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.1 Far from vindicating Cartesian method, Beckett concisely exposes its foundational contradiction: doubt is not merely certain but presumes certainty.2 Beckett’s typically antonymic jest encapsulates Wittgenstein’s refutation of Cartesian skepticism: “He can only begin to doubt who has learned something for certain” (Zettel 410).3 Doubt entails certainty; one would otherwise have to begin by doubting the very language in which doubt is expressed.“Who is certain of no fact could not even be certain of the sense of his words” (On Certainty 114).4Doubt and certainty are correlative concepts governed by implicit communal ratification as to what constitutes a claim at all (see On Certainty 105 and Grayling 2001: 315).Claims to knowledge are meaningful only where doubt is possible, but a stable network of tacit beliefs necessarily underlies doubt.What underlies and enables doubt, then, is language itself.Doubt follows belief and has an end.And beneath both is the unconfirmed and unarticulated “image of the world” (Weltbild) that constitutes “the prevailing background upon which I distinguish between true and false” (On Certainty 94).5 For Wittgenstein, Avrum Stroll explains,even the form the skeptic’s challenge takes—the linguistic format to which it must conform so that another can understand it—presupposes the existence of the community and its linguistic practices.The skeptic’s doubts are thus self-defeating.They presuppose the very existence of that which he wishes to challenge as possibly non-existent, namely the inherited societal background which stands fast for all of us.(Stroll 2002: 147–48)This is why, for all their figmentary shapes and molecular verbal residua, Beckett’s later texts deny the void from its very verge.In the first trilogy Moran and Malone lament the inability to submit their own existence to annihilating Cartesian doubt (Beckett 1955: 147; 1956: 6, 45), while in the second there abides an “unannulable least” (Beckett 1996a: 106), forms of life bewilderingly immune to final negation.“All gnawing to be naught.Never to be naught” (1996a: 115).What Wallace Stevens in the 1951 lecture “A Collect of Philosophy” calls the poetic belief “beyond belief” (W.Stevens 1997: 867) is in Wittgenstein a system of relations (Bezugssystem) that stands fast for all and surpasses justification (see On Certainty 105).6 This system guarantees the coherence of Beckett’s increasingly elliptical, compressed syntax and a lexicon without highly specific semantic content (see Banfield 2004: 16–22).Its emblem in Mercier and Camier, How It Is, and Act without Words II is the sack, inexplicably replenishing its bearers on the brink of terminal privation.It is a reminder of how much has to be believed before doubt enters a Beckett scenario.“Did it need to be known it would be known,” the fifth of the Fizzles declares (Beckett 1995: 236),7 not because it is a certainty but rather a “way of acting” (Handlungsweise—see On Certainty 143, 158, 161, and 233).On Certainty defends that phlegmatic tolerance for doubt typical of Beckett’s monologists.“(My) doubts constitute a system” (On Certainty 126).8 Even radical Pyrrhonian skepticism conforms tacitly to the system of relations it would dismantle.The conditions of doubt belong to a given “image of the world” (Weltbild) that is neither true nor false but the basis of all inquiry and assertion (see On Certainty 162).This image requires no more justification than as an “ungrounded way of acting” (On Certainty 110—see also 192);9 “it is our acting,” he notes, “that lies at the basis of the language game” (On Certainty 204).10 By the elimination of every mimetic superfluity, Beckett reduces human “ways of acting” to its nucleus in an ontologically unguaranteed consensus, prior to experience and opinion, that forms the hinge on which all doubt turns.The rejection of absolute skepticism does not lead to credence in foundations.There is no foundation, only definition, a self-consistent field of description (see Wittgenstein 2001b: 205ff.).Molloy accepts his ignorance and dwells mentally in the barrens “where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away” (Beckett 1955: 53).11 “At the basis of the founded belief lies the unfounded belief,” Wittgenstein states (On Certainty 253).12 Anthony Kenny calls such contingent foundations of inquiry “fossilized empirical propositions which form channels for the ordinary, fluid propositions” (Kenny 1973: 216).Wittgenstein calls them paradigms, as does Moran in Molloy: “Let us be content with paradigms” (1955: 236).13 For Beckett as for Wittgenstein, paradigms are all we have and all we need to have.In their later works Wittgenstein and Beckett pursue the limitations on doubt rather than those on certainty.They moderate a censorious, even puritanical suspicion of language into a grudging respect for its profligate vitality.From the mordant opening of his first published novel, Murphy—“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new” (1970c: 9)—Beckett arrives at the feistier formula of “Company”: “Then on from naught anew” (1996a: 45).That “anew” hovers between adjective and adverb, qualifying both verbal preposition and noun, thus negating and affirming itself in a semantic maneuver of Gestalt aspectual change.Privacy: “A voice comes to one in the dark”In Beckett’s later prose one is often alone, with words.Yet one is never alone with words.Language keeps company.The pathos of Beckett’s later narrators and protagonists inheres not strictly in their isolation but in the bedeviling embeddedness of their language in a world they would deny, and the embeddedness of their world in a language they cannot transcend.Doubt may be certain but language precedes doubt.Thus its threat to the cherished solipsism of characters for whom nothing is more vexatious than the perpetuation of the external world presumed by even the most annulling statements they raise against it.The third person is insinuated into the text, acting contrary to solipsism as Wittgenstein outlines in his refutation of Cartesianism—acting within and upon language.While talk proceeds, the “ipsissimosity” that Belacqua craves in Dream of Fair to Middling Women can only be thwarted (Beckett 1993: 113).Wittgenstein argues what Beckett shows, that the talking solipsist is a contradiction in terms (see On Certainty 61–65).As Beckett notes in Fizzles, solipsism affords scant “protection” (Beckett 1995: 230).The voice that spontaneously “comes to one in the dark” in “Company” may be a specter, a custodian, a self-projection, or a paraclete, but it is always first and foremost speech (Beckett 1996a: 3).This recognition animates the text that directly anticipates “Company,” How It Is.Here is another “who when he lends his ear to our murmur does no more than lend it to a story of his own devising ill-inspired ill-told” (Beckett 1964: 139).14 He is “alone in the dark” conjuring fellowship (99).15 Like the protagonist of “Company,” the voice recounts early memories of a sternly loving mother.The voice both summons society—“I have had company mine because it amuses me I say it as I hear it” (31)16—and recants it—“all imagination and all the rest this voice its promises and solaces all imagination” (79) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]