Oldal 77 [77]
MARIKO HORI TANAKA
Features that Beckett and Churchill have in common can be found in what
Adorno terms “the violence of the unutterable”’ or “the language of the no¬
longer-human” that can be characterized as expressions of silence, negations,
and estrangement. As Adorno contends, “Only in silence can the name of
the catastrophe be pronounced,”* silence is often the only way to express
the traumatic fear of a disaster. Ihab Hassan, in The Literature of Silence,
similarly illustrates this feature, saying “The powers of Dionysos, which
civilization must repress, threaten at these times to erupt with a vengeance.
In the process, energy may overwhelm order; language may turn into a howl, a
cackle, a terrible silence.” As Adorno refers to Beckett’s “reduction of man to
animality”’ asa feature of the absurd in “the atomic age,”® Hassan regards what
happened in “Dachau and Hiroshima” as “turn[ing] men into things; under
its pressure, the metamorphosis of the human form is downward, toward the
worms of Beckett.”? If we think of both Beckett and Churchill’s descriptions
of the degradation of the human species and of their metaphorical depictions
of non-humans, it is natural to associate them with the socio-political reality
of the atomic age.
Criticisms such as Adorno’s and Hassan’s were in fact shared by many
people in the Cold War era when the nuclear arms race intensified, and
atomic annihilation did not seem to be unimaginable. Frank Kermode
remarks, “In the autumn of 1965, when I gave the lectures which make up
The Sense of an Ending [...] The Cuban missile crisis and the assassination
of President Kennedy were quite recent events, the Cold War remained very
cold, and words like ‘megadeath’ were common currency.”’® Kermode then
says “that this word does not appear in the second edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary (1989) may hint at a change of mood, a lessening, however,
temporary, of apocalyptic anxiety after that time.”!! We now know much
about Chernobyl] and Fukushima, but apocalyptic fear is given less expression
today than fifty years ago, and the reality of megadeath seems to be lost in our
imagination. But we acknowledge that if a nuclear war or explosion happened
on a large scale, there would be no future for the human species. The end of
human beings or the death of the earth is no longer a fantasy, and proliferation
of crises like environmental destruction, digital control over our lives, the
Ibid., 86.
Ibid., 94.
Ibid., 89.
Ihab Hassan: The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller & Samuel Beckett, New York, Alfred A.
Knopf, 1967, 18.
Adorno: Towards an Understanding of Endgame, 89.
8 Ibid., 86.
Hassan: The Literature of Silence, 5.
Frank Kermode: The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue,
Oxford, Oxford University, 2000, 181.
4 Tbid., 181.
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