The American Spectator : Brace Yourself

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Brace Yourself

By James Bowman from the December 2009-January 2010 issue

What in the world is bracing about despair?

"Beckett's despair is as bracing as ever." So, at least, says the Sunday Times critic proudly quoted on the marquee of the new production in London by Simon McBurney of Samuel Beckett's Endgame, which was first performed there in 1957. Mr. McBurney himself plays the hapless dogs-body Clov to Mark Rylance's imperious but blind and immobile Hamm. Miriam Margolyes is Nell and Tom Hickey is Nagg, the folks in the garbage cans. The effect of their efforts, if not exactly "bracing," is a powerful one, but the play is so minimalist that it is almost actor-proof. Yet I can't get that word "bracing" out of my head. What in the world is bracing about despair? It's a paradox, of course, but there is shame in such a paradox, an admission that we are indulging ourselves in a pleasure, or more than one pleasure, that once was, like pornography, forbidden -- namely, the narcissistic pleasure of self-pity.

And, as with pornography, at some level we still know that there was a reason why such things were once forbidden, which is why the shame attaching to them lingers on long after you might have expected the world at large to have adopted as indulgent an attitude toward the pleasures of the imagination as it has to other sorts of pleasures. It's not just the British who find despair bracing, but they seem to lead the world in this approach to it. A survey recently published in Britain found that the nation's favorite poet is the American-born T. S. Eliot. Something tells me that Eliot would not have received such an accolade if he were better known for the Four Quartets and his later, religious work than he is for The Waste Land -- which is another example, I suppose, of bracing despair.

It used to be that people read -- or listened to or recited or memorized -- poetry for its "sustaining" or consoling qualities. Even the barely educated of my parents' or grandparents' generation were likely to have by heart a poem like Arthur Hugh Clough's "Say not the struggle nought availeth" or William Ernest Henley's "Invictus." That, by the way, is the one that begins: "Out of the night that covers me,/Black as the pit from pole to pole,/I thank whatever gods may be/For my unconquerable soul." Now, it's the name of Clint Eastwood's new film about Nelson Mandela. The struggle for racial equality is the one non--despairing thing we're still allowed to feel inspired about, I guess. Otherwise, it's "April is the cruellest month" -- if it's anything.

At one point in Endgame, Hamm affects to pray, announcing of the silent God he addresses: "The bastard! He doesn't exist!" In 1957, the censor -- Britain still had such an office then -- wouldn't allow the play to proceed with that line in it. Beckett had to change "bastard" to "swine." It was okay to assert God's nonexistence but not (yet) to call Him a bastard for not existing. Naturally, Mr. McBurney's production restores the original language, whose paradoxical insult to One who is also supposed to be a cipher is presumably another example of bracing despair -- since it or something like it has been often repeated subsequently, and with the same childish pleasure in naughtiness that Hamm, if not Beckett, must have felt. It is, as I have written elsewhere, what informs the spirit of the Coen brothers' A Serious Man which, like Endgame, treats God's nonexistence as comedy, though the Coens, unlike Beckett, don't have the nerve to write proper tragicomedy. The god of their Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men was also a bastard, but he came a little uncomfortably close to not not existing.

Still, the brothers' quirky theology and good jokes are preferable to the lugubriousness of those who lack a sense of irony and whose atheism is an excuse to wallow in self-pity and -- its invariable concomitant -- self-importance. In the new British film about Charles Darwin, Jon Amiel's Creation, T. H. Huxley (Toby Jones) is made to say to Paul Bettany's Darwin: "You have killed God, Sir. And good riddance to the vindictive bugger." Huxley may have been an atheist, but I doubt that he would have indulged in such a vulgarism as that. This is the brash, unlettered, and distinctively present-day voice of John Collee's crudely moralistic screenplay which also has Huxley informing Darwin of a committee "comprised of" himself and others. So much for "The melancholy, long withdrawing roar" of the "sea of faith" as heard by Matthew Arnold. Now it's the Bronx cheer of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, the vogue for whose triumphalist atheism I take to be what lay behind the making of Creation.

A screen card at the beginning of the movie informs the viewer that "Charles Darwin's Origin of Species has been described as the -biggest idea in the history of thought. This is the story of how it came to be written" -- but of course it is nothing of the kind. It may be the story of how all those fashionable atheists came by their lack of religious convictions, but that is not the same thing at all. Charles Darwin, it's true, lost a young daughter named Annie (Martha West) -- who here gets into the spirit of things by telling her father that she likes a sad story because "it makes me cry" -- but to draw a straight line from his grief at her death to his loss of faith in God to his publication of The Origin of Species as a vindication of Huxley's militant atheism is a cartoonish over-simplification, the product, I think, of the current dramatic convention that grief is sacrosanct.

In Beckett grief, like despair, was comic, but the therapeutic culture has since taught us that the authenticity of raw emotion acts as an apology for any bad idea, or bad art, it may be supposed to produce. It goes without saying that we must believe in Darwin's unbelief because of the genuineness of the emotion which, so we must also believe, produced it. Nonsense! Yet some such idea is built into the culture itself today. It must also have been behind Lars von Trier's Antichrist, the sensation (not in a good way) of this year's Cannes festival. Once again, the central idea is the pornography of grief -- together with some pornography of a more traditional sort-conceived and presented to us in as much and as harrowing detail as possible as an excuse for a popular theologian's desire to be rude about God.

At least Mr. von Trier has a somewhat bigger idea than, simply, God's nonexistence. He is trying to explain how it is that some men seem to like torturing or killing women -- a subject that his own filmography (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) suggests is rather an urgent one for him. Antichrist begins with the death of a child to answer the birth of the child in the Christmas story, and in both a new world begins. But in Mr. von Trier's movie, it is not a redeemed but a damned world in which nature, in the form of a fox, tells us that "Chaos reigns" Actually, if nature tells us anything, it is that chaos does not reign, and the rationalist temptation proves too much for Mr. von Trier himself when he tries to explain the cruelty in human nature. But the pleasures of portraying the tortures that the dead child's grieving parents, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, devise for each other are like those of Charles Darwin's near-hysteria of grief in Creation: that is, a kind of compensating emotional immensity to fill the vast hole of God's absence.

The purpose here, as in other apocalyptic movies of the season, like 2012 or The Road, is ultimately political. The emotion is a cat's-paw for some rationalist, like Mr. Bettany's Darwin, to re-make the world in his own image and so to play God himself. Beckett laughed at this impulse in the joke about the tailor who, scolded for taking weeks to make a pair of trousers when God took only six days to make the world, said: "Look at the world and look at my trousers!"

But we've lost the knack of such laughter. Even so fine a filmmaker as Michael Haneke purports in his new picture, The White Ribbon, to explain the First World War by -- you'll never guess-the strict parenting style of pre -- 1914 Germany! In other words, it's our old friend, "repression."

That kind of thing is the oldest of old hat in the movie business, as in other areas of culture. "Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return," wrote Auden to explain the Second World War. It is a kind of intellectual pride, like Mr. von Trier's, in understanding evil, together with a facile political sense of how the evil might be abolished -- say, by not punishing misbehavior in children. When is despair not despair -- and therefore "bracing"? When it is the vanity of intellectual superiority.

About the Author

James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (35) | Leave a comment

Appleby| 12.14.09 @ 6:56AM

This is another example of the face of a world interpreted by rude children whose only desire in life is to poke a stick in the eye of their parents.

Someone told me many years ago that the primary sign of maturity was the ability to do the right thing EVEN IF IT WOULD MAKE YOUR PARENTS HAPPY.

Personally I cant wait until Generation Whine reaches maturity. I am tired of them popping up like whack-a-mole characters with their thumbs in their ears and their tongues out, yelling Ninny Ninny Boo Boo at every facet of the world that they think we made.

Alan Brooks| 12.14.09 @ 8:41AM

but the Derb's despair is welcome-- as an antidote to the Kool Aid that the Drs Pangloss want us to drink.

Alan Brooks| 12.16.09 @ 12:23AM

You confuse apocalypsism with despair.
Brave New World is not apocalyptic; as Huxley wrote:
BNW goes backward while trying earnestly to go forward. That is not despair. A reaction to BNW is not despair-- it is questioning mixed with caution-- the opposite of despair.
And the great Derbyshire is no spoiled brat, but he despairs more than a brat does-- though out of empirical concern, which is 180 degrees around the circle from despair and immaturity.

Alan Brooks| 12.16.09 @ 12:27AM

... Also, a conservative warns you about over-caution, as a priest warns you about sinning too much.

overcaution + sin = hubris

Alan Brooks| 12.16.09 @ 12:28AM

Also, a conservative warns you about UNDER-caution, as a priest warns you about sinning too much.

UNDERcaution + sin = hubris

Alan Brooks| 12.23.09 @ 4:40PM

If you'll scroll down, Appleby, I wrote that the Welfare State-- the practical meaning of what 'brat' amounts to, was started 13 years before any boomers were born; and was kicked into high gear when the oldest boomer was 19, or so.
You cannot blame the unborn or someone barely out of adolescence for the Welfare State.

Or for dependency itself.

Appleby| 12.14.09 @ 6:56AM

This is another example of the face of a world interpreted by rude children whose only desire in life is to poke a stick in the eye of their parents.

Someone told me many years ago that the primary sign of maturity was the ability to do the right thing EVEN IF IT WOULD MAKE YOUR PARENTS HAPPY.

Le Cracquere| 12.14.09 @ 12:51PM

Unfortunately, many of the worst specimens are on the wrong side of 60. If they should finally mature late in their dotage, much good it'll do the world they've already moulded over the last few decades.

Alan Brooks| 12.14.09 @ 8:53AM

There are many conservative reasons to despair: bad families, bad skools, bad neighborhoods.

Alan Brooks| 12.15.09 @ 6:55PM

bad drugs, bad porn, bad crime, bad entertainment...

Alan Brooks| 12.16.09 @ 12:13AM

Appleby is correct. But the welfare state was founded in 1933-- long before the Boomers.
LBJ set up the Great Society in '65, when the Boomers were at the eldest 19.

Steven Weingartner| 12.14.09 @ 12:37PM

"A Serious Man" is a re-telling of the Book of Job, in which God does exist, abeit problematically--at least from Job's standpoint, at least until the end of the book. God exists in "A Serious Man," manifesting Himself in the whirlwind (tornado at he end); however, evil also exists (as it does in Job), and therein lies the problem.

As for "No Country for Old Men," I don't know where Bowman gets the notion that God doesn't exist in that story. Again, as in Job/Serious Man, the problem is that evil exists, and that its existence is inexplicable, a mystery. But the dream recollected at the end of the movie by the now-retired sheriff (Tommie Lee Jones) indicates that evil is not all-powerful: it is dream in which the sheriff's father rides forth into the darkness ahead of the boy, bearing a torch to light the way--and thus dispell the darkness. Here McCarthy is telling us that our salvation amidst the seemingly all-encompassing darkness is to be found in part by looking into our past, which shines light against the unknown. This is not a message of despair.

"The Road" has a similar message. It is not a political movie; nor is it despairing. It is a story about the mystery of existence, and about the mysterious existence of evil--and, relatedly, the mystery of a universe that seems to be both indifferent to and a source of our suffering. As in "No Country," the father and the boy "carry the fire" to light the way and thus dispell the darkness. The book ends on a hopeful note: the last word is "mystery," and it is used in a context that indicates that good is also a mystery, both in the sense that it exists and that it cannot be destroyed by evil.

Bob Miller| 12.14.09 @ 12:38PM

An antidote to despair:
http://www.nachalnovea.com/Liv.....hdavid.pdf

Steven Weingartner| 12.14.09 @ 12:43PM

As for Beckett: the less said, the better. So, I'll say little: vastly overrated, vastly insubstantial. I liked him well enough when I was in high school and filled with ironic despair. But I outgrew that phase. I outgrew Beckett too.

Le Cracquere| 12.14.09 @ 1:00PM

Actually, Beckett is both overrated AND underrated: there's plenty of "there" there, but the fashionable adore him in SPITE of the moral seriousness that lurks under his foolery, and conservatives are tempted to take the fashionable at their word and overlook it.

Beckett reminds me of Ibsen, and each playwrights suffered a similar fate: both were genuine poets and serious men of moral & religious insight, but each inspired a generation of playwrights who adopted their dreariest surface elements and tossed aside the worthy parts at the core.

Steven Weingartner| 12.14.09 @ 1:38PM

Perhaps Beckett did possess moral seriousness. But that did not equate with being a good playwright or even a profound thinker. On the contrary, his thinking was decidedly shallow. Those who think it is profound do so because it is serious and despairing (if he had been serious and happy, he would have been consigned to oblivious). His plays are dreary and boring, in large measure because they combine seriousness with shallow thinking.

In sense he was as serious/shallow in his day as Maya Angelou is in ours. He doesn't comes across as poorly as Angelou because he is a despairing minimalist: fewer words mean fewer targets. But despairing minimalism is the salient trait of mediocrities. Not always, but usually, and in Beckett's case, always. The generation of playwrights who adopted the dreariest surface elements of Beckett (and Ibsen) were in fact adopting them in toto: beneath the surface, there was no "there" there.

Likewise, Beckett may have been a genuine poet, but being genuine does not mean he was a good poet. He wasn't. Nor was Ibsen.

Le Cracquere| 12.14.09 @ 1:59PM

Well, one of the most obvious difference between Beckett & Angelou is B.'s sense of humor. As Chesterton liked to point out, there's all the difference in the world between seriousness and solemnity, and those two exemplify the divide. In his best moments, Beckett is funny, ridiculous, and serious all at once, and not a whit shallow. Even in Angelou's best moments, her po-faced solemnity never comes within a light-year of seriousness.

If a reader or viewer looks under Beckett's surface and sees the same nothing that infests Angelou's poetry, I can't make him see it otherwise. I can only respond that--perhaps mistakenly--I have seen something, an often-profound something. De legendo non disputandum?

And a P.S. on Ibsen: thanks to hacks like Arthur Miller, we think of the early- and middle-period plays when we think of Ibsen. It's easy to come to your conclusions about the man if one thinks of "A Doll's House" and "Ghosts"; much less so if one reads "John Gabriel Borkman" or "When We Dead Awaken."

Steven Weingartner| 12.14.09 @ 3:01PM

I am familiar with Chesterton's quite. With respect to Beckett, I was referring to his seriousness. He is not solemn. My point being that he was indeed serious; and being serious has nothing to do with being a good playwright. I find his humor sophomoric, like his thinking. When I look beneath the surface of his plays I see nothing. Which is perhaps exactly what Beckett meant for us to see. Or to convey.

Steven Weingartner| 12.14.09 @ 3:01PM

Chesterton's "quote" not "quite." Sorry.

Steven Weingartner| 12.14.09 @ 3:04PM

Tony Soprano's mother summed up Beckett's worldview when she told Tony's son that "it's all a great nothing." But she was funnier than Becket.

Steve Weingartner| 12.14.09 @ 3:05PM

"Great BIG nothing." Sorry again.

Le Cracquere| 12.14.09 @ 4:30PM

As Beckett didn't say, "Tough crowd."

Alan Brooks| 12.28.09 @ 7:40PM

The end of social progress is reason to despair, for it means no progress in education, welfare, 'entertainment' (pigslop).

But if your primary goal is to sell conservative-- or in the case of the GOP, anti-conservative-- products, you've got it made. And no one will ever go broke underestimating taste.

Sam| 1.11.10 @ 10:14PM

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Daniel| 1.24.10 @ 2:47PM

Life is often meaningless in many ways and often quite cruel. We may ask ourselves, "what is the point of it all?". Samuel Beckett's Endgame is about "being" and I enjoyed it very much.
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Peter456| 2.20.10 @ 10:37PM

Movies should always be an inspiration for the society as a whole. Some of the movies set a good example for the society. I strongly argue against the comment that you have made against Origin of Species just because it was a great one. You can have a debate over that, if you would wish to. What you feeel should not be the opinio of others who see and hear.
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Rosaline| 3.3.10 @ 8:21AM

A previous commentator said "When I look beneath the surface of his plays I see nothing." Sometimes I feel we spend so much time looking and analyzing we forget to lie back and enjoy the book or play. Deep thought can result in false alarms and interpretations being 'established' which perhaps were never in the mind of the author.

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