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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 nolonger-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. au» w .76 +
