The Endgame of Taste: Keats, Sartre, Beckett

In the context of deciding what kind of weather was better fitted to his taste, Beckett's absurdist quest-hero Molloy decides that he has no taste, that he had lost it long ago. To be sure, modernism never wholly let go of the aesthetic legacy of taste, but by 1947 when Beckett was working on the first in his series of three novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, it had already experienced this legacy in the form of an existentialist nausea. For Molloy, as well as for Sartre's existential man in Nausea (1938), there could be no escape from the imperative to exercise taste, although there could be no actually doing so either. Both were born on the wrong side of Romanticism as to taste, for that is where taste as a means of aesthetic self-making begins to fail. Perhaps nowhere do we see this more clearly than in Keats's late fragmentary epic, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, where the metaphor of taste gives way to into an all-pervasive sickness seated in the stomach. While the starving speaker of The Fall of Hyperion fails to relish the stale banquet he is offered at the outset of the poem, the defeated gods of Hyperion suffer an existential queasiness that plays itself out in bodies that are "crampt and screw'd" (II.25). Even the eponymous hero Hyperion experiences a "nauseous feel" from the repulsive smells he is forced to consume. Critics since Walter Jackson Bate have noticed the proleptically existential tone of the Hyperion poems, the fact that they "anticipate much that we associate with existentialism (no other major nineteenth-century poem does this to the same extent)" (591). Here, I would like to pursue the possibility, evinced by Keats, that existentialism itself—and its dominant paradigms of nausea and disgust—constitute the philosophical aftermath of aesthetic taste. The gesture is toward an extended literary history of the aesthetic in which the metaphor of taste does serious work in the philosophical field of subjectivity. Because the reach of such a gesture is potentially unbounded, the following pages will limit themselves to a consideration of the Romantic legacy of taste (particularly Keatsian taste) in key moments of Sartre's Nausea and Beckett's Molloy (1955). In the opening scene of Nausea, when Sartre's existential man stands on the shore feasting his eyes on the traditionally sublime landscape of the sea, he suddenly finds himself cloyed and disgusted, unable to stomach the raw existence that obtrudes upon him in the form of a nauseating stone. I read Beckett as revising this figurative trauma of taste by transforming Sartre's nauseating stone (galet) into a collection of absurdist "sucking stones" (pierres a sucer) that the vagabond Molloy collects from the shore and periodically sucks in a bravado display of connoisseurship. In this light, the existential stone takes on figurative significance in a tradition of iconic taste-objects extending back through the Century of Taste to Addison's tea-leaves in Spectator paper #409 ("On Taste") as testing ground for the so-called Man of Taste to prove his fine palate. In the end, however, Beckett's absurdist epicure finds that the more he sucks, the more he transforms the idealized subject of taste, turning him inside-out by way of his digestive tract. According to Beckett's revisionary aesthetic of disgust, which I discuss in the final two sections of this essay, the subject becomes constituted according to a "general economy" in which waste and taste lose all distinction. In order to understand how taste gets remade in Molloy, I wish to first consider the souring of taste in …