Hélène Cixous - Zero's Neighbour: Sam Beckett

Midway through Hélène Cixous's intense, strange, often terrifying and thoroughly necessary study of Samuel Beckett's oeuvre, Zero's Neighbour, she compares the first words the author wrote with his last, and finds that the former anticipated the latter to an extent rarely found in world literature. Here was a man who, in his twenties, mined the same dark vein as he did in his seventies, unearthing darkly absurdist, modernist ores. Beckett's fifty-year career essentially came down to a constant boiling away of superfluity, of excess, of ambiguity, until what remained was a pure concentration of man's dignity in the face of insignificance, time, meanness and disinterest. In the end, Cixous writes, “nothing has encroached upon him, nor anybody upon his rock, he remains the same giant hunched upon a pebble.”

Cixous's work engages directly with the text; she does not dryly review or comment upon it. Instead, she takes up the style of Beckett, his mannerisms and his conceits, and she applies them to her text in an effort to better understand his. The act of creating her own “Beckettese” is a tacit critical examination of the author's work, and becomes a remarkable addition to one's understanding of the original. This is not parody or satire but homage, a text created as though it were by Beckett, about Beckett, in an attempt to further elucidate the multiple meanings contained within Beckett.

This method of engagement requires a wholly different sensibility than what is needed when approaching an ordinary critique of a writer's work. Cixous' language is mutable, shifting organically with the ideas presented in an effort to best follow them to the kernel of Beckett's writing, the truth she believes is present in his text and which come at the terminal point of a long line of authors stretching back through Proust, Joyce, Dante, the Bible, Homer. To enjoy Zero's Neighbour is to enjoy Beckett; much in the same way many reviewers of the recently published French novel, Zone, tackled the immense, single-sentence novel with their own, single-sentence review, Cixous tackles Becket qua Beckett, simultaneously layering her text with a great deal of existential and metaphysical meaning, while also draining it of superfluity and excess in an effort to boil things down to their core.

You're not exactly short of inertia, bad will, awkwardness, bad faith – though there's a bit of all that, for 'vermin is bred from nothingness' (Kafka would say, Bernhard would say), which makes you fail, which does not even make you fail in everything: love, friendship, life as a parent, life as a child, occupation: without, no occupation, nobody – it is the lack of end, of end, and of end, doubly, one and the other, for both are linked, one makes the other, yes the end makes the end, the end of one makes the end of man, and the lack of end, thus of a limit, thus of finality as well, is like the lack of air and the lack of law, it's unliveable with.

Beckett's great readers, Cixous tells us, are “the greatly tired, the great explorers of those grey regions”. Readers who understand intimately the nightmares of Kafka and the pessimism of Bernhard, and who deeply recognise the Bible, Dante and Homer's imprint upon the collective world consciousness. Beckett, as is widely known, was an apprentice of James Joyce in his younger years, when the great Irish writer was older and his eyesight was leaving him. The two men, supremely self-educated, arrogant, and wholly devoted to literature as concept, life, faith and vocation, would sit quietly together, not speaking for hours, reading and scratching away at notebooks with their pens. Joyce, the master of excess, coupled with Beckett, the master of the pause, the withheld statement – what to make of these two men? Cixous sees many similarities in the two, even though on the surface they appear so different. For her, they are akin to two sides of the same coin or, perhaps more accurately, Beckett is the quiet melancholic night to Joyce's bustling, exuberant day. Or, more accurately again, Joyce is life while Beckett is the last gasp before death.

Laurent Milesi's masterful translation captures these textual effects quite dramatically; equally helpful are the notes sprinkled liberally throughout the text. Cixous' method has her insert, often in italics though not always, lines from Beckett's work which act as anchors to her argument or, sometimes, as ironic juxtapositions – Milesi's endnotes aid in identifying and explaining these, which add in enhancing the richness of the text without causing the flow to stutter. Similarly, Milesi handles well the “Beckettese” created by the author, compound words brought into existence as the text flows on, shifting to a type of mimetic vocabulary in an effort to properly convey multiple and disparate parcels of meaning. Cixous uses copious quotations, elisions, acts of inclusion and deliberate omission, juxtaposition and more, in an attempt to lift the text from the essayistic into the participatory. Her text requires an active reader, and in fact exhorts us to engage and become complicit in the ideas being presented. She is not satisfied for us to agree or disagree with her views on Beckett – instead we must live them or reject their life, in much the same manner that she herself approaches his texts. This exhausting method is ultimately quite satisfying, and serves to align her quite intimately with the author in a way that a laudatory essay would not. “How can I not love Beckett?”, she asks, and there's truth in that – this text could only be produced by a firm devotee.

As a writer, one of Beckett's primary concerns was the inherent futility and smallness of life, and how, at the end of one's days, there was nothing to do but regret and have it over with. When asked what was worthwhile about life, Beckett, then old and dying, responded, “Precious little”. This was not the bitterness of age but the distillation of all Beckett stood for. At twenty-five, he would have expressed a similar sentiment – though he would have used more words! In Waiting for Godot, in Molloy, in Malone Dies, in The Unnamable, in Endgame, in ... What Where, Beckett shows us, again and again, the futility and meanness of life, its fleeting pleasures, its limited positives, its petty successes, he highlights the erosion of all things, good and bad, by time, the vanishing nature of fame, fortune, and health, and he shows us, over and over, that all there is is what you currently see and have, and that it doesn't, won't and can't get any better than the drudgery of days spent in toil and nights spent dreaming of things that will never be. And yet, and yet – it is not an accident that Beckett's monumental trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable ends with “I can't go on, I'll go on.” For Becket, life and art were not about celebrating beauty or lamenting loss, but dignity in the face of adversity. “I can't go on, I'll go on.” is one of the great summations of a writer's career written by the writer themselves, and it is to this Cixous constantly returns. Literature (life) as she sees it is tired, endlessly so, but by enduring it we are able to retain the dignity that is unique to man, and that once lost, is gone forever. And it is so easy to lose. Constant engagement with the self is required, as well as an acute understanding of our intellectual forebears. Cixous, through Beckett, demands such activity and attention, sparing herself as little as Beckett spared his own life and works, in an effort to dredge the muck of life for the small shining pebbles of meaning that may – or may not – remain after centuries of interminable civilisation. We can't go on, but we'll go on; Cixous can't help but go on, though the path is unclear and seems ultimate fruitless. And Becket? – well, we know what he said.

Author	Hélène Cixous
Title	Zero's Neighbour: Sam Beckett (Original Title: Le Voisin de zéro : Sam Beckett)
Translator	Laurent Milesi
Nationality	French
Publisher	Polity
Published	2010 (English) 2007 (French)
Pages	85
Availability: ---Amazon (US)