Beckett’s “neither” & Giacometti’s Figurine

Beckett’s “neither” & Giacometti’s Figurine
entre deux boîtes qui sont des maisons

with discussion by James Olney

I am very grateful to the editors of Dædalus for per-

mitting and even encouraging me to select two
works–Samuel Beckett’s “neither” and Alberto
Giacometti’s sculpture Figurine entre deux boîtes qui
sont des maisons–for my discussion of influence. As
I have been associated with literature departments
throughout my career, I have chosen Beckett’s for
my primary text. But while I believe that what I want
to say could be said from that work alone, I also
believe that it will be more forceful, more convincing,
and surely more graphic if I couple “neither” with
Giacometti’s Figurine. And as artists, Beckett and
Giacometti had, in the ½nal analysis, so much in
common that when we read, as a summary judg-
ment of a whole body of work, that “he is one of the
few artists who has contributed fundamentally to
the way the human condition is perceived,” no one
unfamiliar with the statement could say with any
assurance which artist is its subject.

Had I been asked earlier in my career to consider
texts that have influenced me and my own work, I
would certainly have chosen differently. Indeed,
looking through the index to my ½rst book on what
might best be called “life-writing,” Metaphors of Self,
I ½nd no mention of Samuel Beckett. Yet today
there seems to me an inevitability about the choice
of Beckett, the only issue being which text to choose
from the many that offer themselves. A major rea-
son for this development is that Metaphors of Self, as
its title implies, was a nonlinear exercise, a study of
various writers in various times, and what each had to

JAMES OLNEY, a Fellow of the
American Academy since 2001, is
the Voorhies Professor of English
Emeritus at Louisiana State Uni-
versity. He is also Coeditor Emeri-
tus of the Southern Review. His pub-
lications include Memory and Nar-
rative: The Weave of Life-Writing
(1998), The Language(s) of Poetry:
Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson,
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1993), and
Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of
Autobiography (1972).

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On
Beckett &
Giacometti

“neither”

to and fro in shadow from inner to outershadow
from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither
as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close,
once turned away from gently part again
beckoned back and forth and turned away
heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other
unheard footfalls only sound
till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other
then no sound
then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither
unspeakable home

–From Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove
Press, 1995), 258. Copyright © 1995 by the Estate of Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/
Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

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say of the self. My most recent book on the
subject, on the other hand, is profoundly
linear, as its title would also imply: Memory
and Narrative. Narrative is always, by its
nature, linear, and so is memory, in spite
of gaps and doubling-back and so on; thus
there is a story of some sort recounted in
each piece of life-writing, while there is
also a history at-large of the entire genre.
In effect, Beckett has grown on me and
imposed himself as the quintessence, the
endpoint (for now, for our time, not for-
ever) of all earlier and all contemporary
exercises in life-writing.

The great story of autobiography begins,

for me and I believe for Beckett also, with
St. Augustine. It passes by way of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau and his massive, unre-
lenting, and tortuous effort in life-writing
to issue in a host of modernist writers who
question and refuse the very premises of
the genre, yet feel compelled to make the
attempt again and again. For Augustine,
however, the genre was a relatively new
one, without the overlay of attempts from

his time to the twentieth century, and in
him Beckett could ½nd phrasing and aper –
çus to turn to his own uses. As he tells us
in an early letter, Beckett spent an entire
day “phrase-hunting in St. Augustine,”1
and elsewhere we hear that he kept a
notebook devoted exclusively to quota-
tions from Augustine, bits and pieces out
of which to construct his own tale.

But it is not in bits and pieces (or “bits
of pipe,” as Beckett once phrased it) that
Augustine makes his greatest contribution
to his twentieth-century descendant;
rather, it is in the stichomythic structure
of Waiting for Godot and almost everything
else Beckett wrote, which was derived, or
so the story goes, from a St. Augustine
passage about the two thieves cruci½ed
on either side of Jesus, the one damned,
the other saved. When questioned by
drama critic Harold Hobson about his in –
terest in the two thieves when he was very
remote from professions of Christianity,
Beckett, according to Hobson, “became
eager, excited. . . . ‘I am interested in the
shape of ideas even if I do not believe

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Figurine entre deux boîtes qui sont des maisons

James
Olney

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Source: CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. © 2013 Alberto Giacometti
Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY.

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them. There is a wonderful sentence in
Augustine. I wish I could remember the
Latin. It is even ½ner in Latin than in En –
glish. “Do not despair; one of the thieves
was saved. Do not presume; one of the
thieves was damned.” That sentence has
a wonderful shape. It is the shape that mat –
ters.’”2 No one has speci½ed just where this
“wonderful sentence” occurs in Augustine,
but no matter: if Beckett wishes to credit
the Great Progenitor for his own inter-
pretation of the human condition as one
situated always in-between–between sal –
vation and damnation, hope and despair,
hither and yon, between doors that “once
neared gently close, / once turned away

from gently part again”–who would
argue with him? It is this shape that rules
his work in large and in small, from
beginning to end. And being the dramatist
he was, Beckett was nothing loath to turn
the Augustinian “wonderful sentence” to
farcical purposes, as in Waiting for Godot,
when his Didi and Gogo, like the biblical
thieves before them, assume places on
either side of the fallen Pozzo, lifting him
from the floor and carrying him about
the stage as if they were all on Golgotha.
There were, of course, signi½cant life-
writers between Augustine and Rousseau
–Giambattista Vico, for example–and
between Rousseau and Beckett–Henry

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On
Beckett &
Giacometti

Adams, for one–but Rousseau remains
the essential and inescapable ½gure who,
like all of Beckett’s ½gures, lies in-between.
And as with Augustine, so with Rousseau:
Beckett’s comments provide the best
guides on how to read Rousseau. In a let-
ter of 1932, Beckett points to “the mad-
ness and the distortion”3 in Rousseau’s
writing, and while the speci½c reference
is to the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, it
could apply equally to Rousseau’s Confes-
sions or Dialogues, three volumes taken to –
gether that comprise Rousseau’s massive,
obsessive achievement in life-writing.
But as any reader who comes to Beckett
with innocent expectations of sanity and
clarity in writing could testify, “madness”
and “distortion” do as well for Beckett’s
texts as for Rousseau’s.

The crucial difference is that the mad-
ness in Beckett’s work is all in the charac-
ter, never in the author, while there is no
distinction between author and character
in Rousseau. Even when he divides him-
self into multiple characters in Dialogues–
J. J., Rousseau, and the Frenchman–it’s
all Rousseau, manic and distorted from
beginning to end. Rousseau adopts three
different forms for his life-writing exer-
cises–narrative in Confessions, dialogue
in Dialogues, and reverie in Reveries–but
each in its own way spins out of control.
The general movement of the three vol-
umes is from social engagement, troubled
though it may be, to absolute isolation
and profound silence as Rousseau, turned
away from door after door, seeks “that
unheeded neither / unspeakable home” of
Beckett’s text. Giving a positive, if tragic,
twist to Rousseau’s isolation, Beckett, in
a letter of 1934, declared, “I must think of
Rousseau as a champion of the right to be
alone and as an authentically tragic ½gure
in so far as he was denied enjoyment of
the right, not only by a society that con-
sidered solitude as a vice . . . but by the
infantile aspect, afraid of the dark, of his

own constitution.”4 This is a very subtle
analysis of the fact and the logic of
Rousseau’s solitude, altogether worthy of
the man who would conclude the 1950
novella Company with these lines:

But with face upturned for good labour in
vain at your fable. Till ½nally you hear how
words are coming to an end. With every
inane word a little nearer to the last. And
how the fable too. The fable of one with
you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of
one with you in the dark. And how better in
the end labour lost and silence. And you as
you always were.

Alone.

One could think of no epilogue more
½tting than this for Rousseau, and it de –
scribes well the hopeless situation he left
for his successors in the life-writing ven-
ture: “you must say words, as long as there
are any, until they ½nd me, until they say
me . . . perhaps they have carried me to the
threshold of my story, before the door
that opens on my story, that would sur-
prise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be
the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll
never know, in the silence you don’t
know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll
go on.”5 Beckett did go on, and so did
many another modernist: inheritors all
of the world that had so confounded
Rousseau. Beckett once said that it is the
task of the contemporary artist “to ½nd a
form that accommodates the mess.”6
Though it is by no means the whole story,
it would be fair to say that Rousseau
bequeathed the mess to Beckett, his con-
temporaries, and his successors, while
Augustine provided a form that might
accommodate it.

If it be granted that Beckett is the key

½gure in life-writing in his time, there
still remains the question of which text to
choose to demonstrate this most persua-
sively. The virtues of “neither” are the

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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compactness of the piece, what we know
of its genesis and evolution, and the
reverberations set off by coupling it with
Giacometti’s Figurine. Beckett’s mature
art was one of elimination, concentration,
shearing away to the essential and beyond
as if to reduce the mess to that which
might be accommodated by some vestige
of form. Figures are gradually disembod-
ied, as Winnie is in Happy Days; or they
start out and remain disembodied, as with
Mouth in Not I, or with the voice from
offstage in Footfalls or from nowhere that
can be discerned, as in Ghost Trio. This sort
of reduction reaches its apotheosis with
“neither,” where there is no character–
not even a pronoun for an absent name
–although, as S. E. Gontarski tells us,
“When the British publisher of Beckett’s
prose and ½ction, John Calder, was about
to publish the work in the Collected Poems,
Beckett resisted because he considered it
a piece of prose, a story.”7 In a story with-
out a character or characters, it seems
½tting that the only sound should be
“unheard footfalls.” Unnamed and un –
seen, indeed nonexistent, characters and
unheard footfalls: this is the art of irre-
ducible reduction to suit a time and a
condition otherwise a mess.

What we know of the origin of “neither”
comes from a story told by the American
composer Morton Feldman, a story of
distinctly Beckettian tenor.8 Having been
commissioned to write an opera, some-
thing he had never attempted before,
Feldman contacted Beckett, who agreed
to meet him at the Werkstatt Theater in
Berlin, where Beckett was assisting in a
production of Footfalls and That Time.
Feldman, who had very weak eyesight,
continues with the tale: “I was led from
daylight into a dark theater, on stage,
where I was presented to an invisible
Beckett. He shook hands with my thumb,
and I fell softly down a huge black curtain
to the ground.” One hardly needs to in –

voke Didi and Gogo, for they are so
patently there. Later, over lunch, Beckett,
clearly puzzled by what Feldman might
be seeking from him, stated, “I don’t like
opera,” to which Feldman responded, “I
don’t blame you.” And so the two, in agree –
ment but at cross-purposes, continued.
Beckett: “I don’t like my words being set to
music.” Feldman: “I’m in complete agree –
ment. In fact it’s very seldom that I’ve
used words. I’ve written a lot of pieces
with voice, and they’re wordless.” Beckett:
“But what do you want?” Feldman: “I
have no idea.” After having declared him-
self clueless, Feldman came up with an
intriguing formulation: “I said that I was
looking for the quintessence, something
that just hovered”–something that hov-
ered, as it were, between words and si –
lence, between to and fro, between light
and dark, something, one might say,
Augustinian in form.

Picking up from Feldman’s hint, Beckett
declared that there was only one theme in
his life and work and jotted down what
that was: “To and fro in shadow, from
outer shadow to inner shadow. To and
fro, between unattainable self and un –
attainable nonself.” Remarking that this
might need some more work, Beckett
offered to send a reworked piece to Feld-
man, which he did shortly thereafter, with
slight revisions to these ½rst two lines
and the rest of “neither” as we now know
it. Feldman promptly set it to music and
so ful½lled his commission.

Musicologists are divided on whether
“neither” is to be called an opera or not.
There is a single voice, who is not a char-
acter in any detectable story, singing the
“libretto” of eighty-seven words–the
words, however, not discernible as such.
But then, if Beckett could call “neither” a
story, why not an opera as well? Beckett
and Feldman worked on “neither” quite
separately, hence, as one music critic puts
it, the piece cannot be called a collabora-

James
Olney

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143 (1) Winter 2014

On
Beckett &
Giacometti

tion, but should be thought of as a “co-
elaboration”; it is “a work containing the
input of two like-minded visionaries fo –
cused on a single theme: the endless and
perhaps hopeless quest for understand-
ing of the self and the universe, as carried
out within the flash of a single life.”9 Beck-
ett must have been more than satis½ed
with Feldman’s translating his words into
“hovering,” for he later suggested Feld-
man as composer for his radio play Words
and Music; Feldman–in turn and, as it
were, in gratitude–followed Words and
Music with a long piece (which was to be
the last composition before his death),
For Samuel Beckett. Feldman evidently
found something innately musical in
Beckett’s lines, and I think he was right;
for what we have in “neither” is a
markedly lyrical grace in a threnody for
humanity moving toward that “unheeded
neither / unspeakable home.”

Alberto Giacometti could not have

known “neither,” nor Beckett’s claim
that in it he realized the “one theme in his
life”: Giacometti died in 1966, a decade
before Beckett’s meeting with Feldman
in 1976. Yet Giacometti’s Figurine entre
deux boîtes qui sont des maisons could well
stand, avant la lettre, as the most brilliant
commentary we have–or could have–
on that piece. And we do know that Gia-
cometti and Beckett were in the habit of
meeting for late-night drinks in one or
another bar in Montparnasse before set-
ting out on long, nocturnal rambles
through the streets of Paris, sometimes
chatting but just as often in silent com-
munion. When they did converse, Beckett
said that Giacometti often spoke of his
torment in not being able to capture in
paint or sculpture what he saw before
him: it was impossible, he said, yet he went
on hopelessly trying. Moreover, the ½gures
he sculpted kept getting smaller and smal –
ler until they disappeared in dust. (“But

wanting to create from memory what I
had seen, to my terror the sculptures be –
came smaller and smaller. . . . Often they
became so tiny that with one touch of my
knife they disappeared into dust.”10) Beck –
ett’s advice was to embrace the impossi-
bility of the task, as well as the incessant
reduction in size, as his very subject.

To be a minimalist and in despair at the
fact was not exactly Giacometti’s choice,
nor was it Beckett’s, but rather their
mutual destiny. As Giacometti’s ½gures
dwindled to dust, the ego or the I corre-
spondingly became impossible and dis-
appeared from Beckett’s texts. It was this
joint phenomenon, and its repercussions
for the act of life-writing, that assumed
such signi½cance for me and my work. If
the “autos” and “bios” of autobiography
become unavailable, all that is left is
graphein, which describes the desperate
dilemma of contemporary life-writers
and critics of the mode.

Most of the late-night conversations of
Beckett and Giacometti are lost to us now,
but one that occurred in unique and emo-
tion-laden circumstances has been pre-
served through Giacometti’s telling. When
En attendant Godot was revived in 1961 at
the Odéon Théâtre de France in Paris,
Beckett asked Giacometti to design the
stage set, and what he produced, in addi-
tion to the full moon that rises at the end
of Act I and again at the end of Act II, was
what Beckett was later to call “the Godot
tree”: a stark, plaster tree that seems to
signify now life, when it unexpectedly
springs new leaves, now death, when Didi
and Gogo contemplate hanging them-
selves from its branches, and always the
in-between that so dominates the play.
After the tree was created in Giacometti’s
studio, he and Beckett spent one whole
night putting it in place on the stage, ½d –
dling with it, adjusting it ever so slightly
in one direction or another. “It was sup-
posed to be a tree,” Giacometti later said,

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James
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the agitated movement of the woman.
This story comes to a terrible and poignant
focus when we learn that in the ½gure
Giacometti was probably recalling a 1945
newspaper photograph of “a naked Jew-
ish woman being driven across the open
space between the prisoners’ barracks
and the gas chambers.”15 It is thus a very
emblem of its time, quite like what Beck-
ett says the Irish Red Cross volunteers
received when they went to assist in
rebuilding the city of St.-Lô after it “was
bombed out of existence in one night.”
Those volunteers, Beckett says, “will
come home realizing that they got at least
as good as they gave, that they got indeed
what they could hardly give, a vision and
sense of a time-honoured conception of
humanity in ruins and perhaps,” he con-
tinues, in one of the most hopeful of all
passages in Beckett, “perhaps even an
inkling of the terms in which our condition
is to be thought again.”16 That “inkling”
is what gives us the work of Giacometti
and Beckett, preeminently Figurine entre
deux boîtes qui sont des maisons and “neither.”

“a tree and the moon. We experimented
the whole night long with the plaster tree,
making it bigger, making it smaller, mak-
ing the branches ½ner. It never seemed
right to us. And each of said to the other:
perhaps.”11 I have taken the liberty of
translating the ½nal word (forse) as per-
haps, rather than the standard translation
of maybe, simply to bring it into line with
Beckett’s comment to theater critic and
theologian Tom Driver: “The key word in
my plays is ‘perhaps.’”12 Neither yes nor
no is possible to them, only perhaps; per-
petually caught (in Giacometti’s phrase)
“between being and non-being,” the two
of them could only go on and on, “beck-
oned back and forth and turned away /
heedless of the way.”

“The older I get, the more I ½nd myself
alone. I suppose in the end I will be
entirely alone.”13 Beckett or Giacometti?
Though it happens to be the latter, it could
well be either. Were it Beckett, it would
likely be the expression of a character
rather than the author, but in either case,
the remark recalls nothing so much as the
utter isolation of the Figurine, an isolation
made yet more terrible by the suffocating
closeness of the “two boxes that are
houses”–or, in a translation of “maisons”
perhaps more to the point, “homes,”
which returns us to “neither” and its “un –
speakable home.” There is a striking
anomaly about the Figurine in that, almost
alone among Giacometti’s sculpted female
½gures, it is in motion, indeed in full stride:
but moving where? Giacometti once
called the piece “Figurine in a box between
two boxes which are houses,”14 which
points up the utterly constricted nature
of movement for the ½gurine, boxed-in
and with nothing but boxes, before and
behind, to move to.

Every viewer of Giacometti’s sculpted
½gure must feel that there is some story
behind it, a story that would account for

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On
Beckett &
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endnotes
1 Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I:

1929–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 62.

2 Harold Hobson, “Samuel Beckett: Dramatist of the Year,” International Theatre Annual 1

(1956): 153.

3 Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, 145.
4 Ibid., 228.
5 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press,

1991), 23.

6 Tom Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum 4 (Summer 1961): 23.
7 S. E. Gontarski, ed., Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989 (New York: Grove

Press, 1995), 284.

8 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon and Schuster,

1996), 556–557.

9 Unsigned note under “Morton Feldman’s ‘neither,’” http://www.themodernword.com/

beckett/beckett_feldman_neither.html.

10 Quoted in a catalogue accompanying a 1965 Giacometti retrospective at the Museum of

Modern Art in New York, p. 28.

11 James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1953), 429.
12 Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” 23.
13 Lord, Giacometti, 427.
14 Catalogue of Giacometti exhibit, Alberto Giacometti, 1901–1966 (London: Royal Academy of

Arts, 1996), 167.

15 Reinhold Hohl, Alberto Giacometti: Sculpture, Painting, Drawing (New York: Henry N. Abrams,

1972), 304.

16 Beckett, “The Capital of the Ruins,” in Complete Short Prose, ed. Gontarski, 278.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Beckett’s “neither” & Giacometti’s Figurine image

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