Share
Aesthetic form [is] sedimented content.footnote1
—T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
The subject of our conversation is Adorno’s literary criticism. I’m not going to consider his ideas about the lyric, novel, drama or essay although such an exposition could be useful; what I want to demonstrate is the critic in action, how he operates, how he shifts between aesthetic and social reflection. To do this, I’m going to present a few elements from his study of Beckett, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ (1961). It is one of his great essays on modern art and can be found in the first volume of Notes to Literature.footnote2
The play Endgame, for those who don’t know, is a kind of black comedy in an absurd and slapstick vein. At the centre of the scene is a blind man, immobilized on a chair, attended to by a servant who would like to kill him, or at least leave him, but lacks the will to do either. The man’s parents, crippled and senile, are confined to two trash cans. From time to time, they stick their heads out. The setting is a room—perhaps a bunker—with two windows that are difficult to access. No one goes out because it’s implied that something unspeakable has happened outside, the nature of which is left for us to imagine. The language is rudimentary and sparse, although very refined in its own way.
The dominant reading sees the play as a work of poetic minimalism, which economizes on words and gestures to render the plenitude of human existence. Something akin to mime, perhaps in the manner of Marcel Marceau. Nobody today remembers Marceau, but for my generation he was very well known. He was a mixture of sad clown and acrobat, and possessed exceptional expressive ability. He performed alone on stage, contending with adversity of various kinds. He would fight against the wind or gravity, for example when climbing a ladder, or struggle in vain to push a chair, things like that. The solitude of the lone figure on stage and the simplicity and duration of his efforts became poetic metaphors, perhaps slipping into kitsch. But it was unforgettable.
This reading—which is not Adorno’s—valorizes precariousness. There’s a poetics here in which less is more, where reduction exalts and scarcity thrills. The inexorably linked master and servant, the elderly parents thrown in the trash, the few and ill-mannered words, all furnish a kind of reverse sublime, a sentimental anti-sentimentalism. They provide images of the persistence of human solidarity, of the painful beauty of our finitude, of the richness that remains even in sorrow and silence. A stylization that through debasement gestures to the essential and metaphysical, to a core of indissoluble humanity that transcends time.
Adorno’s great move was to see this deprivation from another angle. Instead of an exalting stylization, or the purification of a precious nucleus that escapes contingency, precariousness is what it is, without embellishments—a painful expression of frustrated life as it has come to be. Precariousness is taken literally, as the balance of bourgeois civilization or its point of arrival. Instead of the summation of the human condition, which opens perspectives on its plenitude, we have the precarious as the end of the line, or rather, as an end of a line that has been ongoing for a long time, the end to which the old promises of plenitude have led—which naturally makes us look at those promises again with fresh eyes. It is about the chasm we have descended into, the effective result of our history, rendered in precise and devastating detail. Not for nothing is the play called Endgame.
But what is the basis for this reorientation? Let’s follow it in the terms of the play itself, which gives precise clues, although it then erases them through the exasperating mundanity of the action. As far as time is concerned, Adorno notes that Endgame takes place ‘after’, that is, after many things, deliberately vague, or barely specified at all. After, for example, an incomplete nuclear catastrophe, which has—so to speak—allowed life to continue. Something has happened out there which changes everything, without preventing life altogether; it remains to be seen how. But a threshold has been crossed.