Mass deception

adorno's negative dialectics and Pynchon

pp. 127-145

in: Paul M. Eve, Pynchon and philosophy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

Samuel Beckett's penultimate novella, Worstward Ho, is framed "atween"¹ the twain of being and void, crawling in absolute steadiness of rhythm "[t]ill nohow on".² It is also a piece that brings the complex interrelations of microcosmic linguistics and macroscopic form into focus. Respect would be, indeed, due to the critic who could extract a comprehensive reading that reflected the whole from a single of Beckett's phonically playful sentences, without reference to another. It could be, then, that Beckett's malignant void-dweller, never content with "merely bad",³ is entwined (atwained, atweened) within a Hegelian structure: the whole is the true. Superficially, this is convincing. Certainly the question-answer cadence of the piece points towards a dialectical structure ensconced in negation. However, Beckett's overarching presentation of spirit is hardly compatible with the metaphysical ontotheology of Hegel's Absolute;⁴ as succinctly phrased by Hamm in Endgame: "[t]he bastard! He doesn't exist!"⁵ It looks, for Beckett, as if the same might apply to "the whole". The rescue of Hegel that is needed for a Beckettian, and subsequently Pynchonian, dialectic could, as a provisional hypothesis, come through the work of Theodor W. Adorno, although this rescue would save a new dialectics only at Hegel's expense.⁶ This said, if Foucault's philosophical endeavour was underpinned by an often antagonistic relationship to the work of Kant, in the case of Adorno and the Frankfurt School the interaction with German Idealism is marked through an engagement with Kant and Hegel.⁷