“Logoclasm in the Name of Beauty”: Bersani and Beckett’s Enigmatic Sociability

Abstract

In a 1937 letter to his friend Axel Kaun Samuel Beckett vents his frustration with language. He claims that “more and more language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it” (Beckett, “German Letter” 171). In this context, language is at best a disturbance, a barrier between the speaker and thing (or nothing). In this same letter, Beckett expresses his wish to “leave nothing undone [in language] thatmight contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing, begins to seep through” (“German Letter” 172). He claims that there is, in fact, no “higher goal for a writer today” (“German Letter” 172). For Beckett, language not only fails to represent but functions to obscure the “something or nothing” of the world outside the speaking subject. The task of the writer is, then, not more accurate or encompassing mimesis through a new use of language, but the willed destruction of the very customs and habits of language that create an unclear relation between the world and mind. Though Beckett later disavowed this letter as a piece of juvenilia, or “German bilge” (“German Letter” 170), it provides a glimpse into how the young writer had already begun to grapple with the problem of language’s mediating role between the individual and the material world. Beckett claims that he wishes to use language against itself, in fact, to use language to create a “literature of the unword” through an “assault against words in the name of beauty” (Beckett, German Letter173). Here, Beckett puts a name to the activity that he would pursue until this death in 1989: “Wörtenstürmerei.”This word, translated occasionally as both “assault against words” and “word-storming,” is, according to Leland de la Durantaye, better translated as “logoclasm” (14). This logoclasm aims at the destruction of words as icons, stable stand-ins, or representatives of a supposedly “real.” The logoclastic impulse can be seen throughout Beckett’s work, though it appears most forcefully in 1949’s Three Dialogues. Nominally written with art critic George Duthuit 12 years after the “German Letter,” (Beckett, Three Dialogues 138) is an explicit statement, rare in his oeuvre, of the author’s own esthetic theory. In the Dialogues Beckett claims allegiance to a non-relational art, one not based on a gap between thought and reality, art and object, but on an intermingling of the two. Though Beckett uses them to