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THE SPIRITUAL CRISIS OF MODERNITY: Keynes, Beckett, BaudelaireAuthor(s): EUGENE WEBBSource: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Summer 1979), pp. 130-143Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41178115 .

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THE SPIRITUAL CRISIS OF MODERNITY: Keynes, Beckett, Baudelaire

EUGENE WEBB

Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle Sur l'esprit gémissant en proie aux longs ennuis, Et (jue de l'horizon embrassant tout le cercle II nous verse un jour noir plus triste que les nuits ....

Charles Baudelaire, "Spleen"*

1857, when Baudelaire published the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, it was becoming evident that Europe was in a

condition of spiritual crisis- a crisis that has not yet passed.1 The nature and causes of the crisis were, and remain, elusive, but its manifestations were forcing themselves on the perceptive ob- server, and Baudelaire may well have been the most acute of these in his century. Many have described the symptoms of the crisis, and it is currently a commonplace to speak of ours as an age of anxiety, boredom, absurdity, and so on. But few even now have penetrated as far as did Baudelaire into its deeper pathol- ogy-

The entry of this crisis into the modern historical scene is traceable to the period running from the late Middle Ages up through the Enlightenment. Eric Voegelin, for example, has described in numerous writings the development of the spiritual

Mr. Webb, a previous contributor to Soundings, is Professor of Comparative Literature and Comparative Religion at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of two books on Samuel Beckett (1970, 1972), and of The Dark Dove (1975). His forthcoming book,£Wr Voegelin: Philosopher of History, will be published by The University of Washington Press.

* When the low, heavy sky weighs like a lid on the groaning spirit held prey by constant boredom, and embracing the whole horizon around, it pours upon us a black day more melancholy than the nights ....

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condition in which the dimension of transcendence, and with it what he calls the "openness of existence," has gradually become lost on a broad scale.2 As Voegelin observed in the opening paragraph of his essay on Hegel:

When the gods are expelled from the cosmos, the world they have left becomes boring. In the seventeenth century, the ennui explored by Pascal was still the mood of a man who had lost his faith and must protect himself from the blackness of anxiety by divertissements; after the French Revolution, the ennui was recognized by Hegel as the syndrome of an age in history. It had taken a century-and-a-half for the lostness in a world without God to develop from a personal malaise of existence to a social disease.3

The current age of anxiety and despair has long been in preparation. It marks, one might say, the depressive phase of a manic-depressive cycle, the manic phase consisting in the optimism and progressivism that grew out of the striking success of the physical sciences in the early modern era and that found its most influential ideological expression among the philosophes of the Enlightenment, most notably Jean D'Alembert, Antione- Nicolas de Condorcet, and An ne- Robert-Jacques Turgot.4 This earlier enterprise was one of mastery of existence through knowledge. Because of its manifest success in the physical sciences, it was enthusiastically generalized as a method and an ideal to apply to the whole range of human concerns, including the spiritual. It embodied belief in the possibility of the trans- formation of humanity through knowledge without need for moral repentance. In the twentieth century, however, the themes of alienation and of the absurdity of the world seem to have become dominant.

It is somewhat awkward to speak of these developments in the language of historical "periods,""cycles," and "movements." In reality the phases and levels of the life of the spirit are preemi- nently features of the existence of the individual person; it is only when many individuals come to share a similar structure of existence and to exhibit and notice its manifestations that one has a reason to speak of the "syndrome of an age in history." What I have termed a spiritual crisis seems now to be such a syndrome, but the fact remains that any society and period are made up of many individuals, each of whom may be at a different stage of the progress through the pattern as a whole. Baudelaire became sensitive to a malaise that should have been



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plain enough but was scarcely noticed by such contemporaries of his as Auguste Comte or John Stuart Mill. The advocates of the Enlightenment have only slowly lost their confidence, and it is possible to find its point of view represented in any decade of the last two centuries. To put the issue another way, in tracing the progress of a pattern of existential inquiry, of what Plato called a zetema, in which many individuals are involved, it is possible at any given time to find a great variety of levels of actual understanding and spiritual formation represented among them according to the point at which) each has arrived in his or her particular journey-- and of course there are those who refuse to go beyond a certain point or who delay looking more deeply into things until they are forced to do so by events that cannot be denied.5

The experience of the twentieth century has been sufficiently traumatic in various ways that many have been driven to give up the Enlightenment belief in the inevitable moral as well as scientific progress of human civilization. Baudelaire had said in the last years of his life, "La croyance au progrès est une doctrine de paresseux .... Il ne peut y avoir de progrès (vrai, c'est-à-dire moral) que dans l'individu et par l'individu lui-même."6* Baudelaire, however, in this as in many other respects was well in advance of others. It is interesting to compare the reflections of John Maynard Keynes on the attitude toward progress among the members of the important literary and artistic coterie, the Bloomsbury group, during the second and third decades of this century:

We were among the last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who believe in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good .... In short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men.7

It is significant that the memoir in which Keynes made these

"The belief in progress is a doctrine for the lazy. There can be no real progress (i.e., moral progress) except in the individual and on the part of the individual himself.



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retrospective observations ("My Early Beliefs") is dated "9th September 1938," a time of extreme tension in Europe over Hitler's demands for the Sudetenland (Chamberlain flew to Munich on the fifteenth), and that Keynes continues with the comment that, "[we] were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved."

There is a good possibility that Samuel Beckett may have had Keynes's memoir and the world it describes in mind when he was writing his much bleaker assessment of modern man, Waitingfor Godot y and that he made them the target of a part of his satire in that play.8 The vain, egocentric plutocrat of the play is named Pozzo, for example, which was also the nickname Keynes went by in Bloomsbury, and the memoir was published in 1949, the year that Beckett was writing the play. Both Pozzos were collectors of precious objects of one sort or another, and both were aesthetes of a sort, resembling each other in this respect even in the lack of refinement of their capacity for aesthetic pleasure.9

During the course of the play Beckett's Pozzo, who in his first appearance is the very picture of complacency, is stripped of his possessions, becomes old and blind, and is finally forced by the anxious questioning of Vladimir to a realization and confession of utter despair:

Pozzo: (suddenly furious). Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he [Lucky, his slave] went dumb, one day I went blind, one day well go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? .... They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.10

When time is experienced in this way, as an endless closed cycle of world-immanent birth and death, it ceases to have either flow or direction. In Beckett's words, it "piles up all about you, instant on instant" in seconds that are "all alike and each one .... infernal."11

Keynes and Beckett here may be said to represent two different levels in the realization of the implications of existence closed to transcendence, and as such they exhibit the early and later stages in the breakdown of the project of the Enlighten-



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ment. The difference between Keynes and Beckett is historically that between one who had seen his faith in human perfectibility shaken by the anti-semitic Nuremberg laws and the forcible annexation of smaller countries by Nazi Germany, and one who had seen, and had himself been caught up in, the cataclysm.12 Keynes was critical of the heritage of Enlightenment rationalism and optimism that had formed his own mind and those of others in his circle, but his criticism did not lead him very far beyond the attitudes he criticized; and even as he expressed it he could still say, "It seems to me looking back, that this religion of ours was a very good one to grow up under. It remains nearer the truth than any other that I know, with less irrelevant extraneous matter and nothing to be ashamed of . . . .'M3 Beckett's works, on the other hand, express a vision that has no place for even the chastened rationalism of the Pozzo of Bloomsbury. Keynes's memoir may have rung the funeral knell of Bloomsbury and the heritage it represented, but Godot and The Unnamnble write the epitaph over its grave.

To realize that the project of human cognitive mastery of existence does not succeed and that there are mysterious, non-rational depths in man, to realize also that purely world- immanent existence lacks direction and order- such realiza- tions mark a significant advance in understanding in the course of the zetema that leads out of disorder. But of themselves they are only the vestibule, as it were, of insight, only the shore surrounding Mount Purgatorio. To penetrate more deeply into the existential issue, we must turn once again to Baudelaire. Beckett's Unnamable comes to feel himself occupied and domi- nated by demonic presences that force him to tell stories endlessly, tö imagine, to think, to attempt futilely to reduce mystery to problem, and he even comes to realize that the demons are only symbolic representations of utterly irrational compulsions. But he never catches a glimmer of the possibility that human existence has not always been an experience of hopeless disorder or that a life not closed within an immanentist Cartesian mind might not be entirely impossible. Beckett sees clearly the misery of closed existence, but he accepts its di- rectionless ness and disorder as inevitable.14

The poems of Les Fleurs du Mal, on the other hand, represent many stages both of incomprehension and of insight. In the most mature poems of the collection, the closed existence is portrayed as demonic and as the responsibility of the individual,




to whom real alternatives can become open. The alternative of openness is approached only obliquely in the poems - though it is discussed explicitly in Baudelaire's last fragmentary prose writings collected in the Journaux intimes - but the responsibility of the individual for his own torment is made quite clear, as in the following lines from "L'Héautontimorouménos" ("The Self-tormentor"):

Ne suis-je pas un faux accord Dans la divine symphonie . . .?

Je suis la plaie et le couteau! Je suis le soufflet et la joue! Je suis les membres et la roue, Et la victime et le bourreau!*

To say this, of course, is still not to analyze the causes of the disease, but there are other poems that penetrate further. "L'Alchimie de la douleur," ("The Alchemy of Suffering"), for example, both recognizes that there are alternative modes of existence possible and identifies the cause of the closed mode as a sort of alchemy gone wrong:

L'un t'éclaire avec son ardeur, L'autre en toi met son deuil, Nature! Ce qui dit à l'un: Sépulture! Dit à l'autre: Vie et splendeur! Hermès inconnu qui m'assistes Et qui toujours m'intimidas, Tu me rends l'égal de Midas, Le plus triste des alchimistes; Par toi je change l'or en fer Et le paradis en enfer; Dans le suaire des nuages Je découvre un cadavre cher, Et sur les célestes rivages Je bâtis de grands sarcophages. **

*.'m I not a dissonant chord in the divine symphony? I am the wound and the knife! I am the blow and the cheek! I am the limbs and the rack, the victim and the torturer.

**One illuminates you with his fire, the other dresses you in mourning, Nature. What says to one, "Tomb!" says to the other, "Life and radiance!" O unknown Hermes, who aids me and constantly frightens me, you make me the equal of Midas, the saddest of alchemists; through you I change gold into iron and paradise into hell. In* the winding sheet of the clouds I discover a precious corpse, and on the celestial shores I build huge sarcophagi.



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Rather than say that it is an alchemy gone wrong, however, it might be more precise to say that it is an alchemy that has begun to reveal the true character of the alchemical enterprise as such, an enterprise of human control of existence that tries to bring about an advance in level of being, not through openness toward transcendence, but through cognitive mastery and technical manipulation. The difference is essentially that between trust in freely given divine grace, on the one hand, and, on the other, theurgy. As an exclusively immanentist project, the alchemical enterprise is doomed to ironic successes that only reduce man to a world-immanent, enclosed self- changing the gold of the spirit into the baser metal of immanent selfhood and thereby eclipsing the paradise that could begin to emerge in the soul's experiences of transcendence and condemning the immanent self constituted by this action to the hell of closed existence.

Baudelaire presents the symptoms of the resulting spiritual, intellectual, and emotional disease in images that have since become broadly familiar in modern literature. There is the sense of the constrictedness of human existence expressed in the symbol of the closed horizon and a sky that weighs like a lid upon the soul groaning under the torture of ennui. "C'est un univers morne à l'horizon plombé,"* he says in "De Profundis (Clamavi ("Out of the depths I cried"), and in "Le Couvercle" ("The Lid") he again takes up the image of the sky as a lid enclosing the constricted self:

En haut, le Ciel! ce mur de caveau qui Pétouffe . . . Le Ciel! couvercle noir de la grande marmite Où bout l'imperceptible et vaste Humanité.**

Another of the "Spleen" poems ("J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans")*** describes the disunity and disorder that characterize the disease of ennui by means of images of chests of drawers, tombs, cemeteries, boudoirs - all filled with discon- nected fragments of remembered life. Nothings, he says, refer- ring to these similes and the lists of their contents, equals the slow length of limping days,

Quand sous les lourds flocons des neigeuses années,

* It is a dreary universe with a leaden horizon. **The sky above! this cavern wall that suffocates us. The sky! black lid of the enormous pot in which humanity, imperceptible and vast, seethes.

***I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.




L'Ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosité, Prend les proportions de l'immortalité.*

The image of time that drags along, passing but going now here, is one of the more poignant and telling symbols with which he expresses the experience of ennui. In this case we have time that limps because it is the image of crippled humanity. In "Les Sept Vieillards" ("The Seven Old Men"), he presents a similar image of time in the form of seven decrepit, malevolent old men, each exactly alike, who emerge one after the other from the dirty, yellow fog of the "fourmillante cité" (swarming city) - a cumulative revelation of stagnant time that drives the speaker to near madness, "l'esprit fiévreux et trouble,/Blessé par le mystère et par l'absurdité."** In "De Profundis Clamavi" the speaker realizes, at least dimly, that the ennui from which he suffers, and the time he suffers through, have become the very form of his consciousness, and he is tempted to retreat to a subhuman stupor to escape it:

Je jalouse le sort des plus vils animaux Qui peuvent se plonger dans un sommeil stupide, Tant récheveau du temps lentement se dévide!***

There is also the image of time (in "Le Goût du néant," "The Taste for Nothingness") that does not move at all, but simply piles up and buries one:

Et le Temps m'engloutit minute par minute, Comme la neige immense un corps pris de roideur . . . .****

This last image closely resembles an image Beckett used to describe the experience of time when seen from the point of view of a profound realization of its directionlessness. Beckett's trilogy of novels- Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamableib - move from the comparatively superficial, and so comparatively less despairing, consciousness of Moran through a progressive realization of absurdity in the minds of Molloy and Malone to the ultimate combination of clarity and confusion in that of the

*VVhen under the heavy flakes of snowy years, Boredom, the fruit of dull indifference, takes on the proportions of immortality.

**The feverish and troubled mind, wounded by mystery and absurdity. *** The skein of time unwinds so slowly that I envy the lot of the vilest animals, who can immerse themselves in stupefied sleep.

****And time engulfs me minute by minute, as a heavy snowfall buries a stiffening body.



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Unnamable. The earlier characters could move through time in quest of at least minimal satisfactions or relief from suffering, or they could "pass the time" with stories, but for the Unnamable time simply piles up:

. . . the question may be asked, off the record, why time doesn't pass, doesn't pass from you, why it piles up all about you, instant on instant, on all sides, deeper and deeper, thicker and thicker, your time, others' time, the time of the ancient dead and the dead yet unborn, why it buries you grain by grain neither dead nor alive . . ,16

It is significant, however, that Beckett's image of stagnant time in this instance is one in which there is no movement at all and in fact no real desire for movement. Beckett's Unnamable sometimes catches himself wishing something would happen to change his situation, but whenever he has enough presence of mind to reflect, he denies not only that hope, but even the validity of the desire. Baudelaire's image of the corpse fro/en in the snows of time is a despairing one, but in the context of the poems of the Fleurs du mal as a whole- and Baudelaire indeed intended the volume to be read as a whole- it represents an extreme response that is balanced by a constantly renewed, fundamentally healthy longing for the experience of time as a movement toward freedom, insight, moral consistency, coher- ence of vision and of life, and ultimately toward peace, love, and joy. Beckett's Unnamable, who is presented in his trilogy as the most clear-sighted of his protagonists, considers himself superior to such wishes, and this attitude of superiority is, from the point of view of a diagnostic inquiry such as Baudelaire's, both symptom and cause of the frozen quality of the time in which man as Beckett sees him is imprisoned.

The poem by Baudelaire which carries the diagnostic inquiry further than any work mentioned so far is probably the most widely known of any he wrote, the prefatory "Au Lecteur" ("To the Reader"). This is a poem of accusation addressed to all who open the pages of the book, indeed, to the entire population of the age whose state of soul it analyzes. It leads the reader through a progressive revelation of his disease and his own responsibility for it. Through our own perverse and muddled choices, it tells us, we are occupied by a host of demons who swarm in our brains like maggots. Choosing fragmentation and vice, we breathe in death and descend step by step into hell.




without even a sense of horror. The ultimate and central figure among our vices is identified as the spiritual disease of ennui:

.... Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices, II en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde! Quoiqu'il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grand cris, II ferait volontiers de la terre un débris Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde; C'est l'Ennui! .... Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, - Hypocrite lecteur,- mon semblable, - mon frère!*

What is most important about this poem, however, and what makes it so appropriate an example with which to close this essay, is the particular treatment it gives to the alchemical theme. Once again there is an ironic alchemy that produces the reverse of the customarily expected result, but this time the emphasis is on the inner spiritual effects of the process:

Sur l'oreiller du mal c'est Satan Trismégiste Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté, Et le riche métal de notre volonté Est tout vaporisé par ce savant chimiste.

(]'est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!**

What is especially significant about this passage is that it suggests very strongly a comparison with one of the major symbols -of open existence in the Western heritage, Plato's myth of man as a puppet made by the gods and pulled in various directions by different cords.17 One of these, the cord that represents the pull of divinely given law, is made of gold, while the others, representing the pull of the appetites and passions, are made of iron. Each person, says the Athenian Stranger, has the obligation to resist the pull of the iron cords while yielding himself freely to the pull of the golden cord. Baudelaire's alchemist Satan, on the other hand, vaporizes the golden ele-

*. . . in the infamous menagerie of our vices, there is one that is the ugliest, the wickedest, the filthiest! Although he neither makes grand gestures nor emits loud cries, he would gladly make a ruin of the earth and swallow the world in a yawn. It is Boredom! . . . You know him reader, this dainty monster - hyp<x rite reader- my likeness- my brother!

**On the pillow of evil it is Satan Trisiiiegistus who steadily lulls our enchanted minds, and the rich metal of our wills is completely vaporized by this learned chemist. It is the devil who holds the cords that moves us.



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ment in man's will so that it is the Devil alone who is left in control of the cords of the puppet. That the gold must first be vaporized by alchemy in order that man may become entirely a victim of the forces that imprison him in the closed or immanentist mode of existence suggests that in open or transcendentally oriented existence he could have within him the presence of another pull by which he would be drawn in the direction of true fulfillment by attunement to the divine measure.18

Baudelaire did not speak much more explicitly than this in his poems about the true orientation of the soul, but passages in the Journaux intimes from his last years explicate further the direction of his thought. In "Mon Coeur mis à nu" ("My Heart Laid Bare"), for example, he says, "De la vaporisation et de la centralisation du Moi. Tout est là."19* Here the Moi of which he speaks is not the closed immanent self, but the capacity for effective moral intention. In another place in the same work he says, in a way that recalls St. Augustine on the forces o' amor Dei (love for God) and amor sui (love for self) in the soul, "II y a dans tout homme, à toute heure, deux postulations simultanées, l'une vers Dieu, l'autre vers Satan. L'invocation à Dieu, ou spiritualité, est un désir de monter en grade; celle de Satan, ou animalité, est une joie de descendre."20**

The essential issue is the question of right order in the soul. A life governed by the pull of egoistic passion will lead finally to the condition described in "Au lecteur," and this will become, as it has for many in our age, so palpably a hell that one can no longer help noticing that a life without orientation toward transcendence is not freedom but misery. To realize that this misery is the effect of compulsively closed existence, on the othei hand, requires greater discernment and also the willingness to seek a new orientation. It is common for a person who begins to realize the misery of a life without transcendent direction to hold back and wait for incontrovertible, quasi-scientific proof that there is a transcendent deity who can offer rewards comparably tangible to those toward which the iron cords pull. Baudelaire's own path

*The vaporizing and the coalescing of the Self. That is the heart of the matter.

* "There are in everyone, at all times, two simultaneous tendencies, one toward God, the other toward Satan. The reaching out toward God, or spirituality, is a desire to ascend in degree, that toward Satan, or animality, is a delight in descending.



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up from the depths of existence was a prolonged and vacillating one, and he may well have felt this sort of temptation, but one of the indications of the profundity of insight at which his own zetema arrived is another of his last statements, in the Journaux intimes, "Dieu est le seul être qui, pour régner, n'ait même pas besoin d'exister."21* The movement out of the prison of closed existence need not and must not wait upon success in the quest for certainty regarding an object of knowledge, but demands the humility to turn toward mystery, as Baudelaire eventually did, in prayer: "Donnez-moi la force de faire immédiatement mon de- voir tous les jours et de devenir ainsi un héros et un Saint."22** What it requires is a willingness to accept human finitude: both the limitations that are inherent in human knowledge and also the incompleteness, the essential needfulness of man. The humility that makes such recognition of limitedness and need possible can also open up the possibility of discerning in the very anguish that torments man the first dark stirrings of a love that reaches beyond his limits. This in turn can be experienced and responded to as an invitation, as it was ultimately by Baudelaire- an invitation to trust and loyalty.

Baudelaire's poems, when read in the total setting of hisoeuvres, illustrate a truth too often lost sight of in modern literary criticism, which tends to fall victim to pretensions to scientific objectivity and value-neutrality. This is the truth that art has a spiritual dimension and that in the best art this dimension becomes explicit and critically reflective.

The imaginative articulation in symbolic form of the spiritual crisis of an age requires not only aesthetic sensibility and imagination, but also spiritual insight. One artist may never even notice the conditions that make for the deadly ennui Baudelaire describes in his poems; another may feel them intensely and represent them powerfully. Still another, however, may go beyond a merely descriptive representation of symptoms to penetrate to the heart of the existential issue. In the life of the spirit a true diagnosis is already the beginning of a cure - which implies the corollary that the capacity for insightful diagnosis develops only in proportion as one is willing to begin the cure.

*C»od is the only being who, in order to reign, does not even need to exist.

••Give me the strength to do my duty immediately every day and thus to become a hero and a saint.



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The insight into the structure of the disease is an integral part of* the existential inquiry, ov zetema, by which the way up from the depths of existence is illuminated. Baudelaire could penetrate with such unusual depth into the essential character of the modern spiritual crisis because he actually lived it through to the point of beginning to emerge from it.

NOTES

1 . All quotations from Baudelaire will be from the Oeuvres complètes, ed. Y. -(i. LeDantec and Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961).

2. See for example, in the order of their periods of historical coverage: "Siger de Brabant/* Philosophy and Phenomenology cal Research, IV, No. 4 (1944). 507-25; "More's Utopia," Oesterreichische Zeitschrift fuer Oeff entliches Recht, Vienna, Springer, Neue Folge, Bd. III, Heft 4, pp. 451-68; "On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery," Studium Generale 24 (1971), 335-68; 'The Eclipse of Reality," in Phenomenology and Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 185-94; and From Enlightenment to Revolu- tion (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975).

3. "On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery," p. 335. 4. See Eric Voegelin, "The Origins of Scientism," Social Research, XV, No. 4

(1948), pp. 462-94, and From Enlightenment to Revolution, pp. 74-109. 5. Cf. the discussion of Plato's conception of a zetema in Eric Voegelin, Order

and History HI: Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), pp, 82-88.

6. In the section of Journaux intimes entitled "Mon Coeur mis à nu," Oeuvres complètes, p. 1276.

7. John Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs: Dr. Melchior: A Defeated Enemy ami My Early Beliefs (London: Rupert Hart Davies, 1949), pp. 98-99. The members of the Bloomsbury group included among others, Keynes himself, Thoby Stephen, Clive Bell, Saxon Sidney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Vanessa Stephen, E. M. Forster, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

8. For a more detailed discussion of this possibility and of the nature of the evidence for it see Eugene Webb, "Pozzo in Bloomsbury: A Possible Allusion in Beckett's Waiting for Godot," Journal of Modern Literature, V, no. 2 (Apil 1976), 326-31.

9. Commenting on Keynes's role as an art collector, R. F. Harrod said, "Some hold, perhaps correctly, that his success in this field was due to some uncanny extension of his intellectual power into the world of aesthetics, and that he was never deeply moved by visual, as he undoubtedly was by literary, beauty." He goes on to quote Lytton Strachey's comment, "What irritates me about Pozzo is that he has no aesthetic sense." Roy Forbes Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1 95 1 ), p. 180.

10. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), facing p. 57.

1 1. This phrase is taken from Beckett's novel, The Unnamable (New York: The Grove Press, 1958), pp. 143, 152.

12. During the period immediately before the outbreak of the war, Beckett was in Paris urging his Jewish friends to leave before it was too late. Around the




beginning of 194 1 he joined atombat group of the French Resistance, then in 1 942 had to ílee from the Gestapo to the Vaucluse, where he remained in hiding until near the end of the war. For biographical information regarding Beckett see James Knowlson, Samuel Beckett: An Exhibition (London: Turret Books, 1971); Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); and Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biograbhy (New. York: Harcourt Brace ïovanovich, 1978).

IH. Keynes, p. 92. 14. Unless some oí his later works point beyond this vision. For a discussion of

the possibility that this is the case and that there is a genuine sensé of the sacred emerging in some of his later plays, see Eugene Webb, The Dark Dove: The Sacred and the Secular in Modern Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), pp. 63-76. This would not invalidate, however, the point made regarding the works cited.

1 5. Molloy ( 1 955), Mahne Dies ( 1 956), and The Unnmnable ( 1 958), all published in New York by Grove Press. They originally appeared in French (Paris; Editions de Minuit, 1951, 1951, 1953).

16. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, p. 143. W.Imws, 644d-645c. That Baudelaire may have intended this passage as an

allusion to Plato's image is supported both by the parallel in meaning and by the fact that Baudelaire seems to have taken pride in his knowledge of Plato: in the Salon de I859 he speaks of the large number of contemporary painters who are "des hommes sans âme et sans instruction" ("soulless and uneducated men"), but singles out Chenavard for praise as one with whom "je suis sûr de pouvoir causer de Virgile ou de Platon," (4T am sure I could discuss Virgil or Plato"), Oeuvres cameletes, p. 1028.

18. Cf. the other famous passage in the Laws (716c) in which the Athenian Stranger, implicitly rejecting the Sophistic idea that man is the measure of all things, says, "Now it is God who is, for you and for me, of a truth the 'measure of all things,* much more truly than, as they say, 'man/ " Trans. A. E. Taylor in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 1307.

19. Oeuvres complètes, p. 1271. 20. Ibid., p. »277. 21. Ibid, p. 1247. 22. Ibid., p. 1287.

