divagation after Herschel Farbmann

“The end, the end.”—Paul Griffiths, let me tell you.

In the late nineteenth century, the psychophysicist Gustav Theodor Fechner speculated thus about immortality: Before birth, our life in the womb is nothing but sleep; during life, we alternate between sleep and waking, though sleeping less and less as we age; therefore after death, so Fechner reasoned, our immortal life can consist of nothing but endless waking. Fechner’s insomniacal eternity is at once horrible and comic: a blaze of nonstop alertness, a gibbering manic restlessness without end.[1] Nonetheless, in Fechner’s vision, beyond the alternation of sleep and waking, beyond the opposition of life and death, what obtains is not their admixture (grogginess? quasi-animation?), but something that goes on after the end. If death had long been pictured as the brother of sleep—a darker, longer sleep—Fechner revealed a profound uneasiness in that endless night.

There is no reason to think that Beckett or Blanchot ever read Fechner, but it is as if they had continued Fechner’s work, refining his idea by freeing it of its trammeling teleological schema. Their writings uncover something watchful that goes on waking or dreaming, speaking or writing, after the end.[2] But they don’t locate this watchful something only after death; their writings uncover it in the heart of night, and even beneath the calm of day. In Death Sentence, the narrator notices that J’s sleep has “the strange trait of scattering in an instant,” so that “behind her sleep” J “seemed to remain awake” (45/26). Shortly before the second of her two deaths, J wakes in just this way: “though her eyelids were lowered…she went on waking [elle veilla],” the narrator says, a phrase that suggests nothing punctual (on the order of “she woke up”), but something durative, ongoing: elle veilla, as if to say, she waked the night through, she kept watch, she went on “vigiling” behind her sleep (47).[4] A similarly unending restlessness is evident in Beckett’s The Unnamable, in the book’s endless ending, the oft-quoted “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Out of context, this phrase tends to sound heroic, in a Man of La Mancha mode, a pledge that this narrator will never say die. But from the book’s first page it is clear that The Unnamable’s restlessness is an impersonal one, evident in the tightly compressed and polysemic “off it goes on” (premier pas va) (291/7). “Off it goes,” it’s underway, but also: its first step (premier pas) puts an end to going (pas va); “off, it goes on”: behind sleep, J goes on waking; unable to lift his hand to write, the unnamable can only go on writing.

[1] Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode, (Insel-Verlag zu Leipzig, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/44575/44575-h/44575-h.htm ) Kathryn Davis, in her novel Labrador, could almost have been writing about Fechner’s ideas when she described insomnia as “the wish to be immortal, granted by an ass.” But where did I get the Fechner anecdote? Kittler? Rickels? 

[2] This formulation, and this insight, and indeed this whole post, are indebted to Herschel Farbman’s book on Beckett and Blanchot, which calls the watchful something “restlessness.” 

[3] Scene/summary distinction and Davis’s translation.

[4] Or, more common-sensically, “she lay awake,” as Lydia Davis’s translation has it. But “keeping watch” is also an important sense of “veillir.”

[5] Reference Farbman and the Beckett passage.