Shane Weller

Nietzsche among the Modernists: The Case of Wyndham Lewis

The first phase of Nietzsche’s influence on European philosophy, politics, and literature began in earnest only in the last decade of the nineteenth century, gathering considerable momentum in the early decades of the twentieth century, and reaching a height, in Germany, in the early 1930s, when his thought was effectively appropriated by the ideologues of the Nazi Party, principally through the stewardship of Alfred Baeumler, professor of philosophy in Berlin from 1933 to 1945 and author of Nietzsche der Philosoph und Politiker (Nietzsche the Philosopher and Politician [1931]).1 Reacting against Baeumler’s reading of Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger delivered a major series of lectures on the philosopher between 1936 and 1940 at the University of Freiburg, culminating in a critical analysis of Nietzsche’s conception of “European nihilism.” Within the ambit of English literature, however, perhaps no writer of the first half of the twentieth century has more often been seen as under the influence of both Nietzsche’s thought and his style than Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). Indeed, for almost all commentators on Lewis’s oeuvre, Nietzsche remains an absolutely decisive figure, although the precise nature of Nietzsche’s influence on Lewis has tended to be conceived in two, more or less diametrically opposed, ways. On the one hand, there is the position exemplified by John Carey in his 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses. Here, in a chapter provocatively entitled “Wyndham Lewis and Hitler,” Carey identifies Lewis as essentially Nietzschean in order modernism / modernity

NOTHING TO BE SAID

One of the most significant ways in which much late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and philosophy may be distinguished from their predecessors is in their reliance upon the notion of ‘inexpressibility’ and the limits of the sayable. In this article, I seek not only to chart the history of this tradition, but also to reflect critically upon the use it makes of the concept of ‘the nothing’. For all their differences, in both Wittgenstein and Heidegger one encounters deployments of this concept in ways that determine these thinkers’ conceptions of language and literature. My aim here is to initiate a new critical reflection upon the fate of the concept of ‘the nothing’ in modern philosophy and literary theory.

From Language Revolution to Literature of the Unword: Beckett as Late Modernist

At the heart of the high modernist aesthetic lies a commitment to radical linguistic renewal—or what has come to be known as a ‘revolution of the word’. Beckett’s early work adheres in many respects to this high modernist aesthetic, which constitutes a radical response to late nineteenth-century language scepticism. However, from the late 1930s onwards, Beckett commits himself increasingly to what he describes as a ‘literature of the unword’, in which language is turned back against itself through forms of linguistic negativism. This chapter considers the specificities of Beckett’s linguistic negativism in relation to that of a number of other twentieth-century European writers, including Franz Kafka, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul Celan, to argue that their ‘unwording’ practices are characteristic of a ‘late’ modernism.

For a migrant art: Samuel Beckett and cultural nationalism:

This essay charts Samuel Beckett’s linguistic migration from English to French at the end of the Second World War, locating this within the context of other twentieth-century literary migrations. It then proceeds to identify some of the principal ways in which Beckett seeks to resist forms of cultural nationalism (Irish, French and German). The distance that Beckett takes from these European forms of cultural nationalism is reflected not only in the migrant status of his characters, but also in the way in which he deploys national-cultural references. The essay argues that Beckett’s aim in this respect bears comparison with that of the ‘good European’ as defined by Nietzsche. An important difference, however, is that in Beckett’s case the emphasis falls not upon cosmopolitanism but rather upon a perpetual migrancy that is captured above all in his movement between languages.

Decomposition: Georges Bataille and the Language of Necrophilia

One of the more striking features of modern European culture is that particular historical moments have been marked by a preoccupation with one of what, in the emergent sexological discourse, came to be defined as the ‘perversions’.1 For reasons that are at once sociological, cultural and economic, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed a growing concern with paedophilia, while the second half of the nineteenth century saw an increasing interest in cases of necrophilia, particularly in France. A decisive moment in the emergence of the latter preoccupation was the widely reported case of Sergeant Francois Bertrand (1824-1850), the so-called ‘vampire of Montparnasse’, who was put on trial in 1849 for having exhumed and sexually violated corpses in Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. Bertrand confessed to having fantasized about ‘annihilating’ female bodies, and his case was widely reported in medical journals at the time.2 The term ‘necrophilia’ was coined shortly thereafter, in a lecture delivered in the winter of 1850 by the Belgian psychiatrist Joseph Guislain (1797–1860). This lecture was later included in Guislain’s Lecons orales sur les phrenopathies, ou Traite theorique et pratique des maladies mentales (Lectures on the Phrenopathies, or Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Mental Illnesses, 1852), where the term ‘necrophile’ first appeared in print.

Pratfalls into Alterity

There would seem to be something about the comic that attracts cliche, and there is arguably no claim about the comic more cliched than that it ultimately resists analysis, always outwits its interlocutors, and is what Simon Critchley terms a ‘nicely impossible object for a philosopher’ (Critchley 2002, 2). Together with this paradoxical thought of the comic’s resistance to philosophy goes a no less universalizing insistence upon its resistance to translation. Critchley, for instance, is only repeating Paul Valery, among others, when he argues that humour ‘resists direct translation and can only be thematized humourlessly’ (Critchley 1997, 157).1 Humour, then — its difference from the comic being one to which we shall have reason to return — becomes the most absolute of idioms, the ultimate shibboleth. And yet, if (as Henri Bergson argues) cliche, as an instance of mechanicity in language, is itself but one form of the comic, then to say that the comic attracts cliche is to say that it attracts itself, that it doubles itself, feeds on itself, exponentially. As if to prove this very point, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) Freud claims that the notion of translation’s impossibility, and the unethicality that this impossibility imposes upon every would-be translator, has itself become the subject of a joke: ‘An admirable example of a modification joke […] is the well-known cry: “Traduttore — Traditore!” The similarity, amounting almost to identity, of the two words represents most impressively the necessity which forces a translator into crimes against his original [der Notwendigkeit, die den Ubersetzer zum Frevler an seinem Author werden laβt]’ (Freud 1960b, 33–4).

As If the Sex Mattered

Owing, no doubt in part, to the assumption that great art both expresses and addresses a humanity above and beyond sexual difference, the question of gender, and in particular the question of the value assigned to the feminine, remained at most peripheral in early studies of Beckett. Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, including Kristeva’s short essay in Polylogue (1977), it is only since the early 1990s, with the publication of a collection of essays and interviews edited by Linda Ben-Zvi (1990b) and a monograph by Mary Bryden (1993), that gender has come to occupy an important place in the interpretation of his works. These two volumes have established a critical consensus regarding the representation of women up to, and including, The Unnamable (1953). In the novels, short stories, and poetry produced during the first two decades of Beckett’s career, a prevailing misogyny is generally seen to present the reader with a stereotypical view of ‘woman’ either as ensnaring materiality — a disgusting corporeal heterogeneity that Beckett’s male protagonists and, in the postwar prose, his male narrator-protagonists struggle tragicomically to escape in the interests of a purely mental freedom — or, much more rarely, as the incarnate perfected.1

Translation and Negation

How is one to tell whether a given text is a translation or, more precisely, whether it is the result of what Roman Jakobson terms ‘interlingual translation’ or ‘translation proper’ (Jakobson 1987, 429)? If this is a question only rarely asked in translation studies, it remains of some importance despite its apparent naivety, since only when a text has been satisfactorily identified as the result of such a practice can one begin to analyse translation effects as distinct from other kinds of intertextual effect. Clearly, even a close resemblance between two texts in two languages is not enough to guarantee that the relationship between these texts is one of translation proper. Something more is needed. According to Jakobson, this something more is an intentional act of interpretation, across the limited difference between two historically existent languages — French and English, for instance. Now, there are two very obvious ways, one external, the other internal, in which this intentional act is generally indicated, and both of them bear upon the ethics of translation.

In Other Words: On the Ethics of Translation

i ‘‘translation proper’’: the interlingual and its others Is it ever ethical to translate? In other words – But already, as though it refused to await any decision concerning its relation to the ethical, translation of a kind is taking place here. For one definition of translation – one translation of the word ‘‘translation’’ – is precisely: in other words. According to Roman Jakobson, however, in his seminal 1959 essay ‘‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,’’ such a dispatching of words into other words is merely an instance of intralingual translation: ‘‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language.’’ And, as another way of saying the same thing in the same language, intralingual translation is, like intersemiotic translation (‘‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’’), to be distinguished from interlingual translation, or ‘‘translation proper’’ (‘‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other verbal signs,’’ the ‘‘other’’ here signifying the alterity of a different language). For Jakobson, then, ‘‘translation proper’’ takes place across a clearly measured difference, greater than that within any historically existent language, but less than that between the linguistic and the non-linguistic. It is precisely the possibility of any such rigorous organization of kinds or genres of translation (intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic) that Derrida aims to place in question in ‘‘Des tours de Babel,’’ his 1980 essay on Walter Benjamin’s ‘‘The Task of the Translator’’ (1923). Derrida’s deconstruction of Jakobson’s distinction between the intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic depends upon his successfully demonstrating that the integrity of any given language, of any intralingual space, is always already compromised. But even if one does not accept Derrida’s argument on the impossibility of linguistic selfidentity, even if one remains unconvinced by his examples of undecidability (the word ‘‘Babel’’ itself, or ‘‘he war’’ in Finnegans Wake), it seems nonetheless evident that translation of some kind (proper or not, ethical or not) is taking place not just between one language and another, not just between one sign system and another, but within any given language, not least one’s own language, every time the principle ‘‘in other words’’ governs what is being written or spoken. Paraphrase, as one form of interpretation, would be a subcategory of translation in this more general sense, as would commentary and indeed interpretation itself. The word ‘‘translation’’ would in fact be a translation of ‘‘interpretation,’’ and hermeneutics a theory of translation. shane weller

THE WORD FOLLY: Samuel Beckett's "Comment Dire" ("What is the Word")

last words of the last work of an œuvre ever more concerned with last things, not just with an end, but with a “last end”1 that seems, paradoxically, to be, or to become, or to have always been – but who will be able, ultimately, to say which? – as impossible as it is inevitable, as unachievable as it is unavoidable. “What is the word”: the last words of a last poem – but a poem mistaken by Samuel Beckett’s own English publisher for a work of prose,2 and thus a poem in and around which the question of the identifiability of the poetic arises even on the most mundane level. An old problem, then: what, if anything, would distinguish the poem, and this poem in particular, from any other form of writing, not just from what would go by the name of prose but also from those “various paradigms of prosody” which, according to Beckett in his 1934 review of his friend Thomas MacGreevy’s Poems, would masquerade as poetry?3 To ask how it is possible for a poem such as “What is the Word” to be so easily mistaken is, of course, to assume that the poem, or at least the poetic, should always be identifiable, that it should somehow declare itself, and not just through a tag (a subtitle, for instance) that could always, and indeed all too easily, be lost in transit. And yet, however reasonable, however necessary, such an assumption may be, might one not just as reasonably and just as necessarily ask not only whether the poem should always be identifiable, or even whether it should ever be identifiable, but whether the poem is at all? For what if the poem, and not least Samuel Beckett’s last poem, were perhaps that which neither is nor is not? What if it were that which constantly resists identification and nomination? What if, departing from itself as it constitutes itself, the poem were only ever something other – more precisely, something less – than itself? “What is the word”: this phrase, this last of last phrases, is also a title, and thus both the beginning and the end of the fifty-three-line poem4 that Beckett’s English publisher describes as his “final literary utterance.”5 Given this neatly symmetrical arrangement, this apparent identicality of first and last words in Beckett’s last work, it is no doubt tempting to see this poem as one last attempt to reveal, both thematically and formally, that (as Beckett himself wrote of Joyce’s Work in Progress sixty years earlier) the “vicious circle of humanity is being achieved,” in a “continuous purgatorial process” that, in contrast to Dante’s “conical” and culminating purgatory, is “spherical and excludes culmination.”6 It is just such a “complete identification”7 of origin and end that more than a few of Beckett’s commentators have identified as both the principal theme and the form of his works, the reality they are taken represent being