Alors que j’erre sur internet — et ailleurs — , je tombe1 sur un court extrait d’une lettre de Beckett en allemand, écrite en juillet 1937, suffisamment saisissant — il y est question de déchirer la langue, de la trouer, de la discrédire à défaut de l’immédiatement détruire — pour que je veuille la chercher et trouve alors dans sa traduction anglaise. Il y est aussi question du mot, de Gertrude Stein (préférée à Joyce) et de sa méthode à la Feininger :
9/7/37 6 Clare Street Dublin IFS
Cher Axel Kaun,
(…)
Il m’est en effet de plus en plus difficile, pour ne pas dire absurde, d’écrire en bon anglais. Et de plus en plus, ma propre langue m’apparaît comme un voile qu’il faut déchirer pour parvenir aux choses (ou au Néant) qui se cachent derrière. La Grammaire et le Style. Pour moi, ils me paraissent devenus aussi incongrus qu’un costume de bain victorien ou le calme imperturbable d’un vrai gentleman. Un masque. Espérons que viendra le temps – Dieu merci, il est déjà venu dans certains milieux – où l’on usera de la langue avec le plus d’efficacité possible là où à présent elle est le plus efficacement détournée. Comme nous ne pouvons pas éliminer la langue d’un seul coup, nous ne devrions au moins ne rien négliger qui puisse contribuer à la faire sombrer dans le discrédit. A la percer trou après trou, jusqu’à ce que ce qui se cache derrière – que ce soit quelque chose ou rien – commence à s’écouler au travers ; je ne peux imaginer de but plus élevé pour un écrivain d’aujourd’hui. Ou bien la littérature doit-elle rester seule dans les vieilles habitudes paresseuses abandonnées depuis si longtemps par la musique et la peinture ? Y a-t-il quelque chose d’une paralysante sainteté dans la nature vicieuse du mot, que l’on ne retrouve pas dans les éléments des autres arts ? Y a-t-il une raison pour que cette terrible matérialité de la surface du mot ne puisse être dissoute, comme par exemple la surface sonore, déchirée par d’énormes pauses, de la septième symphonie de Beethoven, de sorte qu’à travers des pages entières, nous ne puissions plus percevoir qu’un chemin de sons suspendus dans des hauteurs vertigineuses, reliant d’insondables abîmes de silence ? Une réponse est demandée. Je sais qu’il y a des gens, des gens sensibles et intelligents, pour qui le silence ne manque pas. Je ne peux que supposer qu’ils sont malentendants. Car dans la forêt des symboles, qui n’en sont pas, les petits oiseaux de l’interprétation, qui n’en n’est pas, ne sont jamais silencieux.
Bien sûr, pour l’instant, nous devons nous contenter de peu. Dans un premier temps, il ne peut s’agir que de trouver, d’une manière ou d’une autre, une méthode qui nous permette de représenter cette attitude moqueuse à l’égard du mot, au travers des mots. Dans cette dissonance entre les moyens et leur usage, il sera peut-être possible de sentir un murmure de cette musique finale ou de ce silence qui sous-tend le Tout.
Avec un tel programme, à mon avis, la dernière œuvre de Joyce n’a rien à voir. Il semble plutôt y être question d’une apothéose du mot. A moins que l’Ascension au Ciel et la Descente aux Enfers ne soient en quelque sorte une seule et même chose. Comme il serait beau de pouvoir croire que c’est le cas. Mais pour l’instant, nous voulons nous en tenir à la simple intention.
Les logogrammes de Gertrude Stein sont peut-être plus proches de ce que j’ai à l’esprit. Au moins la texture du langage y est-elle devenue poreuse, ne serait-ce, hélas, que par hasard, et à la suite d’une technique proche de celle de Feininger. La malheureuse (vit-elle encore ?) est sans aucun doute toujours amoureuse de son instrument, mais de la façon dont un mathématicien est amoureux de ses chiffres ; un mathématicien pour qui la solution du problème est d’un intérêt tout à fait secondaire, et à qui la mort de ses chiffres doit paraître tout à fait redoutable. Mettre cette méthode en rapport avec celle de Joyce, comme c’est la mode, me paraît aussi insensé que la tentative, dont je ne sais encore rien, de comparer le Nominalisme (au sens de la Scolastique) avec le Réalisme. Sur le chemin de cette littérature du non-mot, qui m’est si désirable, une certaine forme d’ironie nominaliste pourrait être une étape nécessaire. Mais il ne suffit pas que le jeu perde un peu de son sérieux sacré. Il doit s’arrêter. Agissons donc comme ce mathématicien fou ( ?) qui utilisait un principe de mesure différent à chaque étape de son calcul. Un assaut contre les mots au nom de la beauté. En attendant, je ne fais rien du tout. J’ai seulement la consolation, de temps en temps, de pécher bon gré mal gré contre une langue étrangère, comme j’aimerais le faire en toute connaissance de cause et intentionnellement contre la mienne – et comme je le ferai – Deo juvante.
Avec mes cordiales salutations Dois-je vous renvoyer le volume de Ringelnatz ? Existe-t-il une traduction anglaise de Trakl ?
Traduit avec DeepL.com (version gratuite)
9/7/37 6 Clare Street Dublin IFS
Dear Axel Kaun,2
(…)
It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might 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; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. Or is literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? An answer is requested. I know-there are people, sensitive and intelligent people, for whom there is no lack of silence. I cannot but assume that they are hard of hearing. For in the forest of symbols, which aren’t any, the little birds of interpretation, which isn’t any, are never silent.
Of course, for the time being we must be satisfied with little. At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words. In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All.
With such a program, in my opinion, the latest work of Joyce has nothing whatever to do. There it seems rather to be a matter of an apotheosis of the word. Unless perhaps Ascension to Heaven and Descent to Hell are somehow one and the same. How beautiful it would be to be able to believe that that indeed was the case. But for the time being we want to confine ourselves to the mere intention.
Perhaps the logographs of Gertrude Stein are nearer to what I have in mind. At least the texture of language has become porous, if only, alas, quite by chance, and as a consequence of a technique similar to that of Feininger. The unfortunate lady (is she still alive?) is doubtlessly still in love with her vehicle, albeit only in the way in which a mathematician is in love with his figures; a mathematician for whom the solution of the problem is of entirely secondary interest, indeed to whom must the death of his figures appear quite dreadful. To bring this method into relation with that of Joyce, as is the fashion, strikes me as senseless as the attempt, of which I know nothing as yet, to compare Nominalism (in the sense of the Scholastics) with Realism. On the way to this literature of the unword, which is so desirable to me, some form of Nominalist irony might be a necessary stage. But it is not enough for the game to lose some of its sacred seriousness. It should stop. Let us therefore act like that mad (?) mathematician who used a different principle of measurement at each step of his calculation. An assault against words in the name of beauty. In the meantime I am doing nothing at all. Only from time to time I have the consolation, as now, of sinning willy-nilly against a foreign language, as I should love to do with full knowledge and intent against my own — and as I shall do — Deo juvante.
With cordial greetings Should I return the Ringelnatz volume to you? Is there an English translation of Trakl?
Samuel Beckett, lettre à Axel Kaun, 1937, Disjecta : Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, Ruby Cohn (éd.), New York, Grove Press, 1984.
Beckett logoclast
« In a letter to Mary Manning Howe from 1937, written shortly after the letter to Kaun, Beckett suggests that his approach is the linguistic equivalent of iconoclasm: “I am starting a Logoclast’s League […] I am the only member at present. The idea is ruptured writing, so that the void may protrude, like a hernia.” Logoclasm, or ruptured writing, is related to what Beckett in the letter to Kaun terms “Gertrude Stein’s Logographs.”
Differentiating with approval Stein’s “nominalistic irony” from Joyce’s “apotheosis of the word,” he nonetheless still thinks that her approach to literature has not sufficiently shed its “heiligen Ernst,” its sacre seriousness. “Aufhören soll es.” “The fabric of the language [in Stein] has at least become porous, if regrettably only quite by accident and, as it were, as a consequence of a procedure somewhat akin to the technique of Feininger.” The problem with Stein, according to Beckett, is that she remains “in love with her vehicle, if only, however, as a mathematician is with his numbers.” The death of language, like the death of number to the mathematician, must seem to her “indeed dreadful.” Beckett differentiates his own method from both that of Joyce and Stein as a matter of “verbally demonstrating this scornful [mocking] attitude towards the word [höhnische Haltung dem Worte gegenüber wörtlich darzustellen].” Beckett calls this grinding of the teeth of language a “literature of the non-word.” Ending the letter with a remarkable summons: “Let’s do as that crazy mathematician who used to apply a new principle of measurement at each individual step of the calculation. Word-storming [Eine Wörterstürmerei] in the name of beauty.” In Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett’s first unpublished novel, he speaks of this introduction of the immeasurable or incommensurable into the number line as the insertion of a “demented” interval, a unit that violates unity. In other words, there is nothing to unify the story line, the development, nothing to rationalize the count, to render consistent the passage from 0 to 1. There is no story to tell and nobody to tell it, because there is nothing to provide the story or character with a measurable, countable unity. Both story and character have been atomized. Neither subject matter (the action or plot), nor the presence of the subject, i.e., the character, provide the unit of measure. »
« Horror and Hilarity in the Work of Samuel Beckett », Alexi Kukuljevic
https://www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/media/2023-17-11/alexi-kukuljevic.pdf
« Dans Dream of Fair to Middling Women, premier roman inédit de Beckett, il parle de cette introduction de l’incommensurable dans la droite des nombres comme de l’insertion d’un intervalle « dément », d’une unité qui viole l’unité. En d’autres termes, il n’y a rien pour unifier la ligne de récit, le développement, rien pour rationaliser le compte, pour rendre cohérent le passage de 0 à 1. Il n’y a pas d’histoire à raconter et personne pour la raconter, parce qu’il n’y a rien pour donner à l’histoire ou au personnage une unité mesurable, dénombrable. L’histoire et le personnage ont été atomisés. Ni le sujet (l’action ou l’intrigue), ni la présence du sujet, c’est-à-dire le personnage, ne fournissent l’unité de mesure ». »
Beckett, Stein, Feininger
This is the only extant reference to Stein in Beckett’s writing and it comes at a crucial point in Beckett’s development as a writer; a period when, as Mark Nixon argues in Samuel Beckett’ German Diaries, ‘there is [. . . ] a sense in which he [Beckett] was mentally shaping the aesthetic and creative direction his work was to take’ (Nixon, 2011c, 2). Unlike the work of Franz Kafka, where Nixon observes ‘there is no evidence’ (Nixon, 2011c, 50) of Beckett encountering his work during the 1930s, the above excerpt indicates that by the late 1930s Beckett had encountered enough of Stein’s writing to form a definite opinion of this specific aspect of her œuvre. Furthermore, it suggests that by 1937, dissatisfied with the latest work by Joyce, Beckett had begun to admire the work of an author not only removed from, but entirely at odds with, the Joyce circle. This is evinced in Beckett’s choice of Stein, the so-called Mother Goose of Montparnasse, as the artist whose aesthetics of writing (as he understands them) are close to his idea of the ‘highe[st] goal for today’s writer’; a significant statement, coming as it does in July 1937, less than two years before the publication of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Beckett’s identification with Stein’s work is, admittedly, a guarded one. He appears not to know if Stein is alive or dead – Stein died in 1946 – and refers to her as an ‘unhappy lady’ whose innovative use of language was developed ‘regrettably only quite by accident’ (SB to AK, Beckett, 2009c, 519). These comments indicate that Beckett was careful to avoid making too strong a connection between his own aesthetic and the work of Stein (her work is ‘perhaps [. . . ] closer to what I mean’). For a writer who, in 1931 apologised to Charles Prentice for the ‘stink’ of Joyce in ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’ and wrote of his desire to ‘endow’ his work with his ‘own odours’ (SB to Charles Prentice, 15 August 1931; Beckett, 2009c, 81), such a connection risked merely replacing the ‘stink’ of Joyce (a scent he was actively working to deodorise) with that of Stein. Nevertheless, Stein’s work is certainly closer to Beckett’s proposed ‘literature of the non-word’ than ‘the most recent work of Joyce’ which, Beckett notes in the same letter has ‘nothing at all to do with such a programme’ (SB to AK, 9 July 1937, Beckett, 2009c, 519). As pointed out in the annotated notes to this letter, Stein never used the term ‘logograph’ when referring to her writing (Beckett, 2009c, 521 n.8). The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term ‘logograph’ in its first derivative as a word ‘used erroneously for logogriph’ and in its second derivative as ‘a character or combination of characters representing a word’. ‘Logogriph’ is defined as ‘a kind of enigma, in which a certain word, and other words that can be formed out of all or any of its letters, are to be guessed from synonyms of them introduced into a set of verses.’ This definition is strikingly similar to what Wendy Steiner, in her analysis of the cubist nature of aspects of Stein’s work, aptly describes as ‘literary cubism’ (Steiner, 1978, 131):
For just as the cubists translated reality into geometric relations which were not only in harmony with the medium of their art but were also the principles governing that medium, Stein translated her subjects into grammatical categories with the same double relation to her medium, language. (Steiner, 1978, 136)
As Steiner notes, Stein frequently drew ‘explicit parallels between cubist painting and her own writing’ (Steiner, 1978, 131) and several of her works can be said to operate under the strictures of ‘literary cubism.’ 6 That Beckett refers to Stein’s work as logographic is therefore highly appropriate, as Stein’s technique of translating objects (and people) into ‘grammatical categories’ (Steiner, 1978, 136) is, effectively, the logographic representation of a word in – or through – other words. This analogy between logography and cubist writing is therefore useful in relation to identifying the ‘source’ text or texts from Stein’s œuvre that led Beckett to form this very specific opinion of her work.
In an annotation to Beckett’s equation of Stein’s logographs with the work of Feininger, the editors of Beckett’s letters classify Feininger’s technique as ‘cubist’ (Beckett, 2009c, 521n.8). This is perhaps an over-simplification as Feininger’s technique, like Stein’s, was more versatile than the ‘cubist’ label suggests. 7 His range was expansive and extended from German Expressionism to the (Weimar) Bauhaus, frequently displaying a synthesis of cubist and expressionist techniques. In his essay ‘Images of Beckett’, James Knowlson refers to Feininger not as a Cubist, but as an Expressionist painter whose work Beckett was ‘keen’ on and had encountered in the house of his uncle ‘Boss’ Sinclair in Kassel and later during his six-month tour of Germany (Knowlson, 2003, 59–61). Knowlson argues that Beckett’s personal diaries from his time in Germany ‘contain some of his most precisely formulated aesthetic judgements’ (Knowlson, 2003, 61). Beckett’s entry on Feininger, quoted in the following passage from Knowlson’s essay, is a prime example of these observations:
In the collection of modern paintings that he saw in Halle in 1937, Beckett was most intrigued by the unusual perspectives that he found in some of Feininger’s work exhibited there: ‘All about 1930, and technique perhaps less interesting than the out-and-out “plane” technique of earlier Feininger, of which some examples here also.’ (Knowlson, 2003, 89)
This passage helps explain the connection Beckett establishes between the procedures that gave rise to Stein’s logographs and the work of Feininger. 8 By definition, logographic writing involves the imposition of an unusual perspective on a given word in order to re-present it in other words. A reading of logography in the style of Feininger would thus incorporate the communication of emotional experiences associated with Expressionism. This synthesis between the planar and the emotional or esoteric presents us with a reading of Stein’s work that acknowledges Stein’s attempts at redefining words (through expressing them in other words) while also accommodating the private or esoteric nature of aspects of her writing. What initially appears to be an anomalous or offhand (‘The unhappy lady (is she still alive?)’) reference to Stein is in fact a significant, well-developed aesthetic formulation.
‘Ill buttoned’ : Comparing the representation of objects in Samuel Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26471216?read-now=1&seq=4#page_scan_tab_contents
- A vrai dire, je n’arrive pas à reconnaître que je « tombe » sur cet extrait de lettre dans une production récente de l’ECF, l’Ecole de la Cause freudienne, dont les positions vis-à-vis de la Palestine m’ont blessée mortellement. ↩︎
- Début de la lettre de Beckett à Kaun :
Many thanks for your letter. I was on the point of writing to you when it arrived. Then I had to go on my travels, like Ringelnatz’s male postage stamp, albeit under less passionate circumstances.
It would be best if I told you immediately and without beating about the bush that Ringelnatz, in my opinion, isn’t worth the effort. You will surely not be more disappointed to hear this from me than I am to state it.
I have read through the 3 volumes, have selected 23 poems and have translated 2 of these as samples. The little they have of necessity lost in the process can naturally only be evaluated in relation to what they had to lose, and I must say that I have found this coefficient of loss of quality very small, even in those places where he is most a poet and least a rhyme coolie. It does not follow from this that a translated Ringelnatz could find neither interest nor success with the English public. But in this respect I am totally incapable of arriving at a judgement, as the reactions of the small as well as the large public are becoming more and more enigmatic to me, and, what is worse, of less significance. For I cannot free myself from the naive alternative, at least where literature is concerned, that a matter must either be worthwhile or not worthwhile. And if we have to earn money at any price, let’s do it elsewhere.
I have no doubt that as a human being Ringelnatz was of quite extraordinary interest. But as a poet he seems to have shared Goethe’s opinion: it is better to write NOTHING than not write at all. But even the Grand Ducal Councillor would have allowed the translator to feel himself unworthy of this high Kakoethes. I should be happy to explain to you my disgust with Ringelnatz’s rhyming fury in greater detail, if you feel inclined to understand him. But for the time being I’ll spare you. Perhaps you like funeral orations as little as I do.
I could also perhaps advise you of the poems I’ve selected and send you the sample translations.
I am always glad to receive a letter from you. So please write as frequently and fully as possible. Do you insist that I should do likewise in English? Are you bored by reading my German letters as I am in writing one in English? I should be sorry if you felt that there might be something like a contract between us that I fail to fulfill. An answer is requested. ↩︎