[ PM L A
Beckett after Wittgenstein: The Literature
of Exhausted Justiication
andre furlani
Associate professor in the Department
of English at Concordia University, Sir
George Williams Campus, ANDRE FUR-
LANI is the author of Guy Davenport:
Postmodern and After (Northwestern UP,
2007). His book-length manuscript “Beck-
ett after Wittgenstein” is under consider-
ation at Northwestern University Press.
38
S AMUEL BECKETT’S HOMAGE TO THE ARTIST JACK YEATS RIVALS
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notorious prohibition “Whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Tractatus 89 [pt. 7]):1
Gloss? In images of such breathless immediacy as these there is no
occasion, no time given, no room let, for the lenitive of comment.
None in this impetus of need that scatters them loose to the beyonds of
vision. None in this great inner real where phantoms quick and dead,
nature and void, all that ever and that never will be, join in a single
evidence for a single testimony. None in this inal mastery which sub-
mits in trembling to the unmasterable.
No.
Merely bow in wonder. (“Homage”)
Whereof one cannot speak, thereto one must bow. Beckett rebukes the
insistence on interpreting what is open to view and what is not avail-
able at all. Like the author of Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Beckett
airms the arts’ privileged access to “the beyonds of vision”; like the
author of Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen),
he airms that interpretation is neither inexorable nor always desirable.
his contrasts with both the poststructuralism that enlists the
later work of Beckett and the neopragmatism that enlists the later
work of Wittgenstein. Like Jacques Derrida, Wittgenstein sees that
if no sign by itself can determine a meaning, neither will any sup-
plementary ones; no interpretation could ensure accord between
sign and referent: “Every interpretation hangs in the air along with
what is interpreted, and cannot serve as its support.” Wittgenstein,
however, declines the deconstructive deduction: “Interpretations by
themselves do not determine meaning” (Philosophische Untersu-
[ © 2012 by the moder n language association of america ]
1 2 7. 1 ] Andre Furlani
chungen 344 [no. 198]). What does determine
meaning is the context; the sign “by itself ”
is a misleading philosophical abstraction at-
tached to a vestigial metaphysical demand.
Wittgenstein denies, Martin Stone writes,
“that we can intelligibly consider a bit of sign-
involving behaviour in abstraction from its
surrounding circumstances and nonetheless
still have sign-involving behaviour in view”
(“Wittgenstein” 106; see 100–12).
In Investigations meaning is ungrounded
and yet securely tied by outward criteria to
ordinary social practices, whereas for Derrida
these practices obscure the extent to which
their agreement with meaning is an entitle-
ment only. For the author of Investigations,
interpretation is reserved for exceptions;
for Derrida, plain meaning is a special case.
Where Derrida identiies a necessary possi-
bility of doubt about a sign’s meaning, this is
only because, from Wittgenstein’s perspec-
tive, he has severed the sign from its enabling
circulation within the congruent behaviors
composing a “form of life” (Lebensform)—
that is, the sum of the tacit agreements bound
together in our communal activities, “what
has to be accepted, the given” (Philosophische
Untersuchungen 572).
“If I have exhausted the justiications, I
have now reached bedrock, and my spade is
turned. I am then inclined to say, ‘his is just
how I go about it.’”2 his is just how Beckett
goes about it. “here is an end to the tempta-
tion of light, its polite scorching & consola-
tions,” he writes to Mary Manning Howe on
30 August 1937, insisting, “here is an end of
making up one[’s] mind, like a pound of tea”
(Letters 546). “The difficulty is here: to put
a halt” to explanation (Wittgenstein, Zettel
346 [no. 314]). That this halt should betray
no deficiency or delinquency, that indeed
explanation should end and yet our practice
rightly continue,3 discloses an abiding Witt-
gensteinian complement to Beckett’s uncom-
promising yet phlegmatic representations of
exhausted justiication.
39
To “execute” an interpretation (the
verb Beckett uses sardonically in Watt [73])
depends on a rule-following competence
that permeates our actions (Wittgenstein,
Bemerkungen über die Farben 102 [pt.  3,
no. 303]). Here Wittgenstein’s spade turns. he
philosopher told his Cambridge students in
1939 that grasping a rule is not an interpreta-
tion but a “consensus of action” (Wittgenstein’s
Lectures on the Foundations 183–84). Lan-
guage itself rests on this “Übereinstimmung
im Handeln,” which, unlike C. S. Peirce’s ap-
peal to consensus, is not based on opinion
(Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Ma-
thematik 342 [pt. 6, no. 39]). “But the ground,
the justiication of the evidence, comes to an
end; yet the end is not that certain proposi-
tions strike us immediately as true—i.e., is not
a kind of seeing on our part; rather, it is our
acting, which lies at the basis of the language
game” (Über Gewißheit 160–61 [no. 204]).
he mental intermediary of interpreta-
tion between expression and application re-
quired by Derrida is for Wittgenstein by no
means compulsory.4 Interpretation, Robert
Fogelin notes, must be “understood as a spe-
cial kind of activity that takes place within
language and not as something that lies at its
foundation” (19). According to Wittgenstein,
“[t]he diicult thing here is not to dig down to
the ground but to recognize the ground lying
before us as the ground. For the ground keeps
projecting the illusion of a greater depth to
us, and when we try to reach this we ind our-
selves once again at the old level. Our alic-
tion is that of wanting to explain.”5
Beckett deeply shares what Fogelin calls
Wittgenstein’s “defactoism,” which is neither
a symptom of pessimism nor an expression of
defeat but “a fundamental challenge to the le-
gitimacy of the philosophical enterprise as it is
commonly pursued” (Fogelin 11). Beckett told
the scholar Lawrence Harvey in the early 1960s
that there was “no revolt at all” in his work:
“He used the terms ‘complete submission’ and
said that he was ‘revolted but not revolting.’ He
40 Beckett after Wittgenstein: The Literature of Exhausted Justiication
was using the word in its etymological sense
of turning way from but not active opposition
to” (137). Elsewhere, Beckett celebrates the
van Velde brothers’ “peinture d’acceptation”
‘painting of acceptance’ (“Peintures” 137),
praises the “dispassionate acceptance that is
beyond tragedy” in Jack Yeats (“To Cissie Sin-
clair”; 14 Aug. 1937; Beckett, Letters 536), and
recommends the “quietism” of his conidant,
the Catholic Irish poet Thomas McGreevey
(“Humanistic Quietism” 68).
Exposure during his German sojourn in
1936–37 to the captiously self-legitimating
science sponsored by Nazi ideology conirmed
Beckett’s disdain for generalized elucidation,
as his unpublished German diaries report: “I
say I am not interested in a ‘uniication’ of the
historical chaos any more than I am in the
‘clariication’ of the individual chaos, + still
less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhu-
man necessities that provoke the chaos. What
I want is the straws, f lotsam, etc., names,
dates, births & deaths, because that is all I
can know” (“German Diaries,”15 Jan. 1937).
Beckett’s brand of defactoism unites the mel-
ancholy and resistance that Andrew Gibson
identiies as going “hand in hand” in these di-
aries and other writings (Samuel Beckett 81).
Alain Badiou identiies the late 1950s as
transitional for Beckett, especially in Beck-
ett’s representations of solipsism and alterity
(On Beckett). Despite Beckett’s rehabilitation
from nihilist reception, however, Badiou hy-
postatizes into moral entities what Beckett
treats as pious obfuscations, such as amity,
unity, plurality, and ininity. Little sanctions
Badiou’s imposition on Beckett of Neopla-
tonic and Pauline notions of love remote from
the interactions of the Irish author’s calloused
characters. Yet the late 1950s, as John Fletcher
points out, is when Beckett acknowledged
reading Wittgenstein (Novels [1964] 88–89),
who drated Investigations partly in Ireland.
The stature of Investigations was enhanced
by the publication in 1956 of Remarks on the
Foundations of Mathematics (Bemerkungen
[ PM L A
über die Grundlagen der Mathematik), fol-
lowed by over a dozen major posthumous
works before Beckett’s death, in 1989.
he irst of the following sections identi-
fies Beckett’s allusions to Wittgenstein and
applies the philosopher’s concept of “family re-
semblance” (Familienähnlichkeit) to establish
the nature and signiicance of the two writers’
affinities. Each of the subsequent three sec-
tions isolates a related instance of these aini-
ties. he second section concerns Beckettian
alterity and places my argument within schol-
arship that eschews nihilist readings to gauge
instead the activity of sense making in Beckett.
While much of that work follows from post-
structuralist categories of sense making as dif-
ferentiation,6 mine follows from Wittgenstein’s
account of sense making as rule following, not
least because Beckett himself insistently re-
turns to the protocols of rule following.
he third section situates rule following
and meaning in Beckett not in discourses
of deferral, undecidability, and instability
but in the convergent behaviors of a “form
of life.” While scholars and audiences may
not always recognize that “interpretation
comes to an end” or need not necessarily be-
gin (Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der
Mathematik 342 [pt. 6, no. 38]), rehearsing
theater companies must. My concluding sec-
tion shows that staging his plays in French,
English, and German enabled Beckett to re-
strain the interpretative impulse.7 Indeed, as
he faced an often baffled audience directly
and thus more vulnerably as a stage direc-
tor—to protect himself, he avoided curtain
calls, irst nights, and press junkets—Beckett
could draw clarifying philosophical conir-
mation of his aesthetic practice from Witt-
genstein’s thought. Wittgenstein’s thinking
recommends itself here because for Wittgen-
stein the theater afforded exemplary dem-
onstrations of the nature of self hood and
alterity, rule following, and interpretation.
Wittgenstein’s account of rule follow-
ing, in which understanding is normative
1 2 7. 1 ] Andre Furlani
and interpretation remedial, and his corol-
lary appeal to critical description over ex-
planation elucidate Beckett’s procedures and
diverge from Derridean theory, in which in-
terpretation is constitutive and understand-
ing wrested from an ultimately undecidable
realm of unlimited possibility. Since decon-
struction shows that “one cannot refer to
[the] real except in an interpretive experi-
ence” (Derrida 148), it attends in Beckett’s
texts to purported hermeneutic aporias for
what, as Beckett’s dramaturgy underscored,
oten belongs properly to the surface—an in-
structively unproblematic surface Wittgen-
stein wants recuperated from philosophy.
Family Resemblance
In a description of rule following, Wittgen-
stein asks, “When someone promises from
one day to the next, ‘I’ll visit you tomorrow,’
is he saying the same thing every day or every
day something diferent?” (Philosophische Un-
tersuchungen 352 [no. 226]). En attendant Go-
dot (Waiting for Godot), which premiered in
1953, just as Philosophical Investigations post-
humously appeared, poses the same question.
Godot daily sends word to expect him tomor-
row, but is he saying the same thing every
day? And what kind of action is expectation?
Wittgenstein did not live to see a play
like Godot, largely conined to inconsequen-
tial routine, though almost a quarter century
before the premiere of Godot he foresaw such
a play’s potentially mesmeric quality and
concluded in a notebook entry that it “would
have to be uncanny and wondrous at the same
time” (Vermischte Bemerkungen 456). In he
Blue and Brown Books he sketches a scenario
of waiting as a drama of “family likenesses”:
What happens if from 4 till 4.30 A expects B
to come to his room? In one sense in which
the phrase “to expect something from 4 to
4.30” is used it certainly does not refer to one
process or state of mind going on throughout
that interval, but to a great many different
41
activities and states of mind. If for instance
I expect B to come to tea, what happens may
be this: At four o’clock I look at my diary and
see the name “B” against today’s date; I pre-
pare tea for two; I think for a moment “does B
smoke?” And put out cigarettes; towards 4.30
I begin to feel impatient; I imagine B as he will
look when he comes into my room. All this is
called “expecting B from 4 to 4.30.” And there
are endless variations to this process which
we all describe by the same expression. If one
asks what the diferent processes of expecting
someone to tea have in common, the answer
is that there is no single feature in common to
all of them, though there are many common
features overlapping. These cases of expec-
tation form a family; they have family like-
nesses which are not clearly deined. (20)
The title of Beckett’s play, as well as its key
exchanges, similarly treats waiting not as a
uniform state but as a loosely related array of ac-
tivities. En attendant Godot declares as its sub-
ject only what is done “while awaiting Godot”:
VLADIMIR. What do we do now?
ESTRAGON. Wait.
VLADIMIR. Yes, but while waiting.
ESTRAGON. What about hanging ourselves? (22)
Simply to wait is not a possibility, because
waiting takes on multiple guises, which have
no one feature in common. he play concerns
not waiting but the many ways the pair do not
wait, while waiting. Waiting in Godot is pre-
text and prayer, pastime and pensum, an asce-
sis and a mode of inertia, but above all waiting
is a blanket term for the various means of or-
ganizing the pair’s dilatory passage to vespers.
Beckett, like Wittgenstein, so parses the verb
to wait that it sheds its spurious resemblance
to a simple, homogenous action. Waiting has
no more an essence than does Godot, the
vacuum out of which Vladimir and Estragon
generate minimal possibility.
Expressions of expectation are instances
of language’s collusion in the perpetuation of
misleading a priori concepts. his contributes
42 Beckett after Wittgenstein: The Literature of Exhausted Justiication
to making it impossible to use language to
transcend language. “I cannot get beyond lan-
guage by means of language,” Wittgenstein
declares;8 Tractatus proposes that we are con-
stituted by a language in which being cannot
be stated. “Mistrust of grammar is the irst
condition of philosophizing,” Wittgenstein
says in his 1913 “Notes on Logic” (“Aufzeich-
nungen über die Logik” [206]). “Being is not
syntactical,” Beckett proclaimed while direct-
ing the German version of Godot in West Ber-
lin in 1975 (Cohn, “Ruby Cohn” 129).
The limitations of language are not, in
this view, invitations to interpretation, which
is understood as a mode of substitution (Phi-
losophische Untersuchungen 345 [no. 201]).
Beckett and Wittgenstein expressed funda-
mental misgivings about the interpretivist
mandate assumed in philosophy and literary
studies, and they not surprisingly objected
to much of their work’s reception.9 They
questioned too the merits of institutional
frameworks for the creation, support, and cus-
todianship of philosophical and literary texts.
Wittgenstein’s work ater Tractatus (1922) fa-
vors examples over properties, practices over
principles and abstraction, and attends less
to encapsulating generalization than to vari-
ety and impurity, an impurity that is also the
acknowledged condition of the work itself.
Hence, Tractatus carries a force for those with
reservations regarding critical theory.10
Such a stance would recommend itself to
Beckett, who already in his 1931 monograph
Proust denounces synoptic system building,
depth models, exegesis, and abstraction. It
would also recommend to him Wittgenstein’s
style, about which Stanley Cavell notes, “he
first thing to be said in accounting for his
style is that he writes: he does not report, he
does not write up results” (“Availability” 70).
Both writers identiied their work as “precipi-
tates” and favored provisional titles for them
(Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen
231; Beckett, Echo’s Bones 142). Wittgenstein
does not argue deductively from theses and
[ PM L A
proofs to deinitive conclusions; Saul Kripke
stresses that Investigations “is written as a
perpetual dialectic, where persisting worries,
expressed by the voice of the imaginary inter-
locutor, are never deinitively silenced” (3).11
While Beckett’s exposure to Wittgen-
stein’s ideas cannot yet be precisely dated, tex-
tual and anecdotal evidence permits inference.
Fletcher reports Beckett’s avowal of reading
Wittgenstein since 1958, when the prelimi-
nary studies for Investigations were published
as he Blue and Brown Books (Novels [1964]).
Beckett told André Bernold in 1984 that Witt-
genstein was unheard of in Dublin when
Beckett permanently departed for France in
1938 and that he had been obliged to study
his works unaided in recent years (Bernold 22;
Pilling, Samuel Beckett Chronology 223). he
philosopher E. M. Cioran, Beckett’s friend
since the early 1960s, compared him with
Wittgenstein in a 1976 memoir, suggesting
that had Beckett overlooked the parallels, Cio-
ran was ready to remind him of them (135).
The consonances are equally striking
where the possibility of allusion does not ob-
tain, as in the treatment of expectation. Mar-
jorie Perlof proposes that the issue “is less one
of inluence than of a peculiar symbiosis be-
tween the Austrian philosopher and the Irish
writer” (Wittgenstein’s Ladder 135). Particu-
larly germane here is Wittgenstein’s concept
of family resemblance. Whereas the essential-
ist criteria and abstract categories of analytic
definitions subsume diverse entities under
general rubrics, Wittgenstein recognizes that
a distinct entity may share a property with
another without satisfying necessary and suf-
icient conditions of identity. He remarks that
the strength of a rope “does not lie in some
one fiber running through its entire length
but rather in many ibers overlapping” (Phi-
losophische Untersuchungen 278 [no. 67]).
The Wittgensteinian overlappings per-
ceptible in Beckett’s work imply the fam-
ily resemblances that Wittgenstein himself
stressed between philosophy and literature:
1 2 7. 1 ] Andre Furlani
“one really ought only write philosophy as
poetry” (Vermischte Bemerkungen 483).12 Al-
ready in his 1929 essay on Finnegans Wake,
Beckett extols Giambattista Vico’s insight
that “poetry is a prime condition of philos-
ophy.”13 Wittgenstein, whose work Badiou
aligns with Arthur Rimbaud’s and Stéphane
Mallarmé’s (Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy
156–57, 169), counters philosophy’s Hege-
lian supersession of art by viewing literature
as privileged, because correctively ordinary
and yet, since it may show what nomination
prohibits, exempt from the restrictions on
analytic discourse. Submitting Tractatus to
a literary press, Wittgenstein in an undated
1919 letter to the publisher Ludwig von Ficker
called it “strictly philosophical and at the
same time literary” (Briefe 33).
he concept of family resemblance ofers a
means for assessing literary and philosophical
interactions without the annexation of one to
the other. Wittgenstein and Beckett are partic-
ularly well served by it. “My propositions elu-
cidate in this way,” Wittgenstein writes, “that
he who understands me recognizes them at
last as senseless when he has climbed through
them—on them—over them. (He must, so to
speak, discard the ladder ater he has climbed
up on it)” (Tractatus 85 [pt. 6, no. 54]). In
Worstward Ho (1981), Beckett declares, “Said is
missaid” (108), the axiomatic, self-consuming
logic of the phrase akin to the self-invalidating
performative that concludes—and paradoxi-
cally vindicates—Tractatus.14
Beckett and Wittgenstein share what
F. H. Bradley calls the critical capacity “to
get within the judgement the condition of
the judgement” (265). he paired quotations
above are judgments, certainly, and equally
they are trenchant instances of a commit-
ment to retain and harness the conditions
of those judgments. Such resemblances be-
tween the authors of the deeply philosophical
Worstward Ho and the highly literary Investi-
gations invite reappraisal of the conventions
that isolate them generically.15
43
While no direct evidence indicates that
Beckett read Investigations before the late
1950s, earlier familiarity with the argument
of Tractatus would be difficult to discount.
Translating Murphy into French between 1939
and 1940, Beckett placed a Wittgensteinian
seal on the ladder Murphy draws up into his
garret: “Ticklepenny had unscrewed the lad-
der, so that now he could draw it up ater him.
Do not come down the ladder, they have taken
it away,” the omniscient narrator irrelevantly
commands (188), as though strictly to allude
to the discarded ladder of Tractatus. Now,
as irst noted by Ruby Cohn (“Philosophical
Fragments” 174), Beckett adds a Gallic Lud-
wig (“Louis”), who otherwise never appears
in either version of the novel: “Ticklepenny
avait dévisée la base de l’échelle, de sort que
maintenant il pouvait la ramener derrière
lui. Ne descendez pas par l’échelle, Louis, ils
l’ont enlevée” (137). Within two years Beckett
began Watt, a novel whose Wittgensteinian
analogues have been extensively discussed,
including Arsene’s account of his climacteric
vision: “What was changed was existence of
the ladder. Do not come down the ladder, Ifor,
I haf taken it away” (44).16
Watt was largely completed before the
end of World War II. In 1946 Beckett drated
his irst original French novel, Mercier et Ca-
mier (Mercier and Camier), in which Witt-
genstein’s call for silence on matters deemed
inexpressible is the basis of a comic exchange:
If we have nothing to say, said Camier, let
us say nothing.
We have things to say, said Mercier.
hen why don’t we say them? said Camier.
We can’t, said Mercier.
hen let us be silent, said Camier.
But we try, said Mercier. (144)
A yet more explicit and sardonic (though
equally unremarked) reference to the Tracta-
tus interdiction “Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent” appears in the
opening paragraph of L’innommable (The
44 Beckett after Wittgenstein: The Literature of Exhausted Justiication
Unnamable), written between 1949 and 1950:
“he fact would seem to be, if in my situation
one may speak of facts, not only that I shall
have to speak of things of which I cannot
speak, but also, which is even more interest-
ing, but also that I, which is if possible even
more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget,
no matter” (4). No sooner resolve to speak
l’innommable than fail to speak it. he sen-
tence appropriately fractures and falls silent
on the matter of defying silence. “I shall have
to speak of things of which I cannot speak”
may serve as the caption to Wittgenstein’s
paradoxical book, which ultimately would
speak—by failing to speak—the unspeakable.17
In an undated 1919 letter to Ficker, Witt-
genstein writes:
I should like to write that my work emerges in
two parts: in what is put forward here, and in
all I have not written. And precisely this sec-
ond part is the important one. hat is, the ethi-
cal is delineated by my book from within; and I
am convinced that it is strictly to be delineated
only in this way. In short, I believe: All that so
many blow hot air about these days I in my
book have delineated by being silent about it.
(Briefe 35)
From an ethics of inaudibilities one readily ar-
rives at what Beckett in his 1932 novel Dream
of Fair to Middling Women, whose publication
he postponed until ater his death, vaunts as
an “aesthetics of inaudibilities,” a program
drawing on Rimbaud and Beethoven, “whose
audibilities are no more than punctuation in
a statement of silences” (141, 102).
Private Languages
When attention to a clock’s dial in Beckett’s
novel Ill Seen Ill Said reveals the Wittgenstei-
nian point that any description of time is a
function of the language game in which it is
used (Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books
106–10), the narrator concludes, “hen doubt
certain” (77). Far from vindicating the Car-
[ PM L A
tesian method, Beckett concisely exposes its
foundational contradiction: doubt is certain,
indeed presumes certainty. Beckett’s typically
antonymic jest encapsulates Wittgenstein’s
refutation of Cartesian skepticism: “Only he
who has learned something for certain can
begin to doubt” (Zettel 368 [no. 410]). Doubt
entails certainty; one would otherwise have to
begin by doubting the very language in which
doubt is voiced. “Who is certain of no fact
could not even be certain of the sense of his
words” (Über Gewißheit 144 [no. 114]).
Claims to knowledge are meaningful only
where doubt is possible, but a stable network
of implicit communal beliefs and practices
necessarily underlies doubt (Über Gewißheit
141 [no. 105]). his is why Beckett’s later texts,
for all their igmentary phenomena and mo-
lecular verbal residua, deny the void from its
verge. There abides what in Worstward Ho
Beckett calls an “unnullable least” (106), forms
of life bewilderingly immune to final nega-
tion: “All gnawing to be naught. Never to be
naught” (115). A “system of relations” (Bezugs-
system) stands fast for all (Über Gewißheit 141
[no. 105])—one that guarantees the coherence
of Beckett’s increasingly elliptical, compressed
syntax and that encourages a lexicon with lit-
tle speciic semantic content (Banield 16–22).
In their later works Wittgenstein and
Beckett pursue the limitations on doubt
rather than those on certainty. Both focus on
solipsism, which the rule-governed activity of
speech afronts. his predicament impels the
1980 text Company, to which I now turn with
reference to Wittgenstein’s last work, On Cer-
tainty (Über Gewißheit [published in 1969]).
Wittgenstein defends the sanguine tol-
erance for doubt typical of Beckett’s mono-
logists: “(My) doubts constitute a system”
(Über Gewißheit 146 [no. 126]). The condi-
tions of doubt belong to a given “picture of
the world” (Weltbild) that is neither true nor
false but the basis of all inquiry and assertion
(153 [no. 162]). his picture neither enjoys nor
requires more justification than as an “un-
1 2 7. 1 ] Andre Furlani
grounded way of acting” (143 [no. 110]; see
also 158 [no. 192]). It is a picture common in
Beckett, who reduces human “ways of acting”
to their nucleus in an ontologically unguar-
anteed consensus prior to experience.
What underlies and enables doubt is
then language itself. Doubt may be certain,
but language precedes it. Thus, it threatens
the solipsism typically cherished by Beckett’s
narrators, such as of Company. “And you,” he
tells himself, “as you always were. Alone” (46).
And yet there is a lot of company in Beckett’s
strikingly polyvocal and populous story.
here is a world of it: the world of speech.
In Beckett’s later prose one is oten alone,
with words. Yet one is never alone with words:
language keeps company. he pathos of Beck-
ett’s later narrators and protagonists inheres
not only in their isolation but also in the be-
deviling embeddedness of their language in
a world they would deny and the embedded-
ness of their world in a language they cannot
transcend. he third person is insinuated into
the text, acting contrary to solipsism as Witt-
genstein describes in his refutation of Carte-
sianism—acting in and on language. he voice
that spontaneously “comes to one in the dark”
may be a specter, a custodian, a self-projection,
or a paraclete, but it is always irst and fore-
most speech (Beckett, Company 3; cf. Wittgen-
stein, Über Gewißheit 132 [nos. 61–65]).
“Getting into the solipsistic mood means
not using the word ‘I’ in describing a personal
experience,” Wittgenstein told his Cambridge
students in 1932 (Wittgenstein’s Lectures,
Cambridge, 1932–1935 22). he solipsist ren-
ders pronominal speciicity superluous. he
irst-person pronoun is excluded from Com-
pany, whose protagonist projects an omni-
scient third-person voice that addresses him
in the second and assigns memories the lis-
tener denies: “To murmur, Yes I remember.
What an addition to company that would be!
A voice in the irst person singular. Murmur-
ing now and then, Yes I remember” (10). he
I paradoxically generates company because it
45
abolishes the very terms of solipsism, the tau-
tology of pronominal notation. “What the so-
lipsist wants is not a notation in which the ego
has a monopoly, but one in which the ego van-
ishes,” Wittgenstein said in the same lecture.
The solipsism of Company’s narrator
involves just this evasion of the personal
pronoun. He puts words in the hearer’s
mouth—that is, in his own—only to rescind
them immediately, aware that this interven-
tion of a speaking ego does not conform with
the solipsism that he hopes may aford sanc-
tuary from the pains of engagement: “the irst
person singular and a fortiori plural pronoun
had never any place in your vocabulary”
(45). “he word ‘I’ is one symbol among oth-
ers having a practical use,” Wittgenstein told
his students, “and could be discarded when
not necessary for practical speech. It does
not stand out among all other words we use
in practical life unless we begin using it as
Descartes did” (Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cam-
bridge, 1932–1935 63).18 Company manipulates
the practical uses for and the tactical omission
of the irst-person-singular pronoun.
he narrator of Company strives to com-
mand all the elements of the narrative, in-
cluding his own impotence. he irst person
is denied access to voice. “Could he speak to
and of whom the voice speaks there would be
a irst,” he neutrally reports. “But he cannot.
He shall not.” he shit to the impersonal im-
perative betrays his imperiousness, as does
the biblical modulation: “You cannot. You
shall not” (4). Like the self-entangling mar-
tinet of What Where, the narrator wishes to
do all the disposing. he most important pre-
rogative is to assert that the subject is alone.
His solipsism requires this. The language,
however, disposes otherwise.
Language gives the “deviser” of the story
the means to establish prior exterior entities
through the use of second- and third-person-
singular imperatives and indicatives, which
installs him among relations. He can fabricate
these relations but not the principles of their
46 Beckett after Wittgenstein: The Literature of Exhausted Justiication
coordination. he characters and situations of
the narrative may be plastic and efaceable, but
the condition of narrative itself is not. Speech
is public, subjecting the speaker to codes and
their consequences. The deviser of company
wants no company, in reality. he story is about
how he gets it regardless. He cannot quarantine
his language from this baneful efect.
The first-person singular can be omit-
ted from Company but not “that cankerous
other” the third (4). This other dispels the
soothing mirage of solipsistic seclusion in
the dark recesses of consciousness. his other
proves that the narrative’s speaker is not
“alone” absolutely or necessarily but by ob-
stinate choice, like the monologist of Krapp’s
Last Tape. Except in the sense of a routine ex-
istential pathos that Beckett’s texts refuse (in-
deed, mock), the “you” of Company cannot be
“as you always were. Alone.” he third person,
invoked here by a irst person masquerading
as a second, objectively secures company.
he pronominal oscillations are syntac-
tic maneuvers in an exclusively linguistic
space, but, as Wittgenstein (following Gott-
lob Frege) demonstrates, language depends
on a world antecedent to the irst person. he
camoulaged irst-person narrator can only
devise a third person (and vice versa) because
of the priority of the third. Even projected
as a iction, the third person of Company is
summoned, instantiated—and instantiating.
Its priority is the guarantee of speech, world,
and self. Language does not simply make
company possible; it makes company.
For the Cartesian priority of the irst per-
son Wittgenstein substitutes precedence of the
third, and he locates it in language itself. “I
have tried to convince you of just the opposite
of Descartes’ emphasis on the ‘I,’” he told his
students (Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge,
1932–1935 63). “I does not name a person,”
he declares in Investigations (Philosophische
Untersuchungen 409 [no. 410]). Reference is
necessarily public, an agreement not between
name and object but between parties on the
[ PM L A
use of that name. Self-consciousness perpetu-
ates the illusion that the authority for the ego’s
statements derives from experiences known
exclusively to the ego, when they could not be
intelligible were they private mental events.
he assault on the epistemic criteria af-
forded by the irst person does not eradicate
certainty but displaces it onto the third per-
son. Contrary to Émile Benveniste, for whom
the third-person pronoun is the sign of the
“non-person” (228), Wittgenstein urges that,
far from being evacuated, the third person
is the precondition for any statement of self-
identity, mutuality, or alterity. he existence
of the external world is presumed by any
statement made with respect to it, and so
fundamental doubt inally must devour itself.
Such a displacement and reintegration of the
self are pervasive in Beckett, however much
his monologists may combat them.
he terms of this company place Beckett’s
deviser in the logic of pronominal mutuality
and reception. he conditions of his isolation
are a fortiori communal, since verbal. In the
language of company, the third person con-
fers plurality and facilitates exchange. “You”
may be alone on your back in the dark, as the
narrator imagines, but you are never alone in
your language. his is a source of anguish to
many a Beckett character. Beckett’s readers
do not share this anguish because “leasten-
ing words” like you do not merely displace or
postpone but affront the “so-said void. The
so-missaid” (Beckett, Company 106, 101).
Badiou has inluentially detected in Beck-
ett a maturation “from a programme of the
One—obstinate trajectory or interminable
monologue—to the pregnant theme of the
Two, which opens out onto ininity” (On Beck-
ett 17). He inds in Company and other texts
from the late 1950s onward a redeeming en-
counter with alterity: “the Two of love as the
passage from the One of solipsism to the in-
inite multiplicity of the world” (31). Whereas
Badiou perceives an emerging emphasis on al-
terity in Beckett, however, the later texts usu-
1 2 7. 1 ] Andre Furlani
ally present the other as more phantasmagoric
than do the earlier ones. Language rather than
mutuality sponsors alterity in Beckett; lan­
guage is encounter—makes encounter. It is far
from always welcome in Beckett (the narrator
of Company would gladly rid himself of it), but
it is certainly more welcome than love, a word
scrupulously omitted as irrelevant even from
his play Enough, his tart distillation of he Old
Curiosity Shop on which Badiou dwells.
It is in language that Beckett will capture
the “all but uninane” deposits of being that
remain (Company 107). This is where alter­
ity stumps solipsism. Badiou needs “event,”
“love,” and “infinity” as the bases of a dis­
cursive ethics that Beckett resists and whose
legitimacy Wittgenstein denies (see, e.g., On
Beckett 17, 31, 65). Language precedes and con­
ditions these concepts. he cogito is confuted
by language well before the other assails it.
In Company Beckett follows a Wittgen­
steinian route out of what he regarded as the
impasse of The Unnamable, whose narrator
lails against a language that, in constituting
him, alienates him (hiher 84). For the speaker
of Company, enlistment into the plurality of
language is both coercion and complicity—a
kind of inadvertent connivance with conniv­
ing speech. he story shows the habits of a so­
lipsism wracked by the inveterate mutuality of
speech; yet communication of solipsism, Beck­
ett’s narration emphasizes, abolishes the cap­
tious ontological basis of that condition and
generates instead encounter, one that textuality
multiplies. In challenging the doctrine of the
cogito, Wittgenstein makes a resounding phil­
osophical statement of a condition fundamen­
tal to Beckett’s later texts. “Does he who talks
when no one else is there speak to himself?”
(Philosophische Untersuchungen 362 [no. 260]).
No, Investigations and Company reply.
Rule Following
Wittgenstein’s examination of the idea that
no private realm of meaning should exist is
47
connected to an area increasingly important
to Beckett from the early 1960s, rule follow­
ing. Following a rule is a practice, not an in­
terpretation (Philosophische Untersuchungen
345 [no. 202]). he special experiences of in­
trospection supposed to secure understand­
ing of a rule are, like the more general notion
of a private language, chimerical, for there is
neither an inner process nor a metaphysical
mechanism involved in the ability to obey
an order correctly. Understanding is not the
consequence of a correct interpretation of
the meaning of an order but is instead the
satisfactory demonstration of an inculcated
technique: “To follow a rule, convey a mes­
sage, give an order, play a game of chess are
customs (uses, institutions). To understand a
sentence means to understand a language. To
understand a language means to command a
technique” (Philosophische Untersuchungen
344 [no. 199]).
In Endgame Clov grudgingly obeys
Hamm’s order to survey the earth through
the telescope: “There’s one thing I’ll never
understand. (He gets down.) Why I always
obey you. Can you explain that to me?”
(75–76). Hamm surmises Clov’s unconscious
motivation to be compassion (76), while crit­
ics have adduced the mutual dependency of
the master­slave dialectic, or entropic iner­
tia, or the metatheatrical machinery that in
repertory must restore Clov to servitude by
the next performance. Harder to see is the
simplicity of a dramatic situation in which
rule following and obeying commands are
behaviors justiied not by reason but by their
recognized accord with instructions—Witt­
genstein’s “consensus of action.” As Saul
Kripke notes, “Eventually the process must
stop—‘justifications come to an end some­
where’—and I am left with a rule which is
completely unreduced to any other” (17).
In one of the many dramaticules in In-
vestigations, an interlocutor objects to Witt­
genstein’s example of teaching the rules for
addition by even numbers: “‘However you
48 Beckett after Wittgenstein: The Literature of Exhausted Justiication
instruct him to pursue the serial pattern,
how can he know how he is to continue it by
himself?’ Well, how do I know? If that means,
‘Have I reasons?,’ the answer is: my reasons
will soon give out on me. And then I will act
without reasons” (Philosophische Unter su-
chungen 349 [no. 211]). Without psychologi­
cal inlation (i.e., causal motivations), Beckett
shows the point where reasons for following a
rule end. Clov wants to “understand” why he
always obeys Hamm, but Endgame crisply de-
lineates that Wittgensteinian threshold where
understanding becomes an accompaniment to
an act that derives its meaning from its appli-
cation (Zettel 343 [nos. 305–06]).
Following rules and commands rests on
a basis outside language, where the shared
criteria of a “form of life” establish agree-
ment. As epitomized by his 1978 West Berlin
production of Endgame (Endspiel), Beckett’s
dramaturgy shifted focus from dialogue to
kinetics (spatial interaction, gesture, rhythm
and pacing, etc.). “Look at the earth,” Hamm
commands, and Clov climbs the ladder to
peer through a window:
CLOV. Christ, she’s under water! (He looks.) How
can that be? (He pokes forward his head, his hand
above his eyes.) It hasn’t rained. (He wipes the
pane, looks. Pause.) Ah what a fool I am! I’m on
the wrong side! (He gets down, takes a few steps
towards the window right.) What a fool I am! (He
carries ladder towards window right.) Sometimes
I wonder if I’m in my right senses. hen it passes
of and I’m as intelligent as ever. (73)
Wittgenstein invokes the same situation:
“The absent-minded man who on the or-
der ‘Right turn!’ turns let, and then clutch-
ing his forehead says, ‘Oh!—right turn’ and
makes a right.—What has occurred to him?
An interpretation?” (Philosophische Unter-
suchungen 434 [no. 506]). hus he dispatches
the notion that interpretation inheres in acts
of rule following and obeying. Only when
Hamm acknowledges that Clov has obeyed
his command can Clov’s understanding of
[ PM L A
the command be veriied; and here, as oten
in the play, Hamm’s acknowledgment is tacit,
a matter of subtle or displaced gestures of
agreement encapsulating the form of life he
shares with Clov.
Clov’s primitive reaction at the window is
the result of training in particular paradigms,
without which no agreement about the con-
cept of a rule could even arise. he reasons for
following rules, and for the conviction that
they are correctly followed, come only later.
Obedience in Beckett is neither contingent nor
metaphysical but instead a prerational relation.
Clov’s protestations and threats are the
marks of a primitive and unreasoned obedi-
ence. He follows the intricate rules of the end-
game with aplomb. he repeated resolutions
to quit Hamm’s service are expressions more
of submission than deiance, for Clov must
ind a way not to leave but to stay. Defection
is in the script; Clov’s departure, in the guise
of a seasoned Edwardian rambler, is literally
pure theater: “his is what we call making an
exit” (81). his is what actors, not servants,
call it. It is let to Hamm to discharge Clov:
“It’s the end, Clov, we’ve come to the end. I
don’t need you any more” (78). he masquer-
ading is not a deception but another device
for maintaining the game, “[s]ince that’s the
way we’re playing it” (84). It is another tac-
tic of staying—not staying the same way, not
staying put, but staying in a way that may af-
ford Clov a dignifying glint of possibility.
Wittgenstein’s account of rule following
is an antidote to the temptation to psycholo-
gize the two characters’ relationship narrowly.
Clov’s grasp of rules and commands depends
inally not on interpretation—on hypotheses
concerning their application—but on acquired
and unrelective response to them. Rule fol-
lowing here accords not with inner processes
but with outward criteria of a form of life—
that is, circumstances perceptibly agreeing
with an avowal, as collectively endorsed.
he play’s import is less the psychology
of Clov’s servitude or its perceived symbolic
1 2 7. 1 ] Andre Furlani
innuendoes than the imperturbable adher-
ence to the dynamics of rule and command
following. his is part of what Beckett means
when, in a 29 December 1957 letter to Alan
Schneider, director of the American premiere
of Endgame, he characteristically urges “the
extreme simplicity of dramatic situation and
issue. If that’s not enough for them [critics],
and it obviously isn’t, or they don’t see it, it’s
plenty for us, and we have no elucidations to
ofer of mysteries that are all of their making”
(Beckett and Schneider 24).
His later plays and dramaturgy increase
this insistence on outward criteria. In In-
vestigations, Wittgenstein hypothesizes a
language made up exclusively of four com-
mands; Beckett, in his last performance piece,
What Where, imagines a language consisting
of one. Wittgenstein writes that “[o]ne can
readily imagine a language that consists only
of commands and reports in battle. Or a lan-
guage that consists only of questions and an
expression of airmation and negation. And
innumerable others. And imagining a lan-
guage means imagining a form of life” (Phi-
losophische Untersuchungen 245–46 [no. 19]).
Whereas Endgame pays vestigial attention
to the psychology of asymmetrical relations,
What Where concentrates on the formulas of
rule following. It is a work at ease with con-
cepts of rule following that many early read-
ers of Investigations found baling.
What Where is a round of interrogations,
conducted by and on three indistinguish-
able lackeys, under the empirical rule of Bam
and the transcendent rule of Voice of Bam.
The characters alternate in issuing futile
commands to wrest information from one
another: “He didn’t say it? . . . He didn’t say
where?” (312). As orchestrated by the disem-
bodied Voice, rule following structures and
deines the action.
“When I follow a rule, I don’t choose. I
follow the rule blind,” Wittgenstein writes
(Philosophische Untersuchungen 351 [no. 219]).
Bem, Bim, and Bom follow Bam’s identical
49
orders blind. hey do not question or assess
the commands they follow, even when they in
turn become victims of the commands’ logic.
Eliminating every superluity from the logic of
rule following, Beckett shows how use rather
than interpretation determines the meaning
of the command. he criterion is simply cor-
rect understanding of an order. he lackeys’
behavior initially accords with Bam’s com-
mand, but Bam accuses each in turn of false
report—a failure to obey. he subsequent cri-
sis functions like a remorseless demonstration
of Wittgenstein’s claim that following an or-
der is a practice independent of private under-
standing: “‘to obey the rule’ is a practice. And
to believe one is obeying the rule is not to obey
the rule. And hence one cannot ‘privately’
obey the rule, because otherwise to believe one
is obeying the rule would be the same thing
as obeying the rule” (Philosophische Untersu-
chungen 345 [no. 202]). Belief cannot provide
the criterion for obeying a command; once
again, meaning is not some specter emerg-
ing from one’s head. What Where mordantly
stages what Anthony Kenny calls the “primi-
tive, unreasoned reaction on which the system
of rules and reasons is grated” (176).
As rule following does not rest on in-
terpretation, so in closing the Voice of Bam
mocks the viewer’s inclination to interpret
the action: “hat is all. Make sense who may.
I switch of” (316). If rule following does not
require interpretation, neither does the action
of What Where. Beckett stages not a riddle
but an elemental interaction. It may appear
as though the characters are disturbing ex-
ceptions who betray no more than a slavish,
subhuman obedience (emphasized in the
director Damien O’Donnell’s 2000 version
but not in Beckett’s own 1985 Süddeutscher
Rundfunk television production [Beckett,
Theatrical Notebooks IV]); yet they simply
display what following a command funda-
mentally entails, the performance of an order.
Beckett separates this performance from
psychology to isolate its role in a minimal
50 Beckett after Wittgenstein: The Literature of Exhausted Justiication
form of life. He avoids arrogating to rule fol-
lowing misleading notions of inner process
or judgment, mental states that by deinition
stage and screen action withholds, nowhere
more than in Beckett’s plays and ilms. Shorn
from the dialogue is the least suggestion
of interiority. For this reason Wittgenstein
views theatrical performance as an exemplary
instance of meaningful speech: it establishes
contexts and does not encourage the ascrip-
tion of private mental states to stage charac-
ters. “he contexts in which a sentence stands
are best represented in a drama; thus, the best
example for a sentence with a speciic mean-
ing is a quotation from a drama. And who
asks a person in a drama what he’s experi-
encing while he’s speaking?” (Letzte Schriten
356–57 [no. 38]).
In What Where Beckett imagines a
unique form of life and the restrictive yet via-
ble language that constitutes it. Beckett seizes
upon the great diversity of verbal practices, so
that what may appear to be a pitiless reduc-
tion of speech to mere commands, queries,
and monosyllabic reports becomes conirma-
tion of the fertility of language games, which
preserve their cohesion well ater the justii-
cations for them have been exhausted.
Description over Explanation
Rule following, and thus the meaningfulness
of concepts, is not inherently interpretive:
“there is a way of grasping a rule that is not
an interpretation but that expresses itself in
what we call ‘following the rule’ and ‘going
against it’ from case to case of use” (Philoso­
phische Untersuchungen 345 [no. 201]; see
also Über Gewißheit 132 [no. 62]). Because
rule following shows that interpretation is
not ubiquitous but remedial, it may serve as a
synecdoche for Beckett’s theater.
Like the continuities in Beckett’s art
between affectless abstraction and visceral
proscenium practicalities, important conti-
nuities in Wittgenstein’s writing extend from
[ PM L A
the slick logical abstraction of the early work
to the corduroy traction of ordinary language
in his later thinking. Thus, Investigations
maintains a view that Wittgenstein held since
drating “Notes on Logic,” in 1913: “In phi-
losophy there are no deductions: it is purely
descriptive” (“Aufzeichnungen” 206).
Only what is described has changed: the
irreducible “logical form” that any verbal
“picture” must share with its referent has been
replaced by actual verbal practices, which
have an unfixed logical order. “Philosophy
simply lays it all out and explains and deduces
nothing. Since everything lies open to view,
there is also nothing to explain. For whatever
is hidden does not interest us” (Philosophische
Untersuchungen 303 [no. 126]). Wittgenstein
views the arts the same way, noting in 1930,
“hings lie directly there before our eyes, no
veil over them—Here religion and art part
company” (Vermischte Bemerkungen 458).
his is equally Beckett’s conviction. “One
can only speak of what is in front of one’s
eyes, and that now simply is the mess,” Beck-
ett told Tom Driver in 1961. “he only chance
of renovation is to open our eyes and see the
mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of”
(Driver 219, 220). Already in a preamble to
the irst radio broadcast of Godot in 1953, he
eschewed interpretation, “loftier meaning”
(“Who Is Godot?” 136).
Investigations vindicates surfaces, showing
“how it is” with us and leaving it as it is (Philo­
sophische Untersuchungen 302 [no. 124]—an-
ticipated in Tractatus 18 [pt. 3, no. 221]), a view
that coincides with Beckett’s own defactoism,
not least in his novel How It Is. “Out with all
explanation, description alone must take its
place” (Philosophische Untersuchungen 298–99
[no. 109]; see also Perlof, “Poetics”). Making
this also a primary claim about aesthetics,
Wittgenstein maintained in 1932 that explana-
tion simply substitutes one symbol for another
(Lectures and Conversations 1–40); pursued
outside the hypothetico-deductive sciences,
explanation is liable to concoct “a new myth,”
1 2 7. 1 ] Andre Furlani
such as psychoanalysis.19 “Our mistake is to
search for an explanation where we should
have seen the facts as ‘protophenomena.’ hat
is, where we should have said, his language
game is being played [Dieses Sprachspiel wird
gespielt]” (Philosophische Untersuchungen 476
[no. 654]).
Beckett’s postwar work solicits the ac-
knowledgment that explanation is coun-
terproductive, though his insistence on
eschewing interpretation is oten met with in-
credulity. “Do try and see the thing primarily
in its simplicity, the waiting, the not knowing
why, or where, or when, or for what,” Beckett
wrote on 1 April 1956 to Desmond Smith, who
hoped to produce Godot in Toronto. “Confu-
sion of mind and of identity is an indispens-
able element of the play and the efort to clear
up the ensuing obscurities, which seems to
have exercised most critics to the point of
blinding them to the central simplicity, strikes
me as quite nugatory” (Beckett, “Who Is Go-
dot?” 136). When, ater the 1953 West Berlin
premiere of Wir Warten auf Godot (the Wir
was soon dropped from the title), the journal-
ist Friedrich Lut asked Beckett to expostulate
on its signiicance, “he let me know evasively
(as it seemed to me then): It’s just a play (Spiel).
He had by no means intentionally added
deeper meaning or any hidden meaning at all
to his play. Only in performance (Spiel) itself
should it elucidate itself. Did that not suice?”
(40). Dieses Spiel wird gespielt.
Staging gave Beckett efective means to
mule the symbolic reverberations that the
extensive exegesis of his work had ampliied.
He omitted from the English translation of
Fin de partie (Endgame), as well as from his
subsequent French and German productions
of the play, even the preposterous symbolism
Hamm and Clov attach to the youth rumored
to live outside the shelter—to Hamm he is a
Mount Pisgah Moses, to Clov a navel-gazing
Narcissus (Fin 103–05). hough this passage
travesties hermeneutics, it had nevertheless
incited solemn commentary.
51
he diicult production of Film in 1964
appears to have enhanced Beckett’s confi-
dence in the self-sufficiency of the artistic
entity and in the value of its surface. The
initially dismaying gestation of one of his
most programmatic scripts into an elusive,
autonomous film eventually gratified him.
Inspired by Bishop Berkeley’s claim that “to
be is to be perceived” (esse est percipi), Film
follows (literally) Buster Keaton as he shuns
in vain a perceiving agent coinciding first
with the camera perspective and inally with
self-consciousness. While the ilm was being
edited, Beckett airmed to its director, Alan
Schneider, in a 29 September 1964 letter that
it had escaped its “purely intellectual schema”:
“I now begin to feel that this is unimportant
and that the images obtained probably gain
in force what they lose as ideograms, and that
the whole idea behind the film, while suf-
iciently expressed for those so minded, has
been chiely of value on the formal and struc-
tural level” (Beckett and Schneider 166).
he lesson of Film curtailed the tempta-
tion to illustrate an intention. Beckett learned
to trust the image; the aim was now to get it
onto the stage, page, and screen. By the time
Jessica Tandy sought authorial intention
to clarify the role of Mouth in Schneider’s
American premiere of Not I, Beckett could
write the director, on 16 November 1972,
“I no more know where she is or why thus
than she does. All I know is in the text. ‘She’
is purely a stage entity, part of a stage image
and purveyor of a stage text. he rest is Ibsen”
(Beckett and Schneider 283).
“We lead words back again from their
metaphysical to their everyday use,” Witt-
genstein proclaims (Philosophische Untersu-
chungen 300 [no. 116]). Just as Wittgenstein
grappled with the philosophical treatment of
language, so did Beckett with the reception
of his own work. Ruby Cohn concludes that
Beckett’s production notebook for Endspiel
is “concerned with the physical rather than
the metaphysical” (Just Play 238). “Ohne
52 Beckett after Wittgenstein: The Literature of Exhausted Justiication
Metaphysik” ‘without metaphysics’ became
his watchword as a dramaturge, as the ac-
tor Horst Bollmann recollected of the 1965
West Berlin production of Warten auf Godot,
which Beckett assisted: “When Beckett came
the sun was rising for us, everything became
so clear and we were altogether very content,
you know. Ohne Metaphysik—genau richt
[“Without metaphysics—just right”]. The
first night was a huge success.” Bollmann’s
counterpart Klaus Herm recalled of Beckett’s
assistance on the production: “Until his ar-
rival, they were searching and digging to get
at the deeper sense of it and Beckett said, ‘But
why? It’s so simple. It’s just a play.’ his helped
them very much to accept it as such—as just a
play” (Knowlson and Knowlson 180).
Help like Beckett’s was not something
criticism supplied, beyond such rare excep-
tions as Stanley Cavell’s “Ending the Waiting
Game” (1969), which identiied the “ordinari-
ness” of Endgame and its “hidden literality”:
“he words strew obscurities across our path
and seem wilfully to thwart comprehension;
and then time after time we discover that
their meaning has been missed only because
it was so utterly bare—totally, therefore un-
noticeably, in view” (119–20). Not coinci-
dentally, Cavell’s essay relected his epochal
engagement with Wittgenstein’s thought,
employing his notion of “critical description”
to temper the mystiications of hermeneutic
responses to the play (128).
Wittgenstein’s stated aim was not the
promulgation of doctrine but what Badiou,
following Jacques Lacan, calls an antiphi-
losophy eliminating misleading ideas, false
problems, and interpretations that obstruct
the view of “how it is” with us (Wittgenstein’s
Antiphilosophy 75–81). This aim informed
Beckett’s dramaturgy, as when he addressed
the cast of his production of Endspiel: “‘I
don’t want to talk about my play. It has to be
taken purely dramatically, to take shape on
the stage. It doesn’t concern itself with philos-
ophy,’ he says with emphasis and adds, ‘with
[ PM L A
poetry perhaps.’ hen he closes with surpris-
ing inality, forestalling any objection: ‘he
piece is interesting here exclusively as stage
entity [Spielvorlage]’” (Haerdter 92).20
“Don’t think but look!” Wittgenstein in-
structs himself and his readers (Philosophische
Untersuchungen 277 [no. 66]), while Beckett
writes in his Godot production notebook,
“[Z]uerst Wahrnehmen dann Kommentieren”
‘[F]irst observe then comment’ (Theatrical
Notebooks I 202). he notebook’s editors point
out that this is “one of Beckett’s instructions
to himself and to his actors” (403).
Beckett led his plays back from their
metaphysical to their everyday use. Directing
gave the playwright the opportunity not only
to reconceptualize his dramas but also to pro-
duce an authorial anticommentary on works
already encrusted with explication (Gontar-
ski, “Staging” 87). Having declared himself
incapable of producing an introduction to his
work (Völker 60; see also Gontarski, “Grey-
ing” 144), he used staging as a superior—be-
cause purely expository—substitute.
Aspiring to Jack Yeats’s “breathless im-
mediacy,” Beckett inds traction in the rough
ground of exhausted justiication. His program
note to the German premiere of Endspiel com-
plements Wittgenstein’s claim that “[t]here’s
no riddle. If a question can be put at all, then
it can also be answered” (Tractatus 84 [pt. 6,
no. 5]). Beckett insists that “Endspiel wird
bloßes Spiel sein. Nichts weniger. Von Rätseln
und Lösungen also kein Gedank” ‘Endgame
will be just play. Nothing less. So no thought
to riddles and solutions’ (“On Endgame” 110).
Wittgenstein insisted the same, referring to
the interpretive mandate of dream psychology:
“Such a riddle [Rätsel] does not have to have a
solution. It intrigues us. It is as though there
were a riddle here. his could be a primitive
reaction” (Letzte Schriten 378 [no. 195]).
Published a year before the homage to
Yeats, Investigations was available to corrobo-
rate Beckett’s critique and endorse his drama-
turgy: description over explanation. It ofered
1 2 7. 1 ] Andre Furlani
coinciding philosophical sustenance, even a
vindication of methods that had aroused ex-
asperation and suspicion. Beckett refrained
from explaining his enigmatically obvious
plays in favor of describing them through
stage directions. he results, as many critics
have attested, were transformative versions of
his work and should transform its reception
(Füger; Bradby). The theater notebooks ac-
centuate inlections of embodiment at the ex-
pense of metaphysical innuendo. In Beckett’s
1975 production of Godot, the play became a
rhythmic geometry of balance and counter-
point, symmetry and antithesis, vectors of
approach and departure (Beckett, heatrical
Notebooks I; Ross 72–73). Beckett used his
production to restore the kinetic logic of a
play mired in what he disparaged as exegeti-
cal “undertones” (Beckett and Schneider 29).
Beckett before his acting company was
not unlike Wittgenstein before his class. In
his 1931 lectures Wittgenstein objected to
James Frazer’s interpretive approach to re-
ligion in The Golden Bough: “Here one can
only describe and say: this is what human life
is like” (“Remarks” 120). Beckett told Lau-
rence Harvey, “he function of the critic—all
he can do—is to say ‘here is a poor devil in
this situation’” (Harvey 134).
As Wittgenstein attempts to demystify
language, philosophy, and his own writing,
so too does Beckett. “We want to understand
something that already lies open to view,”
Wittgenstein writes. “For this, in some sense,
is what we appear not to understand” (Philo­
sophische Untersuchungen 291 [no. 89]). Beck-
ett’s writing and dramaturgy are intent on
restoring the supericies to view, thus assuring
his audience both of the primacy of the im-
mediate theatrical event and of what Carla Lo-
catelli characterizes as “the ineliminability of
the object of representation” in his work (235).
No European writer of Beckett’s generation
more fully shares Wittgenstein’s respect for
surfaces and his perception that meaning does
not depend inescapably on interpretation.
53
Wittgenstein’s method invites closer
attention to Beckett’s mode of critical self-
exposition. The prestige of Investigations
supplied a credible philosophical riposte to,
or relief from, the excesses of hermeneutics.
he philosopher’s antidote was congenial to
Beckett’s principles and consonant with his
practice, both of which retain their urgency
as hermeneutical excesses persist in literary
and other kinds of theory.
NOTES
I gratefully acknowledge the collaboration of David Sher-
man, David Rudrum, Darragh Languay, Brian Jones,
Todd Hopkins, and Suzanne Bufam and the support of
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada. his essay is for my teacher Charles Lock.
1. All unattributed translations are mine.
2. Philosophische Untersuchungen 350 (no. 217); see
also Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik
199–200 (pt. 3, no. 74), Zettel 342 (nos. 300–02), and Be­
merkungen über die Farben 28 (pt. 1, no. 74).
3. Philosophische Untersuchungen 372 (no. 289) and
Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik 406–
07 (pt. 7, no. 40).
4. Derrida writes that “the essential and irreducible
possibility of mis-understanding . . . must be taken into
account in the description of those values said to be posi-
tive” (126). Wittgenstein’s contrasting view is contrary
to Stanley Fish’s doctrine of the authority of interpretive
communities (Stone, “On the Old Saw”; Sedivy) and in-
compatible with Richard Rorty’s reduction of all inter-
pretation to questions of use.
5. Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik
333 [pt. 6, no. 31]; see also Zettel 345–46 (no. 314).
6. Connor; Locatelli; Hill; Begam. See also Badiou,
On Beckett, and those who engage his thought—e.g., Gib-
son, “Beckett” and Beckett; Weller, “Anethics,” Beckett,
and Taste; Critchley, “Demanding” and On Humour.
7. Pascale Casanova similarly sees in Beckett’s texts
“no meaning beyond the textual surface, no message
to be deciphered under the manifest appearance.” She
insists, however, that they “merely recount the process
of their begetting, or the exhaustion of the logical and
formal possibilities and consequences of a proposition
arbitrarily given as motor and principle of the writing”
(74). Casanova would thus evacuate his texts of the rich
surface sense Beckett recovers beyond exhaustion.
8. Philosophische Bemerkungen 54 (pt. 1, no. 6); see
also Tractatus 12 (pt. 3, no. 332); Bouwsma 24.
54 Beckett after Wittgenstein: The Literature of Exhausted Justiication
9. Beckett did not permit even himself to explain his
work; the actor Jack MacGowran recalled his saying, “I
will feel superior to my own work if I try to explain it”
(Gussow 23; see also Bair 557).
10. See esp. Altieri, “Tractatus” and “Wittgenstein”;
also Guetti, Wittgenstein; Perlof, Wittgenstein’s Ladder;
Stone, “Wittgenstein”; Allen and Turvey; Schroeder. For
a rebuttal, see Szafraniec 76–97.
11. See also Certeau 11; Dauber and Jost, “Varieties”
xix; Wittgenstein, “To J. M. Keynes.”
12. Scholars have struggled to ind an adequate trans­
lation of the original German phrase: “Philosophie dürte
man eigentlich nur dichten.” See Winch’s translation in
Culture and Value 24e, which is modiied by Gould 76
and Perlof, “But Isn’t the Same?” 38, 53.
13. “Dante” 24; see also “To Thomas McGreevey”;
21 Sept. 1937; Beckett, Letters 550.
14. Where all philosophical statements are considered
senseless, as Tractatus, part 6, number 53, concludes, per­
force too are those of the Tractatus—including part 6, num­
ber 53 (85). Conant, “Method” and “Philosophy”; Diamond;
and Sass (137), who are refreshingly willing to take Witt­
genstein at his word rather than accuse him of inadvertent
contradiction, cogently propose that Wittgenstein seeks
only to give an illusion of what Beckett in Watt calls “ef­
ing the inefable” (62) and works by ironic self­distancing
to disqualify positive transcendental statements.
15. Robinson observes that Wittgenstein eliminates
ontological or categorical obstacles considered as “distin­
guishing philosophy as a kind of writing from literature as
another,” while Beckett shows the “falseness of such a sep­
aration by creating a philosophical literature” (157–58).
16. See, e.g., Hoefer 74–76; Cohn, “Philosophical
Fragments” 175; Coe 103–04. For a rebuttal, see Fletcher,
Novels (1964) 88–89, Novels (1970) 87–88, and Samuel
Beckett’s Art 136; Acheson; for a counterrebuttal, see Per­
lof, Wittgenstein’s Ladder 134–35. For the possible prov­
enance of the ladder analogy in the work of Wittgenstein’s
Viennese contemporary Fritz Mauthner, see Ben­Zvi,
“Fritz Mauthner” and “Samuel Beckett.” For a rebuttal, see
Pilling, “From a (W)horoscope” and “Beckett”; Feldman.
Crucially, an analogy that arrested both Wittgenstein and
Beckett entered their work for kindred reasons. Note that
in Dream of Fair to Middling Women Beckett substitutes
the phonetic “f ” for the written “v” to mimic a German
pronunciation of English: “I think of Beethofen” (139).
17. Beckett “fervently disagreed” with Tractatus,
part 7, according to Duncan Scott, who worked as a light­
ing engineer at London’s Royal Court heatre on several
of Beckett’s productions in the 1970s. “‘hat’s the whole
point,’ he said, ‘We must speak about it’” (218). Of course,
Wittgenstein fervently agreed that poets, not philoso­
phers, can and should speak about the unspeakable. Both
the thesis and the style of Tractatus engaged Beckett, up
through the 1970s (e.g., Fizzles, no. 5).
[ PM L A
18. See also Wittgenstein, Philosophische Unter su­
chungen 409 (no. 410) and Philosophical Occasions 228,
269; Guetti, “Monologic” 264; Scruton 288–94.
19. Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1930–1932
62–63 and Lectures and Conversations 51; see also Philo­
sophische Untersuchungen 253–54 (no. 29) and Tractatus
23 (pt. 3, no. 332).
20. See also Arikha 143; Asmus; Bair 557; Beckett,
heatrical Notebooks II xxi; Bernold 65; Cioran 132–33;
Federman 302; Gussow 177; Simpson 119; Völker 146.
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