Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium and Beckett’s Novel Comment C’est How It Is

 

 

 

 

Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium

 And Beckett’s Novel

Comment C’est How It Is

 

One of the names that is often cited in respect to the works of Samuel Beckett is the Marquis de Sade, both Jean- Michel Rabaté and Danielle Casseli referenced Sade in connection with Beckett’s final attempt at the novel Comment C’est ( 1961) at the first How It Is Symposium organised by the theatre troupe Gare Saint Lazare Ireland at the Centre Culurel Irlandais, Paris, 2^nd February, 2018[1].  Yet, it would appear that to refer only to Sade in relation to Beckett’s work is to leave out another very important figure, and yet one who is so often neglected and yet who is absolutely indispensable in the notion of power play which goes on in the celebrated author’s work. The figure I am referring to is of course none other than Leopold von Sacher- Masoch ( 1836- 1895). The Sado-Masochistic element in Comment C’est, however, far from being a titillating novel of domination and submission in the usual manner involving dungeons, latex and the inevitable Saint Andrew’s cross, although funnily enough Beckett does make playful use of the latter in the work rather, his novel invokes the philosophical ideas of Friedrich Hegel as outlined in The Phenomenology of Mind ( 1807), the discourse of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, involving the hermaphroditic giants who attempt to overthrow throw the gods and so were punished by being split in two by the gods ( Beckett makes great play of the term scissiparity in his novel), and I shall also be obliged to refer to Gilles Deleuze and his reading of Masoch in terms of the historical dimension. Finally, Michel Foucault’s ideas on the fluidity of power will also have to be invoked as well as Alan Badiou’s ideas on mathematics as ontology. As you can see, power play in Beckett is a thoroughly exhausting game. 

One of the most seminal discourses in contemporary western philosophy is the what is often referred to as the Master & Servant dialectic which features in Friedrich Hegel’s most celebrated text The Phenomenology of Mind ( 1802). I remember being an undergraduate and my professor at the time, who was German, and who was responsible for introducing us to the works of Hegel in my final year had warned me that if I did not stop reading Lacan she would fail me utterly. That was enough to get me to put the great rehabilitator of Freud back on the shelf and to get engage properly with the famous Hegelian dialtectic, and thank God that she did scare me into reading this phenomenal thinker even if it were just to have me read this singular text which had such a profound effect on Karl Marx ( 1818-1883) and so is, in a sense, the bedrock of communism so much so that Stalin ( 1878-1953) himself was to write his final dissertation on Hegel, all of which underscores this current reading of Comment c’est How It Is ( 1961- 63) written by Beckett over fifteen years after the second world war. Indeed, the ripple effect of such a short text, five pages approximately, are simply astonishing making it surely one of the most important texts in contemporary philosophy and crucial to having a proper understanding of the following text. straight

So, in a nutshell, Hegel’s master and servant dialectic is quite simple to grasp, really. This is its beauty. What it proposes is that when two humans meet, Hegel is concerned with human subjectivity from a phenomenological perspective – meaning he attempts to render the human experience as objectively as he possibly can, confined as he is to the straightjacket of his own human subjectivity which he believes can only be breached by annihilating the ego. Looking objectively then at two human subjects when they first encounter one another, Hegel proposes that immediately there is a battle to the death ensuing, present day advocates of WOKE take note, in terms of the will. We can see already the origins of Nietzsche famous ‘Will to Power’ doctrine here. And what immediately ensues, according to Hegel, is battle ensues. If it helps to conjure an image of two intrepid warriors of old, Achilles and Hector say, or in modern terms the Predator and the Alien! But, you must understand that Hegel is really only interested in geist or spirit, so these two analogies are really just symbolic. Fighting ensues between the two agents and in time there is a victor and a vanquished. Here is were it gets tricky, as there is a complicity between the two. Hegel describes it as a kind of co-dependence on the two whereby the servant, or lesser of the two, in an ironic twist is now somehow really the master as the actual master, through the formers servitude becomes dependent on the servant for all of the services that they provide that they are in turn rendered slavish in turn. It is an ingenious discourse, and the origins of socialism can clearly be apprehended in the core of its teaching.    

Enter Aristophanes and Plato! So, one of the most celebrated philosophical discourses in the western world is Plato’s Symposium and in which Socrates and his companions are discussing the subject of love and each gives their definition. But the one definition that is, without a doubt, the most memorable, and I say this simply as it has since entered into common discourse over the centuries and in many cultures and corresponding languages traces of this discourse remain and are even used still to define love today, which when you simply stop to think about that, for a minute, it really is quite extraordinary. But then the tale that Aristophanes is extraordinary, as when his turn comes to define love he talks about the tale that Homer first spoke about in relation to Otys and Ephialtes who were the ‘primeval humans’[2] and who were hermaphroditic and so could self-replicate and thus multiply, and they apparently did so in such numbers that they became wayward and decided to take on the Gods in Olympus. Aristophanes paints this incredible image of these round creatures, containing both aspects of man, so male and female conjoined, who climbed up upon each others shoulders forming a ladder up into the sky so that they were able to storm the heavens, which they did and so a war broke out between these all powerful hermaphroditic giants and Zeus and his assembled army of Gods.

When the battle finally was over and the Gods were victorious, Zeus held council with the other Gods in order to decide about what should happen to the rebellious giants who had tried to overturn them and this is what Zeus decided to do in the end. He decided to split each giant in two and hurl the male element far from the female so that the two halves would be forever apart from one another and so, Love, according to Aristophanes is when the two halves finally find one another again and they mate and they become once more whole. This is Love according to Aristophanes. It is an extraordinary account, but what makes it even more extraordinary is the fact how this myth has entered into popular culture and language. For example, in English there is a very common expression which both young and old people still use today in Dublin and other English speaking cities and that is the phrase ‘my other half’. And it is transgenerational, this is another extraordinary thing about this phenomenon as it is not just old people who use the expression but middle age people and young people do also, so this is living proof that this ancient myth rings true to people and has done for generations and generations throughout the ages of time. Of course, it is the task of writers to renew the tale or tell it again just as Aristophanes retold it after Homer. Well, this is one of the wonderful things that Samuel Beckett does in his novel Comment c’est / How It Is.

One of the most immediate signs in the text is the term scissiparity, it is actually used in the extraordinary collocation ‘latrinal scissiparious frenzy’[3], which is but part of a lexicon of terms that are surgical in origin. For example, ‘imbrication of the flesh’[4], ‘cleave’[5] and then phrases such as ‘bodies glued together[6]’, the text is full of such allusions to Aristophanes myth all of which I will come back to, but before I do that I should like to present an entire fragment from the text which will immediately situate us where we want to be. This particular segment is extracted from part 2 of the book, with Pim.

 

heads together necessarily my right shoulder overriding his left I’ve

the upper everywhere but how together like two old jades harnessed

together no but mine my head its face in the mud and his its right

cheek in the mud his mouth against my ear our hairs tangled togeth-

er impression that to separate us one would have to severe them good

so much for the bodies the arms the hands the heads[7]

 

So, here is what could be described as the first complete frieze from Plato’s symposium illustrating and quite graphically Aristophanes description of the primeval beings that were joined together as one whole and who were later separated by Zeus as a punishment so that they could never come together again and storm the heavens. Noticed the very clinic language Beckett uses- ‘harnessed together’, ‘to separate us one would have to sever them good’ – to severe, this is a very specific verb, and once again rather clinical. There is something of the operating table in all of this[8]imbuing the text with a gruesome realism which is rather reminiscent of the imagery of Francis Bacon[9]. Here now is a description of the creatures that Aristophanes describes in Plato’s Symposium.

 

the primeval humans were round, their backs

and sides forming a circle, and they had four hands and

four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways,

set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two

sets of genitals, and the remainder to correspond. [10]

 

Again, a very graphic description which helps the reader to visualise even more graphically these extraordinary creatures, and, once again, this tallies very much with the extremely graphic descriptions that Beckett uses of the couples in his modern retelling.

 

we are one and all from the unthinkable first to the

no less unthinkable last glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh

without breach or fissure[11]

 

The almost forensic use of very scientific terminology that Beckett employs matches in content the extremely rigorous reasoning of the formal method of thinking, which Giles Deleuze was to single out so markedly as such a distinctive element of his style and which he described as ‘a relentless Spinozism’[12]as Beckett exhausts every possible variable in every context, and, this, for Deleuze, is the most distinctive feature of Beckett’s style of writing. The way he flips from ‘the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last’ in such a reflexive and such a relentless manner is merely the rigorous application of a forensic method, so it makes perfect sense to insert very elevated topic specific vocabulary to formulate the very distinctive lexical sets which the substance of Aristophanes myth, surgical incision, suggests. Indeed, the only difference, really, between Plato’s text and Beckett’s is that Beckett simply multiplies the vision further into a kind of nuclear process of atomisation creating a very disturbing apocalyptic vision of humanity that makes Michelangelo’s vision of Hell in the Sistine Chapel appear like a mere cartoon.

 

at the instant Pim leaves me and goes towards the other Bem leaves

the other and comes towards me I place myself at my point of view

migration of slime- worms then or tailed latrinal scissiparous frenzy

days of great gaiety[13]

To be continued... 

---

[1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50fe596ee4b0499abb0986a9/t/5df7a321148f414853332919/1576510271747/How+It+Is+Symposium+2018+-+The+Beckett+Circle

 

[2] Jowett, Benjamin: Selected Dialogues of Plato, Translated by Benjamin Jowett Revised and with an Introduction by Hayden Pelliccia, The Modern Library, New York, 2000, p. 229.

[3] Beckett, Samuel: Comment C’est How It Is and / et L’image, A Critical-Genetic Edition Une Édition Critico-Génétique, Edited by Edouard Magessa O’Reilly, Routledge, New York, First Paperback Edition 2016, p. 145.

[4] Ibid, p.185.

[5] Ibid, p.139.

[6] Ibid, p.117.

[7] Ibid, p. 119.

[8] It’s a rather curious thing but Eoin O’Brien when he is speaking about the town of Saint- Lô in Normandy, after the war, he writes how ‘it has a special significance in that it symbolises Beckett’s departure from Ireland and the severance of old ties and friendships.’ Beckett was working for the Irish Red Cross at the time as an ambulance driver and somewhat also playing the role of an interpreter, a point that I think is important in the context of the current discourse with its focus on medical terminology. There were 100 beds in the temporary hospital unit that was set up in what remained of the town after the terrible destruction of the battle for Normandy and Beckett would have been surrounded by both Doctors and Nurses during this time who would have been heavily involved. O’Brien states that ‘by Christmas 1945 the full Irish staff, consisting of ten doctors, each a specialist, 31 state-registered nurses, most of whom had specialist training, a pharmacist, pathologist and administrative staff, had arrived. By March 1946, 80 in-patients were receiving treatment, and over 120 patients attended an out- patient department.’ So, a considerable theatre of operations by any account, all of which would appear to be highly important in the context of the kind of language that Beckett is using in relation to the couples in Comment C’est How It Is.

O’Brien, Eoin: The Beckett Country, Samuel Becket’s Ireland , The Black Cat Press in association with Faber and Faber, Monkstown and London, 1986, p.327.  

     

[9] Bacon, like Beckett, in a curious parallel also was employed during the war in an official capacity, he was an air raid warden during the blitz and so would have also been privy to the sight of countless horrors that he had experienced also during the war.

[10] Jowett, Benjamin: Selected Dialogues of Plato, Translated by Benjamin Jowett Revised and with an Introduction by Hayden Pelliccia, The Modern Library, New York, 2000, p.229.

[11] Beckett, Samuel: Comment C’est How It Is and / et L’image, A Critical-Genetic Edition Une Édition Critico-Génétique, Edited by Edouard Magessa O’Reilly, Routledge, New York, First Paperback Edition 2016, p.185.

[12] Deleuze, Giles: The Exhausted, Translated by Anthony Uhlmann, SubStance #78, 1995, p. 3.

[13] Beckett, Samuel: Comment C’est How It Is and / et L’image, A Critical-Genetic Edition Une Édition Critico-Génétique, Edited by Edouard Magessa O’Reilly, Routledge, New York, First Paperback Edition 2016, p.145.