I understand to propose that one’s quarrel with the world need not be settled, nor cynically set aside as unsettlable. It is a condition in which you can at once want the world and want it to change – even change it, as the apple changes the earth, though we say the apple falls. (Nietzsche’s word for the spreading inability to want the world is nihilism.)
Cynicism and nihilism are the temptations, the false solutions, that what Cavell calls ‘Emersonian perfectionism’ can invite, the inner superiorities that can seem preferable to the conflict described. How not to fall into cynicism, nihilism, and the inner superiority that these provide, and what vulnerabilities will one be exposed to if one resists these particular unfortunate falls? These are Cavell’s fears and misgivings about resisting Silenus’s wisdom. Cavell’s apple reminds us that moral perfectionism has unpredictable consequences; unpredictable consequences being what you get if you shrug off your cynicism and your nihilism. ‘Our sense of an unattained self is not an escape,’ Cavell notes, intimating that the self is constituted partly by its unattained self, or selves, but mindful of the perpetually ironic fact that it is our aspirations that so often humiliate us by our falling short. And that if our cultural ideals diminish us they are indeed strange fictions. It is as though at this moment – and we partly sense this through his allusion to Nietzsche’s nihilism – we should imagine that Cavell is wondering here, that if the self-cures for Silenus’s wisdom are Hamlet or Dionysus, cynicism or nihilism, what are the self-cures for Emersonian perfectionism? Both self-cures, we should note, by proposing a solution, are proposing that there is one. Both, in promoting, respectively, less life and more life, want us urgently to absent ourselves from where we are now. And both, though apparently opposed, make an impossible demand; or rather, ask us to want something, paradoxically, that we can’t know much about. Silenus says, what you really want is not to have been born: Emerson says, what you really want is your as yet unattained self. It would be part of our hope to believe there is a difference. And it might also be part of our hope to wonder what they are forbidding us by urging us not to want to have been born, or urging on us a better, a preferable, future.
What then are the preconditions, for any given person, for going on wanting the world, in Cavell’s words? And what kind of life, and what kind of ideals, might sustain going on living in the world but not wanting it? And this, I think, is where Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957) comes in. Not least because, as Hamm so winningly says, ‘You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!’ And, as Cavell adds, ‘No cure for that, but perhaps there is something else for it.’
III
In October 1935 Beckett went to a lecture by Carl Jung at the Institute of Psychological Medicine in London. Jung presented a case of a disturbed young woman in a way that seems to have struck Beckett. As Geoffrey Thomson, the friend Beckett went with to the lecture, described it: ‘Jung had rather a dramatic, impressive way of speaking – he paused, and then said, “Of course, the truth of the matter is, this young girl had never really been born” ’ (Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist). Twenty years later, in Beckett’s radio play All That Fall (1957), Mrs Rooney describes ‘a little girl, very strange and unhappy in her ways’. What she calls ‘one of these new mind doctors’
could find nothing wrong with her … The only thing wrong with her as far as he could see was that she was dying … it was just something he said, and the way he said it that have haunted me ever since … When he had done with the little girl he stood there motionless for some time … Then he suddenly raised his head and explained, as if he had had a revelation. ‘The trouble with her was that she had never really been born!’
Biographers, of course, have speculated about what this might have meant to Beckett (‘There is no doubt,’ Cronin writes, in the way biographers can, ‘that he thought that the diagnosis was a profoundly suggestive illumination of his own case.’) What there is rather less doubt about is that something about Jung’s description allowed Beckett to go on thinking about something that recurred in his writing. What could it mean, that this girl, that anybody, could not have really been born? To have not been born as one should have been: with, say, the wherewithal to live. Or whatever being really born is imagined to involve. Presumably if someone feels they have never really been born, or someone describes someone else in this way, it suggests that at least someone knows, or has an idea about, what it is to be really born; what those who have been really born can do that the others can’t. At its most minimal, in the way Jung and Mrs Rooney report it, it is preferable to have been really born, even though that also still leaves you really dying. There is, then, the desire not to have been born, and the desire to have been really born: born properly. And the sense that Beckett may or may not have had, that the desire not to have been born could be the consequence of not having really been born. That being the promising version.
Either way, having really been born or not, there is still the question that Cavell (and not only Cavell) sees Beckett’s Endgame as raising: ‘Man is the animal,’ Cavell writes, ‘for whom to be or not to be is the question: its resolution therefore must have the form of an answer … Why do men stay alive in the face of the preponderance of pain over pleasure, of meaninglessness over sense?’ ‘Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!’ Hamm says after asking Clov whether he remembers his father; and it is remembering his father that brings on Hamlet’s infamous question. An endgame is a game played with a view to ending the game, something of course that happens whether or not one does this intentionally. And finding a way of ending, or enduring – or enduring by being preoccupied about ending – what one now wishes had never begun links Hamlet and Endgame as Cavell suggests. Indeed, Endgame shows just how sustaining a conversation about ending can be. And also, of course, brings back Silenus. ‘The very best thing,’ Silenus says, ‘is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing.’ Clov says to Hamm, ‘Better than nothing! Is it possible?’ ‘The end,’ Clov says, ‘is terrific!’ At the end of the play nothing has actually ended but the play.
Endgame dramatizes a way of life that is inspired by the wish not to be, to be nothing. But it does so in the full knowledge that, as Clov remarks, ‘We too were bonny – once. It’s a rare thing not to have been bonny – once.’ Whether we begin bonny, or not really born, we are torn; and in this play, which Beckett described in a letter to Alan Schneider as, ‘rather difficult and elliptical, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than Godot’, it is the ellipsis – the ‘leaving out’, the ‘falling short’, the ‘failing’, in the words of the OED – that claws at us. ‘To claw’, in the great dictionary of Samuel Johnson, about whom Beckett once wanted to write a play, is also ‘to flatter’ (to which Johnson adds, with a Beckettian flourish, ‘an obsolete sense’). It can be flattering to have a sense of an ending without having to end it. It can be flattering to enjoy the words about, or to make enjoyable words out of, the predicament. ‘Do you believe in the life to come?’ Clov asks; ‘Mine was always that,’ Hamm replies. It’s no life, the life to come. But there’s a lot of life in saying it.
What is left out of the play are good reasons to want to have been born, really born or not. And this may be why Beckett refers to Endgame here as more inhuman than Godot (1953). It is as if to say, once you take waiting out of the picture – and Beckett refers to the play here as Godot, without the waiting – what is there? What is left? What are we doing once we are no longer waiting for something better, for the next best thing; no longer waiting for our supposed perfectibility, for the life to come; for what Cavell calls our as yet ‘unattained self’, the unattained self we assume to be the ultimate unforbidden pleasure? If your life is always the life to come, it is, endlessly and not endlessly, deferred (‘We are all saved for death,’ Seneca, a writer that interested Beckett, said in Natural Questions). Endgame is perhaps ‘inhuman’, for Beckett at least, because the characters cann
ot find a so-called human value to value, except the value of going on talking about how to bring life and the so-called values it encourages to some sort of conclusion – and with so much amusement, of whatever kind.
Clearly, it is an unforbidden pleasure to talk endlessly about the end, the end in both senses. And this is despite the fact, or because of the fact, that it is all talk, only words. ‘Words, he says he knows they are words,’ Beckett wrote in The Unnamable (1953); ‘But how can he know, who has never heard anything else? True.’
Coda
Those who want to change us are those who want to persuade us that we have got our pleasures wrong; that what we enjoy and the ways we enjoy are in some way harmful to ourselves and others. The so-called fundamentalists, of any faith, want to settle these questions once and for all – these questions about what we should enjoy – and believe they know how to do this. So-called liberals want to keep these questions open, and undecidable in any final way. Both these groups are telling us what the lives are that we should want, and how we should get them (and what conversations we should want, and how we should get them). And both groups define themselves by what they forbid. Their motto is: look after the forbidden, and everything else will take care of itself.
Both the fundamentalists and the liberals believe that pleasures can only be assessed, or evaluated, by the harm they do. They are both, above all, impressed by our potential to harm (and believing in our potential to harm makes us more harmful). So everything ultimately depends upon how harm is defined, and who defines it. Unforbidden pleasures, at least compared with forbidden ones, are, of course, relatively harmless (people don’t tend to kill for unforbidden pleasures). Clearly we want harm and pleasure to be somehow inextricable; or rather, we have come to think of the harmful pleasures as better (passion, for example, is assumed to be profounder than affection). What we don’t know is what a society organized more around unforbidden pleasures than forbidden pleasures would be like; what a society would be like that didn’t start from the principle, and therefore promote the principle, that we are primarily a danger to ourselves and others. We should, that is to say, also be able to start with the simple acknowledgement that it is extraordinary how much pleasure we can get from each other’s company, most of which is unforbidden. And that so much depends on our capacity or our willingness to protect our pleasure in each other; and, indeed, on how we bear the consequences of its loss, and of its recovery. That we have good reasons to fear each other shouldn’t be allowed to obscure how much we can enjoy each other.
But how do you get people to change their pleasures, or stick to the pleasures that are approved? Now that we are more wary than ever about conversion experiences, what ways of changing people can we afford to value? What languages can we use to evaluate people’s pleasures and to transform them, and what can we then do when language doesn’t do the trick? Solving these and similar questions, as Philip Larkin wrote in his poem ‘Days’, ‘Brings the priest and the doctor / In their long coats / Running over the fields.’ If it was not the priest and the doctor, who could it be now? And what might they be wearing?
Acknowledgements
Much of this book was originally presented in different versions as lectures at the William Alanson White Institute (New York), the University of Buffalo, King’s College London and the University of York. I am very grateful to Jean Petrucelli, Tim Dean, David Russell and my colleagues at York, respectively, for arranging these invitations, and for making them so conducive. Hugh Haughton’s introductions to my lectures in York have been a continual source. A different version of ‘Against Self-Criticism’ was given as a LRB Winter Lecture at the British Museum and was published in the London Review of Books. Conversations with Lisa Appignanesi, Leo Bersani, Mat Bevis, Norma Clarke, Brian Cummings, Ziad Elmarsafy, Kit Fan, John Forrester, John Gray, Stephen Greenblatt, Hugh Haughton, Michael Neve, Chris Oakley, David Russell, Ramie Targoff and Barbara Taylor have been essential. And I have learned often more than I realize from Geoffrey Weaver’s Reading Group.
My editor, Simon Prosser, has been crucial in the writing of this – and indeed of all the other books I have been fortunate enough to publish with him. I have also been very fortunate again in having the book copy-edited by Sarah Coward. My agents (and friends) Felicity Rubenstein and Amy Rennert have consistently backed my writing with so much energy and enthusiasm that I almost take it for granted, but it has made all the difference.
THE BEGINNING
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HAMISH HAMILTON
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First published 2015
Copyright © Adam Phillips, 2015
Cover Image © Mary Evans Picture Library
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Davis, Olena Kalytiak, And Her Soul Out of Nothing. Copyright © 1997 by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press; ‘Elemental’ from Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy by Joanna Klink, copyright © Joanna Klink, 2015. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
ISBN: 978-0-241-96409-5
Unforbidden Pleasures Page 14