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Modernism/modernity, Volume 19, Number 4, November 2012, pp.

637-655 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2012.0091

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/summary/v019/19.4.chesney.html

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Beckett, Minimalism, and the Question of
Postmodernism

Duncan McColl Chesney

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No

modernism / modernity
matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
volume nineteen,
Samuel Beckett, 1983
number four,

pp 637–655. © 2013
Art indicts superfluous poverty by voluntarily undergo-
the johns hopkins
ing its own.... Along with the impoverishment of means
entailed by the ideal of blackness…what is written, university press

painted, and composed is also impoverished: The most

advanced arts push this impoverishment to the brink of
silence.
Theodor W. Adorno1

This article addresses a simple question: Is Beckett a post-

modernist writer? Of course, the question is not so simple at all,
for it begs a number of other tricky questions that get only more
complicated as we address them: How am I defining modern- Duncan McColl
Chesney is Associate
ism and postmodernism? What does the post in postmodernism
Professor of Compara-
signify? And in any case, Beckett’s work does not suffer from not
tive Literature in the
fitting easily into either of these categories or periodizations, so Department of Foreign
who really cares? Yet all the same, it seems that if postmodernism Languages and Litera-
has any analytical value as a category, a style, or a “cultural domi- tures of the National
nant” applied to literature (in Fredric Jameson’s appropriation of Taiwan University in
Raymond Williams’s term), then Beckett is a crucial test case: He Taipei. He has a Ph.D. in
follows perhaps the most exemplary of prose modernists, James Comparative Literature
from Yale University and
Joyce, and produces a body of work which is very much unlike
has published articles
that of his famous predecessor and compatriot/co-exile, as well on Proust, Faulkner,
as that of the subject of his youthful scholarly interest (another Beckett, Coetzee, and
quintessential prose modernist), Marcel Proust. Beckett clearly, various topics in film
and not just temporally, comes after these modernists and their studies.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

638 moment. His defining war is the Second, not the First. His childhood was not that of
the fin-de-siècle; his abandoned homeland was the Republic of Ireland; his exile was
so famously marked by the change of language in order to achieve what he called “the
right weakening effect”2 in a clear attempt to escape the style of Joyce in the language
of Proust, and thus attain a style all his own. If post simply means after, then Beckett
is perhaps the first great postmodernist. But we all know it is not so simple.

Postmodernism as American avant-garde

It has been argued that postmodernism is essentially an American phenomenon.

According to Antoine Compagnon, the French understanding of the Modern derives
from Baudelaire and Nietzsche, and the “Baudelairean modern, melancholic and dandi-
fied, includes the postmodern as an awareness of the end of history and a refusal of the
modernist logic of overcoming, with its dialectic of progress that recasts old religious
messianisms.”3 Thus for the French (and we should never forget that most of Beckett’s
major works were written in France, in French), Beckett has never been considered
postmodern—but then, this tells us nothing about his relation to an Anglo-American
understanding of modernity. Things are perhaps more complicated in Germany, a
discussion of which is not relevant to the current essay,4 but let’s accept this claim for
the moment: Postmodernism is American. Why?
In one of the earlier yet most astute discussions of postmodernism, After the Great
Divide, Andreas Huyssen provides a compelling account of the development of the
American avant-garde in the 1960s. According to Huyssen, it is first of all essential
to distinguish the historical avant-gardes in Europe from modernism. The modernist
writers and artists followed the nineteenth-century development of l’art pour l’art of
aesthetic autonomy—deriving from Kant and Schiller but reacting against Romantic
conceptions of art’s organic relationship to nature and society and its (revolutionary)
political vocation (as, for example, in the Parnassians). Modernism was a reaction against
the breakdown of traditions and systems of belief resulting from the ascendancy of
the bourgeoisie, the industrial revolutions, urbanization, and so forth. The increasing
leisure time of a growing class produced a need and thus a market for art through
which the very notion of art, artist, artistic production, and consumption were changed.
The growth of this market was partially masked by the ideology of autonomy. Art was
released from its courtly, ritual, and religious roles in a breakdown of the system of
patronage, and thus the artist became free, his work serving only artistic ends. Yet at
the same time the value of his work was determined by a market and was understood
as an object of consumption. In radical contrast to this autonomization, the historical
avant-gardes (e.g., Futurism, Dada, Constructivism, early Surrealism, and above all
Marcel Duchamp) contested precisely this autonomy within the arena of art, and in
doing so, actively rejected the “institution art” and the society that produced it. The
avant-gardes in the 1910s and ’20s (following a politicized prehistory in the nineteenth
century) had as an enemy the institution of art as a tool of bourgeois legitimization, and
were thus political and anti-bourgeois through and through. As Peter Bürger puts it,
 Chesney / beckett, minimalism, and the question of postmodernism
“the [historical] avant-garde intends the abolition of autonomous art by which it means 639
that art is to be integrated into the praxis of life.”5 Two notes: First, while Dada prac-
titioners and the like reacted against “institution art,” they were not reacting against a
consolidated “culture industry,” since one did not yet exist as such. They were a reaction
against an ideology of art and the society whose interests it served. Second, one source
upon which to draw in reaction to nineteenth-century High Art was “popular culture,”
meaning the practices deriving from surviving popular traditions of song, visual art, or
artisanal tradition, and so forth.6
America, argues Huyssen, did not have an avant-garde element to its Modernism
since art was not a tool of bourgeois legitimization. On the contrary, in a way, art itself,
as such, was somewhat radical in America, or at any rate did not pose a threat to the
social status quo in the same way. The modernists, undifferentiated from a non-existent
avant-garde, thus served more or less to establish a High Art ideal. So it is only in the
immediate post war era, in Eisenhower America, that art is institutionalized, along with
a smug sense of comfort and international legitimacy in America, and it is against this
situation that the American avant-gardes react in the 1960s—that is, Pop Art, Op Art,
Minimalism, Performance Art, Conceptual Art, and so forth. However, this avant-garde
movement in America was different, claims Huyssen, in that, (a) the media and the
culture industry were consolidated to an unprecedented degree, and thus many mass
industrial products could be mistaken for “popular culture” in the older sense of the
term;7 and (b) in the climate of the Cold War (McCarthyist silencing of the organized
left, among other issues), these movements had no coherent politically adversarial
orientation. “While postmodernism [that is, the American avant-garde] rebelled against
the culture and politics of the 1950s, it nevertheless lacked a radical vision of social
and political transformation that had been so essential to the historical avant-garde.”8
Avant-garde art sought to eliminate the distance between art and life, by transform-
ing both (for example, Russian Constructivism, while it lasted, or Surrealism). But,
“rather than aiming at a mediation between art and life, postmodernist experiments
soon came to be valued for typically modernist features such as self-reflexivity, imma-
nence, and indeterminacy.” Thus “postmodernism was in danger,” according to Huys-
sen, “of becoming affirmative culture right from the start.”9 Pop artists, most notably
Andy Warhol, were trying to eliminate the distance between art and popular culture,
and thus between art and life, in some more or less ironic sense. But what were these
specimens of popular culture, these Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyns and the like,
if not mass-produced consumerist products in the service of capitalist expansion, or
rather, their images: the spectacle (of the commodity) as commodity? There is only so
far a little irony about this identity between art and the commodity (that is, the market)
can take you. In the end, art—if it still exists—can have almost no meaning except,
at best, that little bit of irony, and at worst, pure affirmation of that state of affairs in
exercises in narcissism (the artist as media star), in the expansion of the art industry
and rising profits from art, in ’70s drug culture, and so forth.
“The problem with postmodernism,” concludes Huyssen in a now-familiar thesis,
“is that it relegates history to the dustbin of an obsolete épistémè, arguing gleefully that
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

640 history does not exist except as text, i.e., as historiography.”10 The critical element of
thought born of history and its narratives is lost. And the “Great Divide” between High
Art and mass culture (still non-contemporaneous feudal culture, or kitsch), essential
to narratives of modernism, is no longer relevant to the postmodern. The relation to
the historical avant-garde is established here, and the difference as well. America’s
avant-garde is Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and so forth, and this is also the
onset of postmodernism.
If postmodernism is America’s depoliticized avant-garde moment, then it seems all
the more irrelevant to Samuel Beckett. However, one of the first great proponents and
ideologists of postmodernity, Ihab Hassan, virtually defined the term around the work
of Beckett in the 1967 book The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller & Samuel Beckett,
and subsequently in The Dismemberment of Orpheus (1971, 1982) and the essays in
The Postmodern Turn (1987), some of the key critical texts of postmodernism. In a
list of dichotomies, Hassan tries to characterize postmodernism in the “Postface” to
the second edition of Orpheus in 1982, all the while maintaining a sort of differentia-
tion between the avant-garde and the modern related to what I have just discussed.
His catchword for postmodernism is, at this point, “indeterminance,” a mix between
indeterminacy and immanence, the ultimate effect of which is “open, playful, optative,
provisional (open in time as well as in structure or space), disjunctive, or indetermi-
nate forms, a discourse of ironies and fragments, a ‘white ideology’ of absences and
fractures, a desire of diffractions, an invocation of complex, articulate silences.”11 On
the contrary, modernist works were defined by determinacy, form, purpose, design,
hierarchy, mastery, presence, metaphysics, and so forth. If we grant that there is le-
gitimacy and coherence to all of these qualities being subsumed under a concept or
category of the postmodern (and the modern), we are still left with the fundamental
question: Why? What has led to this breakdown? Hassan does not suggest a cause,
not out of some putative post-structuralist questioning of causality, but more because
it wasn’t clear to him in 1982.

Greenberg’s Modernism

Without going further into a sketch of the now well-known history of the postmodern,
I want to go back to the liminal moment around 1960 when the American avant-gardes
developed into what will be called by so many “postmodernism.” However, rather
than referring to the Duchamp-Cage-Warhol axis,12 I want to focus on exasperation
and exhaustion, “apocalypse by reduction,”13 and the other great art movement of the
’60’s: Minimalism.
As early as 1939 Clement Greenberg had expressed his influential account of mod-
ernism (or what he calls “avant-garde”) in the article “Avant-garde and Kitsch.” Here
he first discussed the genesis of the abstract in the inevitable move of modern artists
toward reflection on the essential materials of their various media, in an imitation of
“the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves.”14 More clearly stated
sixteen years later:
 Chesney / beckett, minimalism, and the question of postmodernism
It seems to be a law of modernism—thus one that applies to almost all art that remains 641
truly alive in our time—that the conventions not essential to the viability of a medium be
discarded as soon as they are recognized. The process of self-purification appears to have
come to a halt in literature simply because the latter has fewer conventions to eliminate
before arriving at those essential to it.15

Tabling this comment about literature and concerning ourselves with painting, Green-
berg’s flatness thesis comes in here: “flatness alone [is] unique and exclusive to pictorial
art,” he writes in 1960.16 Thus Cubism rather than Surrealism is the legitimate Modern
Painting, as is its extension into Abstract Expressionism. Another interesting assertion
from that article: “The essence of Modernism lies…in the use of characteristic methods
of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order
to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”17 Modernism as self-critique,
autonomy, purity, and (formal) competence.
Again I seem somewhat far from Beckett, but the wonder years of Jackson Pollock
(1947–1953), as well as the first triumphs of Abstract Expressionism in Barnett Newman
and Mark Rothko in the late ’40s, correspond exactly, though unrelatedly, to Beckett’s
tremendous “frenzy of writing” (as Knowlson, citing Beckett himself, dubs the period
1946–53)18 that produced the Nouvelles, the Trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone meurt,
l’Innommable), and En attendant Godot. So too do related developments in the visual
arts—and Beckett was a keen amateur of the visual arts—in Europe and the European
tradition: works and writings by Lucio Fontana, Joseph Albers, Alberto Burri, Yves
Klein, and, in France, the American Ellsworth Kelly. Moreover, my reason for men-
tioning Greenberg’s famous thesis is a recent and very powerful reading of Beckett
which, though it makes no reference to Greenberg, presents a compelling reading of
Beckett in precisely this light: Pascale Cassanova’s Beckett l’abstracteur (1997), recently
published in English translation as Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution
(2006). Dismissing a certain strand of Beckett criticism in a few pages, Casanova argues
that Beckett is the writer who realizes literary abstraction (equivalent to Greenberg’s
modernist imperative, but here happening contemporarily rather than earlier). And
she focuses not on the most famous plays (Godot, Fin de Partie, and Happy Days), nor
on the great four-novel sequence (Molloy through Comment C’est), and certainly not
on the English-language novels, but on the later prose works, culminating in Beckett’s
last masterpiece, Worstward Ho (1983), which she claims

is not the evocation of a nihilistic stance or the representation of ontological tragedy, but
a kind of ultimate poetic art: Beckett delivers his theory of literary abstraction in practice
and elaborates an abstract text at the very point when he explains how he writes it.19

Worstward Ho is a “pure object of language which is totally autonomous.”20 Without

going further into Casanova’s exhilarating argument, it is clear that she has come up with
a radically new way of understanding Beckett, and that she places him firmly within a
tradition of modernist purism or self-purification. And this form of purism in Beckett
is certainly a form of minimal or minimalizing art, which is not (yet) to say minimalist,
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

642 but, as Carla Locatelli for example has explored, “subtractive” in method;21 a search, in
Beckett’s words, for the “meremost minimum”22 of representation, of art. What lacks in
Casanova (as in Locatelli) is a good account of why this happens historically, in a broader
sense than merely literary history, about which she indeed has much of interest to say.

Beckett and Painting

Beckett’s own personal interest in painting and the visual arts is well known; equally
well known to Beckett scholars is that none of the artists I have just mentioned were
celebrated by Beckett, if he even knew of their existence. Beckett’s writings on art
and artists, both the pieces collected in Disjecta and the discussions, primarily with
Tom MacGreevy, that we see in the letters, are fairly broad in range, but engage a very
different set of artists than the up-and-coming New Yorkers whom Greenberg would
celebrate and who would become part of the famous shift of the center-of-gravity of
the art world from Paris to New York, or their European counterparts that I mentioned
above.23
Beckett’s art knowledge was not “learnèd” or scholarly, but empirical, the fruit
of “tramping unweariedly through museums and haunting exhibitions”24 in Dublin,
London, Paris, and particularly across Germany in the winter of 1936–7. Beckett
seems to have had good historical taste, but more interesting here is his home-grown
appreciation of, and strong opinions about, contemporary art as famously expressed in
the three “dialogues” with Georges Duthuit of 1949. The contemporaries most highly
celebrated by Beckett in his critical writings and letters are certainly Bram van Velde
and Jack B. Yeats, in addition, perhaps, to Klee, Munch, Karl Ballmer, Braque, and a
few others. He has more ambivalent feelings about Picasso, Matisse, Rouault, Bonnard,
Mondrian, Kandinsky, and others, for reasons pertaining to his definition of modern
painting articulated in “Peintres de l’empêchement”: “le premier assaut donné à l’objet
saisi, indépendamment de ses qualités, dans son indifférence, son inertie, sa latence....”25
The indifference of the object of the painting, as a pole of the philosophico-artistic
relation of subject and object, is key here, and accordingly Beckett expresses a sort of
wariness of “abstracteurs de quintessence,” including Mondrian, Lissitzky, Malevich,
and Moholy-Nagy, who in their different ways, and in different periods, abandon the
representational object altogether. Beckett also eliminates surrealists from his definition,
since they are less concerned with the relation to the object than with the relationship
among conventional and unconventional objects (“questions de répertoire”). Beckett
seems to insist that a sort of abstraction occur in painting, from the given object to
the indifference of object, but that for this to happen, an object must in some sense
remain; thus his rejection of pure abstraction. Indeed, as Vivian Mercier suggests, much
of Beckett’s enthusiasm for contemporary art revolves around Expressionism (includ-
ing Fauvism).26 This also seems true in the interest he communicates to MacGreevy
regarding the Brücke group (particularly Nolde, if less so Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner,
and Heckel) and related artists, above all Ballmer and Willem Grimm, during his tour
of Germany in 1936–7.27 Beckett’s concern is thus with the interior relationship, within
 Chesney / beckett, minimalism, and the question of postmodernism
the artist, to the world of objects, filtered through an often obsessive concern “with his 643
expressive possibilities, those of his vehicle, those of humanity.”28
In any case, painting as a matter of expressive vocation, to take terms quite literally,
is central to Beckett’s understanding of art in general, as in the famous statement in the
dialogue on Pierre Tal Coat where he speaks of an art that prefers, instead of “going a
little further down a dreary road,” rather “the expression that there is nothing to express,
nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no
desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”29 The quotation is famous,
perhaps too much so. What it means is quite complicated. Why is there nothing to
express? Because there is nothing new under that sun which, having no alternative,
shines on, all the same?30 How has the painter no means or power to express when
everything from easels and brushes to ceramic urinals is ready to hand? And what do
desire and obligation have to do with all this?
To answer these questions, assuming, despite the tone of the dialogues, that Beckett
is being quite serious in stating his position, it is necessary to draw back a bit and think
more generally about the situation of modern art. A good framing of the narrative of
modernity in which I want to place Beckett, along with certain of his contemporary
visual artists, is provided by J.M. Bernstein in his recent book on modern art, Against
Voluptuous Bodies. According to Bernstein, “Modernism is modern art’s self-conscious-
ness of itself as an autonomous practice.”31 This autonomy, however, is not exactly the
triumph it might have seemed to nineteenth-century priests of art for art’s sake, but
“a consequence and so an expression of the fragmentation and reification of modern
life.”32 So far, this is a well-known story. But Bernstein, following Adorno, wants to
be much clearer about what is lost over the course of the era of reason triumphant,
through the industrial revolutions, mass migrations and urbanization, the loss of com-
munal and spiritual traditions—in short, the process of disenchantment and alienation
that we call modernity. “What has been excised from the everyday is the orientational
significance of sensory encounter, sensory experience as constitutive of conviction and
connection to the world of things.”33 In response to the triumph of abstract rationaliza-
tion in science, in the market, in the organizational structures of modern work, life,
and culture—whereby, according to the argument of the Dialectic of Enlightenment,
rational control has reached an extreme and regressed back to myth—art’s task is to
recuperate or rescue particular, embodied experience, prior to its domination and
conceptualization by instrumental reason and “identity thinking” [Identitätsdenken].34
Skipping back to the issue of the artist’s relationship to the object, that is, the ques-
tion of realism and its alternatives, I again cite Bernstein, who contends that “realism
is not primarily a matter of making likeness of the world but a complex matter of the
fitness of the wholly human powers of art in relation to a particular, human, and secu-
lar social world.” He continues, “Modernism, as the forsaking of realism, is hence the
record of the sorrow of the world, its lack of human worldliness. Only this explains why
modernism must be an art of failure….”35 A rejection of realism; sorrow and failure; a
misfit between man and world, or a world of men as misfits: Clearly we are approach-
ing the world of Samuel Beckett.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

644 Beckett’s world, or worlds, is of course ours and not ours, Ireland and France as
much as anywhere/nowhere. It is so as a matter of necessity, all fictional worlds be-
ing secondary ontologies with greater or fewer points of salience that map onto our
(primary) lived worlds.36 But what stands out as most characteristically “Beckettian”
in this respect is a minimalist reduction of recognizable elements (settings, objects,
characteristics), which opens his works onto a greater domain of pertinence to ours,
while rendering interpretation almost always impertinent because it always fills in the
gaps37 with unwarranted external material from our worlds, expressing our concerns.
This is one important aspect of Beckett’s peculiar, minimal, elliptical style, and of its
difficulty of interpretation.
For Adorno, modernist art like Beckett’s is a response to the situation of modernity,
itself a product of the dialectic of enlightenment whereby sensuous particularity has
been sacrificed to the abstract universal. However, the proper response to this sacri-
fice is not saturation in sensuous particularity (which, ideologized and technicized, is
precisely what we get through Technicolor, Dolby sound, digital 3-D computer imag-
ing, and so forth); that is, not the particular but its simulacrum. The right response is
rather the dark truth of the poverty of experience offered up unwaveringly (as in the
Adorno epigraph). This is Beckett’s “art unresentful of its insuperable indigence.”38
From this understanding come the minimal abstractions of Beckett’s great works, but
also his celebration of visual art that realizes the modern impossibility of realism and
elaborates this impossibility as a subjective relation to thingness (choseté), as resistance
of the medium and ultimately as a questioning of (artistic) subjectivity.
In this context, if we return to the famous statement in the “Three Dialogues,” we can
understand better the expressive aporia. The artist has no lyrical or organic connection
to nature, to his fellow men, or even to his own self to which he can give expression.
His tools—traditional forms, the very stuff of his art—have revealed themselves to be
impotent. Thus, if he has any sense at all, he has no desire to do this, to undertake the
expression he feels compelled to. Why compelled? Here Beckett honestly responds, “I
don’t know.” The answer is: because he is an artist. Is it genetic, or some psychological
imbalance or mania? Who knows? But as a man who feels existentially that his vocation
is artistic expression (rather than quantity surveying or teaching French, for example),
but is also convinced that he has nothing at his disposal to help him realize this urge,
his choice is to go on, despite impossibility, and to fail “as no other dare fail.”39
In Bernstein’s account, Abstract Expressionism is an unsurpassed pinnacle and the
end of modernist painting because it achieves an “unowned” sensuous particularity, a
non-subjective expressiveness40 that achieves “meaning beyond or without discursive
redemption.”41 I think Beckett could certainly have appreciated this. Indeed, as Vivian
Mercier suggests, Bram van Velde’s work advances, from more Expressionist work in
the 1920s, toward a sort of overlap with Abstract Expressionism from the late 1930s
on. I am not aware of Beckett’s knowledge of this quintessentially American modern-
ist movement, but it is certainly kindred in its concerns with van Velde’s work, as with
Beckett’s own.42 However, I am not interested in establishing a link between Beckett’s
aesthetic and that of the Abstract Expressionists except insofar as both can be related
to the general problem brought out most clearly in debates around Minimalism.
 Chesney / beckett, minimalism, and the question of postmodernism
Minimalism 645

In strict art historical terms, Minimalism refers primarily to “sculpture or three-

dimensional work made after 1960 [or rather, in the 1960s], that is abstract—or even
more inert visually than ‘abstract’ suggests—and barren of merely decorative detail, in
which geometry is emphasized and expressive technique avoided.”43 Minimalism—or
minimalisms—“challenged prevailing aesthetic forms and served to propel a redefini-
tion of the ‘object status’ of a work of art into conceptual terms as [artists] redefined
the structure, form, material, and production of the art object, as well as its relationship
to space, other objects, and the spectator.”44 The style has its origins in Suprematist
(e.g., Malevich), De Stijl (e.g., Mondrian), and Constructivist (e.g., Tatlin, Rodchenko)
abstract painting and sculpture, and is associated with a number of key artists: those
focused on geometrical, non-expressive work often in industrial materials like Donald
Judd, Tony Smith, and Ronald Bladen up to Richard Serra and beyond; and those de-
riving more obviously from Duchamp, focused on the indistinctness between art and
normal or found objects, like Carl Andre and Dan Flavin, as well as others who do not
fit so well into this distinction, notably: Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Sol LeWitt.45
More broadly speaking, minimalism is “a movement, primarily in postwar America,
towards an art—visual, musical, literary, or otherwise—that makes its statement with
limited, if not the fewest possible, resources.”46 This definition allows Edward Strickland
(a musicologist) to link together minimal trends in painting, sculpture, music, poetry,
and prose in an overall cultural movement, an interpretative move with which I am
inclined to agree. But the application of the term “minimalism” to literature, while
compelling in response to certain contemporary and subsequent works by nouveaux
romanciers as well as a certain American tradition, has not been extensively developed.
It is generally defined as “a poetics that holds that spareness, tautness, understatement,
and reduction are emblematic of poetic authenticity.”47 As far as prose goes, the only
example given in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is Samuel
Beckett (although more general discussions, for example Strickland’s, often mention
Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others).
Beckett’s style is certainly spare, taut, and reduced—or rather, is characterized by
a process of becoming ever sparer, tauter, and more reduced over the course of forty-
odd years after the purgative madness of Watt (finished 1945, published 1953) up to
“Stirrings Still” (1988) and the other final pieces. Indeed, as Locatelli discusses, the last
third of Beckett’s career is characterized not only by subtraction and reduction, but by
self-reflexivity about this process of reduction in the works themselves. For example
(one can chose almost at random), “Comme tout serait simple alors. Si tout pouvait
n’être qu’ombre. Ni être ni avoir été ni pouvoir être. Du calme. La suite. Attention.”48
The meta-commentary rushes in to control the abstraction at the point of its approach
to nothingness—a control most masterfully staged in Worstword Ho. Prior to this,
Beckett had long exercised a practice of aesthetic self-denial, of conventional elements
of drama and prose fiction, or rather (since such elements as character, setting, plot,
and so forth cannot be entirely eradicated) of their plausibility or believability. As is
well known, Beckett will not allow “suspension of disbelief” but rather invites disbelief
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

646 by drawing attention to artificiality, but it is crucial to see how this self-reflexivity is
motivated, or at least abetted, by the minimalizing reduction. Fin de partie/Endgame
provides examples that are typical. When Hamm says “A moi…Ça avance…” / “Me to
play…we’re getting on…”,49 this is a meta-theatrical comment which fills a void created
by abstraction or subtraction of a hitherto seemingly crucial dramatic element: plot.
The same goes for Clov’s famous remark (and reassurance to the audience): “Quelque
chose suit son cours” / “Something is taking its course.”50 The minimalism of plot and
the self-reflexivity go hand in hand. The same can be said for character: “Mais vive-
ment la saisir là où elle s’y prête le mieux” / “But quick seize her where she is best to
be seized”;51 for setting: “Imagination dead imagine. A place, that again. Never another
question. A place, then someone in it, that again”;52 and of course, for meaning: “What
is it meant to mean?”53 The famous and comic self-reflexive commentary of Beckett’s
narrators and dramatic characters is doubtless not only a result of this minimalism,
but is certainly interrelated.
Whatever its general applicability, minimalism as a critical or stylistic term was
first developed with respect to sculptural or three-dimensional art in the ’60s and in
what will be known as a postmodern interpretation. As Peter Schjeldahl recalls of
his experience in the ’60s, “here was an art (was it art?) that existed in relation to me
and that I, in a sense, created.”54 This is what Greenberg protégé Michael Fried will
condemn early on as the theatricality of the “literal object,” the modernist imperative
of renouncing theatricality, the art object’s indifference to the subject.55 Theatrical art
is dialogic and spatial; meaning is given by the perceiver in the encounter within the
specific exhibition space because the object itself has no meaning; “the work and the
situation it creates…exhausts itself in its effect on the beholder.”56 Thus we see the
confluence of Cage, Rauschenberg, and the Black Mountain School with Minimal
Art towards aleatory performance—art without any regulative criteria of value. For
Kantians like Fried and Greenberg, this development is a disaster, and ultimately as
foreign to the aesthetic as, say, gastronomic experience.
In Minimalism, Greenberg’s move toward painterly flatness and abstraction was
wedded to an avant-garde, Dada questioning of the institution of art and, finally, to
the elimination of the last of the holdovers from the classical (or rather romantic)
conception of art: artistic intention.57 Minimal art content, minimal artistic effort: art,
if art, only minimally. This was not a development that Greenberg condoned, though
he grudgingly admitted that it had to be taken seriously.58 Minimalism, seen at the time
as distinct from Pop Art, fuses to a certain degree with it (as foreseen by Greenberg
in 1967) insofar as both move toward Conceptual Art and Performance Art, calling
into question and destabilizing the object, the subject, the institution of art, the rela-
tion of art to popular culture, and so forth, and exemplifying, in the failure of political
optimism of the ’60s around the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement and
so forth, the pervasiveness of the society of the spectacle, the indefatigable power of
capitalist cultural appropriation, and a subsequent cynicism and disengagement. In
short: “what is called postmodernism in culture might as well, within the art culture,
be termed the Age of Minimalism.”59 With Fried, we might call this the age of theat-
ricality, or even of Post-Art.
 Chesney / beckett, minimalism, and the question of postmodernism
Painterly minimalism is not strictly speaking Minimalism since Minimalism proper 647
is a rejection of the painterly in any respect as a move toward indistinction of object
and art, something theorists claimed painting could not attain (as in Donald Judd’s
manifesto “Specific Objects” of 1965). However it emerges as a rejection of the
metaphysical pretensions and pathos of abstract expressionism (as in Rothko) and the
psychological and physical expressiveness of Action Painting (in Pollock) toward a sort
of neutral or inert abstraction, first in Frank Stella and Agnes Martin and exemplar-
ily in Hard Age “Post-Painterly Abstraction” that eschews the spiritual-transcendent
tradition of the monochrome.60 Examples include Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, and
Kenneth Noland (the overlap between Abstract Expressionism and minimalist paint-
ing, such as it is, is traditionally thought to be “colour field painting”). John Perrault
writes, “What is minimal about Minimal Art, or appears to be when contrasted with
Abstract Expressionism or Pop Art, is the means, not the end…[involving] a minimum
degree of self-expression.”61 It is “an art whose blank, neutral, mechanical impersonality
contrasts so violently with the romantic, biographical Abstract-Expressionist style.”62
Barbara Rose connects Abstract Expressionism back to Malevich and “the search for
the transcendent, universal, absolute,” and Minimalism with Duchamp and “the blanket
denial of the existence of absolute values”63—reminiscent of Beckett’s description of
Joyce’s purgatory and its “absolute absence of the Absolute.”64
A hinge here is perhaps Barnett Newman, whose work, as Strickland argues, tends
to Post-Painterly Abstract minimalism, though his critical writing and even his titles
drip with portentous depth (for example the tremendous Vir heroicus sublimis of
1951). Many of Newman’s contemporaries and immediate successors, not only among
minimalists, but famously including Andy Warhol, certainly saw a connection between
his work and minimalism. Robert Morris describes Newman’s work as “the least al-
lusive…least metaphysical painting…the most direct.”65 Jean-François Lyotard writes
of Newman’s paintings from Onement 1 (1948) through Vir heroicus sublimis (1951):

If we examine only the plastic presentation which offers itself to our gaze without the
help of the connotations suggested by the titles, we feel not only that we are being held
back from giving any interpretation, but that we are being held back from deciphering
the painting itself; identifying it on the basis of line, colour, rhythm, scale, materials (me-
dium and pigment) and support seems to be easy, almost immediate. It obviously hides
no technical secrets, no cleverness that might delay the understanding of our gaze, or
that might therefore arouse our curiosity. It is neither seductive nor equivocal; it is clear,
“direct,” open and “poor.”66

For Lyotard this is an example of the pure, minimal sublimity of “taking place”—that
is, occurring. “What is sublime is the feeling that something will happen, despite every-
thing, within this threatening void, that something will take ‘place’ and will announce
that everything is not over. That place is mere ‘here,’ the most minimal occurrence.”67
Commenting on the famous “zip” in Newman’s work, and especially in the ’60s sculp-
tures (for example, Broken Obelisk of 1961), Lyotard writes that “Being announces
itself in the imperative,” a minimal command to “Be!”68
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

648 For Lyotard, the sublime is an experience of the non-presentable which both de-
mands and is denied sensible expression. It is an experience that cannot possibly be
subsumed under a concept of understanding, of reason. And this neo- or post-Kantian
sublime is for Lyotard a mark of the postmodern, a term which according to his post-
script to the Postmodern Condition is not temporal but a matter of tone. Thus he even
claims that the postmodern precedes the modern as an aspect of its movement. Without
committing to this and related claims in Lyotard’s aesthetic, I nonetheless want to take
his description of Newman as marking an overlap between Abstract Expressionism
and Minimalism. The sublime fact of being, shorn of symbolism, allegory, anthropo-
morphism, and the like, is certainly the goal of Minimalist work in Judd and Morris,
as well as in Frank Stella’s famous “what you see is what you see.”69
Here I want to return one last time to Bernstein’s take on late modernist art. This
minimal sublime situation sought so earnestly by Judd and others was precisely what
invited the “theatrical relationship” of the spectator to the object bemoaned by Fried.
Fried criticizes this theatrical effect for being all there is in the creations of Smith,
Morris, and others. “Literalist art” is a theatrical art-effect “without the art itself.”70 And
Fried insists that this aesthetically empty literality is not a matter of sheer objective
presence, but rather “of latent or hidden naturalism, indeed anthropomorphism.”71
Bernstein counters that Fried has effectively identified the symptom but misdiagnosed
the problem. The literalist, minimal works’ “very simulation of artistic fullness and
their insistent emptiness can feel like a particular and horrifying fate of the human,
as if all that remained was the wholly empty form of the human, the general idea of
anthropomorphism without a content to fill it.”72 He continues, “might we not think of
such works as aesthetically performing (through the use of geometric forms, repetition,
and machined materials) the claim of Enlightenment rationalism, its demythologizing
animus, while in being so emphatically aesthetic, never simply fully rationalized things,
mere objects?”73 Thus the empty presence of minimalist works is (part of) their critical
claim on us. These sculptures and paintings, like Beckett’s minimal works, express the
nothing to express, and in Adorno’s sense, thereby indict our own emptiness via the
aborted anthropomorphism. To put it differently, the minimalist style presents gaps
or an appeal which incite ever more engagement. But this engagement ultimately fails
to connect and reveals itself as nothing but pure, subjective auto-affection—unless it
then leads to self-interrogation of our projected selves, or relation to the world, and
so forth, and find this, too, to be empty. Thus the works present us our emptiness.
The shared empty, almost inexpressible presence in Newman and the early Minimal-
ists is what I want to claim for the ethico-aesthetic thrust of Beckett’s work. It is not
purely aesthetic, nor is it merely discursive—the gloss on the work that has become
so important in art since the ’60s. It is palpable to viewers in the encounter with the
work: the object, sculpture, painting, or play. It is an aesthetically expressed emptiness
as ethical and philosophical claim (and not “nothing,” as Beckett insists to Duthuit).
Of Newman, Greenberg wrote: “Newman happens to be a conventionally skilled
artist…but if he uses his skill, it is to suppress the evidence of it. And the suppression
is part of the triumph of his art, next to which most other contemporary painting begins
 Chesney / beckett, minimalism, and the question of postmodernism
to look fussy.”74 This predicament brings me back to Beckett. The use of prodigious 649
skill to suppress this skill for the sake of an ever more minimal art, utterly lacking in
the Absolute, seems to describe Beckett very well as well as to place him squarely in
a modernist tradition different from the avant-garde Dadaist inspired anti-art of the
Duchamp-Cage-Warhol axis (or a Duchamp-Cage-Ad Reinhard-Yves Klein performa-
tive axis). Beckett does not want to destroy art for the sake of a new life, or cynically, out
of some nihilist gesture, or in some post-modernist hermeneutic sense to draw atten-
tion to the “role of the reader” (or viewer, as it were), in generating meaning. Rather,
following Theodor Adorno, I would say that Beckett wants to use the utmost ability
and knowledge of tradition to continue to create art in a shattered world in which none
of the “old answers” remains valid (“Ah les vieilles questions, les vieilles réponses, il
n’y a que ça!” / “Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!” as
Hamm says in Endgame.75) He thus presents them in their invalidity and engages the
reader/viewer in a process of meaninglessness. Nullifying and silencing convention and
the tradition, Beckett constantly undermines his own project. But, according to the
Unnamable’s pensum: “il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer” /
“…you must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”76 This urge is not just the bare, biological
self plodding on despite it all, and not just the merely self-reflective, formal credo of
the artist at the end of tradition (as delineated in Casanova), but also an affirmative,
although not exactly triumphant, endorsement of art, of the almost hopeless but still
minimally valid project. It is an art which proved to Adorno, for one, that such a thing
was still possible after Auschwitz;77 an artwork (like Fin de partie/Endgame) that is
possible, and necessary, as a minimal, fractured, irrecoverable monad separated from
society, and useless for politics, pleasure, entertainment, therapy, or what have you.
But this very fractured-ness was in a way the starkest realism, and this irrecoverability,
this uselessness, was in a way the most useful thing for a society in need of the most
searching critique of its own current damaged state.
In a key definition that weds a Marxist concept of art praxis to a Modernist concept
of artistic autonomy, Adorno writes in the Aesthetic Theory:

Art...is social not only because of its mode of production, in which the dialectic of the forces
and relations of production is concentrated, nor simply because of the social derivation
of its thematic material. Much more importantly, art becomes social by its opposition to
society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as
something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying
as “socially useful,” it criticizes society by merely existing...78

In this brilliant dialectical move, Adorno retains insights of nineteenth-century mate-

rialist and idealist conceptions of the artwork.79 Beckett, for Adorno, exemplifies this
difficult balance between autonomy and engagement. His art, as critics have always
noticed, does not explicitly engage the times, does not name the catastrophe, though
the text has, as has been asserted time and again, “the power...to claw.”80 Adorno gives
an account of how this is true by providing a more sophisticated understanding of the
artwork. And the negative utopian element in art becomes clear. “Through the irrecon-
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

650 cilable renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of
reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled.”81 That is, Endgame, or Worstward Ho,
or what have you, does not provide an obvious answer or escape, does not flesh out the
minimal, damaged subject; it does not makes us feel better, or make things easier to
bear, or help us forget, or help recuperate sensuous particularity and provide us with
a glimmer of utopian happiness through beautiful semblance. And it is precisely in
renouncing any false reconciliation of the state of affairs, of society after Auschwitz or
Hiroshima or Vietnam or this recent famine or that emerging genocide, that art holds
fast to a promise of real reconciliation in the midst of the damaged and unreconciled
world: not by some utopian escape, which in its simple negation remains tied to the logic
of repression, but by the formal, aesthetic engagement of the truth of this world and
articulating an aesthetic truth that is non-discursive, or non-“communicatively rational.”
As Minimalism became more accepted and mainstream by the late ’60s, it lost much
of its confrontational and critical power: the power of the larger, industrial “specific
object” (Donald Judd) to engage the viewer in a challenging dialogue was lost to monu-
mentalism in Serra and beyond (to a post-modern sublime of magnitude, for example,
in Anish Kapoor), or the concept of Minimalism was generalized beyond any coherence
in its over-application to various media and formats (for example, Robert Smithson and
landscape minimalism, or Jackie Winsor and Eva Hesse); the conceptualism present
from the beginning in the Dada strand of the Minimal took precedence and led in
new directions toward a regime which is still ours; Philip Glass’s enormous commer-
cial success led to a sort of New Age repetitive post-minimalism that no longer has
anything to do with the original conceptions of Young or Riley; Alain Robbe-Grillet’s
objectivist, minimal novels and films suffered from his subjectivist, sex-fantasy turn;
and so on. The arts entered into the epoch of a new cultural dominant—the postmod-
ern—which, like any dominant, has its aesthetic highs and lows, even if its criteria of
value are exceedingly difficult to identify—or rather, to distinguish from pure market
values. Performativity, poly-vocality, multi-perspectivism, heterogeneity, pastiche,
eclecticism, double coding, fragmentariness, anti-realism, the melting of formal and
generic borders, “indeterminance,” “ontological uncertainty,”82 and so forth—many of
these values or qualities are not so much different from modernist techniques per se,
but different in tone: celebratory, affirmative, playful, and “liberating.”83 But Samuel
Beckett, while somehow remaining fresh and challenging, kept doing what he had been
doing all along, producing in the face of this changing Zeitgeist ever more minimal
masterpieces like Imagination morte imaginez and Film (1965), Assez and Bing (1966),
Sans (1969), Le Dépeupleur (1970), All Strange Away (1976), Company (1979), Mal
vu mal dit (1981), and Worstword Ho (1983). This astonishing commitment to a lost
cause, the late modernist cause of impossible expression, is what makes Beckett one
of the few persistent voices in the unfinished project of failed modernism.
 Chesney / beckett, minimalism, and the question of postmodernism
Lateness 651

This discussion leads me finally to the question of late modernism and indeed of
the concept of lateness itself. By now the existence of the late modern has more or
less been established, not least by Fredric Jameson in his book A Singular Modernity.
But there he describes the late modern as a period of the full-fledged reign of the
ideology of modernism, only tentative and finding its form in the works we normally
call modernist. Late moderns would then be those like Nabokov who are well aware
of the modern tradition and exploit it, explode it, and yet celebrate it precisely as a
dominant. Jameson is more interested in sketching the theoretical and ideological
outlines of this period than the aesthetic. And one of the heroes, or protagonists, of this
period is none other than Adorno, about whom Jameson earlier wrote a book entitled
Late Marxism. From as early as 1934, Adorno had been concerned with articulating
a concept of aesthetic lateness in his writings on Beethoven. However, the lateness in
style of great artists is far from being some fully achieved wisdom, some unconcern
for public reception and the like that characterizes establishment figures finally able
to express themselves unhindered. On the contrary,

The maturity of the late works of important artists is not like the ripeness of fruit. As a
rule these works are not well rounded, but wrinkled, even fissured. They are apt to lack
sweetness, fending off with prickly tartness those interested merely in sampling them.
They lack all that harmony which the classicist aesthetic is accustomed to demand from
the work of art, showing more traces of history than of art.84

This not unnoticed fact has often been explained, continues Adorno, by bringing the
works closer to documentation, that is, biography. Yet Adorno claims the essence of the
late work is precisely the opposite, whereby “everything individual is both shrunken
and saturated with the ideal unity of its species.”85 This argument, which Edward Saïd
late in his life adopted and made his own, is based in Adorno on a very detailed and
complicated engagement with the last works of Beethoven (which Saïd helps to clarify
for those of us with imperfect knowledge of music composition and theory). Adorno
concludes his brief discussion, “the late style is the self-awareness of the insignificance
of the individual, existent. Herein lies the relationship of the late style to death.”86
Elsewhere I develop this line of thinking with reference to Beckett’s pessimism and
the influence of Schopenhauer on his thinking, but for the moment I want to conclude
that this lateness is not necessarily biographical; that is, if lateness comes with age,
with the approach of death, then an artist like Beckett became an old man during the
war, in his 30s; he was “old young” like Mercier and Camier, and indeed most of his
characters. His entire mature work, I would argue, is late in Adorno’s sense. One sus-
pects that perhaps lateness is then another myth of modernism, but I would want to
show that modernism, rooted historically and etymologically in the now and associated
with the new, is indeed essentially late. Bernstein writes about late modernist paint-
ing, which he calls painting in the absence of painting, that is, painting which eschews
representational means of relating us to our world: “what matters about [this] painting
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

652 is not representational but categorical, an inscription of a way of bearing the burden of
the absence of experience, the default of sensuous particulars, the excision of bodily
happiness….”87 According to Bernstein, this is a persistently modern trait. Adorno
argues compellingly in the Aesthetic Theory that modernism (pace Ezra Pound and
the Futurists) was never about the new and the future, so much as about escaping the
old, and coming to new terms with entire past tradition.88 In this sense, the modern is
always late. And this is how, in unwaveringly pursuing the minimalizing gesture of the
modern, Beckett produces an art which is not only late in style, but even at this late
date continues to be art, continues to challenge and complicate all of the traditional
categories of aesthetics even as society and culture seem to have left him far behind.
For Saïd, this lateness was tied with a pathos of modernity: His figures are Tomasi di
Lampedusa, Richard Strauss, Luchino Visconti, and Adorno himself. Beckett is not
quite the same in ways that need to be explored. In any case, he exemplifies what
Jameson claims about Adorno: a persistently necessary and productive lateness. That
this style is minimal I think I have shown. And that it is fundamentally at odds with
the postmodern, however positively or negatively we understand that term, also seems
clear. My main point, then, would be that his persistent importance and difficulty should
teach us something about the reigning dominant.

Notes
1. The Beckett quotation is from Worstword Ho (New York: Grove, 1983), 7. The Adorno is from
Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1997), 40.
2. In a famous response to American theater director Herbert Blau. See The Grove Companion
to Samuel Beckett, eds. C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 2004), 207.
3. Antoine Compagnon, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity, trans. Franklin Philip (New York:
Columbia UP, 1993), x. Compagnon’s comment is from the preface to the American translation of his
book originally written for a French audience.
4. See the editors’ introduction to Andreas Huyssen and Klaus R. Scherpe, eds. Postmoderne,
Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels (Hamburg: Rowolt, 1986).
5. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (1974; Minneapolis: U of Min-
nesota P, 1984), 53–4.
6. Perry Anderson in A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso 1982) and Fredric Jameson in A
Singular Modernity (New York: Verso 2002)—both following Ernst Bloch’s Erbschaft dieser Zeit
(1962; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 104–126—have discussed this moment of Modernism
as characterized by the ‘Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen,’—the contemporaneity of the non-
contemporaneous—incomplete modernization and coexistence of different cultural and life forms,
phrased, tellingly, in terms of time, not of space.
7. Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana UP), 165.
8. Huyssen, 169. For a counter-narrative highlighting the overlap of politics and art in twentieth-
century America, see Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox (New York: Verso, 1993).
9. Huyssen, 170.
10. Huyssen, 172.
11. Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1982), 271.
12. As Huyssen dubs it, 188; Jean Perrault in 1967 speaks of “a Duchamp, neo-Dada, Cage tradi-
tion” that leads to Judd-Morris style minimalism. See Gregory Battcock, ed. Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 259.
 Chesney / beckett, minimalism, and the question of postmodernism
13. As Hassan says of Beckett in The Literature of Silence (New York: Knopf, 1967), 113. 653
14. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., ed. John O’Brian (Chicago:
U of Chicago P., 1986–1993) I, 8.
15. “American-type painting” in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1971), 208; a slightly different version from that in the Collected Essays, III, 217–236.
16. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Collected Essays, IV, 87)
17. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 85.
18. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove,1996), 323.
19. Pascale Casanova, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, trans. Gregory Elliott
(New York: Verso 2006), 26.
20. Casanova, 26.
21. Carla Locatelli, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works After the Nobel Prize
(Phiadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990), x.
22. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove, 1983), 9.
23. The dark political side of this history, related ultimately to Huyssen’s narrative of American
postmodernism, is documented by Serge Guilbaut in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art:
Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1983).
24. In the words of Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett (London: Souvenir Press, 1990), 88.
25. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta (London: Calder, 1983), 135; “The first attack mounted against
the object seized, independently of its qualities, in its indifference, its inertia, its latency—there’s a
definition of modern painting no more ludicrous than another.” Translation provided by Mercier in
Beckett/Beckett, 103-4.
26. Mercier, Beckett/Beckett, 99.
27. See for example Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929–1940, ed.
Martha Dow Fehsenfeld et al. (Cambridge: CUP 2009), 386.
28. Beckett, Disjecta, 142.
29. Beckett, Disjecta, 139. Of course in 1949 these descriptions applied to none of Beckett’s pub-
lished works anymore than they particularly applied to the painters under discussion in the dialogues,
though Beckett’s frenzy, writing himself out of the Joycean impasse of his youthful works into the
very different aesthetic impasse of the French prose works that led him to the “diversion” of Godot,
was by then well under way.
30. As in the first sentence of Beckett’s Murphy (New York: Grove, 1957), 1.
31. J.M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006), 3.
32. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, 3.
33. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, 3.
34. In Adorno’s sense of the term; see for example the “Cogitative Self-Reflection” section of
Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 148–51; Adorno, Gesammelte
Schriften, vol 6 (Fankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970),152.
35. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, 12–13.
36. Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986), 43–113.
37. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1978), 168.
38. Beckett, Disjecta, 141.
39. Beckett, Disjecta, 145.
40. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, 157.
41. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, 120. In its very “presence without assimilablity,” Abstract
Expressionism as a Modernist sublime risks, as Bernstein notes, losing its aestheticized threatening-
ness or traumatic nature and becoming merely beautiful: wallpaper (120).
42. For an elaboration of this connection with respect to Mark Rothko, see Leo Bersani and Ulysse
Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993).
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

654 43. Kenneth Baker, Minimalism: Art of Circumstance (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 9.
44. Anne Goldstein, introduction to Goldstein ed. A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968
(Cambridge: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and MIT Press, 2004), 17-18.
45. James Meyer’s canon, in Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale UP,
2001), includes as principals: Judd, Andre, Morris, Flavin, Truitt, and LeWitt, between 1963–68.
46. Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000), 7.
47. Alex Preminger et al., eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1993), 788.
48. “How simple then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to
be. Gently gently. On. Careful” [my emphasis]. Beckett, Mal vu mal dit (Paris: Minuit, 1981), 24; Ill
Seen Ill Said (London: Calder, 1982), 20.
49. Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie (Paris: Minuit, 1957), 89; Endgame in Complete Dramatic Works
(London : Faber, 1986), 125.
50. Beckett, Fin de partie, 26, 47; Endgame, 98, 107.
51. Beckett, Mal vu mal dit, 17-18; Ill Seen Ill Said, 15.
52. Samuel Beckett, “All Strange Away” [1964] in The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989, ed. S.E.
Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1995), 169.
53. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days in Complete Dramatic Works, 156.
54. Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings 1978–1990 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991), 205.
55. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” in Gregory Battcock, ed. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthol-
ogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 116–147.
56. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, 131.
57. A great example is Tony Smith’s phone call one evening to a foundry to order a 6’x6’x6’ cube
that led to “Die,” 1962.
58. “Minimal art remains too much a feat of ideation, and not enough anything else.” “Recentness
of Sculpture” [1967] in Greenberg, IV, 254.
59. Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox, 210.
60. From a prehistory (Turner and Monet and so on) to Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White
on White of 1918 though to Yves Klein’s blues and Ad Reinhardt’s black canvases, which I suppose are
rather the cynical opposite of spiritual transcendence, see Barbara Rose, ed. Monochromes (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004/6).
61. In Battcock, Minimal Art, 260.
62. Barbara Rose in Battcock, Minimal Art, 274–5.
63. Rose in Battcock, Minimal Art, 275.
64. Beckett, Disjecta, 33.
65. In Ann Temkin, ed. Barnett Newman (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art/Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2003), 85. Significant influence on Judd, Stella, and Flavin can be shown. See for example
Judd in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, eds., Modern Art and Modernism (London: Harper
and Row, 1982).
66. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stan-
ford : Stanford UP, 1992), 83.
67. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 82.
68. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 88.
69. Quoted in Meyer, Minimalism, 7.
70. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Battcock, Minimal Art, 134.
71. In Battcock, Minimal Art, 129. For a richer discussion of Fried’s theatricality thesis, its notion
of presence, and the implied emptiness, or in fact absence in the objects of Judd, Morris, and others
in their relationship to death, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde
(Paris: Minuit, 1992). See also Donald Judd “Specific Objects” (1965) http://homepage.newschool.
edu/~quigleyt/vcs/judd-so.pdf.
72. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, 132–3.
 Chesney / beckett, minimalism, and the question of postmodernism
73. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, 133. 655
74. “After Abstract Expressionism” (1962) in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism,
IV, 132–3.
75. Beckett, Fin de partie, 54; Endgame, 110.
76. Samuel Beckett, L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1953), 213; The Unnamable in Trilogy (London:
Calder, 1959), 418.
77. “Während die Situation Kunst nicht mehr zuläßt – darauf zielte der Satz über die Unmöglichkeit
von Gedichten nach Auschwitz – bedarf sie doch ihrer.” Adorno, Ohne Leitbild in Kulturkritik und
Gesellschaft I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 452.
78. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, [1970] ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans.
Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 225-6.
79. It is materialist both in the sense of an economic-historical understanding of the social phe-
nomenon of Art, and in the sense of the formal or generic specificity of the individual work; idealist
in the Hegelian sense of the essential mediation of concept and spirit, and in the aestheticist sense of
art on a spiritual remove from the concerns society.
80. Beckett, Disjecta, 107.
81. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 33.
82. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London, Routledge, 1987).
83. See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Rout-
ledge, 1988).
84. Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1998), 123.
85. Adorno, Beethoven, 160.
86. Adorno, Beethoven, 161.
87. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, 10.
88. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 21.