Beauty & Sadness

by André Alexis

  Up to this point, everything is clear, and then comes

  5. Love is a form of banishment.

  How and where did we pass from desire to “love”? That’s the jump my mind made as I read that passage, but of course we do not pass from desire to love. Beckett wrote “What goes by the name of love.” The banishment he is referring to is brought on by his erection. Love, real love, the thing that has no name, here, in this passage, is not banishment. “Real love” is, perhaps, homecoming, that which eludes the narrator of “First Love,” precisely the thing Murphy seeks when he ties himself, by means of seven scarves, to his rocking chair and goes in search of the unattainable place.

  Rereading Beckett, I encountered what I thought of as my “literary self” over and over again, but the idea of love as banishment, or desire as banishment, reminded me of something I’d written immediately after my break-up with K:

  A calm comes over me after we’ve made love

  You’ve turned away and your back gracefully

  declines. How fascinating this is: light

  from a candle, the smell of us exhaled

  by a bedsheet. But all of this must end.

  In a moment, you’ll rise to wipe my semen

  from your belly. The cats will tilt against

  your shins, in their cloudy campaign for food.

  And so a door will close. I’d hold us here

  a moment more, but desire dies

  in the time it takes you to turn and ask

  if I’m hungry. I say something clever

  and meaningless and close a door myself,

  as you yawn and go to the kitchen.

  It’s disconcerting to write such things, to feel them about a relationship that has ended. For months, my memory was like a white, tile floor on which clear glass has broken. But the banishment described in this poem is of a different order from that described in “First Love.” The state of pleasure after lovemaking is a kind of alienation from the self, yes, but most of us would prolong this alienation if we could. To me, the banishment is less extraordinary than the place to which I have been permitted access, the place where I am not my “self,” the place where I can live without regard for my endless names or the many selves they designate.

  Very lovely, but what am I saying, exactly? That the moments following lovemaking are what I know of love? That although desire un-selfs us, once desire is spent we may come to another, deeper place? Isn’t this a convenient conflation of love and desire, with the emphasis on what follows orgasm as opposed to the great derangement that precedes it? And what is it about the postcoital moment that suggests love, anyway?

  As a man who rarely feels at home in the world, the intimacy, the two-in-oneness that follows lovemaking is one of the only states during which I am will-lessly taken from myself. It isn’t inevitable, you understand. I’ve certainly had sex and felt nothing but embarrassment afterwards, ashamed that I had allowed myself to be vulnerable. This “world of two as one” (an occlusion of myself) has come into being with only three women in my life. The three I have loved — meaning, I suppose, the three with whom I was not careful to hold to my “self.”

  In love, I couldn’t care less who I am or who I am not.

  Yes, the banishment in my poem is almost entirely different from the banishment in “First Love.” Nevertheless, when I read Beckett again, I felt he had articulated something within me. Behind my “banishment,” there is Beckett’s.

  A predecessor’s use of an image (or notion) doesn’t cancel out one’s own use of the same image (or notion). Each use of a figure or image is like a veil before the thing itself: a small brass key on a table of white wood, say. Every writer puts a veil in front the table and key, a veil that is like a fine Dacca gauze (“Those transparent Dacca gauzes / known as woven air, running / water, evening dew . . . ,” as Agha Shahid Ali wrote). One is always aware of the key and the table, but one sometimes becomes aware of all the veils before them, too.

  And isn’t it odd that artists so often point to a specific veil (Dante’s, for instance) and say “this veil has meant so much to me”?

  ____

  There are any number of ways to express the unhappiness that follows the end of a relationship. The images that come to me bring with them the idea of place (garden, field, bedroom) and discomfort therein. The feeling for place and place lost is often found in Beckett’s work. So, when I speak of Beckett’s “influence” on my writing, I suppose I’m referring to my sometimes unconscious appropriation of his images (fields, rooms, etc.) and language to express my own feelings.

  “Influence” is a mercurial word, though. Not only does the assertion of influence beg the question “where does this image or idea come from in the first place?” but it also implies that the one who has been influenced, the ephebe, has come to his or her world of symbols through the agency of this master’s work and this master’s work alone. But the idea that the ephebe needs a specific master in order to produce his or her work is a little unconvincing. I mean, it’s difficult to think of any artwork that has had anything but multiple progenitors. Then, too, there are the natures of the master and the ephebe. If they are both exiles (as Beckett and Dante both were), isn’t it likely that they will turn to and respond to similar images? Dante loved Homer’s Odyssey, while Beckett admired Joyce’s Ulysses. A school of exiles — Homer, Dante, Joyce, Beckett. Is it so surprising they should have images and ideas (banishment, exile, loss) in common? Is it inconceivable that they might come to the same images and ideas independently? It would be stranger, wouldn’t it, for those who share Dante’s emotional type or some of his circumstances, not to sound like Dante once in a while.

  And yet, Beckett insists on Dante. He is one of those writers who inevitably points away from himself. In fact, we can be confident that Beckett was influenced by Dante not only because we hear echoes of Dante in Beckett’s writing but because Beckett has so vigorously asserted Dante’s presence. He has leaned on Dante’s influence. He wrote an essay entitled “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce” linking his masters Dante and James Joyce; his short story “Dante and the Lobster” is filled with references to the Divine Comedy; he referred to the novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable as being tripartite, in the way of Dante’s Comedy. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of Beckett’s thinking may well be this obsession with his own lack of innovation.1

  So insistent is Beckett in pointing to Dante, I decided to re-read La Vita Nuova, Dante’s brilliant, prosimetric2 meditation on love and poetry, to discover just how much Beckett I could glean from it. Here is a passage from the Canzone that begins with the words “Donna pietosa.” In it, Dante describes the “doubtful” landscape of premonition and bereavement:

  Lying there, thinking of the fragility of my life,

  seeing how slight its substance is,

  Love, whose home is in my heart, began to weep:

  at which my soul was so distraught

  that sighing I said in my thoughts:

  “It is true that my lady too will die.”

  Then I was so filled with distress,

  I closed my eyes, so heavy were they with that abyss.

  And so scattered

  were my spirits, they all went wandering:

  and then imagination,

  roaming wildly and far from truth,

  showed me women’s faces hurrying by

  that cried to me: “You will die, you will die.”

  Then I saw many doubtful things,

  in the empty dream I had entered:

  I seemed to be in a place I did not know,

  and saw women going by in the street,

  dishevelled, weeping, crying out,

  their cries spread like fires of grief.

  Then it seemed to me little by little

  the s
un darkened and the stars appeared,

  and they wept together as one:

  birds fell as they flew through the air,

  and the earth trembled:

  And a pale man appeared and, hoarse,

  said to me: “What? Have you not heard the news?

  Your lady is dead, who was so lovely.”3

  After rereading La Vita Nuova, I began a comparison of Beckett’s banishment from the self and Dante’s banishment from Love. And there are certainly echoes (as well as perversions, parodies, and deformations) of Dante in Beckett. They both have versions of courtly love, versions of love as transcendent and redemptive (though, in Beckett’s case, the redemption is endlessly deferred), versions of banishment and bereavement, and so on. The resonances — some of which you can hear clearly if you read “First Love” and La Vita Nuova together — appealed to me. But the more I went about comparing the two, the more I felt I had fallen into a trap. Beckett’s insistence on Dante is misleading. Let me count the ways:

  1. Though James Joyce had a great influence on Beckett’s work (again, Beckett dixit), the insistence on Dante serves to obscure Joyce’s influence. In pointing out Dante’s influence on Joyce, Beckett goes one step further, dissolving Joyce in Dante.

  2. By insisting on Dante’s influence, Beckett enshadows influences that are less “elevated,” though perhaps as significant (Buster Keaton, Stephen Leacock, etc.)

  3. By insisting on Dante, Beckett provides a kind of clarity — an explanation for why he writes as he does — that makes his work less complicated than it actually is.

  4. By insisting on Dante, Beckett gets to have it both ways: he disappears behind Dante while remaining ever-present as “he who points to Dante.”

  That third point was the most intriguing and most perplexing, as far as I was concerned. Why would Beckett want to make his work seem less complicated than it is?

  By constantly pointing to Dante, to Dante’s influence, Beckett is insisting on his own critical — as opposed to creative — intelligence, on his awareness (even if it is sometimes unconscious) of his (that is, Beckett’s) place in a literary spectrum. We know, however, that Beckett trusted his unconscious, that he gave it free rein. He compared his writing process to that of the Surrealists, saying he began with the pure stuff of his subconscious and then worked it into the shape he wished.

  Is it possible that he inevitably worked his creations towards Dante?

  If so, how did he know he was working towards Dante and no one else? Dante himself was aware of his own debts to Virgil, Guido Cavalcanti, and Statius (to keep only to poets whom Dante admitted to admiring). In being influenced by Dante, how influenced was Beckett by Cavalcanti or Virgil or Publius Statius?

  It’s easy, isn’t it, to imagine a dialogue between Dante and Beckett in which Dante says

  — Cazzo, anch’io l’ho copiato, da Stazio!4

  And that’s it, isn’t it? The main problem with the idea of “influence” is that it leads, inevitably, to questions of priority that can’t be answered. And though the effort to designate who has influenced whom is amusing and sometimes enlightening, especially when made by a critic like Borges,5 the effort probably has less to do with understanding what it is men and women do when they use words symbolically than it has to do with power and status.6 That is to say, the creation of an echelon of influence, with Dante at the top, or Homer, or Shakespeare, is more significant as politics than aesthetics. It has nothing to do with the beautiful.

  ____

  If reading La Vita Nuova did not (could not) tell me why Beckett needed Dante as such a constant point of reference, it did start me thinking about reconciliation, its nature and variations.

  La Vita Nuova is a work of mourning, autobiography and literary criticism. In it, Dante tells of his love for Beatrice. He chooses a number of his poems about her, commenting on them and on the poetic tradition to which they belong. The most striking poem in it, for me, is the Canzone from which I’ve quoted, the one that begins “Donna pietosa.” It is a poem that prefigures the death of Beatrice and leads to the end of the book, in which the poet is actually bereft of Beatrice. La Vita Nuova is, above all, a meditation on love (courtly love) as the highest virtue, goal, or attainment. The fact of Beatrice’s death is overwhelming, but through poetry it has been transformed. The love Dante has for Beatrice is enshrined in the poetry along with the grief at her death. Poetry allows Dante to go on, by bringing the two emotions together, by reconciling life and death.

  (A definition: reconciliation comes from the Latin verb conciliare — “to bring together,” “to unite.” It means to “re-bring together” or to unite once again. Reconciliation can also refer to the process of making consistent or compatible, like seamlessly gluing two halves of a broken plate together again.)

  Beckett’s work cannot and does not effect a reconciliation. In that sense, he is Dante’s mirror opposite. Beckett’s work is filled with longing for the reconciliation at the heart of Dante’s art. Beckett’s characters constantly tell their stories, with the hope that . . . in the belief that if they can only tell their stories “right,” they will be relieved of the burden of telling. They are optimists, in that they never stop believing that there will be a moment of transcendence, that a life freed of the need to speak will come, that when there is no more need for Art, they and life will be, finally at peace, finally reconciled. The art by which Dante found reconciliation is impossible for Beckett, but Beckett’s work makes a virtue of its yearning for the “impossible,” and so keeps the “impossible” (reconciliation) as firmly in mind as Dante’s work does.

  But if, in his art, Beckett could not arrive at transcendence or reconciliation, in his attitude to the past he may have. By endlessly pointing to Dante as his master, Beckett is doing two things. First, he is suggesting that his ideal Art is one exemplified by Dante’s work. And second, by constantly placing himself in relation to the past, by constantly bringing himself into line with Dante, by stressing the dependence of his work on Dante’s, he is like a man swimming a great distance from shore who must look back to see where he is or else go too far and drown.

  This looking back, finding perspective, placing himself on an echelon, was, perhaps, Beckett’s way of making sense of an otherwise futile endeavour (Art). In his work, he embraced the futility. He made the futility his subject. But in talking about his literary “place” — somewhere after Dante — he was able to connect with (or place himself in an acceptable relationship to) a human striving (Art/Literature) for which he felt evident love and ambivalence.

  I asked a couple of questions near the beginning of this essay. I answer them, now, with the idea of reconciliation in mind.

  1. Are my images my own?

  No, not really. Most will have been used before me by writers who have preceded me. Or if, in fact, an “object-image” of mine is new, the mode of its use will not be unusual. That is, for want of the telephone, Dante could not have written Cocteau’s Voix humaine, but he would have understood Cocteau’s work as one poet understands another’s. In this sense, all poets are contemporaries. Shakespeare might not immediately appreciate bpNichol’s concrete poems, but I bet it wouldn’t take him long to understand what it is that makes bp’s work necessary.

  2. Are my emotions my own?

  Certainly, and they are private. Much as I might wish otherwise, no one knows what I am feeling until I express my feelings in a language. But once they’re expressed, once they are written, their privacy is compromised.7

  Wondering what I loved most about you, I broke

  a bâtard and brushed its crumbs from the tablecloth.

  What were you thinking, as you pushed the sugar bowl

  away, touched the rim of your cup,

  turned to look out the window of La Gamelle?

  That fragment of time has an orbit

  now, returning at intervals,


  eclipsing the present.

  I have broken the same bâtard

  a thousand times, watched you

  push the sugar bowl and look out the window,

  a thousand times. I have not left you,

  not made you unhappy, not destroyed our life

  together.

  Then comes the revolution:

  I have left, I have made again, I have destroyed.

  A thousand times and one.

  For meaning, meaningless.

  Even for meaningless, meaningless,

  this persistent moment. But I miss your hands.

  And that is more than I knew then.

  These words connect me to poets who have written before me. (It isn’t the quality of the work that connects me. It’s the fact of it. They also separate me from my predecessors. The poem is both new and old, as are the emotions that inspired it. In this back and forth, something essential takes place, something that is likely to go on for years, as I try to come to terms with the aesthetic quality of the poem and the emotional pain that lies behind it.

  There is a final reconciliation to talk about: the (hopefully skilful) bringing together of elements or ideas to create this essay, elements and ideas inspired by my most recent reading of Beckett’s work:

  — A new life comes only once you have seen the old life for what it is. For this, poetry can be invaluable.

  — Seeing the history of literature with himself firmly in place beside Dante was Beckett’s way of placing himself in relationship to the past.

  — Understanding that Beatrice is dead, Dante can go on, only after turning her death into a sort of permanence, a permanence that allows consoling “repair” of the breach that Beatrice’s death has created in his life and his soul.

  — Seeing oneself “in relation to” a person, a lineage, a tragic event (rather than being trapped in the emotions called up by them): this is the beginning of reconciliation.