A Commentary on Samuel Beckett’s What Where

Aesthetic form is a figure moving through a rain storm, an image perhaps from Susanne Langer, one illuminatingly apposite to Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of form, drawn from the idea of determinate negation—though Adorno never would have provided so open-handed an image. But Langer and Adorno’s thinking in any case derives ensemble from what is a secret to no one who has ever thought about it, as is easily documented in a pinch by thousands of years of Neoplatonists. And if that one insight is commonly given with or without philosophical qualification, the problem of the perception, presentation, and comprehension of that movement—which is anything but a fact, except in the etymological sense of being a deed, and may not be there to be seen at all—its critical discernment, hardly amounting to yea or nay, inevitably runs up against the puzzle that it can neither be imitated or simply discussed. Though without an element of each, and not as if they might just be stirred together, what is at stake is failed. But whatever the difficulties involved, and they are necessarily insuperable, what is first of all important, so far as this commentary on Samuel Beckett’s What Where is concerned, is that Beckett himself found this, his last work for the theater, on stage a failure. All the same, the sense in which this work is Beckett’s Tempest is the reason for this close commentary of the work’s stage script. The intention here, then, is the reverse of Adorno’s essay on Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, which was a labor in the disillusionment of a reputed masterpiece (Alienated Masterpiece). It should be noted, incidentally, that the discussion of the Westminster Chimes, which here figures centrally, is not a claim to establish the work’s origins but an aspect of that problem of presentation, already mentioned. So far as the origin of this essay goes, however, it is written in memory of Rolf Tiedemann (1932–2018) in appreciation of his magisterial editions of the collected works of Adorno and Walter Benjamin, his life work

Aesthetics · Appearance of impropriety · Art · Deed · Discernment · Element (criminal law · Epistemology · Explication · Linguistics · Literature · Negation · Presentation (obstetrics · Tempest · Work of art · Franz Kafka Literary Studies · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Samuel Beckett and Modernism