Anti-Natalism

by Ken Coates

  Christianity, for Beckett, is a tale of human suffering. Christ’s suffering and death represents human misery and suffering relieved only by death. There is either no god or if there is he must be a malevolent tyrant. Beckett looks for an explanation or a cause for man’s suffering but finds no answer (37). Since existence inevitably brings untold suffering it must be a kind of punishment for being born. Thus birth is the original sin for which man is punished by suffering and death. And it is not a question of the amelioration of human condition and the alleviation of suffering. These practical humanistic measures cannot touch the basic conditions of existence (38). The ‘universe as experienced by our consciousness is no less arbitrary, cruel, and senseless’ than if it was created by a God who wishes to fill the world with pain.

  Man’s cruelty to man, especially evident on the part of those with privilege and power, is another fairly persistent theme in Beckett’s works. In Endgame Hamm’s treatment of his parents and that of Clov, his attendant, is nothing short of brutal and sadistic. He recalls his callous treatment of a poor, starving man with a child who begged him for help. He was then a rich land-owner or something of the sort. It was freezing cold, just before X’mas. The man wanted Hamm to take him and his child in his service. There were others who needed help and whom he could have helped but did not. Instead he told the man, “Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that”! (37) Hamm’s remark is reminiscent of Pozzo’s outburst In WFG, “That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth” (Beckett 1954, 121). Pozzo too was a tyrannical and cruel master to his menial Lucky whom he treated like a slave. There is an even more general statement in his novel How It Is (Beckett 1964) where human beings are seen as torturers and tortured in turn in an endless chain of ‘intimacies and abandons’.

  For Beckett then the futility of existence combined with the cruelty and suffering that it invariably entails condemns it to nullity. His writings express the revolt against ‘the intolerable imprisonment of man within the determination of cause and effect, of beginning and ending’. To Beckett, the ‘meaningless limitations and compulsions of birth and death, and the universe which imposes such conditions on man can never be accepted’ (Robinson 1969, 32).

  In How It Is the human condition as a whole is portrayed as a journey in the dark with no direction or goal. The narrator is crawling through mud and slime as he describes his journey. He comes across other crawlers in the mud acting in turn as torturers and victims. Here Beckett creates an ‘eternal, dark and silent world where the hero is imprisoned in the mud and where countless millions of other men also lie tormented and tormenting’ and which is infinite. The narrator differs from Beckett’s earlier characters in that he feels little of their anguish, their quest for meaning and significance. Rather he has ‘resigned himself to eternal futility’. He endures without hope, simply fulfilling ‘the demands of the place where he finds himself’. (Robinson 1969, 217) He wonders about the laws of this world of muck and speculates on the underlying pattern or order. In the end he abandons this attempt and accepts the only known reality, i.e. of the mud and his voice. Crawling in the mud seems to represent the journey of the human race through the centuries, across a “vast stretch of time through abject abject ages each heroic seen from the next” (Sen 1970, 104).

  Against Procreation: Given Beckett’s attitude to existence it is not surprising that his characters often express strong anti-natal views. For Beckett, as for Buddhism, birth is the gateway to the pain and suffering that existence brings to human beings, with the inevitable end in decay and death. Thus ironically it is birth that brings death in its train. For Beckett the two are closely linked. His notion of ‘wombtomb’ is expressed by such aphorisms as “birth was the death of him” (see Stewart 2009, 169). In WFG, Pozzo’s oft-quoted remark, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more” (Beckett 1954, 333) is a more poignant expression of the same idea. Elsewhere in WFG, Vladimir exclaims, “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps” (339).

  Since Beckett sees life – at any rate the conscious existence of man - as a form of punishment, the unforgivable ‘sin’ of being born, of being ejected into the meaningless phenomenon of life is nothing short of a disaster. Ergo all those who give birth are guilty. What they commit is little short of a crime. Beckett’s characters are often full of resentment and disgust for their progenitors. Thus even such a hallowed figure as the mother is a target of such feelings. Thus Molloy, “I speak…. of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit”.(Beckett 1959, 16,). Molloy hates his mother because ‘she was the cause of his birth and hence all the consequent suffering’ (Robinson 1969, 28). In Endgame, Hamm the principal character of the play, calls Nagg his father “Accursed Progenitor” and “Accursed fornicator.” Nagg is the ‘hated and unforgiven arbitrary author of his existence’ (269). The following exchange between father and son reveals the absurd nature of procreation.

  Hamm: Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?

  Nagg: I didn’t know.

  Hamm: What? What didn’t you know?

  Nagg: That it’d be you. (Beckett 1964, 35)

  As Benatar argued earlier, procreation violates the freedom of the unborn, one who is brought into being without consent. On the other hand the procreator does not know what attitude the progeny will have towards his existence. Viewed in its totality it turns out to be an absurd and irresponsible act which inflicts life upon an innocent. However Nagg adds a caveat, “if it hadn’t been me it would have been someone else. But that’s no excuse” (38), which underlines the sheer contingency and absurdity of both the act and its consequences.

  In Endgame when Clov detects a flea Hamm is alarmed: “A flea? Are there still fleas?.....But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God”(27). Clov returns with the insecticide. “Let him have it! “says Hamm. Recall that Hamm presides over a household consisting of himself, his attendant Clov and parents Nagg and Nell. They are confined to a room, with windows looking outside. But outside this room apparently all life has been eliminated. Hamm’s alarm at the existence of a flea is therefore justified. For where there is life there is procreation which could start the disastrous process of evolution once again. Here Hamm echoes, in the context of a macabre but funny play, the more seriously articulated thought of Hartmann along these lines encountered earlier (see Ch.2 above).

  Beckett’s attitude to procreation is very similar to Schopenhauer’s. Procreation not only brings in its wake suffering and death but also a continuation of pointless existence. It is a reprehensible act. There is little doubt that Schopenhauer was a major influence on Beckett. But there are other parallels and influences such as Manichean and early Christian viewpoints with which Beckett was, directly or indirectly, familiar (Stewart 2009, 177). According to a leading Early Christian father, Gregory of Nyssa, “the bodily procreation of children…..is more an embarking upon death than upon life….Corruption has its beginning in birth and those who refrain from procreation….bring about a cancellation of death by preventing it from advancing further” (173). In the Gospel of the Egyptians we find the same idea, viz. to procreate is to nourish death. “To abstain from procreation is to hasten the end of the world and so defeat death” (173). Saint Augustine, whose works were well-known to Beckett, thought along lines not dissimilar. In The City of God he wrote ”death is perpetuated by propagation from the first man, and is without doubt the penalty of all who are born” and “lust in opposition to the spirit…..is the conflict that attends us from our birth. We bring with us, at our birth, the beginning of our death” (174).

  In connection with his play Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett’s notes refer to one of the three Manichean prohibitions, viz. that of marriage and sexual reproduction. For Mani, birth is the imprisonment of the “true light” of th
e spirit. Abstinence from sex prevents this from occurring (ibid.). Procreation, in other words, keeps the spirit mired in worldly entrapment. In Manichaeism, as in Schopenhauer’s thought, the best situation is never to have been born and Beckett’s essay on Proust appears to echo this belief. As we saw earlier (see Ch. 2), according to Schopenhauer the will-to-live finds its strongest expression in sexual reproduction which perpetuates the sufferings of existence. Procreation therefore must be rejected.

  In Beckett’s (1996) play Eleutheria, which was only published after his death, there is a Dr. Piouk, a most explicit and fervid exponent of anti-natalism. He would “ban reproduction”, “perfect the condom and other devices and bring them into general use”, and “establish teams of abortionists, controlled by the state”. Among other things he would encourage homosexuality and practice it himself. ( Stewart 2009, 177). Dr. Piouk makes it clear that he is not against sex as such providing it does not result in reproduction. And while new life is to be prevented, for existing lives euthanasia will be an option but not an obligation. Although put in a crude and extreme form all this seems to be broadly in line with anti-natal attitudes we explored earlier. Ironically however, Piouk does not follow upon his own plans. He wants a child “to entertain me in my leisure hours, which are forever becoming briefer and more desolate” and secondly “so that he can receive the torch from my hands, when they are no longer strong enough to carry it” (178). Here Beckett seems to hint at the problem of putting anti-natalism in practice, and the role of self-interest in treating procreation and new life as a means to one’s own selfish ends. As Stewart comments, ‘if even the most enthusiastic exponent of the end of reproduction cannot follow his own dictates, humanity must inevitably be condemned to continue its guilty, problematic existence’ (178). Nonetheless Dr. Piouk acts as a mouthpiece of a radical solution to bring humanity and its sufferings to an end. Here Beckett’s fictional writings show a close affinity with the philosophies and prescriptions of Schopenhauer, Hartmann and, above all, Benatar. Benatar, it will be recalled, believes that despite the logic and strength of his arguments against procreation, baby making will go on unabated (see Ch.3). He rightly identifies parental self-interest as the main reason for procreation, which also seems to be the point Beckett is making here.

  Man’s Incurable Optimism: Beckett is scathing about what he calls ‘our smug will to live’ and ‘our pernicious and incurable optimism’ (Proust, 15). As we saw earlier, from a Brahmanic and Buddhist standpoint such attitudes are seen as a result of ‘ignorance’, which keeps us chained to existence with its interminable cycle of births and deaths. However very few of Beckett’s characters display anything like ‘optimism’. In some ways the tramps in WFG, with their hope that a certain Godot will come and ‘save’ them or at any rate provide them with the key to the inscrutable nature of man’s existence, may be seen as being optimistic. Their refusal to commit suicide and to persist in waiting for Godot against all odds could be seen as an example of their ‘incurable optimism’. But their persistence in the search for meaning or ‘salvation’ implies the refusal to accept existence and religious consolation at their face value. In this sense they are not optimists. What Beckett calls optimism is a part of our smug will to live, the central idea of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. This is not what we find in the despair of Vladimir and Estragon and in their boredom with existence.

  As we shall see below, Winnie, in the play Happy Days, is perhaps the only Beckettian character that shows the mundane everyday optimism which the vast majority of mankind displays and lives by. It is not so much ignorance on her part as a form of ‘adaptation’ to the sufferings of existence, a way of coping by denying its terrible reality, by putting a positive gloss on life (see Zapffe and Benatar in Ch.3). Common religiosity, occupation with the trivia of everyday living , following a routine, evoking memories of the past, longing for love, telling oneself stories and the like constitute her survival kit. Here we are reminded of Zapffe’s point about the variety of means deployed by humans to forget the frightful reality of existence as well as that of Benatar’s Pollyanna principle (see Ch. 3).

  Happy Days, (Beckett 1966) opens with Winnie, a woman in her fifties, buried in a mound of earth. Her husband Willie, almost a silent companion, is holed up in the mound behind her. The environment is one of “blazing light” with scorched grass around. It is very hot. Winnie speaks of “this hellish sun”…..”this blaze of hellish light”. In fact there is no day and night any more. A bell rings for Winnie to wake her up and another for her to sleep. The play consists almost entirely of Winnie’s monologue, ostensibly with Willie as the listener.

  The title “Happy Days” is largely ironic. The key phrase uttered again and again by Winnie is “That is what I find so wonderful”. In Act One She is buried up to her waist and in Act Two up to her neck. She can barely move, has nothing to do, and finds it difficult to pass time. She longs for attention, indeed love, and is pathetically grateful to Willie for his occasional, monosyllabic responses. After one of these she says “Oh you are going to talk to me today, this is going to be a happy day…..another happy day” (19). And when he does not respond to her repeated calls she accepts the situation with resignation: “ah well…can’t be helped….just one of those things…another of those old things….just can’t be cured….poor dear Willie” (10)….no zest…for anything…no interest…in life” (11). Much of Willie’s indifference to her and his lack of response she finds “very understandable…..Most understandable” (23). Willie sleeps most of the time and when awake reads a newspaper and spends time looking at pornographic pictures. In spite of all this, she dreams of Willie coming round to her side of the mound to “live this side where I could see you….I would be a different woman….Unrecognizable….But you can’t, I know…What a curse, mobility!” (35) She thinks Willie still desires her. Towards the end of the play when he starts climbing up the mound and trying to approach her she thinks he might want to touch her face again and may be after a kiss. When he calls her “Win”, she is delighted and finds it “another happy day!”(47)

  The play shows that her way of coping is the common way – following a routine, relying on habit ‘the great deadener’, the ‘guarantee of dull inviolability’ and a source of security, as Beckett (1931, 19, 21) put it in his essay on Proust . She has a large handbag within reach which contains a miscellany of trivia, things which help her get through the day. She busies herself with such things as brushing her teeth, putting on her make-up, lipstick and all, scrutinizing her face in a hand mirror, brushing and combing her hair. She does these even though there is no one around and Willie can barely see her. As she says, “these things tide one over”. Although she wishes she had Willie’s “marvelous gift” for sleeping his time away she adds promptly, “can’t complain….no no….mustn’t complain…..so much to be thankful for…no pain…hardly any…wonderful thing that…many mercies…great mercies…prayers perhaps not for naught” (12). She repeats the phrase “That is what I find so wonderful” often. Examining her toothbrush she finds the words genuine pure “hog’s setae”. She does not know what that means and finds out later from Willie. However insignificant she has found something new and that is enough. “That is what I find so wonderful, that not a day goes by….hardly a day…without some addition to one’s knowledge however trifling.. …..provided one takes the pains” (16).

  The play begins with the bell for Winnie to wake up. “Another heavenly day,” she says gazing at the zenith. She prays and follows up with “For Jesus Christ sake Amen” and “World without end Amen”(9-10). She relies a great deal on words, on her endless chatter to carry her through the day. But she admits “even words fail at times….what is one to do until they come again? Brush and comb the hair…trim the nails ….these things tide one over” (20). In Act Two when she is buried up to her neck and cannot move any longer she still remains the same Winnie. As the bell rings she opens her eyes and greets the “day” with “Hail, holy light……Someone
is looking at me still….Caring for me still…That is what I find so wonderful….Eyes on my eyes” (37). Despite her terrible state she persists in her belief in a benevolent god.

  Although aware of the increasing heat she finds it ‘’ wonderful….the way man adapts himself….To changing conditions”. Suddenly her parasol catches fire by itself. But this does not disturb her equanimity. With the sun “blazing so much fiercer down, and hourly fiercer, is it not natural things should go on fire….in this way…spontaneous like” (29). Then follows this harrowing remark, “Shall I myself not melt perhaps in the end, or burn….just little by little be charred to a black cinder” (29). However soon she consoles herself by claiming that nothing really has changed, her parasol will be there again next day to help her through the day, her mirror will be in her bag as usual. “That is what I find so wonderful, the way things…(voice breaks, head down)”. She turns to her bag, brings out odds and ends, stuffs them back and finally brings out a musical-box, turns it on and listens to the waltz from The Merry Widow. She sways to the rhythm with a happy expression and forgets all about the heat and the fear of being charred to cinders.