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 the worst of failures.
The equation8 stated and solved by Worstward Ho therefore provides (strict) irrefutable proof of a formidable formal ambition, without precedent in the history of literature, of a logical, combinatory option in the service of a new literary form. Worstward Ho is not the evocation of a nihilistic stance or the representation of ontological tragedy, but a kind of ultimate poetic art: Beckett delivers his theory of literary abstraction in practice and elaborates an abstract text at the very point when he explains how he writes it.
It is possibly also a literary testament of sorts, discreet, disclaimed, tacit: the assertion of an aesthetic revolution with which Beckett has never been credited.
But it would be too easy to reduce his set of discoveries to a pure formalism: the search for the appropriate road to abstract art in literature led him not only to alter the forms of organization of the text, but to undermine the foundations of literature. His mere problematization of the subject, of psychological interiority, or of the imagination disclosed, possibly for the first time in the history of forms (at all events, with such demonstrative power), that literature rests entirely on the presuppositions of the philosophy of the subject. By means of a simple displacement, Beckett denounces the taken-for-granted realist assumptions on which the whole literary edifice is based.
With Worstward Ho Beckett created a pure object of language, which is totally autonomous since it refers to nothing but itself. As if it was working towards a black hole from which there could issue no trace of representa-tion, no form that might recall, even vaguely, a body … Without a subject, without scenery, standing out on a black (dim), empty background, freed from any temporal or spatial reference-points, the images of Worstward Ho inaugurate abstract literature: they are headed towards a working drawing of abstraction or darkness.