doubtful, and who chalks up all the errors and inconsistencies: ‘What? Yes’; ‘No mind and pain? Say yes’ (pp. 8–9).
Among the logical objections that arise straightaway are those of place and time. These two founding instances of any literary narrative, referring at once to the text’s field and what is out of frame, are subject to constant alterations that emerge like second thoughts whenever it is necessary to make concessions to grammatical and referential order. One cannot advance the hypothesis of an absolute independence of the text with respect to the world, grammar and literary convention. One can simply propose, because one wishes to aim for it, the ‘minimal minimum’ before the disappearance of words and meaning. As early as p. 11, the description of place is problematic: ‘A place. Where none … Know only no out of. No knowing how know only no out of. Into only. Hence another. Another place where none. Whither once no return. No. No place but the one … Whence never once in … Beyond less. Thence less there’ (pp. 11–12). Formulating the objection to himself (to enter one place it is necessary to leave another and envisage positing at least two places, including something out of frame, not in question in our constraints), Beckett explains the rule, which is essential, of his project’s independence (no beyond or beneath, no transcendence or reference to the world). Time, defined at the outset as ‘[a]ll of old. Nothing else ever’ (p. 7), raises precisely the same deductive problem of a time transcending the pastless present of writing: ‘No once. No once in the pastless now. No not none. When before worse the shades? The dim before more? When if not once?’ (p. 38).
‘From now’, ‘so far’, ‘later’, ‘now’ only explain and articulate the internal time of the text, the chronological unfolding of its formation, its autonomous conditions of possibility. In contrast, the ‘least minimal minimum’ known of time, of place, of elements to worsen, necessarily implies something beyond the text that Beckett seeks to diminish solely so as to proceed in the direction of the worst. It is the irreducible residue of a referent, even when completely disembodied, even when reduced to its logical structure (the void, for example), which Beckett tries to get round by ‘somehow’. Thus, from defeats to concessions the way of ‘better missaying’ is imperceptibly altered. For example, examination of ‘least’ leads to a semi-defeat, resignation to an irreducible minimum that will henceforth have to be integrated into the rules: ‘Least never to be naught. Never to naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least. Say that best worst. With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worst’ (p. 32). It is this irreducible residue that Beckett desperately tries to circumvent, sidestep, coax into arriving at all costs at ‘nohow’.
But there are some residues before which one must resolve to surrender: these are the three elements that resist both worsening and disappearing (and the progression of the text is also the disclosure of a strange power-lessness in the face of them).
The void first of all. The law of its immutability is stated very early on: ‘The void. Unchanging. Say now unchanging … The void. How try say? How try fail? No try no fail’ (p. 17). But he makes a few attempts: ‘That narrow field. Know no more. See no more. Say no more. That alone. That little much of void alone’ (p. 18); ‘Unworsenable void. Never less. Never more. Never since first said never unsaid never worse said’ (p. 42). Only to conclude in irritation at the end of the text: ‘A pox on void. Unmoreable unlessable unworseable evermost almost void’ (pp. 42–3).
Next, the dim. Beckett tries to worsen it in the sense of darkness, but it resists any metamorphosis. It gives rise to some virtuoso comparative variations that nevertheless fail: ‘Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim. Utmost dim. Leastmost in utmost dim. Unworsenable worst’ (p. 33).
Finally, the head, aporia of aporias, observed and observing, ‘scene and seer of all’ (p. 23). The head is the only element in the text that must necessarily, desperately be both within and without, in the text and outside it: the head that says, that sees, that forms images, sees its head in its head and very rapidly – paradox of infinite inter-locking – is confronted with the impossibility of making itself disappear without erasing the text along with it. Of the three ‘shades’, the head is the one that Beckett most tortures, disfigures, scars, gradually reducing it to its most salient features (‘stares’ for the eyes). It is the very mark of the text’s reflection on itself and its conditions of possibility. Reduplication underscores the logical contradiction. The first formulation of it is to be found on p. 10: ‘Head sunk on crippled hands. Vertex vertical. Eyes clenched. Seat of all. Germ of all.’ The setting and ordering imply that the head is at once a shadow on the stage and an element on course for the worst: a spectator (‘clenched staring eyes’ [p. 13]) before which stand the twain, the bowed one, the void, and the dim (‘same narrow void. Before the staring eyes’ [p. 19]); and, finally, matrix of all that (and of itself). The head is the begetter begotten: ‘On back better worse to fail the head said seat of all. Germ of all. All? If of all of it too. Where if not there it too? There in the sunken head the sunken head’ (pp. 18–19). This is proof that Beckett pushes the coherence of his project to the point of raising in his text the issue of his own presence-absence; he incorporates into his ‘setting’ the hand that writes and the head that thinks, supplying a kind of self-portrait in action. It is a disenchanted, prosaic self-portrait of the writer refusing the presuppositions of consciousness to the extent that he objectifies himself as manufacturing images in his own images – that is, by placing himself in the painting, like Velazquez representing himself painting in the background of Las Meninas. He is the painter and the subject of the painting, represented and representing, ‘scene and seer of all’. In connection with the ‘centre’ of this painting, at the beginning of The Order of Things Michel Foucault enumerates what he calls the ‘three “observing” functions’ that we find in Worstward Ho: ‘In it [the centre] there occurs an exact superimposition of the model’s gaze as it is being painted, of the spectator’s as he contemplates the painting, and of the painter’s as he is composing the picture’. ‘The entire picture,’ Foucault writes, ‘is looking out at a scene for which it is itself the scene.’7
As a result, in the game of the worst ‘that head in that head’ is going to be devalued into a ‘sunken skull’ (p. 22); the ‘clenched staring eyes’ will lose their eyelids; and the ‘remains of mind’ (p. 29) gradually disintegrate into ‘some soft of mind’ which ‘oozes’ (p. 33). As in the Vanities metaphorically representing death in the privileged form of a skull, Beckett worsens the head to the point of making it a single black hole: ‘One dim black hole mid-foreskull. Into the hell of all. Out of the hell of all’ (p. 44). This is the ‘what little left’ (p. 46) that makes it possible to conclude and reach the point where one can no longer advance (‘nohow’); the residue of mind that remains for saying that one has come as close as possible to the dissolution of meaning, but that in still saying it – even to the minimum extent possible – one is not quite there yet. On several occasions in the text we find an interrogation, logical and insoluble in the objectivist system set in place by Beckett, of the origin of words: ‘Whose words? Ask in vain’ (p. 19); and later: ‘Worsening words whose unknown … Now for to say as worst they may only they only they … Nothing save what they say’ (p. 29). Alternatively put, the task laid down in the first paragraph of acceding to the worst from ‘somehow’ to ‘nohow’ is also that of proceeding from words to their disappearance via the gradual withdrawal of meaning. In the order of lessness – that is, the ‘nearly unseen’ and the ‘nearly unsaid’ – what words say cannot be completely eliminated; it is impossible not to know anything (‘[t]oo much to hope’ [p. 9]), but it is possible to know ‘[e]nough to know no knowing’ (p. 30).
Worstward Ho originates in an utterly coherent aesthetic programme, which at the outset posits its end (term) as its end (goal): what counts at the end, in the endgame, is not the disappearance, the final failure of the text, but instead a project that determines its end once the rule, the algorithm, has exhausted all its possibilities. The last words, repeated from the programme clearly announced at the beginning (‘Said nohow on’) resonate like a cry of victory: the success of
