“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.
