room’, and writes: ‘Whoever finds shelter in an equiv-
ocal “at home” is lost. All infinity requires errancy. Otherwise, there is
no point in invoking the banal clichés of past glory to struggle against
the law of the Father: the locked on will be, just because he is locked
up, in-finitudinized, eaten up by the worse’ (2018, 236, my translation).
The two terms chosen by Badiou are useful, for that ‘uncovering’ sends
us to the etymology of ‘revelation’, in Greek, apokaluptô, ‘I uncover’. In
that sense, we can understand why ‘catastrophe’ as a concept prevents or
pre-empts any temptation to adopt an ‘apocalyptic tone’ in philosophy.
Beckett who owned Kant’s collected works in German may have read the
short essay he entitled ‘Of an overlordly tone recently adopted in Philos-
ophy’ (1796),8 in which Kant attacked F. H. Jacobi, who was launching a
theory of philosophy as a revelation, and that of J. H. Schlosser, a Platoni-
cian. Kant denounces a conception of philosophy as bringing an ineffable
secret, or a revealed divine truth. For him, the point was to be patient,
scientific and prosaic.
At the exact opposite, the theme of the Lisbon disaster calls up Beck-
ett’s earlier meditation on a term that he had found in Leonardo da Vinci,
the idea of disfazione, a term no longer used in contemporary Italian, but
a common way in the Renaissance of referring to disasters, cataclysms
and all sorts of catastrophes. It is rendered as ‘ruin’ or ‘destruction’ in
Leonardo’s Notebooks (‘Of the deluge and the representation of it in
painting’ and ‘Description of the deluge’, 914–20). Leonardo indulged
26 J.-M. RABATÉ
in evocations of tempests, a recurring apocalyptic fantasy of the deluge

that destroys the whole of humanity. One finds the term in Leonardo’s
philosophical ‘disputation’ on the question of whether the law of nature
is that of life or of universal destruction. Should animals, should all living
creatures, live by killing each other? There are two distinct voices in this
disputation, the stronger of which belongs to a materialist voice. It asserts
forcefully that man is no better than predatory animals; man is caught
up in the universal rhythm of creation and destruction: ‘Behold now the
hope and desire of going back to one’s country or returning to primal
chaos, like that of the moth to the light, of the man who with perpetual
longing always looks forward with joy to each new spring and each new
summer, and to the new months and the new years, deeming that the
things he longs for are too slow in coming: and who does not perceive
that he is longing for his own destruction (E’ non si avveda che desidera la
sua disfazione)’ (‘Philosophy’, 75). Thus, man is a creature of catastrophe,
Leonardo concludes, developing a theme he had found in Lucretius.
In 1939, Georges Bataille endorsed this enthusiastic appreciation of
universal destruction in an essay published in his review Acéphale, ‘The
practice of Joy before Death’. Bataille associated the joy of being alive
with sadistic violence unleashed in the middle of universal catastrophe. He
ended the essay with a ‘Heraclitean Meditation’ welcoming the prospect
of total dissolution: ‘Before the terrestrial world whose summer and
winter order the agony of all living things, before the universe composed
of innumerable turnings stars, limitlessly losing and consuming them-
selves, I can only perceive a succession of cruel splendors whose very
movement requires that I die: this death is only the exploding consump-
tion of all that was, the joy of existence of all that comes into the
world; even my own life demands that everything that exists, everywhere,
ceaselessly give itself to be annihilated’ (1985, 239).
Beckett, who had met Bataille after the war, and who had used the
term of disfazione to discuss Proust, quoted it in his commentary on
the paintings of Bataille’s brother in law, André Masson: ‘[Masson’s] so
extremely intelligent remarks on space breathes the same possession as
the notebooks of Leonardo who, when he speaks of disfazione, knows
that for him not one fragment will be lost’ (1983, 141). However, in
the end, Beckett parted ways with Bataille and questioned his reliance on
‘disfazione’. Beckett suspected that the over-enthusiastic endorsement of
catastrophe he found in Leonardo, Masson and Bataille, all too eager to
catch the minute details of destruction, would simply capitalise on catas-

trophe for aesthetic ends. Indeed, in his notebooks, Leonardo can be
seen gloating over the panicked disarray of men and animals, the ruins
of cities commingling with the ruins of mountains, in a strange hyper-
realistic fantasy in which no detail gets lost, from the leaves to the eddies
in the lakes into which palaces have crumbled.
Bored with an all too predictable Schadenfreude, Beckett left ‘dis-
fazione’ to Masson and Bataille; their frantic acquiescence to universal
undoing ended up sounding all too glib. Beckett was wary of ready-made
catastrophes, which is why he wrote to Georges Duthuit: ‘Greatly enjoyed
your lack of enjoyment of the all-purpose disaster, à la Bataille’ (2011,
187). The ironical ‘désastre à tout faire’ is a good send-off of Bataille’s
acephalic frenzy. What bothered Beckett then was that the praise of
universal destruction entailed a sleight of hand. Even when they embraced
catastrophe, Leonardo and Bataille relied on a substantial permanence by
imagining a recombination of atoms after their dissolution. Such calcu-
lations will always be defeated by the circularity of time. This was the
dramatic irony well perceived by Leonardo: the more we desire the return
of the spring, the more we approach our dissolution, and yet we desire
this return because we know that dissolution approaches. However, this
psychological paradox should not lead to a position of omnipotence that
would end up placing that artist beyond good and evil.
Leonardo’s partiality to catastrophe was indeed positioned beyond
good and evil. Freud had noticed that Leonardo, who was so fastidious
and would free caged birds in markets, never betrayed any compassion
for other people. He followed without equanimity criminals led to their
execution in order to study their faces distorted by fear for his paint-
ings. ‘He often gave the appearance of being indifferent to good or evil’,
Freud notes (16). Everything in his world would fall under the domi-
nation of scientific knowledge or aesthetics, a tendency also present in
Masson. Beckett rejected the dialectical sleight of hand, the glib exchange,
in which loss, death and catastrophe turn into the artist’s gain. Dismissing
an all too easy ‘turning’, he refuses to make a strophe of the catastrophe.
Thus, Beckett rejected the ‘strophic’ great works of art in which death
and loss find a dialectical resolution as was the case in Proust or Joyce.
By contrast, he praised Beethoven’s late musical style, an inspiration for
a verbal artist like him who was interested in negativity and gaps, abysses
and dehiscence. This is what Beckett expresses in his famous ‘German
letter’ from 1937. His programme consisted in bringing all language into
disrepute:
28 J.-M. RABATÉ
To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it
something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher
goal for a writer today. […] Is there any reason why that terrible mate-
riality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like
for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s
seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing
but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable
abysses of silence? (1983, 172)
By a remarkable historical coincidence, Theodor W. Adorno developed

similar ideas in his essay on Beethoven’s late style, written in 1934 but
published in 1937.9 Rejecting any biographical reading that would high-
light the artist’s subjectivity, requiring only formal analyses, Adorno insists
on the return of clichés and conventions in the ‘late style’ of an artist like
Beethoven. This is because these conventions function as the ruins of art
as such:
The power of subjectivity in late works of art is the sudden flaring up with
which it abandons the work of art. It burst them asunder, not in order
to express itself but so as to cast off the appearance of art. What is left
of the work is ruins, and subjectivity communicates itself, as if by means
of ciphers, only through the hollowed-out forms from which it escapes.
Touched by death, the hand of the master liberates the mass of material
that it previously shaped; the cracks and crannies it contains are testimony
to the ultimate impotence of the self in the face of existence; they are the
master’s last achievements. (2003, 297)
It is fascinating to see Beckett and Adorno, both in their early thirties,

embrace ruin and impotence as the key to an artistic expression that
deliberately destroys the concept of art at exactly the same time. Adorno
concludes with the famous sentence: ‘In the history of art, late works are
the catastrophes’ (2003, 298). Beckett elaborates his new aesthetics of
impotence against the sublime power of art still deployed by Joyce and
Proust.
Should one conclude, as Ben Hutchinson has done, that modernism
enacts a full deployment of the logic of catastrophe whose best represen-
tative would be a writer like W. G. Sebald? Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis
would provide a good model: this mass was meant as a testimony to the
Napoleonic wars, but was so moving that it could never be followed by
any applause. Another model would be the demonic compositions of the
fictional artist Adrian Leverkühn, whose theories of music are based on

Adorno discussing Arnold Schönberg, in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus.
Whether modernist or classicist, this art is new only in so far as it can be
conscious of its lateness—hence by adhering to the consciousness that it
is an art of the catastrophe. This modernist catastrophe is one that we
can enjoy, whether as a missa solemnis or as a missa parodia. It is pure
anti-strophe, and we should be ready to greet it without any applause.
If we move to visual analogies, it seems to me that Beckett would have
been closer to a painter he always quotes with respect, Salvador Dalí,
who at the end of his long career, became interested in the mathematics
of catastrophe that he had found in the work of René Thom. This led
to a series of paintings illustrating different kinds of catastrophes. One of
the latest of these, entitled The Swallow’s Tail, dated May 1983, owes its
shape to Thom’s four-dimensional graph. It is combined with a second
graph, the S-curve called by Thom ‘cusp’. It was exemplified by Dalí
as the curve of a cello; its apertures look like a mathematical symbol, a
large italicised S meaning an ‘integral’ in calculus. At the same time, one
recognises the painter’s signature moustaches in the S. Curiously, this
‘S. D.’ looks very much like ‘S. B.’. Thus, if Dalí was inscribing his later
work under the category of ruin and catastrophe, it looked more like
a veil of Veronica thrown upon the artist’s face, and Beckett would be
happy to countersign it.
Notes
1. See Badiou (2003).
2. Beckett told Israel Shenker in 1956: ‘You notice how Kafka’s form is classic,
it goes on like a steamroller - almost serene. It seems to be threatened the
whole time - but the consternation is in the form. In my work there is
consternation behind the form, not in the form’ (Graver & Federman,
148).
3. Rank, The Trauma of Birth (1929). See also Tonning (2005).
4. Benjamin, ‘The Lisbon Earthquake’ (1999, 536–40).
5. The relevant pages are from 644, with the allusion to the disappearance
of the mammoths to 648, about the very old oak trees that can live one
thousand years.
6. Marquis de Sade, 281. I discuss this passage in greater detail in my Beckett
and Sade.
7. Foucault (1973, 150), translation modified. See Foucault (1966, 163).
8. See Immanuel Kant, Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der
Philosophie (1796) and Derrida (1984, 3–37).
30 J.-M. RABATÉ
9. Adorno, ‘Beethoven’s Late Style’ (2003, 295–8).
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Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 295–8.
Badiou, Alain (2003). On Beckett. Trans. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power.
Manchester: Clinamen Press.
Badiou, Alain (2018). L’immanence des vérités. Paris: Fayard.
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Noonday Press.
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Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
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Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder.
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Faber.
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and Lois Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Daniel Gunn, Martha Fehsenfeld and Lois Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Beckett, Samuel (2012). The Collected Poems. Ed. Seán Lawlor and John Pilling.
London: Faber and Faber.
Benjamin, Walter (1999). ‘The Lisbon Earthquake’. In M. Jennings, H. Eiland
and G. Smith (eds.), Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 536–40.
Bonnet, Charles (1769–1770). La Palingénésie Philosophique, ou ideés sur l’état
passé et l’état futur des êtres vivants. Two volumes. Genève: Claude Philibert
and Barthelemi Chirol.
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of the Earth. Trans. Ian Johnston. Arlington: Richer Resources Publications.
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New York: George Braziller, pp. 914–20.
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The Not-All Catastrophe in Ill Seen Ill
Said/Mal vu mal dit and ‘Comment
Dire’/‘What Is the Word’
Llewellyn Brown
Beyond historical and biographical dimensions, the notion of a Becket-

tian catastrophe can highlight a preoccupation with negativity spanning
modernist creation more generally.1 This approach brings to light a very
specific process of writing involving a purification of any anecdotal dross
to arrive at a radically structural and topological aspect at the heart of
language, to actively produce a dimension that undermines any meaning.
It is around this point that writer and reader experience an encounter,
in the incommensurable distance that separates them. In the following
lines, it will therefore be a question of catastrophe as inherent in the way
creation reveals the speaking being’s relation to language.
In approaching this question, psychoanalysis will be called upon in
order to highlight the part of existence where one is bereft of words and
the mastery they afford: what Beckett calls weakness or failure. Thus, for
Jacques Lacan, the realm of names and meanings, with their reassuring
impression of adequacy, is considered to belong to the imaginary register.
This will be examined in the light of sexuation, whereby the masculine,
L. Brown (B)
Lycée International de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France
e-mail: llewbrown@free.fr

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08368-6_3
34 L. BROWN
unifying the domain of reality, is seen in relation to its opposite, the

feminine: radical alterity which can never be pinned down by identity,
while inevitably harking back to the masculine, thus causing unstillable
‘catastrophe’, beyond the true and false antinomy.
Catastrophe of the Imaginary

If Beckett’s work may be seen as evidencing the effects of a catastrophe,
the catastrophe itself is rarely present as a dramatic event. In two late
works—Ill Seen Ill Said / Mal vu mal dit (Hereafter Ill Seen) and ‘what is
the word’ / ‘Comment dire’2 —it can be seen, in a preliminary approach,
from the point of view of melancholia: as an ancient subjective event
which has destroyed any possibility of constituting a world composed of
shared representations.
The pejorative adverb ill in Ill Seen seems to suggest seeing as an estab-
lished and collectively received norm defining speaking and saying well,
of which the text preserves a trace in the French original: ‘À l’imagi-
naire profane la masure paraît inhabité. [...] Rentre enfin dans son pays
et avoue, Personne’ (Beckett 1990, 15) [‘To the imaginary stranger the
dwelling appears deserted. […] Returns at last to his own and avows,
No one’ (Beckett 2009, 48–9)].3 The uninitiated person—or his imag-
ination—hailing from another realm is unable to perceive the presence
and the movements of the old woman, who is declared inexistent. This
inability would seem to disparage the woman’s reality, in comparison with
more consistent representations. And yet, in spite of her very spectral
nature, she refuses to vanish definitively.
This state appears to testify to a catastrophe occurring in an inaccessible
past, impeding the subject’s inclusion in collective representations. Such
a notion is suggested by references to a moment that, being ‘ancient’, is
situated beyond any chronological time. ‘All so bygone’ (54, 63)/‘Les
faits sont si anciens’ (28, 45). Such an experience inscribes itself in an
indelible manner at the moment of Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’ when the as-
yet uncoordinated infans, perceiving his bodily image as a marvellous
whole, seeks confirmation from his Other, in order for this representa-
tion to ground his own subjectivity (Brown 2019, 30–3). The catastrophe
takes place when this confirmation fails to found the imaginary register by
the exclusion of the invisible gaze object. It is as if ‘having barely entered
THE NOT-ALL CATASTROPHE IN ILL SEEN ILL SAID/MAL … 35
the realm of desire […] the subject finds himself brutally without a part-
ner’ (Lambotte 2012, 473), ‘on the threshold of an illusion or of a belief
that it is henceforth impossible to invest’ (Lambotte 2012, 597).
Paradoxically, this catastrophe is revelatory of a fundamental truth,
whereby reality as a whole (the ‘imaginary’ register) is no more than
an insubstantial construction. This revelation excludes the usual stages
whereby one’s fantasy takes on consistency in order to be subsequently
deconstructed as a deceptive artefact. Marie-Claude Lambotte says, of the
melancholic, that he ‘discovered too early the cipher of the message. [...]
The mirror gave up its secret too soon’ (1999, 126).
However, what could be considered as an original subjective catas-
trophe can be turned around in order to be seen not as negative, but
as touching on a very real part of existence in language, and brought to
light as a productive force in creation.
From ‘Limited Wholes’ to the Lacanian Not-All

This distinction between a meagre trace of conventional reality, on the
one hand, and an enigmatic unity, on the other, testifies to a certain
logical structuring of language, developed by Lacan in his ‘formulae of
sexuation’, and which requires a slight explanatory digression.
On the side of the (phallic) universal, we can say that ‘all men are
mortal’: the subject is possessor of no substantial being beyond the
signifier, which both represents and effaces him. This constitutes what
Jean-Claude Milner calls a ‘limited whole’ (17–8): one that is bounded
by a second element having the status of an exception. This exception
guarantees the coherency of the whole, ‘confirming the rule’ as ‘falsifi-
able’, in Karl Popper’s term, so that any catastrophe remains limited in
scope. These elements point to what would ground the infans in relation
to his mirror-image, or provide Beckett’s ‘imaginary stranger’ (48) with
the image he could recognise and share with ‘his own’ (49).
On the side of the feminine, however, the perspective is quite different,
without escaping the universality of the masculine, which is the only
representation of sex in the unconscious: the feminine both refers to
and objects to it. Once again, two formulations are given, but both are
negative. The limited whole contains a part that exceeds its own limits,
also negating the founding exception situated on the masculine side.
At the same time, we cannot assert the embodied existence of absolute
otherness. This leads to the equivocal statement whereby the universal is
36 L. BROWN
valid for ‘not all’. This register of the not-all (pastout ) points to what
is not entirely inscribed in the masculine (phallic) function: unceasingly
subverting it, while continuing to refer to it. This ‘feminine’ dimension is
real and impossible to eliminate. It is unlimited, since it is not hemmed-
in by a border, and also necessarily entails a degree of undecidability,
where binary alternatives such as yes or no cannot be posited. The catas-
trophe here is therefore understood as the continual instability whereby
imaginary references are undone, negating any guarantee or stability.
These formulae also manifest their unity, since the phallic function
never ceases to be present throughout each of the successive formulae: the
mode of veiling and unveiling is precisely a manifestation of the phallus
(Fierens 2018, 210). The phallic signifier drives saying, in a movement
leading from one formula to the following, creating the catastrophe as
continuously renewed, recalling the etymological sense of this term as a
‘turning-point’. That means that the only form of jouissance4 that exists
is phallic: there is no other, except as expressed in the form of its negation
and the hypothetical ‘if there were (but there is not), it must not be that
one’ (Lacan 1975, 56). For this reason, it is necessary to work from the
positive and the nameable, in order to point to what cannot be grasped
as absolute alterity. This otherness is the ‘catastrophe’, which can only be
perceived negatively, as constantly subverting any representation.
Instability of the ‘Not-All’

While, on the side of the masculine, there is an Other as an authority
who exists, the feminine side shows this pre-eminence to be illusory, since
there is no ‘Other of the Other’ (Lacan 2013, 353): no metaphysical
authority to provide the ultimate grounding of reality. For Lacan, there-
fore, being and reality are anchored in speech and are caused by the
signifier. No ‘pre-discursive reality’ (Lacan 1975, 33) provides a standard
whereby one could verify enunciation as true or false. Any conception of
reality is already mediated by discourse, and speaking reveals the speaker
as the subject—not the conscious author—of discourse. This means that
the Beckettian catastrophe is not bounded within a reality made up of
coherently combined, identifiable elements: it does not compose a narra-
tive or a tragedy. Rather, it is structural, a term expressing the reduction
of empiric entities to the minimal functions that determine these forms
which, as such, belong to Lacan’s ‘imaginary’. However, this structure
is not an order which would be arbitrary, over-arching, complete and
THE NOT-ALL CATASTROPHE IN ILL SEEN ILL SAID/MAL … 37
autonomous. Rather, it involves the way signifiers—expressive of pure

difference—undermine any coherence, revealing the incompletion caused
by the presence of a radical hole in language, which is real in so far as it
cannot be pinned down, but only be circumscribed.
Thus, for the ‘imaginary stranger’ in Ill Seen, the existence of the old
woman remains ungraspable: a catastrophe of which he has no percep-
tion. In both Ill Seen and ‘what is the word’, we find not simply the
subjective deviation from a given norm, but rather an overall movement
where words, emotions and a stylised reality interfere with each other.
This means that no third agent is capable of providing a framework
within which two terms might enter a calm dialectical relationship. What
prevails is the minimal structural configuration of two associated signifiers,
drawing any two entities into a perpetual catastrophe, as Beckett explains
in his 1931 essay Proust :
The observer infects the observed with his own mobility. Moreover, when
it is a case of human intercourse, we are faced by the problem of an object
whose mobility is not merely a function of the subject’s, but independent
and personal: two separate and immanent dynamisms related by no system
of synchronisation. (Beckett 1987, 17)5
Indeed, to say that vision is always inevitably subjective supposes a refer-

ence to stable representations. Here, however, the subject necessarily has
a ‘catastrophic’ impact on the object he observes, since he ‘infects’ it.
Beckett accentuates the problem by also asserting the total independence
of the other, who maintains a completely foreign mobility.
This lack of ‘synchronisation’ between two terms returns in Beck-
ett’s 1952 text on Henri Hayden’s painting, where he points to the
ruse behind many modern works, consisting of reducing objective reality
to subjectivity, or abolishing subjectivity to the benefit of untainted
objectivity:
C’est une chose des plus curieuses que ce double effacement. Et d’une
bien hautaine inactualité. Elle n’est pas au bout de ses beaux jours, la
crise sujet-objet. Mais c’est à part et au profit de l’un et de l’autre que
nous avons l’habitude de les voir défaillir, ce clown et son gugusse. Alors
qu’ici, confondus dans une même inconsistance, ils se désistent de concert.
(Beckett 1983, 146)
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Tuomas tunsi yhtäkkiä hillitöntä rakkaudenkaipuuta. Ihan sydäntä
kouristi ja suonet lakkasivat lyömästä lyödäkseen jälleen sitä
hurjemmin. Lopetettuaan syöntinsä meni hän vaimonsa luokse, laski
kätensä tämän vyötäisille ja hymyillen virkkoi.
— Etkö tulekin minun aittaani tänä iltana?
— Mitä vielä!
— Mutta kun minä nyt kerran pyydän.
— Senpähän sitten näkee.
Se oli kuin lupaus ja kevein mielin astui Tuomas ulos tuvasta

mennäkseen kynnökselle.
— Kuulehan, Tuomas kääntyi vielä ovelle, lämmittäisitkö saunan.

Palo tulee tänä iltana kynnökselle.
— Joka iltako sitä nyt pitää äyhkyttää.
Annan ääni oli taas jäinen niinkuin tavallisesti.
— Mentäisiin sitten saunan jälkeen verkon laskuun, sanoi Tuomas

kuin sovitellakseen.
Otettuaan suitset portailta meni Tuomas hakaveräjälle. Siinä tuli

häntä vastaan Topias Isotalo kainalossaan vitsaskimppu. Oli käynyt
Tuomaan hakametsästä vitsasvarpoja hakemassa, kun ei löytänyt
muualta.
— Kynnökselleenkö se Tuomas…?
— Niin. Mistä päin se isäntä nyt…?

— Vitsaspuitapa katselin enkä löytänyt muualta kuin tuosta sinun
haastasi. Näkyi niitä siinä olevan, niin päätin minäkin ottaa.
— Onhan niitä siellä…
— Eikö liene yli oman tarpeen.
Isotalo koetti naurahtaa hyväsuopaisesti ja tarjosi tupakkaa

Tuomaalle.
Tuomas istui veräjäpuulle ja silmäili salavihkaa isäntää, joka näytti

aikovan sanoa jotain erikoisempaa.
Mitähän se nyt aikoo? Sillä on se entinen salakavala ilmeensä.

Tuomas tunsi vihaavansa Isotaloa jostakin salaisesta syystä, joka ei
ollut oikein selvillä hänelle itselleenkään.
Epäröityään hetken aloitti Isotalo.
— Kun tässä tuli hankituksi täksi kesäksi vähän työvoimaa taloon,

niin olen aikonut muuttaa verosi päivätöiksi, kun sinullakaan ei ole
tässä erikoisempia kiireitä mökkisi töissä. Onhan se sopivampi
senkin vuoksi, ettei mene rahoja verosta. Olen ajatellut, että tekisit
kaksi päivää viikossa muulloin paitsi heinäaikana. Heinäviikko saisi
jäädä silleen, tahi jos vaimosi kävisi muutamana päivänä…
Tuomas kopisti vihaisella liikkeellä porot piipustaan.
— Ei se käy päinsä. Minulla on kylliksi työtä torpassa ja

rahakauppa on aina selvempi. Mitäs sitä nyt muuttelemaan, kun se
on ollut näin ennenkin.
— Kyllä se nyt täytyy muuttaa, virkkoi Isotalo kylmästi.

— Ja minkä tähden se nyt täytyy muuttaa, kun se on näin kauan
saanut olla ennallaan?
— Johan minä sanoin, että minä tarvitsen työvoimaa, ja sitä minä

saan sillä neuvoin parhaiten.
— Mutta kun se ei sovi minulle, tenäsi Tuomas.
— Kyllä sen täytyy sopia.
— Kuka siihen pakon panee?
— Minä, sanoi Isotalo jyrkästi.
Tuomas vaikeni. Hänen sisässään kuohui ja toinen käsi puristi

lujasti suitsia, toinen aidanseivästä niin, että se ruiskahtaen katkesi
ja pää jäi Tuomaan käteen. Topias väistyi hätkähtäen. Hänen
silmissään välähti oudosti. Aikoiko Tuomas tosiaankin tarttua
aseeseen?
Tuomaan pää painui alas ja hän istahti raskaasti veräjänpuulle.

Mitä oli tehtävä? Ja mitä Isotalo aikoi, kun työveroa vaati? Mikä oli
tarkoitus? Hänen isänsä Tuomas oli suorittanut Heinämäestä
veronsa rahassa, miks ei Tuomaan poikakin sitä voinut suorittaa
samoin?
— Asia pidettänee siis sovittuna ja ylihuomenna sinä tulet töihin?
— En voi sitä luvata. Tuomas Tuomaanpoika ei tee mitään

harkitsematta, virkkoi Tuomas ja astui veräjältä hakaan.
— Jos aiot asua Heinämäessä, niin olet ylihuomenna kello neljän

aikana
Isontalon kesantopellolla, huusi isäntä hänen jälkeensä.
— Osaa se olla ylpeä kuten isävainajansakin, mutisi hän vielä

ottaessaan maasta vitsaskimppunsa ja lähtiessään kävelemään
Heinämäkeen johtavaa tietä.
III.
Anna oli lehmiä lypsämässä pelto veräjällä. Lehmisavu kiemurteli

tasaisena ja levisi tuoksuvana pilvenä vesaikkoon, jossa kellokas
seisoi märehtien. Anna kuuli kopsetta polulta ja nousi katsomaan,
kuka sieltä mahtoi tulla. Isotalo! Anna punastui ja painoi päänsä
piiloon lehmän kylkeä vasten. Mistähän se nyt? Näkiköhän sitä
Tuomas? Kun nyt pysyisi siellä palollaan. Sanoi sen kohta loppuvan.
Täytyy pitää varalta.
— Hyvää iltaa!
— Iltaa. Mistä sinä nyt tulet?
— Kävelin vain tuolla metsässä. Oli Tuomaalle asiaa.
Anna naurahti.
— Mitä sinulla Tuomaalle?
— Vaadin verosta päivätöihin. Pari päivää viikossa ei muuta. Kun

nyt sinulle ei tulisi vaan ikävä?
— Pyh! Kyllä joutaakin siitä kurnuttamasta.

Isotalo rämähti nauramaan.
— Sitähän minäkin, että parempi se on vero työnä suorittaa. Ei ole

aina siinä kintuilla pyörimässä.
Anna kaatoi maidon kiulusta saaviin, taputti Omenaa ja nousi yli

veräjän.
— Tuletko tupaan, kysyi hän suorien hamettaan ja katsellen

vierasta veitikka silmäkulmassa.
— Tulen tietysti.
Tupa tuoksui koivunlehdille. Pikku Matti nukkui kehdossaan. Anna

jäi seisomaan ikkunan ääreen katsellen tyvenelle järvelle.
Isotalo läheni ja laski kätensä hänen vyötäisilleen.
— No, ei saa, oli Anna kieltävinään.
— Miksei saa?
— Sattuu Tuomaskin tulemaan.
— Ei tule. Paloaan meni kyntämään. Tapasin hänet hakaveräjällä.
— Mitä varten sinä sen tosiaankin päivätöihin käskit?
— Johan sanoin. On siinä aina kintereillä kieppumassa.
Isotalo istui penkille ja veti Annan polvelleen. Anna vähän

vastusteli, mutta jäi kuitenkin.
Oletpa sinä lämmin ja tuoksuva, virkkoi Isotalo sieraimet
värähdellen.
— Eikö oma vaimosi ole? ilakoi Anna.
— Semmoinen koranka. Kuiva kuin kuusen kanto. Kylmä kuin kivi

kaivossa.
— Johan nyt!
— Semmoinen on.
— Mitäs otit.
En arvannut ottaessani.
En minäkään, sanoi Anna nauraen.
— Sama vahinko sinulle kuin minullekin.
Pikku Matti heilahti vuoteessaan ja äännähteli.
Anna meni hyssyttämään.
Isotalo katseli pienokaista pitkään ja hymyillen.
Mitä sinä katsot, kysyi Anna.
Että kun ei siinä vain olisi minun poikani.
Anna naurahti hämillään.
— Olisiko tuo.
Onko se sinusta Tuomaan näköinen?

— Ei.
— Siinäpä se.
— Mistäpä sen nyt niin varmaan tietää, sanoi Anna hiljaa.
Isotalo rämähti nauramaan.
— Mutta Tuomas pitää tietysti poikaa omanaan?
— Saahan pitääkin.
— Kyllä minun puolestani.
Anna istui jälleen penkille ja Isotalo siirsihe lähemmäksi.
— Ylihuomenna tulee Tuomas meille. Saanhan tulla silloin tänne?
— Et nyt tulisi kuitenkaan.
— Miks'en?
— Sinä käyt liian usein täällä. Tuomas voi tulla tietämään.
Isotalo naurahti ja kysyi.
— No mitä silloin?
— Saattaa vaikka tappaa minut kun tietää.
— Päh! Semmoinen retus!
Molemmat nauroivat. Isotalo veti Annan pään kainaloonsa ja

suuteli keskelle suuta.
— Näin minä vaan teen. Ja kummallisen hyvälle se maistuukin
toisen omalta.
— Et nyt puhuisi noin, pyyteli Anna punastellen ja alaspainetuin

katsein.
Isotalo hyväili Annan täyteläisiä jäseniä silmissään samea kiilto.
— Mene nyt jo pois. Tuomas saattaa tulla minä hetkenä tahansa,

kielteli
Anna.
Isotalo nousi ja virkkoi ovella.
— Sitten ylihuomenna.
— Eikö mitä.
— Varmasti!
— Jollei Tuomas tulekaan työhön.
— Hänen täytyy tulla!
— Ei se minun kehoituksestani ainakaan tule, arveli Anna…
— Kyllä minä saan hänet tulemaan, sanoi Isotalo porstuassa

mennessään…
Anna istui ikkunaan nojaten ja katseli järvelle mietteissään.
On siinä komea mies. Jäsenet aivan kuin rautaa. Ja miten tuima

katse sillä on. Ihan panee värisemään. Mikä hänessä lieneekin niin
viehättävää? Miksi hän ei ottanut minua silloin kuin..? Mutta rikas oli
kai silloin parempi. Nyt ei enää kelpaa. Voi, voi kuitenkin, onkohan
tämä nyt suurikin synti pitää hänestä. Kun voisi ainoastaan pitää,
mutta kun… Sen katseiden alla aivan pökertyy. Kyllähän pitäisi
Tuomasta kohdella kuitenkin paremmin, kun vain voisi. Jos koettaisi
edes joskus olla hänelle oikein hyvä… Nyt se sieltä jo tuleekin.
Tuomas astui tupaan kumaraisena ja väsyneenä ja istui

huoahtaen penkille. Anna kiirehti hänelle ruokaa laittamaan. Kantoi
täyden viilikehlon pöytään lampaan koiven ja voiastian. Lisäksi
äsken leipomaansa ohraohukaista.
— Syö nyt. Saunakin on jo valmis.
— Eipä tuo nyt tee mieli ruokaa, virkkoi Tuomas allapäin.
— Miksei? Mikä sinun nyt on? e
— Isotalo tuo kävi verolle vaatimassa, vaikka itselläkin olisi työtä

liiaksi.
— Ja siitäkö sinä…?
— Sepä se tässä niin painaa.
— No käyhän nyt siltä syömään. Toin siihen vähän parempaa, kun

saat aina yksin raataa.
Tuomas katsahti vaimoonsa. Mitä se nyt haastoi? Eihän se ennen

noin…
Kas, eikö olekin pöydässä viilikehlo ja voitakin.
Anna sai mieheltään kiitollisen katseen. Hiukan keventyneenä hän

virkkoi.
— Pitänee sitten haukata, että pääsee kylpyyn. Etkö sinäkin tule
syömään?
Anna tuli.
— Jospa sinä nyt kumminkin menisit verotyöhön. Saattaa muutoin

isäntä suuttua.
— Mitä siitä, jos suuttuu.
— Ajaa pois mökistä.
Tuomaan kasvot synkkenivät.
— Millä oikeudella?
— Kyllä ne aina oikeutensa löytävät, arveli Anna.
— Mutta minulla kun on työtä kylliksi kotonakin. Pitäisikö minun

sitten yöllä vielä raataa omilla vainioilla.
— Eihän tässä nyt enää niin… kevättyöt jo lopussa. Jos tuolle

kelpaisi minun työni heinäaikana. Saisit sinä olla kotitöillä.
Tuomas katseli oudoksuen vaimoansa.
— Olisiko sinusta verotyö niin mieluista?
Annan katse painui alas.
— Eipä se niin… mutta ajattelin, että sinä suorittaisit enemmän

kotiniityllä.
— Parasta se on sinun olla kotitöillä, sanoi Tuomas melkein
jyrkästi.
— Sinä et sitten päästäisi minua minnekään, virkkoi Anna

nyreissään.
— Kyllähän minä sinua muuanne, mutta eihän nyt verotyöhön.
Tuomas nousi pöydästä ja painoi puukon seinän rakoon.
— Mikä lienee tarkoitus isännällä, kun työhönsä tahtoo. Ei tuo ole

ennen tahtonut. Joko nyt lienee rahaa liiaksi, kun ei kelpaisi
verostakaan… Joko sitä sitten saunaan…?
— Mene vain, käski Anna.
— Etkö sinä tulekaan?
— En. Menköön piika-Iida löylyä lyömään.
— Kyllä minä itsekin…
Tuomas painui ulos, otti portailta oman taittamansa vastan ja meni

saunaan.
Löyly virkisti väsynyttä ruumista ja vasta tuoksui nuorelta koivulta.

Ei tuntunut veroasia enää niin raskaalta.
Mitähän se eukkokin sinne nyt minua niin ajaisi? Rahaan on sekin

perso.
Säästäisi vain siinäkin. Eiköhän se, kun vain jaksaisi… Saisihan
tuota hänen mielikseen koettaa. Jos tuo antaisi paremman
kaskimaankin,
Isotalo. Silmillä se on siitä kuitenkin, jos ei mene.
Tuomas pukeutui rantakivellä istuen. Järvi lepäsi tyvenenä
rantojaan kuvastellen.
— Saisi sieltä nyt särkiä verkolla, saattaisipa saada ahveniakin,

kun olisi jaksanut verkot laskea. Mutta ei jaksa. Semmoista se on.
Yhden työn saa kuntoon, niin jo toinen jää. Sitten pitäisi vielä
verollekin ehtiä.
Tuomas käveli pihaan ja istui aittansa rapuille.
Anna kuului liikkuvan aitassaan ja paneutuvan nukkumaan.
— Ethän sinä tullutkaan, virkkoi Tuomas alakuloisesti Annalle.
— Mihin?
— Minun aittaanipa.
— Enhän minä ole luvannutkaan.
— Lupasithan.
— Siellä on niin ahdasta.
— On tuonne ennen mahtunut.
— Minua niin nukuttaa, kuului Anna sanovan jo sängystään.
Tuomas kopisti porot piipustaan ja virkkoi äreästi.
— Nuku sitten.
Meni aittaansa ja veti paukahtaen oven kiinni.

— Tällaistako se on sitten vaan eteenkin päin? Tuomas huokasi
raskaasti vuoteessaan.
IV.
Topias Isotalo käveli kesantopellollaan. Torpparit olivat saaneet

pellon auratuksi ja tyytyväisenä Isotalo katseli sileää vainiota, joka
laajana levisi hänen ympärillään.
Oli siinä pelto semmoinen, että sai hakea vertaista. Multa kuin
kahvijauhoa eikä yhtään kiveä. Ei ollut naapureilla tilkkuakaan
sellaista maata. Kelpasi sitä viljellä ja rikastua.
Kuinka paljon niitä olikaan tuhansia pankissa? Viisikymmentä.

Metsästä saisi monta senvertaa, jos möisi. Karjasta jää puhdasta
useita tuhansia vuodessa.
Isotalo röyhisti rintaansa ja rasvoittuneelle naamalle levisi syvä

tyytyväisyyden ilme.
Kadehtivatkohan naapurit häntä? Kyllä kai! Jokainen sitä osasi.

Mutta eivätpä osanneet panna taloansa kuntoon yksikään. Elää
kituuttelivat vain jok'ainoa kuin kerjäläiset. Ja kävivät häneltä rahoja
lainailemassa. Heh. Vaivaiset raukat!
Isotalo aikoi kävellä pihaan, mutta pyörähtikin pellonveräjästä

karjatielle.
Jos pistäytyisi Heinämäessä. Anna oli siellä nyt yksin kotona.
Tuomas oli aamulla tullut verotyöhön.
Topias sytytti hyvältä tuoksuvan sikaarin ja hymähteli.
Täytyipäs Tuomaan tulla, vaikka vastusteli. Ei uskaltanut jäädä

tulematta. Ei se, äijä poloinen, aavistanut, mitä varten hänet verolle
vaadin. Heh. Ei se mitään huomaa, on se toki semmoinen pökkö. Sai
pahus keinotelluksi itselleen komean vaimon. Tai oikeastaan sai, kun
annettiin saada. Ei sitä olisi saanut, jollen olisi kehoittanut Annaa
sille menemään. Taisi tulla mietityksi, että siinäpähän on Anna
lähellä.
Omana poikanaan hypittelee Tuomas pikku Mattia, mutta

yhtäpaljon siinä pojassa on Isotalon verta kuin Tuomaankin. Mistäpä
äijä sitä älyää. Parasta onkin, kun ei mitään huomaa. Tulisi
turhanpäiten harmia hyvälle miehelle.
Isotalo kulki suoperukkansa poikki. Yhtä laajana aukeni se kuin

kotipeltokin, jollei laajempana. Oras oli tiheää ja lupaavannäköistä.
Siitä lähtee helposti kaksisataa hehtoa suviviljaa. Muutamia vuosia
oli Isotalo sitä viljellyt ja nyt se kykeni jo antamaan satoja semmoisia,
että pitäjällä niistä kerrottiin.
Suo oli kuulunut naapuritaloon, Heikkilään, jonka Isotalo oli

keinotellut itselleen ostamalla Heikkilän velkojat ja panemalla velat
hakemukseen kaikki yhtaikaa. Se toimenpide ei loukannut Isotalon
mainetta. Kukaan ei uskaltanut siitä paljon puhua ainakaan niin, että
olisi Isotalon korville tullut. Melkein jokainen oli velkaa hänelle.
Kuitenkin oli Isotalo saanut Heikkilän huutokaupan jälkeen viettää

muutaman unettoman yön. Heikkiläisellä oli iso perhe, jonka kanssa
joutui maantielle. Pyrki vieläkin joskus vistottamaan raakuutensa.
Olisit heittänyt edes yhden lehmän Heikkiläiselle. Torpan paikkakaan
ei olisi ollut liikaa. Ja se yksi velkakirja lienee ollut jo hänen isänsä
aikana maksettukin. Mistä hän sen tiesi, oliko vai ei. Olisi vaatinut
aikanaan kuittaamaan. Saattoi muistaa Heikkiläkin väärin.
Olkoon miten tahansa. Lempoako heistä enää ajattelemaan.

Elämän meno
kun nyt on kerran semmoista, niin se on. Yksi sille ei mitään voi.
Täytyy tietysti jokaisen katsoa eteensä. Muuten jää puille paljaille.
Eikähän talo olisi Heikkilän käsissä pysynytkään.
Isotalo pistäytyi Heinämäen pellonveräjästä sisään. Tuli siinä

mieleen silloiset ajatukset, kun oli käynyt ensimäisiä kertoja Annaa
tapaamassa. Isotalo naurahti.
Tuntuipa silloin niinkuin varkaissakäynniltä, kuin toisen miehen

aittaan olisi pistäytynyt luvatta. Nyt se ei enää vaivannut. Kaikkihan
tapahtui vapaaehtoisesti ilman mitään vaatimusta. Miksei hän, kun
kerran Anna suostui. Hänen puolestaan olisi Anna saanut ottaa
muitakin, jos olisi tahtonut.
Isotalo hätkähti.
Joku toinen, tuntematon, sanoi hiljaa.
— Mutta Annallapa ei ollut aikaa enää valita.
— Miten niin aikaa? koetti Isotalo kysyä.
— Sitenpä niin, että Anna olisi jäänyt maantielle lapsensa kanssa.
— Lapsensa?
— Jonka tiesi olevan tulossa — sinulle, Isotalo.
— Minulle? oli Isotalo hämmästyvinään. Oliko se nyt niin varma.
— Kas kun vielä arvelet, vaikka itsekin myönnät, että poika on

sinun.
— Mutta enhän minä Annaa pakoittanut Tuomaalle…
— Et, mutta kehoitit menemään. Olisit ottanut itse. Mutta piti

saadaksesi rikas, joka nyt ei kumminkaan kelpaa.
— Kelpaa?
— Ei kelpaa, ei kelpaa, kiusasi tuntematon. Vieraan vaimon luona

käyt.
Veit köyhältä ainoansa. Häpeisit!
— Piru! Mikä se nyt taas noin kiusasikin? Omatuntoko? Mikä se

on? Omatunto, omatunto. Sangen hämärä käsite. Mikä on sitä
vastaan, mikä ei? Minua se on aina johtanut harhaan. Ja silloin kun
sitä olisi tarvinnut, on se ollut paikalla liian myöhään. Ja se on
vaatinut tekemään semmoista, joka ei sovi Isotalon maineelle. Ja
jota ei Isotalo koskaan tee!
Omatunto? Kiusaaja se on. Takiainen, jota ei saa luotaan pois

karistetuksi. Ja sangen hämärä. Tänään omatunto myöntää jonkun
asian, huomenna ei. Sekoittaja se on, pannahinen! Ja kintereillä se
kieppuu alinomaa. On rahaa ja rikkautta ja komea talo ja terve
ruumis. Ei olisi kiusana mikään, jos ei se olisi aina takin helmasta
tempomassa: Elä nyt mene sinne. Voitkohan sinä nyt tuon tehdä?
Semmoinen se on, pakana. Milloinka sen saisi viimeisenkin itsestään
karistetuksi?
Isotalo astui Heinämäen tupaan.
Oli lauantai ja Anna puhdisti permantoa huomaamatta tupaan

tulijaa. Tukka oli auennut ja posket hehkuivat. Täyteläiset pohkeet
jännittyivät luudan nopeasti heiluessa.
Isotalo hymyili sieraimet värähdellen.
Pakana sitä Tuomasta, miten kauniin vaimon sai! Kelpaisi sen, kun
olisi miestä miehekseen. Mikä kiehtojainen hänessä lieneekään.
Aina on kuin ensi kertaa näkisi.
Isotalo hiipi hiljaa ja laski takaapäin kätensä Annan silmille.
— Hui! Kuka se niin…?
— Arvaa?
Arvasihan Anna sen kysymättäkin, kuka tulija oli. Ei riuhtaissut

itseään irti, vaan odotti lujempaa hyväilyä.
Pikku Matti leikki piika Iidan luona ulkona rannassa.
Isotalo silmäili ympärilleen. Ei näkynyt mitään peljättävää.
— Tule! kuiskasi Isotalo läähättäen Annan korvaan.

V.
Päivä paistoi korkealta. Poutapilvi lepäsi liikkumatta taivaanrannalla.

Multa pölisi hevosten kavioissa ja nousi tomupilvenä ilmaan. Miehet
astuivat väsyneinä ja hikisinä hevosten jälessä. Pöly tarttui hien
kanssa ruumiiseen ja päätä huumasi tulinen auringon paiste.
Kovin olivatkin laajoja Isotalon vainiot, joilla torpparilauma

hevosineen sai hikoilla kuumana kesäpäivänä. Kun isännän silmä
vältti, lepuutettiin hevosia ja tarinoitiin.
Heinämäen Tuomas oli ruunallaan ajanut yhtämittaa aamiaisilta

lähtien yhtään levähtämättä.
Poutalainen seisatti hevosensa ja astuksi Tuomaan saralle.
— Pysäytähän hevosesi, virkkoi. Kuoliaaksihan ajat ruunasi tuolla

menolla. Ei meitä Isotalo kiittele, vaikka rupeamassa tämä pelto
äestetään. Kyllä minä sen miehen tunnen. Ei kiitosta koskaan,
vaikka kuinka raataisit.
Tuomas istui pientarelle ja naurahtaen virkkoi.
— Kissa kiitoksella elää.

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Edited by Michiko Tsushima

Mariko Hori Tanaka

ISBN 978-3-031-08367-9 ISBN 978-3-031-08368-6 (eBook)

Catastrophe and Aesthetic Creation

Catastrophe and Everyday Life in Samuel Beckett 135

Ecological Catastrophe and the Role of Art

Llewellyn Brown teaches at the Lycée international de Saint-Germain-

Samuel Beckett and trauma (2018), Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influ-

(Peter Lang, 2003) and Hannah Arendt: Reconciling Ourselves to the

Michiko Tsushima, Yoshiki Tajiri, and Mariko Hori Tanaka

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Philosophically linking the concept of catastrophe with aesthetics, Part

to this dimension, in other words, to the fundamental indecision that lies

In his chapter on Beckett’s sense of history, William Davies clearly sides

outer space as shown in Hamm’s remark in Endgame indicates the rela-

pervade Beckett’s writing with his acute sense of afterness in fractured

It can be said that in Beckett’s acute sense of slowness and afterness

Catastrophe, That Old Gag

J.-M. Rabaté (B)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

Beckett’s play mobilises the main meanings I attribute to the term of

Barthes was meditating on his own ‘catastrophe’, quite simply his

Catastrophe, Ecology and Survival

ainsi a-t-on beau

Uncharacteristically, Beckett’s poem unfolds as a single sentence with

Ainsi a-t-on beau […] se rappeler le mammouth […] rêver en générations

thus will one in vain

as if it was yesterday remember the mammoth

Here is a poem of mourning, focusing on Beckett’s father who had died

This context allows us to understand why Kant can appear so ‘cold’,

Could there be any more ludicrous rationalization of the itch to animise

Sade’s irritation is here presented a ‘mièvre’. The adjective suggests some-

elaborate at the same time a philosophy stressing the unbroken continuity

sudden unbalance. These small changes generate a modification of the

in evocations of tempests, a recurring apocalyptic fantasy of the deluge

catch the minute details of destruction, would simply capitalise on catas-

By a remarkable historical coincidence, Theodor W. Adorno developed

It is fascinating to see Beckett and Adorno, both in their early thirties,

fictional artist Adrian Leverkühn, whose theories of music are based on

9. Adorno, ‘Beethoven’s Late Style’ (2003, 295–8).

de Sade, Marquis (1987). La Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu. In

Beyond historical and biographical dimensions, the notion of a Becket-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 33

unifying the domain of reality, is seen in relation to its opposite, the

Catastrophe of the Imaginary

From ‘Limited Wholes’ to the Lacanian Not-All

Instability of the ‘Not-All’

autonomous. Rather, it involves the way signifiers—expressive of pure

Indeed, to say that vision is always inevitably subjective supposes a refer-

— Etkö tulekin minun aittaani tänä iltana?

— Mutta kun minä nyt kerran pyydän.

— Senpähän sitten näkee.

Se oli kuin lupaus ja kevein mielin astui Tuomas ulos tuvasta

— Kuulehan, Tuomas kääntyi vielä ovelle, lämmittäisitkö saunan.

— Joka iltako sitä nyt pitää äyhkyttää.

Annan ääni oli taas jäinen niinkuin tavallisesti.

— Mentäisiin sitten saunan jälkeen verkon laskuun, sanoi Tuomas

Otettuaan suitset portailta meni Tuomas hakaveräjälle. Siinä tuli

— Niin. Mistä päin se isäntä nyt…?

— Onhan niitä siellä…

— Eikö liene yli oman tarpeen.

Isotalo koetti naurahtaa hyväsuopaisesti ja tarjosi tupakkaa