Anti-Natalism

by Ken Coates

  At other times she simply recalls her past. “Oh the happy memories!....My first ball!...My second ball…(Long pause)…..My first kiss!.....A Mr. Johnson, or Johnstone…Very bushy moustache, very tawny….Within a toolshed, though whose I cannot conceive” (15). Words and speech are important to Winnie as a way of passing time and forgetting her misery. She often quotes lines or bits from the classics, e.g. Shakespeare, Browning and others. These too she claims help to tide her over. “That is what I find so wonderful, that not a day goes by…..without some blessing…in disguise (20)”. “What are those exquisite lines?....Go forget me why should something o’er that something shadow fling….(Pause. With a sigh.) One loses one’s classics….not all…A part…A part remains…….That is what I find so wonderful, to help one through the day…..Oh yes, many mercies, many mercies” (43). But she is aware of the limitations of talking. “Stop talking now, Winnie….don’t squander all your words for the day, stop talking and do something for a change..” (31). She starts filing her nail. “Keep yourself nice, Winnie, that’s what I always say, come what may, keep yourself nice (32)”.

  However at times she is reminded of the grim reality of her situation and neither routine activity nor words can stop her being aware of it. But she puts a brave face on it and is prepared to “wait for the day to come…..the happy day( italics added) to come when flesh melts at so many degrees and the night of the moon has so many hundred hours….That is what I find so comforting when I lose heart and envy the brute beast” (16). The brute beast is to be envied presumably because it has no consciousness and above all no awareness of its inevitable death. For Winnie her day of release from earthly existence is also a “happy day” just as so many of her other days she considers to have been happy. She is resigned. Come what may she remains and will remain happy. She generalizes her attitudes and action enlisting “human nature” in her support. “There is so little one can do….One does it all….All one can…’Tis only human….Human nature….Human weakness….Natural weakness” (18-19). Elsewhere she says despairingly, “What is the alternative?..What is…(17).

  We should note, however, that for all her ‘optimism’ Winnie is not without the consciousness of suffering. She is not exactly a ‘conventional’ everywoman determined to look at the positive side of everything and carry on regardless. For surprisingly, along with the common bric-a-brac in her bag she also has a revolver. She brings it out accidentally while rummaging inside her bag and kisses it rapidly before putting it back (13). Later she brings it out again by chance and this time decides to leave it out by her side. “Oh I suppose it’s a comfort to know you’re there, but I’m tired of you…I will leave you out, that’s what I’ll do (26)”. She is reminded of Willie’s “Brownie” revolver. He wanted her to take it away from him in case he is tempted to put himself out of his misery (26). As with many other Beckett’s characters, for Winnie and Willie too the possibility of suicide remains in the background.

  Happy Days can be seen as a paradigm case of the “incurable” human optimism and the will to survive no matter at what price. This is underlined by the stark disparity between the terrible conditions of Winnie’s existence – her own as well as of the environment she is in –and her resigned state and acceptance of it all. The play has an air of compassion and understanding for Winnie and her ways of coping with the dreadful exigencies of existence. Her love and longing for Willie, their limited but nonetheless real communication through which a degree of companionship is achieved suggests some redeeming features. Beckett here seems to be making some concession to human weakness, to the plight of human beings afflicted with conditions for which they bear no responsibility. It is not without interest that this optimism and will to live is expressed by a female character whereas Willie seems to have freed himself of the will to live and appears to have no interest whatsoever in existence. Willie is akin to other Beckett characters, males who have turned away from ‘normal’ existence altogether.

  Concluding Remarks: The principal theme of Beckett’s writings, especially as expressed in his plays, is man’s gratuitous suffering during his absurd journey from birth to death. His writings reflect and echo the rejectionist worldview we explored in the chapters above. His themes have a close resemblance to those we came across in the religious and philosophical viewpoints considered earlier. Life as pointless and gratuitous suffering (Buddhism, Schopenhauer), the absurdity of conscious life with its need for meaning and the impossibility of finding one (Zapffe), the false promises and consolations of religion (Zapffe), the ‘incurable optimism’ of human beings in the face of their terrible fate and the variety of coping strategies (Zapffe, Benatar), birth as the gateway to suffering and death and the need to stop procreation (Schopenhauer, Zapffe, Benatar), the boredom of a pointless and meaningless existence (Schopenhauer) are all there in Beckett’s work.

  Beckett is not a philosopher but a creative writer. He has rarely expressed himself on what his writing is about, in short the ‘meaning’ of his plays and other works. It is only in his long essay on Proust, written early in his writing career, that we get some idea of his philosophical thought. There he speaks of how habit and routine deaden sensibility and protect humans from existential insecurity. He castigates man’s ‘incurable optimism’ which sustains human beings and keeps the wheel of life turning. He quotes the Spanish poet Calderon approvingly about man’s ‘sin’ of being born. And echoing Buddhism he puts suffering at the heart of human existence. Although one cannot read off a writer’s worldview directly from his fiction there can be little doubt about the dominating presence, in his plays and other works, of the rejectionist themes we outlined earlier.

  Jean-Paul Sartre: Contingency and Existence (Nausea)

  The principal character of Sartre’s novel, Nausea (1962), is Antoine Roquentin, a man aged about thirty. The novel is in the form of a diary in which Roquentin records the story of his experience and gradual discovery of the contingent nature of existence. He realizes that people and things are simply there for no rhyme or reason. This awareness of the superfluous nature of all existence, including his own, fills him with anguish and despair. What follows is the struggle to come to terms with his metaphysical predicament and the search for a personal solution. What makes it an existentialist novel is that it is about living this philosophical discovery and its implications as an individual – about feeling it as a personal crisis - rather than simply recognizing it as an abstract piece of knowledge.

  Roquentin is a historian writing the biography of Marquis de Rollebon, a French diplomat and politician of the!8th century. He is in Bouville, a provincial city and port, where the papers and documents of Rollebon are deposited. The book begins with a strange experience that Roquentin has been having lately when he touches or holds objects. He picks up a stone on the seashore but has an unpleasant feeling in his hand and drops it immediately. When he holds the doorknob to enter his room at the hotel where he is staying he feels as though the doorknob has a presence and a personality of its own and recoils from it. There are similar experiences with other familiar objects and Roquentin finds all this quite unsettling. He cannot understand what is happening to him. It is only later that he comes to realize that for the first time in his life he is experiencing ‘existence’ as a sheer material presence of things bereft of their everyday, familiar, innocuous nature as useful objects, e.g. a doorknob, or with names to identify or classify them, e.g. a seagull. Like most people he took existence for granted. Never before did he have this feeling of encountering things – objects, living creatures including himself and other human beings – as sheer material presences.

  At first he thinks it is some passing feeling. He writes “My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter them” (Sartre 1962, 8). He hears the footsteps of the commercial traveler, who comes every week, coming up the stairs of the hotel. It ”gave me quite a thrill, it was so reassuring: what is there to fear in such a regular world? I think I am
cured” (9). However soon he realizes that something has happened to him. “I can’t doubt it any more’. He is afraid of being in contact with objects. They give him a feeling of nausea. Like the other day when he picked up a pebble on the seashore he felt a “sort of nausea in the hands” (20). Another day when he entered the café at his hotel ‘the nausea seized me, I dropped to a seat, I no longer knew where I was; I saw the colors spin slowly around me”. And since then “the nausea has not left me, it holds me” (30). Other encounters and uncanny experiences of this kind follow and eventually, one day, Roquentin has something of a revelation while in the municipal park. At last he understands the source of his nausea and his feeling of the strangeness of objects, including human beings, around him. This is how he describes it.

  Contingency: “I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface” (170-1). What confronted him was simply the brute presence of a “black, knotty mass”. Never before had he understood the meaning of existence. And now suddenly it revealed itself. ‘It is there, all around us, in us, it is us’ and yet we do not see existing things as simply a dense, opaque, bewildering presence, without any rhyme or reason.”‘We were a heap of living creatures’ with not ‘the slightest reason to be there, none of us” (172), thinks Roquentin, yet we seem to be unaware of the superfluous, contingent nature of our existence. He comes to the conclusion that ‘Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance’ (180).

  How does Roquentin feel about his discovery? “I can’t say I feel relieved or satisfied; just the opposite, I am crushed. Only my goal is reached: I know what I wanted to know; I have understood all that has happened to me….The nausea has not left me ….but I no longer have to bear it as an illness or a passing fit: it is I” (170). It is this meaningless presence of things and living creatures, including himself, that gives him the feeling of nausea. “I was no longer in Bouville, I was nowhere, I was floating, I was not surprised, I knew it was the World, the naked World suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this absurd being. You couldn’t even wonder where all that sprang from or how it was that a world came into existence, rather than nothingness. It didn’t make sense……I stifled at the depths of this immense weariness” (180). And then suddenly “the park emptied as through a great hole, the World disappeared as it had come, or else I woke up – in any case, I saw no more of it: nothing was left but the yellow earth around me”. (181)

  Responses to Contingency: Roquentin thinks that people sense the superfluity of their existence but try not to face up to the reality. There are many ways of evading it, many ways of imposing a necessity on existence, e.g. by inventing a creator or a causal being, asserting one’s ‘right’ to exist, as the elites tend to do. Surrounding themselves with family, professional involvement, civic leadership and the like they gloss over the fundamental absurdity of their existence. He finds ample proof of this when he visits the local museum.

  The museum was full of portraits of the local worthies - the Bouville elites - idealized by the painter. “They had been painted very minutely; yet under the brush, their countenances had been stripped of the mysterious weaknesses of men’s faces. Their faces, even the least powerful, were clear as porcelain”. However at the entrance was a painting entitled “The Bachelor’s Death”, a gift of the State to the museum. The painting showed the bachelor lying on an unmade bed “naked to the waist, his body a little green, like that of a dead man… The disorder of the sheets and blankets attested to a long death agony….Near the wall a cat lapped milk indifferently” (113). This man had lived only for himself and by a well-deserved punishment no one had come to his bedside to close his eyes. The painting was, felt Roquentin, a warning to him. He could still retrace his steps and get back to the fold. Over a hundred portraits were hanging on the wall in the room he was about to enter. With the exception of a few young people who died prematurely and a Mother Superior, none had died childless or intestate, none without the last rites. “Their souls at peace that day as on other days, with God and the world, these men had slipped quietly into death, to claim their share of eternal life to which they had a right. For they had a right to everything: to life, to work, to wealth, to command, to respect, and, finally, to immortality” (114). Not only God was on their side but by inventing rights and duties these leaders of men had provided themselves with a rationale for their existence. The visitors to the museum were full of admiration and reverence for these men. Soon Roquentin has had enough. He turns back. “Farewell, beautiful lilies, elegant in your painted little sanctuaries, good-bye, lovely lilies, our pride and reason for existing, good-bye you bastards!” (129)

  Roquentin realizes that there were other ways of shielding oneself from the truth about existence. His meeting with the Self-Taught Man revealed some of these. The Self-Taught Man was a bailiff’s clerk, one of the few people in Bouville that Roquentin spoke to. He was interested in knowledge for its own sake and was often to be seen at the Bouville municipal library. He invited Roquentin for lunch one day when Roquentin remarked, laughing, “I was just thinking ….. that here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing” (151). The Self-Taught Man became serious making an effort to understand him. He repeated slowly, “No reason for existing”. “You mean life is without a goal? Isn’t that what one might call pessimism?” (151) He tells Roquentin about a book he read by an American writer called “Is Life Worth Living?” Isn’t that the question he was asking? That certainly wasn’t the question Roquentin was asking. But he had no desire to explain. “His conclusion”, the Self-Taught Man says, consolingly, “is in favor of voluntary optimism. Life has a meaning if we chose to give it one. One must act, throw one’s self into some enterprise. Then, if one reflects, the die is already cast, one is pledged” (151.). What do you think of that Monsieur, asks the Self-Taught Man. Roquentin replies, “nothing”, and thinks that ”that is precisely the sort of lie’ that many people tell themselves”. (152). All this echoes Zapffe’s point about ‘anchoring’ and ‘distraction’, about ways of avoiding facing up to the void of existence.

  The Self-Taught Man then comes up with another line of defense. During the First World War he was taken prisoner. The experience of facing a common fate with other prisoners, and their close physical proximity gave him a sense of a strong bond of solidarity with these men. Although he did not believe in God, in the internment camp he “learned to believe in men” (154). He became a socialist and a humanist. The Self-Taught Man reminded Roquentin of the variety of humanists that he had come across in Paris: the Communists, the Socialists, the Christian humanists and others. They were all lovers of humanity in general even as they were at each other’s throats (158).

  Roquentin’s companion makes one last attempt to corner him. Why was he writing? Surely in order to be read by someone? When he does not get an answer he says “Perhaps you are a misanthrope?” Roquentin knows this is a trap, an attempt to label him. If he accepts the label he is “immediately turned around, reconstituted, overtaken”. Humanism can absorb all sorts of attitudes including misanthropy. For it too has its place in the human concert. It is “only a dissonance necessary to the harmony of the whole” (160).

  Quite apart from the ‘right’ to exist proclaimed by the elites and the love of mankind or humanism as expressed, for example, by the Self-Taught Man there was also the question of being taken in by appearances. For example, people walking along the seashore in Bouville look at the sea and wax lyrical about it. “What a lovely day, the sea is green, I like this dry cold better than the damp” etc. Poets! Thinks Roquentin, they only see the surface which is a thin film of green. What they don’t see is the reality u
nder the water. “The true sea is cold and black, full of animals; it crawls under this thin green film made to deceive human beings…(but they)… let themselves be taken in” (167-8).

  Roquentin’s disgust with existence and its superfluity does not leave him. This contingent presence of “tons and tons of existence”, including his own, is stifling. It is the source of his nausea and there is no way out of it. Above all his thought, his consciousness about it all is particularly unsettling. “It’s worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I. The body lives by itself once it has begun. But thought – I am the one who continues it, unrolls it. If only I could keep myself from thinking”, thinks Roquentin (135). Ah! “Will there never be an end to it?’ But my thought is me. That’s why I can’t stop thinking. At this moment ‘I am horrified at existing”. But “I am the one who pulls myself away from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing” (136). He thinks of suicide. It will at least wipe off one superfluous life. Nonetheless his body will go on existing. The blood, the decomposing flesh, finally the bones that the earth will receive, all that would be “in the way”. His death would be in the way.”‘I was in the way for eternity” (173) concludes Roquentin. In other words once you come into existence you are stuck with it and even death cannot get rid of it. Here Sartre expresses the fundamental contradiction of conscious existence - the chasm between consciousness and mind on the one hand, and one’s bodily self on the other which belongs to nature and appears to consciousness as an alien presence.