The Tree of Unknowable Noumenon

Gazing Upon the Ding-an-Sich
Beckett and Giacometti

I've borrowed this image from the site of Paul McVeigh, who tells us:

Beckett and Giacometti in the latter's studio in Paris in 1961, looking at the Tree that Giacometti has just made for Waiting for Godot. Ironically, there is no photo of the Tree itself and, since it ended up being stolen, we can only guess at what it looked like.

Or perhaps, as in Kantian philosophy, the two were envisioning the Tree as the Ding-An-Sich -- the Thing-Per-Se, the unknowable noumenon -- the object as it is in itself, independent of the mind, as opposed to a phenomenon, which can be apprehended, and that is why we cannot see the Tree. Where did McVeigh obtain this photograph? Perhaps from Mary Ruefle:

One photograph I adore, and keep always by me, shows Samuel Beckett, Albert Giacometti, and a young critic/admirer whose name I do not know standing in a gallery where Giacometti's set for Waiting for Godot is on display (though you can't see it) -- a single tree. If you know Giacometti's work, you can imagine it. The photo was taken in the early sixties, before Giacometti died, and in it Beckett and Giacometti are looking up, up, up at the tree: Beckett has the look of someone praying before a crucifix, and Giacometti has a slightly more self-conscious look, as if admiring the thing but also hoping someone else might see in it what he sees in it -- which is only natural, as he himself made the thing; and the young critic/admirer is not looking at the thing at all, he is looking at Beckett and Giacometti. He is much, much younger than they are, and he does not see the Thing; he sees the two men instead, because it is obvious he mistakes them for the Thing, and he is not there to see the Thing, he is there to see what he takes for the Thing, the two men. While the two men are looking at the Thing. (Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey, page 301)

We do not see "the young critic/admirer" described by Ruefle. We will have to take her word for the fact of his merely phenomenal existence. But Ruefle's 'word' is at times hard to take since she plays with them and their meanings. For example, why does she write, "The photo was taken in the early sixties, before Giacometti died"? Look at the photo. Does Giacometti not look alive? He of course is not yet dead! If she had written, "The photo was taken in 1961, five years before Giacometti died," the statement would have been readily understandable. Also banal, mundane, quotidian. She would never have written such words. Instead, she wrote something far more baffling . . . and intriguing.

I reached the end of Ruefle's book, page 309, yesterday evening -- actually, just the end of her lectures, for she has a bit more to say after those. But page 309 is end enough to recall beginnings, such as pages 1-2, where she writes:

Paul Valéry also described his perception of first lines so vividly, and to my mind so accurately, that I have never forgotten it: The opening line of a poem, he said, is like finding a fruit on the ground, a piece of fallen fruit you have never seen before, and the poet's task is to create the tree from which such a fruit would fall.

You have found here only the fruit left by Giacometti's missing Tree, and if you are a poet, you know the task that lies before you now . . .

Samuel Beckett: Letters Between the Crash and the War

Samuel Beckett

1970

(Getty Image from New York Times)

The Irish novelist and literary critic Joseph O'Neill has published "I'll Go On" in the New York Times, a fascinating review of Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck's Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I, 1929-1940, a collection that offers us "a portrait of the artist as an unsettled, underemployed and relatively unknown young man" in all his acknowledged intellectual brilliance.

I never realized that Beckett was brilliant. I knew that he was an artistic genius, of course, but had no inkling of his being intellectually gifted:

This volume (three more are promised) auspiciously begins with two notes from Beckett to James Joyce, in the second of which (from April 1929) this 23-year-old lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris politely briefs the maestro on the distinction between the infinitive and substantive forms of a Greek phrase.

I'd have to look that up just to understand the grammatical point in question . . . though I suppose that this is as much an admission of my ignorance as it is a compliment to Beckett's intellectual gifts.

But we have, or have had, some things in common: "he is broke: he wears his shoes until they finally 'explode' on the Boulevard St.-Michel." I walked the steep streets in San Francisco until my own shoes went off like miniature land mines on some inconvenient hill or other. Like me, therefore, he was a "flâneur as well as a great hill-walker." So . . . I feel with him a cameraderie that I never before felt, for his nihilism had never appealed to me even though I appreciated Waiting for Godot, which I finally saw in Germany while waiting for Sun-Ae to come into my life, though I was until afterwards unaware of that great romantic fact upon which I waited, rather unlike Beckett's unawareness of what lay ahead for him and his Suzanne:

Suzanne is Suzanne Deschevaux-­Dumesnil. Here's how we learn of her: "There is a French girl also whom I am fond of, dispassionately, and who is very good to me. The hand will not be overbid. As we both know that it will come to an end there is no knowing how long it may last." Beckettists will know, of course, that in due time Suzanne and Sam married, and that the marriage lasted till their deaths.

Uncanny! That he knew it would end, I mean. How could he have known?

Ultimately, however, and altogether separately, we chose, and have chosen, different aims and ends and aimless ends, as one sees in Beckett's gnomic words:

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning

The intellectually gifted Beckett chose aesthetics and eventual success. The mediocre me has chosen the academic world and is still waiting . . . and oft muttering, "Let us go."

At least, this waiting gives me time to straighten my own crooked tie and smooth out the irony of my wrinkled brow.