Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides For The Perplexed)

BECKETT: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

THE GUIDES FOR THE PERPLEXED SERIES

Continuum’s Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.

Related titles include: Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed Claire Colebrook Derrida: A Guide for the Perplexed Julian Wolfreys Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed Steven Earnshaw Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed Mary Klages Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed Jeff Love

BECKETT: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED JONATHAN BOULTER

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704 11 York Road New York London SE1 7NX NY 10038 © Jonathan Boulter 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Jonathan Boulter has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-8264-9267-8 (hardback) 978-0-8264-8195-5 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

Man disappears. This is an affirmation. —Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction Part I: Drama 2. Waiting for Godot and Endgame 3. Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days, Play, Not I Part II: Prose 4. Murphy and Watt 5. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable 6. Texts for Nothing, The Second Trilogy 7. Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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81 108 130 154 162 170 179

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is dedicated to Mitra Foroutan and Margaret Boulter. I also thank my students who have endured my enthusiasm for Beckett over the years, particularly those in my senior Beckett seminars at Saint Francis Xavier University and The University of Western Ontario. I gratefully acknowledge Faber and Faber Ltd for permitting quotation from Samuel Beckett’s work. The following material is used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.: ‘Not I’ Copyright © 1963 by Samuel Beckett, ‘Play’ Copyright © 1973 by Samuel Beckett, ‘Waiting for Godot’ Copyright © 1954 by Grove Press, Inc. Copyright Renewed © 1982 by Samuel Beckett, ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ Copyright © 1957 by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © 1958, 1959, 1960 by Grove Press, Inc. and ‘Happy Days Copyright © 1961 by Grove Press, Inc.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

We need a dreamworld in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit. —Paul Feyerabend, Against Method BACKGROUND AND INFLUENCE

Samuel Beckett (1906–89) is one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century. Born into a middle-class Protestant family in Dublin, Beckett studied Modern Languages (French and Italian) at Trinity College, earning a B.A. in 1927. In 1928, after a short and unsuccessful stint as a teacher at Campbell College, Belfast, Beckett became lecteur at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris replacing Thomas MacGreevy, the person responsible for introducing Beckett to James Joyce. Beckett was massively influenced by his fellow Irishman’s writing and in fact published an essay on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’) in 1929, the same year that he published his first short story ‘Assumption’. In 1934, while living in London, Beckett published More Pricks than Kicks, a collection of short stories and in 1936 he completed his novel Murphy (which was published in 1938). In 1937, Beckett moved to Paris and made France his permanent home until his death in 1989. Beckett’s early works, including the novel Watt (published in 1953), the last novel to be written in English before Beckett turned to writing in French in 1946, failed to attract much critical attention.1 It was while Beckett was writing his first novel trilogy, which includes Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953), that Beckett produced his most famous work and indeed the play that was 1

BECKETT: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

to transform twentieth-century drama, Waiting for Godot (composed 1948–49). Beckett said that this play was essentially written as a diversion, a ‘relaxation, to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time’.2 The two-act play, featuring the now iconic tramps waiting for this Godot who never will appear, was revolutionary and contributed in no small part to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. Waiting for Godot, a play in which ‘nothing happens, twice’,3 as Vivian Mercier famously put it, radically questions the grounds of its own genre. That is to say, Beckett presents a drama that overturns audiences’ basic assumptions. There is no character development, no plot of any consequence, no clear progression of any narrative content or action: it is a play staging the anticipation of action rather than action itself. Initially, the play baffled audiences; when first performed in the United States (having been billed as the ‘laugh hit of two continents’4) people flocked out in droves. Eventually, however, it became clear that Beckett’s work, if not traditionally dramatic, did speak to what was perceived to be a recognizable condition in the 1950s: anxiety. In some senses, and this is true for all of Beckett’s work, not simply Godot, Beckett is interested in analyzing the human being at moments of intense self-awareness and anxiety (and what is anxiety if not a condition of extreme self-consciousness?). Godot spoke to a generation that recognized itself as anxious for meaning, for significance. And although it is perhaps too easy to historicize Beckett’s work for interpretive comfort, we should notice that his major work (including the first trilogy and the drama of the 1950s and 1960s) was produced in a context of great shock and protracted anxiety: the Second World war had recently ended, the truth of the death camps had begun to be fully known, and the growing conflict between the West and the Soviet Union served as a constant reminder of the threat of total nuclear annihilation. Indeed, Beckett’s Endgame (1957), which takes place seemingly after some great catastrophe (the world has been ‘corpsed’, to use Clov’s horrific word) speaks directly, as the great critic Theodor Adorno argues, to a post-Holocaust world.5 For all its difficulty Beckett’s work thus does speak to its time, does present, if read carefully, a diagnosis of the twentieth century; read from another perspective the work becomes symptomatic of the twentieth century. That is to say, Beckett’s work could only have been written in a century that witnessed such massive scenes of destruction and brutality. 2

INTRODUCTION

Beckett produced Waiting for Godot while creating his most important and influential body of prose work: the first trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. If Waiting for Godot revolutionized drama, this prose trilogy did the same to the novel. Indeed we may argue, as does A. Alvarez, that in these works Beckett essentially ‘assassinates’ the novel form.6 If Waiting for Godot removed the drama from drama, these novels removed all comfortable signposts from narrative: coherent plot, stable character, events occurring in identifiable space and time. It is clear that Beckett is not primarily interested in telling ‘stories’ in any conventional sense here; indeed, one cannot even really suggest a novel like The Unnamable—which is narrated by shifting, perhaps bodiless, personalities in what may be some kind of afterlife—has a story at all. In later works like How It Is (1961), All Strange Away (1963–64), Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), and the second trilogy (which includes Company [1980], Ill Seen Ill Said [1981], and Worstward Ho [1983]), Beckett offers texts which seem to dismantle the generic markers between prose and poetry to the point where it becomes clear that his main concern is simply (but what a word!) language itself and the way human experience is bound up in the linguistic. My interest in this Guide will be to suggest that this obsession with language, in the way we know and are known by the world via languages themselves perhaps ineffective and failing, is the through-line connecting Beckett’s work, both in prose and drama. In this sense, and I will return to this point in detail, Beckett’s career is an elaborate and nuanced commentary on a statement by philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer: ‘Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all’ (Truth and Method: 443). Beckett’s work revolutionized twentieth-century literature. Certainly, to write a conventional play would prove rather more difficult after Waiting for Godot, Endgame, or the later more stylistically avant-garde work. Dramas like Happy Days (1961), which sees a character buried to her waist (later to her neck) in the earth; or Play (1963), in which three characters interned in urns are forced, unaware of the others’ presence, to speak about the nature of their tortured relationship; or Not I (1972), in which a disembodied mouth frantically spews out a narrative of assault and madness; or Breath (1969), a 35-second play featuring a stage filled with rubbish and the sound of a cry at birth and death, all challenge notions of what constitute ‘drama’ as such. Playwrights like Harold Pinter (who acknowledges Beckett 3

BECKETT: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

as his master), Edward Albee, and Sarah Kane, are all massively influenced by the plays: their experiments with form and staging are all responses to Beckett’s elaborate and relentless critique of dramatic convention. And equally, we need to recognize the influence of Beckett’s prose on twentieth-century fiction. Beckett’s first trilogy, as well as his later prose, has had enormous influence on writers who in their turn have become important in the progression of twentiethand twenty-first-century prose. Paul Auster (whose New York Trilogy can be read as a direct postmodern rewriting of Beckett’s first trilogy), J. M. Coetzee (who in fact wrote his PhD dissertation on Beckett’s Watt), and John Banville (who in works like The Book of Evidence shares Beckett’s fascination with the workings of the possibly deranged mind) all claim an artistic inheritance from Beckett’s singular vision: their representations of the inner self—psychotic, traumatized—can be traced to Beckett’s interest in the solitary and marginal figure, reduced in possessions and body, negotiating a path through a hostile or indifferent world. BECKETT’S STYLE

It is precisely this quality of singularity that readers key into when encountering Beckett’s work: there is simply nothing remotely like Beckett in the world of literature. While Beckett’s early work (Murphy, More Pricks than Kicks, the posthumously published Dream of Fair to Middling Women7) bears traces of Joyce’s influence (as seen in what is, for Beckett, unusually energetic even playful, prose), his later work—the turn to which I locate in 1953’s Watt (written between 1941 and 1945)—is uniquely Beckett’s. While it is perhaps unfair to summarize and distill the qualities of a writer’s work, we can make a few general comments here. Beckett’s work always, even as its most extreme limit of uncanniness and strangeness, is relentlessly humorous, if darkly so. At moments of extreme despair on stage a character will offer a line that will make us laugh, uneasily. In Waiting for Godot, for instance, Vladimir and Estragon witness Pozzo’s brutal treatment of Lucky; they then have this brief exchange: Vladimir: That passed the time. Estragon: It would have passed in any case. Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly. (40)

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INTRODUCTION

At moments of extreme pain in the novels a character will deflate his despair with irony. Malone, alone and dying in his bed, for instance, offers this: ‘My body is what is called, unadvisedly perhaps, impotent. There is virtually nothing it can do. Sometimes I miss not being able to crawl around any more. But I am not much given to nostalgia’ (Malone Dies: 180). This brutally amusing writing alleviates the gloom of the Beckett play or novel, but it does add a certain uncanny frisson to our experience of the work: why are we laughing at this? How can there be humor in such a depleted world? In an interview Beckett once said: ‘If there were only darkness, all would be clear. It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable’ (220).8 Beckett is the master of mixing light and dark, of humor with pain, of the recognizable with the unfamiliar. The result is a kind of writing that is consistently disorienting but not strange enough to be fully alienating: we do recognize and respond to something in the work, a quality perhaps of shared suffering, of shared despair and, be it ever so humble, shared compassion. Readers often remark on the particular quality of Beckett’s sentences, especially in the prose. Unlike that of his early master Joyce, Beckett’s mature prose is crystalline in its concision. Indeed, Beckett once remarked on the difference between Joyce’s method of composing and his own: ‘we are diametrically opposite because Joyce was a synthesizer, he wanted to put everything, the whole of human culture, into one or two books, and I am an analyzer. I take away all the accidentals because I want to come down to the bedrock of the essentials, the archetypal.’ 9 In Damned to Fame Knowlson quotes Beckett’s views on Joyce: ‘ “I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it . . . I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding” ’ (319). And thus while Beckett’s sentences are easily enough read (we may have to look up the odd word now and again),10 there is a slow-burn quality to this writing, as meanings and resonances come to light, and apply pressure, long after we have passed over

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BECKETT: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

the individual words. The famous line from Malone Dies, ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’ (186), is an example of a sentence which snags our attention with its peculiar use of a word or idea. Nothingness, radical absence, the sentence suggests, is the most pressing reality with which we must deal. The sentence’s circularity and repetition, moreover, uncannily transfers absence into presence: nothing thus becomes something as we feel its real claims on us. The sentence brilliantly demonstrates how a single word can shimmer with multiple resonances: the first use of the word ‘nothing’ is very different from the second. Indeed, the word seems simultaneously to have casual and deeply philosophical meanings all of which fold into each other and are exchanged. Malone, aware of the effects of his own words, offers this commentary on this sentence: ‘I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech . . . They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark’ (186–87). Another related uncanny effect occurs when Beckett offers an idea only to negate its claims immediately: ‘Live and invent. I have tried. I must have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is live’ (Malone Dies: 189); ‘I am dead, but I never lived’ (Texts for Nothing 11: 333); ‘Say a body. Where none’ (Worstward Ho: 471). The final lines of Molloy are perhaps the most famous example of Beckett’s selfcontradictory, self-cancelling rhetoric: ‘Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining’ (170). The effect, a dizzying one, is to keep the reader consistently on her interpretive toes, preventing her from settling on any comfortable or comforting meaning. This effect reaches its terminal point in Beckett’s late prose, in texts like Worstward Ho. Beckett here forgoes conventional grammar, character, plot, and story and presents language itself as character (in this way we are justified in asserting, as suggested, that language is always Beckett’s main concern). The language of the late texts is contradictory and produces familiar vertiginous effects: Worsening words whose unknown. Whence unknown. At all costs unknown. Now for to say as worst they may only they only they. Dim void shades all they. Nothing save what they say. Somehow say. Nothing save they. What they say. Whosesoever whencesoever say. As worst they may fail ever worse to say. (478)

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INTRODUCTION

Surely this is some of Beckett’s most challenging, most difficult writing. But if we listen to it carefully we can attend to themes he will explore throughout his career. We can hear Beckett’s obsessive return to the rhetoric of ‘nothing’; we encounter his interest in ‘failure’ as a trope of writing; we see his interest in moving past the barriers of conventional language to explore the limits of what can be said and not said (or missaid) in language which is itself dead or spectral: ‘void shades’. Beckett, for all his difficulty, can be read clearly because, as I explore in detail below, his writing gives us the interpretive clues we need. An interpretive dizziness is a given when reading Beckett: what we do with that dizziness, how we choose to interpret our moments of uncertainty, becomes our task, our obligation.

THE DIFFICULTY OF READING BECKETT: GENRE, NOTHINGNESS, THE POSTHUMAN BODY Genre

The year 2006 was the centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth. At various festivals and conferences his works were performed, discussed, and criticized. Indeed, even the mainstream media, usually oblivious to the work of the literary avant-garde, took notice if only to recycle the primary critical clichés about Beckett’s work: it is bleak, difficult, and ‘about’ the absurdity and meaninglessness of existence. This last cliché, given at least tacit support by Beckett himself, is one this Guide will in part seek to dismantle, but for now we need to acknowledge the truth of what is generally perceived about Beckett’s work: its uncompromising difficulty.11 We are presented, in both the drama and prose, with unfamiliar and seemingly unreadable situations: two tramps on a near-empty stage, waiting; a blind tyrant, accompanied by his crippled parents and a peevish servant, yearning for his life (and the play he seems to know he is in) to end; a play in which a mouth, speaking in near incomprehensible language, is the main ‘character’; an old man, lying in bed, telling stories until he dies. And one could go on, and we shall here, listing the myriad difficulties posed by Beckett’s work. At a basic level, however, we notice one common feature of these texts, one link which may be our interpretive entry point: they all deliberately dismantle generic expectation. That is to say, every Beckett text defies our notions of what a play or a novel should be doing. If we recognize this generic ‘decomposition’ 7

BECKETT: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

as Beckett’s primary method of problematizing interpretive protocols, we come to an important initial realization: Beckett’s texts resist being interpreted and categorized and this may in fact be what they are about, the problem of interpretation itself. This Guide thus will begin with an analysis of the way Beckett manipulates genre in his work. Waiting for Godot, for instance, is a drama in name only: if the root of the word ‘drama’ is the Greek for ‘action’, Beckett is deliberately writing a drama that is not, in fact, a drama at all (nothing happens in the play; or, more precisely, nothing happens: the experience of nothingness is what the play is about). The novels of Beckett’s first trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) again, are novels in name only: as this trilogy progresses, there is a diminishing of plot and a removal of all identifiable characters within identifiable space and time. Beckett’s late prose and drama blurs the distinction between genres: How It Is, a ‘novel’, reads like poetry; A Piece of Monologue (1982), a ‘play’, reads like a short prose story; Beckett’s last major work, in the so-called second trilogy (Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho), reduces the very language of prose to nongrammatical clauses, and places ‘characters’ (who function merely as grammatical indices, may indeed only ‘be’ disembodied grammatical indices) in locations that are beyond life and death. It is my suggestion that the trajectory of Beckett’s career as dramatist and novelist traces a systematic deconstruction of the very premises of drama and prose, a deconstruction that witnesses the simultaneous and systematic dismantling of the self, or subject, who would rely on narrative as a means of self-understanding. I propose here to suggest that this deconstruction, this dismantling of all received structures of subjectivity and narrative, be it in prose or drama (and his characters on stage are only ever telling stories), is the major theme of Beckett’s work and, of course, the cause of the major difficulties in the reading of this work. Once we understand that Beckett’s method is to call into question the very premises of drama and prose, we may be better able to understand what I see as his major purpose: to call into question all those methods—narrative being the primary one—we have of understanding ourselves. Genres come ready built with meaning and expectation: plays and novels have structures—beginnings, middles, endings; character and plot ‘development’; settings—that readers naturally assume should be in place. Plays and novels have recognizable 8

INTRODUCTION

characters and tell stories that, while perhaps confusing and challenging, assume what we can call ‘knowability’. That is, these narratives are assumed to reflect a recognizable reality, one to which the reader can orient herself. A central, if unspoken, assumption of what is called classic realist literature, is that narrative itself is a natural and authoritative way of communicating reality.12 Language, in other words, is the adequate vehicle for representing reality, and most importantly, for representing the self; in classic realist fiction, crucially, the self— think, for instance, of Dickens’ David Copperfield—precedes language and uses it, controls it, to transcribe his reality. Beckett is working to reveal all these expectations as artificial and constructed. He indicates that we construct ourselves as selves in the stories we tell, the histories we construct, and thus his dismantling of these narratives is his way of examining the very fragility, the very constructedness, of the human and human understanding itself. Narrative and other generic conventions are ways of controlling experience, of shaping experience; they are not unproblematic reflections of experience. In the end, however, by systematically reducing narrative to its essence, to what he calls its ‘worsening words’, Beckett discovers the persistent essence of the human, whose narratives ‘fail again’ and ‘fail better’, but who is insistently present in that failure, if only as a trace, specter, or ghost of itself. My argument, ultimately, is that for all Beckett’s seeming difficulty and negativity, his novels and plays work systematically to celebrate, if in an inverse way, the human subject who will not cease to narrate and who will, thus, always be. REDUCTION TO THE ESSENTIALS: NOTHINGNESS AND THE POSTHUMAN

To begin, perhaps we should acknowledge that while Beckett’s work explores questions concerning the fundamental nature of the human, Beckett himself will seem to be of little help to us in interpreting that work. Although he has offered some important, if opaque, critical insights into what appears to be a personal philosophy of art and life, Beckett tended to resist offering direct interpretations of his work, resisted offering what a character in his novel Watt calls ‘semantic succour’ to his readers, his actors, his directors. When, for instance, Alan Schneider, a friend and director of many of Beckett’s plays, asked for Beckett’s interpretation of Endgame, Beckett replied ‘I simply 9

BECKETT: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

can’t write about my work, or occasional stuff of any kind’. He went on to excoriate journalists and critics: But when it comes to these bastards of journalists I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind . . . My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended), made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin. (No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider: 24) It is curious to note the way Beckett resists interpreting his work yet at the same time provides something of a clue to reading: his work, he says, is a ‘matter of fundamental sounds’. One way of understanding this comment, and certainly this is the way I tend to read his work, is to notice how Beckett tends to strip away all excess on stage and page: he is after an analysis of the fundamentals, the core, or ‘essence’ of what maps out human experience. There is no accidental word or occurrence in a Beckett text, no distraction from the real business of trying to understand what it means to be. Hence, for instance, a novel like Malone Dies, where there is only one character, immobilized in bed and thinking about his impending death. Here Beckett is asking a crucial, perhaps the fundamental, question: What does it mean to exist, to be, at the moment when your life is on the verge of flickering out? Can we recognize what it truly means to be alive, what we may call the fundamental impulse of being, only when life itself is about to cease? Beckett pares plot, character, and language down to its essentials, stripping away the ‘meat’ (of both prose and character) to examine life lived at extreme limit points. Indeed, as I have indicated, in later texts such as Worstward Ho, the first sentence of which reads ‘On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on’ (471), Beckett reduces plot and character so radically that it is possible to say that we have text where grammar, itself functioning at the limit of comprehensibility, indicates a subjectivity on the verge of nothingness. By writing about fundamental sounds Beckett presents himself as an intensely curious and courageous writer. Curious about the precise nature of the human being, Beckett takes himself and his readers to the extreme limits of humanity and asks us, obliges us, to look carefully at ourselves at moments of crisis. These moments of crisis 10

INTRODUCTION

work in Beckett as points of fundamental, if compromised and opaque, revelation: it is here, at the point where the world ceases to make sense or correspond to one’s presuppositions, that the real, the fundamental interpretive and ethical questions arise: How do I go on in the face of this crisis of meaning? What is my responsibility to myself and others when meaning collapses? These moments of the collapse of meaning, of the crisis of interpretation, are central to Beckett’s work (indeed we may say they comprise the totality of the work) and to his philosophy of art. In some ways Beckett’s real interest is in the encounter, existential, artistic, and interpretive, with what he importantly refers to as ‘Nothing’. The experience of nothing, the nothingness realized in the boredom of Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot (the first line of which is ‘Nothing to be done’), the nothingness that threatens our interpretive security, what Clov in Endgame calls the ‘zero’ point of meaning, the nothingness of loss and absence that informs so densely the later trilogy, is one that paradoxically (how do you write about ‘nothing’?) articulates and motivates Beckett’s own work. In 1949, Beckett published Three Dialogues, a series of pseudodialogues between ‘B’ and ‘D’. B, who critics identify as Beckett himself (rightly I believe), offers what has become perhaps the most often cited entry point into Beckett’s own work. B has been discussing modern art and comes to offer his own view of the proper subject matter and motivations of the modern artist: B.—Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road. D.—And preferring what? B.—The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. (556) A number of things are crucial here. First, notice how B expresses a weariness with artistic convention, how the idea of ‘doing a little better the same old thing’ bores him (this is an idea to which we will return). It is clear even relatively early in his career that Beckett would not be creating conventionally familiar art. Notice, second, how the 11

BECKETT: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

word ‘nothing’ gathers a kind of incremental resonance in this final sentence, how it becomes clear that nothing, to speak perhaps paradoxically, becomes something, something to be explored as a theme, as a reality (we may recall that line from Malone Dies: ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’). As this astonishing sentence concludes Beckett acknowledges a personal ethical obligation as an artist, an obligation to observe, analyze, and express these moments when the nothing arises—perhaps even against his own will—and appears to nullify meaning, to threaten our comfort, to erase our grasp of the real. ‘POSTHUMANISM’

To have based a career on the exploration of ‘nothing’ may seem perverse to some. Certainly the reader’s encounter with Beckett’s various representations of the void, of absence, of loss will be a difficult one for the simple reason that Beckett’s world is difficult to bear. And some readers over the years have found in Beckett’s work a certain ruthless, perhaps even a cold inhumanity. If we trace the trajectory of Beckett’s work, on both stage and in prose, we do notice that his systematic reduction of things, what I have suggested is his reduction to the ‘fundamentals’, does involve the reduction of the human self, what I will in this study be referring to as the ‘subject’. Notice how for instance, in the drama, we move from fully embodied subjects in Waiting for Godot, to the less physically able characters in Endgame (Hamm is blind and crippled; Clov can only walk in a stiff-legged gait; Nagg and Nell both have lost their legs), to characters immobilized in urns in Play, to the disembodied Mouth of Not I. A similar trajectory holds in the first prose trilogy: Molloy, whose body is failing yet able; Malone who is immobilized in bed; the unnamable, who may simply be a brain in an urn. In the later prose texts, it is difficult even to determine precisely the nature of the human and the status of its body, ‘Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in’ (471). Beckett seems to strive throughout his career to rid his work of the body, to work thus toward what we may call a kind of posthumanism. Posthumanism can be defined as that strand of philosophy which radically critiques the idea that the individual subject is the center of all things, the beginning and end of all knowledge and experience: this is therefore a radical critique of Humanist philosophy which would 12

INTRODUCTION

posit the human’s reason and rationality as being transparently available to the thinking subject. Posthumanism begins by countering Humanism’s belief that the human is self-producing, self-coincidental, that it is somehow responsible for the production of its world and its experience of the world. As a philosophy, posthumanism can be traced to many sources, but the thinking of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud is crucial. Each worked to suggest that the human subject is not self-producing or self-coincidental, but is, rather, produced by its culture (Marx), its language (Nietzsche), and its unconscious drives and instincts (Freud). Posthumanism strives to understand the precise economies of these forces and asks questions like these: How is the human subject to rather than the master of language? How does the subject negotiate her relation to the drives—toward Eros, Thanatos—that Freud posits? How can the subject free itself, if at all, from the cultural forces of capital, ideology, and religion, forces which precede and exceed the subject’s experience? These are all Beckett’s questions and he will work out answers in plays like Happy Days and novels like Murphy and The Unnamable, texts which are about how the subject negotiates a relation to culture (Happy Days), to the drives (Murphy), to language (The Unnamable). But we should also note how Beckett’s posthumanism becomes uncannily literalized in his middle-to-late-period drama and prose. Beckett is interested in exploring the very limits of the human, the very essence of what constitutes the human. To this end Beckett will push the human past our common conceptual boundaries; that is to say, at times he moves his characters into the space of death, of what is, perhaps, a kind of afterlife. In the prose this thematic begins with Malone Dies, a novel tracing the moment a man passes into inexistence; in the drama, it begins with Play, which sees three characters in what appears to be an afterlife (the characters are in funeral urns) bickering over the narrative of their past lives; in the second trilogy we can easily imagine, indeed should imagine, that the speakers of the texts, as well as the figures that appear in the narratives, are specters, ghosts. I explore the figure of the ghost, the specter—the literal posthuman—in detail in my final chapter, but I just wish to indicate here how Beckett’s interest in paring things down to the essentials leads logically to an interest in the specter, the ghost, which becomes the image of the human after all things have been stripped way. Precisely, the ghost becomes a trace, 13

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a mark, of the human’s passing out of existence but—and this is absolutely central—the ghost is an insistent reminder of the human that once was. The specter, in other words, serves to recuperate the human even as the human passes into oblivion: the specter thus becomes what Slavoj Zizek calls the ‘indivisible remainder13’. To put it bluntly, for Beckett the total elimination of the human is a total impossibility. Perhaps, Beckett suggests, we can only find the nature of the human, what he calls ‘the bedrock of the essentials’, at the moment the human exchanges one state for another, one reality for another. Perhaps only the absence of the human (the specter) truly reveals what has been the human’s true nature. And what is for me fascinating, and crucial, about this process is the way Beckett eliminates the human at precisely the same time as he eliminates, denatures, and deconstructs, narrative form itself. In some ways Beckett is arguing that language itself must be eliminated in order for the specter, the ghost, the posthuman, to appear: language must be eliminated in order for the truth of the human to be known. We may see in this reduction a kind of cruel treatment of the human, a perverse interest in illness and decay, but I think this would be a fatal interpretive error. Certainly Beckett’s work implies that the body is always a liability, something that will inevitably fail (an hilarious line from Malone Dies suggests this: ‘If I had the use of my body I would throw it out of the window’ [212]). But we must notice that the body, or signs of the body, never fully disappears from Beckett’s world. The persistence of the body, the fragmented body, the disembodied body, is one of Beckett’s major themes and one that poses some of his most interesting interpretive questions and challenges: why does Beckett work to reduce and fragment the body? How are we to interpret fragments of humanity? One answer to these questions relates to what I have said above about Beckett reducing things to the fundamentals in order to understand the essence of the human: in Play and Not I, Beckett seems to be suggesting that these characters really only are their voices, really only are, to be more precise, their narratives. What matters to them, at this specific place, at this specific time, is their ability—perhaps their compulsion, their obligation—to speak. Beckett would seem to be suggesting that the totality of the body, at this specific moment, is not terribly important to the subject as she tries to understand her present situation. But, as I suggest, we do notice that Beckett never 14

INTRODUCTION

fully removes the body, or the signs of the body (voice, for instance), entirely: the stories his characters tell, his work seems to imply, are written on and through the body. Stories are translated, in other words, by the body. Beckett’s characters may be posthuman but they are not fully postcorporeal. Another way of putting this idea, admittedly one of Beckett’s most challenging, is that subjectivity—that sense the human has of itself as a thinking, interpreting creature—is fully dependent on the body. Subjectivity is embodiment: you are your body and your body’s desires, as much as you are your mind. And thus while the body is an impediment and will always decay and fail, the body cannot disappear in Beckett because the self, and the self’s understanding of itself, would as well. There is, as I read it then, a kind of dark compassion in Beckett for the compromised body, for the crippled and the ill: there is a compassion for the suffering subject who can really only understand herself and her world through the medium of a decaying, painful, body. Our questions, as readers of Beckett, must now become: if the self understands itself through the compromised, spectral, body, what kinds of interpretations will it make? If the self understands the world through its fragmented, posthuman body, what kinds of interpretations of the world can be made? ‘POSTHUMANISM’: A PROVISO

These are all Beckett’s questions but I wish to offer something of a proviso before continuing. I suggested above that Beckett is striving for a ‘kind of’ posthumanism. I think it is best always to use terms provisionally with Beckett for surely one of the effects of his work is to call absolutely into question the very idea of stable categories, stable oppositions (‘human-posthuman’). Perhaps it is best here, at the outset, to suggest that his work critiques the idea of the human and the posthuman equally. Precisely, by discovering the persistence of the human even in its most denuded form, Beckett essentially collapses the opposition ‘human-posthuman’ to the point where the terms become interchangeable, and hence almost meaningless. That is to say, for Beckett we are always already posthuman insofar as we are controlled by discourses (history, ideology, language) preceding and exceeding us; we are always already posthuman as we discover that our bodies are sites of inevitable failure and collapse; we are always already posthuman insofar as the idea of a singular 15

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self is an illusion. Beckett acknowledges these ideas early in his career; in Proust (1931) he acknowledges that the self is not a stable subject but rather that the ‘individual is a succession of individuals’ (515); moreover, ‘The subject has died—and perhaps many times—along the way’ (513). My use of the term ‘posthuman’ then is something of a convenience, a way of speaking ‘about’ or ‘around’ the peculiarities of the Beckettian subject, the subject who always must negotiate his reality via systems of thought—language being the primary—whose parameters and protocols are always just beyond his full control. THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION

Beckett’s manipulation of genre, his reduction and dismantling of the subject, his relentless interest in the various aspects of ‘nothingness’ (loss, absence)—he calls this his ‘fidelity to failure’ (‘Three Dialogues’: 563)—lead, as I have been suggesting, to some fairly acute interpretive difficulties. Hans-Georg Gadamer, a philosopher of the hermeneutic school (and student of Martin Heidegger), suggests that all real interpretation, or ‘hermeneutics’, begins with identifying a specific location of doubt or unease in a text. As he writes in Philosophical Hermeneutics: ‘The real power of hermeneutical consciousness is our ability to see what is questionable’ (13). We need, in other words, to be able to ask the proper questions of texts. But in Beckett our problem becomes seemingly intractable because everything in the text appears to be questionable. How are we to interpret texts that seem, paradoxically, to offer so many questions and then resist or foreclose the possibility of answering those questions? How, in other words, are we to read Beckett? I will suggest here, in ways that look back to Beckett’s own sense of obligation (recall his sense, expressed in Three Dialogues of the ‘obligation to express’), that our interpretations of Beckett should begin by paying careful attention to the ways in which his texts anticipate our difficulties and perhaps offer some guidance. If we are puzzled by certain things—Who are these characters? What are their histories? Where and when exactly are these stories occurring? What exactly does it all mean?—we should recognize that our perplexity with the text is mirrored by the characters’ own perplexity about their worlds. The reader’s situation of puzzlement is precisely that of the characters and thus we arrive at a crucial observation: Beckett’s texts themselves will set out the ground rules for interpreting his world. 16

INTRODUCTION

We notice, for instance, that characters in Beckett recognize they inhabit worlds in which meaning seems to have absented itself; they seem even to recognize that the words they use to describe their worlds are no longer meaningful. When Clov is asked by Hamm about the meaning of the word ‘yesterday’ he erupts: ‘That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day. I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent’ (122). The opening lines of The Unnamable see a character asking questions of himself that surely become the reader’s: ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ (285). In the novel Watt, the eponymous main character comes up against the extreme limits of interpretation and begins to lose his grip on reality. Watt’s loss of the real begins when he notices that it is difficult to pin meaning down, and in a question that goes to the heart of the matter the narrator asks: ‘But what was this pursuit of meaning, in this indifference to meaning? And to what did it tend?’ (227). To recognize what is questionable in Beckett is to recognize that the question is being asked in the text, by the text itself. Our interpretive task here is not to shy away from the difficulties in these texts but to recognize how interpreting that difficulty becomes, in some fundamental way, the main theme of Beckett’s work. Because we must notice something essential about Beckett’s characters: they all are, perhaps even without realizing it, in search of meaning; they all are, in other words, interpretive creatures (just as their readers and audiences are). Beckett’s characters may inhabit a ‘corpsed’ world in which there is ‘nothing to be done’, but they all never cease in the attempt to discover something meaningful. Now, of course, Beckett’s world is not one to offer some kind of easy consolation; this is not a world in which comfort will often, if ever, be found. Perhaps the best description of Beckett’s world is that it is ‘haunted’ by the absence of meaning. This metaphor—one which may account for the recurrence of spectral, ghostly characters in his late drama and prose—suggests not precisely the absence of meaning, but a world in which meaning did occur, where meaning once existed. Beckett’s characters exist in a world where only spectral traces of meaning exist: this is the twilight of meaning, the memory of meaning. The pain of the Beckett character is in the realization that meaning once did exist; and because it once did exist, there is a sense, and not necessarily a positive one, that it can be captured again. 17

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Beckett’s characters thus function in a state of profound regret and agony—often repressed and disavowed—over what might have been. In Krapp’s Last Tape, for instance, Krapp retraces his past history through tape recordings of his own voice to revisit a moment of possible, though now forever lost, happiness. Krapp’s own voice, his own history, is spectral because his recordings are of a dead and irretrievable past, but one which clearly still haunts him now. In what is surely one of Beckett’s most painful—and intensely compassionate moments—we see how a ghostly history brutalizes Krapp: Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited . . . Here I end this reel. Box . . . three, spool . . . five. Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back. (229) Beckett does not, as the critical cliché may have it, merely represent a world of absurdity, a world without meaning. This is a world that continually feels the claims of the past, of history. And there is a meaning in discovering these claims, a meaning in recognizing one’s indebtedness to the past, a meaning in realizing that one’s obligation is to come to terms with these claims and debts. THEORETICAL APPROACH: THE ‘LITERATURE OF THE UNWORD’, MELANCHOLY, AND THE ARCHIVE

Part of my purpose here in this Guide is to provide ways of making sense of Beckett’s difficult work. One way I will proceed will be to draw on the work of philosophers, theorists, and critics whose ideas allow us to understand the complexity of Beckett’s universe. I will here be drawing on the likes of phenomenologists Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Emmanuel Levinas, marxist Theodor Adorno, psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. I believe that the work of these theorists can effectively unpack certain interpretive problems in Beckett just as I believe that certain moments in Beckett—I think of Mouth’s entry into language in Not I—can effectively illustrate the interpretive problems in the work of some theorists (indeed I will use Not I to illustrate Lacan’s difficult notion of the Real). My intention is not, therefore, simply to read Beckett through a particular theory 18

INTRODUCTION

but to imagine that there is a mutual process of interpretation and interrogation occurring between theorist and fiction. THE GERMAN LETTER

I also believe, perhaps naively, that Beckett himself is his own first and best critic. As I have mentioned Beckett offered few critical commentaries on his work over the years but those that have come down to us—as for instance, Three Dialogues—are of great value to any reader. In the latter chapters of this study I will be referring often to Beckett’s German Letter of 1937 and especially to his notion of the ‘literature of the unword’, a concept I think is central to the progression of his work. I wish, therefore, to take some space here and outline the importance of this Letter. In 1936 Beckett traveled to Germany on what essentially was an art holiday: he visited several art galleries and, although angered by the Nazi regime’s censoring of art it considered decadent, he was greatly impressed—and influenced—by the work he saw. The trip served as a kind of spiritual and philosophical awakening, as his diaries attest. The German Letter is part of a correspondence between Beckett and a friend (Axel Kaun, whom he met in Germany) written three months after his return to Dublin. In the Letter Beckett speaks of the need to move past received discourses and conventions, to liberate himself from traditional languages and forms. I quote at some length: It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. (171–72) 19

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In my estimation the full implications of the Letter, which for me is Beckett’s artistic manifesto, will not be realized until the later novels (especially the trilogies), but we should recognize how Beckett’s stated impatience with traditional form resonates into even the early prose and drama. Beckett’s disdain for ‘official English’, for ‘Grammar and Style’, things as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit, speak to a frustration, a boredom even, with the logic and trajectories of the nineteenth-century novel. He speaks, further, to how music and painting have found ways of moving beyond traditional form in order to represent silence and absence (things not associated with representative art); he suggests that language itself must be shattered in order to reveal what was previously unrepresentable. And while Beckett’s manifesto sounds avant-garde, his idea that language is a veil to be torn apart looks back to the Romantics and their notion that poetry works to reveal the unseen. Beckett’s ‘my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart’ echoes Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry and his sense that poetry lifts ‘the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’ (117). There is, of course, a world of difference between lifting and destroying the veil—the difference, perhaps, between the Romantic and the Modern!—but Beckett’s desire as a writer is a familiar one: his work will attempt to show the world in a new way. In my reading, Beckett’s tearing of the veil becomes the perfect metaphor for the process of revealing, overtly, self-consciously, and critically, the implications of art, here the novel and drama, in a new way. THE ‘LITERATURE OF THE UNWORD’

In the last paragraph of the Letter Beckett suggests that this process of destroying language, of revealing its ‘terrible materiality’ (172) will eventually lead to what he calls a ‘literature of the unword’ (173). I wish in what follows to suggest that Beckett’s entire career as a writer finds its beginning and end, its ground and goal, in this idea, stated in 1937. A literature of the unword is, obviously, a contradiction in terms, a paradox, an aporia (to use the Derridean construction); a literature of the unword is an attempt to use language to silence language (he calls it ‘An assault against words in the name of beauty’ [173]). His aim, essentially, is to find a means of decomposing and moving beyond language, to shatter language into a kind of erasure 20

INTRODUCTION

of itself (this attempt to eliminate language is geometrically proportional to his attempt to eliminate the body, as we will see). My argument is quite simply this: throughout his career Beckett is searching for the means to put an end to literature, to put an end to writing, to put an end to his own desire to write. The trajectory of his work, from the early drama and prose to the late, is one of radical reduction, of working to find a means to literature’s end. In the drama we move from the fully embodied drama of Godot to the late ghostly plays where often language does not even feature; in the prose we move from the playful garrulousness of Murphy to the shattered syntax and diminished grammars of Worstward Ho.14 It is precisely because Beckett’s work is grounded on such complex philosophical contradictions—a writer writing literature out of existence: impossible!—that I believe we must have recourse to the various theoretical and philosophical traditions that arose simultaneous with Beckett’s own development as a writer. My theoretical approach in this Guide can perhaps best be described as promiscuous but I tend to think that a deconstructionist psychoanalysis is the best way of proceeding with Beckett, at least for me. To illustrate what I mean here—and by way of concluding this Introduction— I wish to outline two concepts which will prove critical in my reading of especially the drama. MELANCHOLIA

A major theme in Beckett is that of memory, of characters, like Krapp or Hamm, haunted by the ghost of memory. At a basic level the Beckett character lives in a protracted state of regret and loss, a state he or she may not even recognize as such. History, the past, impinges profoundly on the character and, as Beckett writes in Proust, threatens continually to ‘deform’ him. In 1917 Sigmund Freud published an essay that has recently come to be seen as a crucial diagnosis of a contemporary cultural condition. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud attempts to come to an understanding of how the subject deals with trauma and loss. There are, he theorizes, two responses to loss, to the loss of a loved one, or the ‘loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, or so on’ (252). The first and most healthy is what he calls mourning. Mourning is a process by which the loss is comprehended and accepted, ‘worked through’, to use his terminology. Mourning is the 21

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normal way one must deal with trauma and loss, with what Freud beautifully terms the ‘economics of pain’ (252). Precisely how the subject overcomes loss is not known by Freud—it is a difficult process; it is ‘work’—but eventually the mourner accepts that the loved one, with whom he may have identified, is no longer here to makes claims on him. Melancholia, on the other hand, is an abnormal response to loss and situates the subject in a continual position of narcissistic identification with the lost object. In other words, the melancholy subject cannot accept that her loved one is in fact gone and works pathologically ‘to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object’ (258). What this means is that the past—loss, trauma—continually works its way into the present moment because the subject cannot move past it. More troubling is the idea that the subject does not wish to allow loss to recede into history but desires continually to maintain a connection to the traumatic moment. In some ways the subject maintains this pathological state—which may in fact not be so pathological after all—because the traumatic moment is important for her, may in fact have shaped who she is. We may diagnose a great number of Beckett’s characters as being melancholic in Freud’s sense. They are haunted by the past and some, like Krapp, Hamm, and Winnie, deliberately attempt to reconnect with a past that includes moments of loss and extreme pain. In other words, the function of memory in Beckett is largely melancholic precisely because the characters acknowledge, consciously or unconsciously, that they are the products of a past which has mercilessly defined them as suffering subjects. Beckett’s characters cling so relentlessly to the past because, for reasons we will explore, the present moment is devoid of significance; the agonizing past may brutalize but in it are the traces, the historical fragments of identity and meaning. THE ARCHIVE

Deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, drawing heavily on Freud, offers a second related concept that I will use to read these characters’ relation to history, loss, and trauma. In Archive Fever, Derrida analyzes the concept of the archive as a way of coming to an understanding of the way the subject negotiates its relationship to history, to the past, and the future: the archive is, thus, a means by which Derrida tries to understand the human as a being situated in time, feeling the 22

INTRODUCTION

claims of the temporal. Perhaps the best way to define the archive is as a conceptual or material space of memory. The mind can serve as an archive just as a library or physical monument can. Derrida suggests that the archive is a place of commandment and commencement, a place where events of the past are documented authoritatively as marking the beginning of something, a life, a culture, a civilization. Archives are spaces of preservation, conservation but also of creation: a culture’s understanding of itself—a subject’s understanding of itself— is created within the space of the archive. It is clear that the archive is a way of materializing, making concrete, the past. And if history is largely, or can be largely, the narratives of conquest, defeat, and violence, the archive is also going to function as a space commemorating trauma and loss. It strikes me therefore that the archive—as a space that maintains a continual relation to the past—is always already a melancholy space. What I wish to suggest here, in specific relation to Beckett’s work, is that the Beckettian subject becomes a literal embodiment of what I have elsewhere called the ‘melancholy archive’.15 The Beckettian subject, immobilized and fragmented—think of Winnie, buried to her neck in earth in Happy Days; of Mouth in Not I; of Malone in Malone Dies; of the figure in Company—is always a historical subject, a subject, more precisely, subject to, history. She is continually remembering, sometimes against her will, what has occurred in the past; she is continually attempting to recapture a past she may not fully comprehend. And it is the Beckettian body which becomes the primary repository for these remains, these traces, of history. The character may exist—as in Happy Days, or Endgame—at what appears to be the end of human culture, but she—her body—maintains the archival traces of that lost culture. The images Beckett gives us in his drama and prose—a disembodied mouth, a body immobilized in a wheelchair or the earth, people in urns—are images that concretize the idea of memory as embodied or archived. I suggested above that for Beckett subjectivity—the sense of who we are—is fully dependent on the body. What Freud and Derrida allow us to understand is the way subjectivity in Beckett is fully dependent on history and archived memory. Freud’s notions of mourning and melancholia, together with the Derridean reading of the archive, are concepts that will prove useful in reading an author whose work is at a profound level always about the past, a past which may have receded into forgetfulness but whose claims are still being felt. In its strangeness Beckett’s work presents 23

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numerous difficulties, but as we shall discover he never abandons his reader or audience completely. First, as I have mentioned, his characters—who at times become our surrogates, our uncanny doubles—express much the same confusion about their worlds as the reader; as such, the strangeness, because shared, becomes in a sense normalized. Second, and perhaps more important, Beckett’s work keys into fundamentally recognizable situations. We all are creations of histories we may not recognize, or wish to recognize; we all at times disavow our pasts even as we feel the pressures of history; we all, in other words, are historical—in Freud’s terms, melancholy— creatures. Beckett’s work is crucial because it relentlessly, remorselessly, compels us to confront the profound claims that history must make upon us all. As we come to recognize the claims of the past and realize the extent to which history constructs the human subject, we begin to understand that Beckett’s work, at times seemingly so strange, seemingly inhuman, is only ever a compassionate attempt to comprehend humanity itself.

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Part I DRAMA

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CHAPTER 2

WAITING FOR GODOT AND ENDGAME

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only one day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day, but on the last day of all. —Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks Waiting for Godot and Endgame are, in terms of length, the most substantial plays in the Beckett canon. They mark the beginning of Beckett’s career as a dramatist and sound the various themes he will explore throughout his work.1 And while I will be discussing each work separately, it might be useful here to ground our discussion with one observation: both take place in unidentifiable places and times. What is perhaps only clear about the plays’ spatial and temporal contexts is that they take place after: after a time in which significant and meaningful action could have occurred; after some cataclysm (Endgame); after familiar categories, such indeed as time itself, have become redundant or defunct. In some crucial ways thus, Beckett’s characters in both Godot and Endgame are situated in the strange space of nostalgia and expectation: impossible nostalgia for what has been—‘Ah, yesterday!’ (Endgame)—impossible expectation for what may, but never does, come—‘We’re waiting for Godot’. My reading of these plays works toward an interpretation of the effect of Beckett’s dismantling of all familiar categories (genre, space, time, character, action) and attempts ultimately to understand the effect, on character and audience, of the displacement of time and history as ordering principles. I will suggest that the deconstruction of an understanding of time—as a linear, forward-moving event— leads to a radical realignment of the understanding of ethical action. I will therefore be exploring these questions: What kind of ‘present’ 27

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do these characters inhabit if they are continually looking to the past or to the future for significance? What kinds of ethical responsibilities arise when you remove ‘meaning’ from the present and place it in the past or future? What happens when you realize that the past and future are vacant categories? Ultimately, Beckett is exploring one fundamental, yet extremely complicated, question: what orients my ethical action, my responsibility to the other, in a universe seemingly devoid of purpose and meaning?

WAITING FOR GODOT Context and response

Waiting for Godot was written between October 1948 and January 1949, a time of particular pressure in Beckett’s creative life. This was the period when Beckett was in the midst of writing his first prose trilogy (all three texts were written between 1947 and 1950) and these novels presented specific problems to him. The trilogy, much as the drama would do, challenges generic expectation insofar as the novels essentially are minute examinations of consciousness. As such the novels have no real plot and take place in times and spaces difficult to identify. The writing process was never easy for Beckett, and the trilogy, with its representation of the vagaries of eccentric interiority, was creative agony.2 Waiting for Godot was, as Beckett himself tells us, a form of creative escape from the protracted abstractions of the trilogy, a way of removing himself from the ‘wildness and rulelessness’ of the ‘awful prose I was writing at the time’ (Bair: 381). Drama would allow him to map the trajectories of real, concrete, characters in the real space and time of performance. Much like the logical progression of a chess game (chess being one of Beckett’s obsessions), Waiting for Godot would work itself out according to a kind of relentless symmetrical logic: two characters, for two acts, waiting. While it is true that the initial productions of Godot were met with bafflement, audiences, encouraged by positive critical reviews,3 subsequently warmed to it and it became the play to see. Its unfortunate American premiere in Miami, billed as the ‘laugh hit of two continents’ and starring Bert Lahr (The Wizard of Oz) and Tom Ewell, is perhaps the exception to this general tendency.4 Audience puzzlement was—and still is—quite understandable given what the play offers: two tramps on a stage, empty save for a mound of dirt, a road, and 28

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a bare tree (which will suddenly grow five leaves between the first and second acts), waiting for a man named Godot who does not appear. The play is divided in two with all action symmetrically distributed. In both acts three other characters appear, Pozzo and Lucky (a gregariously cruel landowner and servant) and a boy who twice reports that Godot will not come ‘this evening but surely tomorrow’ (43). The drama of nothing

Vivian Mercier’s famous remark that Godot is a play in which ‘nothing happens, twice’ is perhaps a good beginning point here, although we will need to explore the resonances of Beckett’s ‘nothing’ if we are properly to understand the concept’s philosophical importance to the play. It is true to say at least this about Godot: it is like nothing else ever seen on stage before. And this is true for the simple reason that Beckett has presented an antidramatic drama. The word ‘drama’ comes from the Greek, meaning ‘action’. We come to the theater expecting significant action to take place: Hamlet, a play also about waiting and deferred action, at least gives us a play-within-a-play (in which a murder is staged), the killing of Polonius, and a final sword fight which sees the death of four characters. In Godot we get characters talking, exchanging hats, eating carrots, and in one crucial and paradoxically action-packed scene, we are presented with a character who performs an act of thinking. Thus one of the main difficulties with Godot is that the play is not doing what it is supposed to do: it is not telling us a story in any real sense. When Estragon opens the play with his now famous ‘Nothing to be done’ (3) we are confronted in some sense with the purest negation of dramatic action in the history of drama. But the line is complex: it refers at once to Estragon’s present context (he cannot remove his boot, thus there is ‘nothing to be done’ about his discomfort), and to the general philosophical themes of the play. There is nothing to be done about the present situation these characters find themselves in: there is no escape from the knowledge of the necessity of waiting. There may be nothing done in conventional terms in this play but perhaps another kind of action will occur: the act of thinking, of thinking while waiting, of being self-conscious about waiting. More precisely, Godot, as Vladimir makes clear in his philosophically nuanced response to Estragon’s opening gambit, is about confronting that there is no solution to the problem of being (alive): ‘I’m beginning 29

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to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle’ (3). Hugh Kenner, one of Beckett’s early and most astute critics, suggests the play realigns audience expectation: ‘The substance of the play is waiting, amid uncertainty. If there has never been a play about waiting before, that is because no dramatist before Beckett ever thought about attempting such a thing’ (32).5 Beckett has staged a play about uncertainty, waiting, and boredom. Waiting for Godot, from this perspective, begins to look like it may simply be ‘about’ what it says it is about: waiting. For some critics of a more existential bent, thus, Godot becomes a perfect representation of what it means to be, period: we have all waited in anxiety and hope for something. Alain Robbe-Grillet, in an enormously influential early essay on Godot, draws on the existential-phenomenological philosophy of Martin Heidegger, especially Heidegger’s notion of ‘thrownness’. Heidegger’s idea, worked out fully in Being and Time (a text which intersects in fascinating ways with Godot), is that to be means simply to have been thrown, without guidance or aid, into existence and told to live.6 To be, according to Robbe-Grillet means, simply, to be there, in a space without signposts: Probably it is the theater, more than any other mode of representing reality, which reproduces this situation [of being] most naturally. The dramatic character is on stage, that is his primary quality: he is there . . . We grasp at once . . . this major function of theatrical representation: to show of what the fact of being there consists. (111; 120).7 Robbe-Grillet goes on to say that Godot ‘consists of nothing but emptiness’ (114) but that because it is about nothing—this word consistently arises!—the play is ‘misjudged in every way’ (114). And here, with Robbe-Grillet’s remark (written, we need to point out, in 1953, very early in the critical response to the play) we arrive at a crucial moment in the reception and interpretation of Waiting for Godot: the play about nothing becomes a play that means a great many things. Humankind, as T. S. Eliot reminds us, ‘cannot bear very much reality’8; humankind also cannot bear too much nothingness, cannot, perhaps more accurately, conceive of nothingness. Certainly we

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cannot allow a play about nothing simply to be a play about nothing. Kenner remarks that Godot ‘is not “about”; it is itself; it is a play’ (31) but from the outset audiences and critics have not allowed the play ‘to be about’ nothing and thus it has been subjected to all manner of interpretive intervention.9 The play’s vagueness—the way it refuses to specify where and when the action occurs and who precisely Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, and Lucky are—strikes many as an indication that Beckett is presenting an allegory here. The gaps in the play would seem to allow the audience to read it in many ways and thus ironically the primary characteristic of the play, its difficulty, is not permitted to stand, is in fact erased, in the critical readings. In what follows I wish to rehearse some possible readings, look closely at the play’s most persistent interpretation—that it is about God and revelation (or failed revelation)—and then offer my own reading, that Waiting for Godot ultimately is ‘about’ its own interpretation and a fundamental human desire for meaning. Ties that bind

One of Beckett’s obsessions is the notion of inescapable relationships. His plays and novels are filled with characters in painful relationships which seem to offer nothing positive. Beckett referred to the people in these relationships as ‘pseudo-couples’ because often there is nothing formal (like marriage or blood relations) binding them together. Vladimir and Estragon are the most prominent pseudo-couple and offer the template of Beckett’s later exploration of these curious bondings.10 They are bound together in a relationship of dependency, affection, repulsion, and anger; they know full well that they are not happy together—Estragon in fact says, ‘There are times when I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us to part’ (10)—but they are unable to separate. Even though Estragon seems in the habit of leaving Vladimir in the evenings (presumably to sleep alone), he inevitably returns to suffer with him in the mornings: Vladimir: You again! Come here till I embraced you. Estragon: Don’t touch me. Vladimir: Do you want me to go away? Gogo! Did they beat you? Gogo! Where did you spend the night? . . . Who beat you? Tell me.

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Estragon: Another day done with. Vladimir: Not yet. Estragon: For me it’s over and done with, no matter what happens. ... Vladimir: I missed you . . . and at the same time I was happy. Isn’t that a queer thing? Estragon: Happy? Vladimir: Perhaps it’s not quite the right word. Estragon: And now? Vladimir: Now? . . . There you are again . . . There we are again . . . There I am again. Estragon: You see, you feel worse when I’m with you. I feel better alone too. Vladimir: Then why do you always come crawling back? Estragon: I don’t know. (50–2) Estragon’s ‘I don’t know’ is, of course, a complex response to a complex question. He returns for many reasons the primary probably being the fact that he is in the habit of doing so; habit, as Vladimir says, is ‘a great deadener’ (515).11 Vladimir and Estragon have become used to one another and it is fair to suggest that while they are perhaps happier away from each other, they truly only exist, or feel they exist in any fundamental sense of the term, when they are together: each needs the other to confirm his existence, however miserable, however habitual.12 It is also clear that Vladimir and Estragon are tied together in a mutual pact of waiting. Their bond thus echoes the more mysterious bond that ties them to Godot: Vladimir: Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come— Estragon: Ah! ... Vladimir: Or for night to fall. We have kept our appointment and that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much? Estragon: Billions. (72)

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The minimum achievement of Vladimir and Estragon has been to maintain some kind of word, their bond to Godot. In this sense the play is about the effect of such bonds, such relationships. Vladimir and Estragon know this: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir:

We’re not tied? I don’t hear a word you’re saying. I’m asking you if we’re tied. Tied? Ti-ed. How do you mean tied? Down. But to whom? By whom? To your man. To Godot? Tied to Godot? What an idea! No question of it. For the moment. (15)

And of course Beckett literalizes the bondage metaphor with Pozzo and Lucky, another pseudo-couple tied together in a bond that expressly speaks of power. It is not hard to see Pozzo as an allegorical figure of the petty tyrant abusing the (ironically named) figure of the servant, Lucky. Critics are fond of seeing in Pozzo and Lucky a representation of philosopher Hegel’s notion of the Master-Slave dialectic, a condition of inevitable power between the powerful and the powerless in which both components of the relationship—master and slave—require the other in a mutually supportive, hence dialectical—relationship. (Perhaps Pozzo even acknowledges his allegorical status when he states ‘I am perhaps not particularly human, but who cares?’ [22].) Pozzo becomes a concrete manifestation of the master arbitrarily wielding power, a concrete manifestation, in some ways, of what Godot could be in reality (Vladimir and Estragon wonder if Pozzo is in fact Godot when they meet him for the first time). Lucky, such a strange character, mute except for his performance of thinking, simply becomes the figure of long suffering, the rope that binds him to Pozzo the representation of that power. Lucky’s one speech (35–37), a dis-articulate expression, demonstrates, perhaps, the effect of power on the subject: his speech is an incoherent expression of anger suggesting that his resentment cannot be expressed directly, coherently. His speech, his act of ‘thinking’, is a patchwork

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of philosophical and cultural references (to God, to Bishop Berkeley, to Shakespeare); working not as a sensible expression of pain, it functions rather, rhythmically and aurally beyond the verbal, beyond the comprehensible, as a pure performance of pain. His auditors’ agony on listening to the speech is perhaps an acknowledgment, as witnesses, of Lucky’s despair, an acknowledgment that they at some level are responsible for his pain: Pozzo for continuing his enslavement of Lucky, Vladimir, and Estragon for not attempting to free him.13 It is crucial to notice how neatly Beckett arranges the play in terms of the responsibilities and relationships which bind people together: Vladimir and Estragon to each other; Vladimir and Estragon to Godot; Pozzo and Lucky to each other. In some ways Beckett is asking a simple question: What keeps people together? It is habit; it is power; it is, as we shall see, belief. Interpreting the play as a meditation on the logic of relationships and power is, of course, to focus primarily on concrete stage business, on, that is, the way the characters interact with each other as pseudo-couples. But the one interpretation that dominates discussion of the play, that it is a play about God, begins by concentrating on absence, on what does not occur on stage. I will suggest that interpreting Godot as God, or some kind of messianic figure, is still to think of the play in terms of relationships and power, but now, given the radical absence that is Godot, we move into more explicitly philosophical territory. The absent God

It should be stated at the outset that Beckett regretted his use of the name ‘Godot’. Peter Woodthorpe, who played Estragon in the British premiere of Godot, recalls Beckett’s unhappiness with having chosen the name ‘Godot’: ‘Beckett also said to me about “Godot” that he deeply regretted calling it “Godot”, because everybody interpreted it as God . . . He said it had nothing to do with God. He was almost passionate about it’ (Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett: 123–24). Although the play was originally written and performed in French, where the word ‘Godot’ would not necessarily call to mind the English word ‘God’, Beckett’s protestations that the play is not about God seems rather disingenuous (or at best rather naïve). Even if Godot had had another name, the play would have religious resonances. And certainly the numerous references to the Bible, God, Christ, and

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crucifixions, do nothing to lessen the impression that something more metaphysical than, perhaps, waiting for a prospective employer to offer work, is afoot in the play. Indeed, early in the play Vladimir and Estragon are discussing the Biblical story of the two thieves crucified with Christ, one of whom repented and was saved. Immediately following a heated discussion of the story (they engage in some textual exegesis, perhaps anticipating and echoing how Godot will be subjected to analysis!) we hear for the first time the play’s refrain ‘Let’s go. We can’t. Why not? We’re waiting for Godot. Ah!’ (8). Beckett is nothing if not a careful composer and thus while he may deny the religious readings of the play, the work itself—with its deliberate juxtaposition of the idea of Christian salvation with the anticipated arrival of Godot—seems to offer the possibility that it is about salvation and redemption. And indeed, the absent Godot and the response he seems to have inspired in Vladimir and Estragon—a kind of agonized loyalty— fits perfectly, perhaps too perfectly, into a specifically Pauline notion of humankind’s relation to the deity.14 In Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians he writes that humankind needs to become responsible for their own redemption. Paul, as the enlightened master, acknowledges that he will not always be present to guide his flock, and thus he states: ‘Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation in fear and trembling’ (Philippians 2:12).15 In The Gift of Death philosopher Jacques Derrida comments on Paul’s letter: If Paul says ‘adieu’ and absents himself as he asks them to obey, in fact ordering them to obey . . . it is because God is himself absent, hidden and silent, separate, secret, at the moment he has to be obeyed. God doesn’t give his reasons, he acts as he intends, he doesn’t have to give his reasons or share anything with us: neither his motivations, if he has any, nor his deliberations, nor his decisions. Otherwise he wouldn’t be God, we wouldn’t be dealing with the Other as God or with God as wholly Other. (57) Derrida’s analysis of the condition of the Christian believer speaks to the existential condition of Vladimir and Estragon and perhaps allows us to see their struggle as being one with some kind of endlessly compromised faith. Belief has become habit for Vladimir and

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Estragon but this condition is one, as Derrida would suggest, entirely consistent with the binding that occurs between believers and their gods: ‘The disciples are asked to work towards their salvation not in the presence ( parousia) but in the absence (apousia) of the master: without either seeing or knowing, without hearing the law or the reasons for the law’ (56–7).16 This is the religious equivalent of Heidegger’s notion of ‘thrown-ness’: cast without guidance into the world, Vladimir and Estragon fix on Godot, the absence that becomes fully present as hope, as possibility: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir:

I can’t go on like this That’s what you think. If we parted? That might be better for us. We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. Unless Godot comes. And if he comes? We’ll be saved. (86)

The critique of belief: Time

But of course, Godot does not come, will never come. To read this play as strictly about the Pauline God (or the Judaic messiah) is to fail to notice that the play is more accurately understood as a critique of the idea of salvation, of redemption, a critique that begins in the play’s sustained deconstruction of a concept centrally related to the idea of salvation: time. In Proust, Beckett defines time as ‘that doubleheaded monster of damnation and salvation’ (511). And certainly Vladimir and Estragon would seem to live in a time of hope, hope for a salvation that may come. But this reading does not take into account a central Beckettian conceit: the repetition of all things in a time which seems no longer to function as time. To be saved at some point in the future, as the messianic figure would have it, requires a consistently forward-moving, linear temporal sequence. Time, in other words, needs to function in conventional (Western) terms in order for the future to come, for the future to be reached as such within time. Beckett begins to dismantle a conventional understanding of linear temporality by clearly structuring the play on the logic of repetition.17 One implication of the play is that Vladimir and Estragon will be endlessly returning to this spot, endlessly awaiting Godot. This circularity and repetition—two days which see two appearances of Pozzo, 36

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Lucky, and the Boy; two days which end with identical, sudden, and wholly artificial risings of the moon; two days in which Godot does not appear; two days which end in identical postures of stasis: ‘Let’s go. They do not move’—clearly dismantles what we call the teleological (end-oriented) structure of messianic thinking. And this not merely because there seems to be no forward progression in this repeating structure but, more ominously, because Vladimir and Estragon (as much as Pozzo and Lucky) seem unaware for certain if they are in fact repeating themselves, seem unaware, that is, of how time itself functions. Estragon’s uncertainty as to whether he met Pozzo and Lucky the day before, echoed by Pozzo’s ignorance of Vladimir and Estragon in the second act (made perhaps somewhat understandable by his unexplained sudden blindness), is simply a manifestation of an inability to track or trace time, in this case the past. And when Vladimir questions Pozzo about Lucky’s muteness in the second act, Pozzo explodes: Vladimir: Dumb? Since when? Pozzo: Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (82) Pozzo’s speech, which does go to the heart of Beckett’s critique of teleological and messianic time, suggests that the divisions of past, present, and future do not function: there is only a now, a now of Heidegger’s thrown-ness, a now of endless (because essentially timeless) suffering. One of the refrains of Lucky’s speech is ‘time will tell’, a line Beckett has Lucky repeat for thematic effect and that circulates crucially through the play. The line is a cliché, certainly, but one parodied, as it is repeated in Lucky’s speech in monstrously painful circumstances, to the point of sense (and also perhaps of warning?): time can no longer tell, can no longer narrate or reveal any truths— and narratives perhaps, needing time in order to understood as such, no longer can function—because time itself cannot function here in this strangely liminal space of the play: ‘Time has stopped’ (30), as Vladimir puts it so tellingly. 37

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What I am suggesting here is that Beckett is critiquing—holding up to critical scrutiny—the idea of the salvational moment. Godot will not come today, but he must, Vladimir and Estragon believe, in the habit of believers, come tomorrow. Beckett holds Vladimir and Estragon up as types of the faithful, the hopeless faithful types of those who must believe that significance will come. It may be possible thus to read their ignorance of the recent past not merely as a symptom of time’s dismantling, but as a willful act of repressing an awareness of repetition. By denying repetition, by hallucinating that this is all happening for the first time, Vladimir and Estragon can believe that this now is singular, unique, as a pure moment of waiting and expectation. Interpretation and self-consciousness

But Beckett’s scrutiny of the desire for belief extends as equally to the audience. The critics who read the play as being about God or the salvational moment, as being about power, the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic, as being about France under Nazi rule, have all fallen into the same belief trap that Vladimir and Estragon find themselves. I think perhaps the best way to read this play is to begin with the suggestion that if it is ‘about’ anything it is about the desire for belief. More specifically, I wish to explore how the play, if it is an allegory, is an allegory of interpretation; in other words Waiting for Godot is about the way it is read by its audiences. My suggestion that the play is about the act of interpretation itself accounts in part for the play’s intense self-consciousness. I suggested in the Introduction to this Guide that Beckett’s characters are all anxiously self-aware: the same applies to the major dramatic works. Waiting for Godot, in other words, knows it is a play, knows that it is being watched and is under critical scrutiny. When Vladimir approaches the front of the stage, faces the audience, and says ‘inspiring prospects’ (8) or when he refers to the auditorium as a ‘bog’ (9), he indicates an awareness of the play as spectacle, as something with an audience (one he seems to despise or fear). When he suddenly needs to relieve himself and ‘hastens towards the wings’ (28), Estragon says ‘End of the corridor, on the left’ (28) pointing out the existence of an offstage (yet of course still fictional!) toilet not belonging to the world of the play. In the second act Vladimir pushes Estragon toward the

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auditorium where he catches sights of the audience and ‘recoils in horror’ (66). Much as the protagonist in Beckett’s Film suffers from ‘the anguish of perceivedness’ (163), Estragon is horrified at the idea of his existence being confirmed, perhaps even articulated, by an audience. Vladimir complains of having been ‘better entertained’ (32) by the actors on stage and, perhaps like the actual audience, grows bored: ‘I begin to weary of this motif’ (76). Pozzo is certainly a representation of petty tyranny, but it is also painfully obvious that he is always acting a role, asking Vladimir and Estragon, after a long speech, ‘How did you find me? Good? Fair? Middling? Poor? Positively bad? . . . Bless you, gentlemen, bless you! . . . I have such need of encouragement! I weakened a little towards the end, you didn’t notice?’ (31). All these examples—and of course there are many more: the entire play is massively self-conscious of its artifice—indicate a highly selfaware play. The concomitant effect of this self-consciousness, I would suggest, is the audience’s heightened awareness of their own active role in the proceedings. And Beckett knows this: when Vladimir and Estragon ritually exchange insults in the second act the ultimate term of abuse, spoken as the stage directions put it, ‘with finality’, is ‘Crritic!’ (68). This moment indicates Beckett’s mistrust of his readers but does also, of course, indicate an awareness that reading, interpretation, and judgment—correct or incorrect—will take place. One of the lovely symmetries of the play—in a play filled with symmetry—is that our position as readers of Waiting for Godot, the play, is mirrored by Vladimir and Estragon’s reading of Godot, the character: all of us wish, perhaps, to make Godot and Godot be ‘about’ something, salvation or otherwise. But, as indicated above, Beckett deliberately withholds or immobilizes the meaning of Godot, just as he immobilizes Vladimir and Estragon in the final moments of each act, an image, as I read it, of physical, psychological, and interpretive paralysis: they are stuck in place just as they are tied to their dependency on Godot, their need for Godot to mean something to them. Why belief? Why faith?

If Vladimir and Estragon have fallen into the habit of belief, and we are in some ways their doubles, Beckett would seem to be asking us about our incessant, ceaseless desire for significance and meaning, a questioning that reflects specifically on our desire to make this play

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mean something, and generally onto our own existential condition of thrown-ness. Why do we demand that things mean? Why do we insist on creating meaning out of the nothingness of being? Why are we unable to accept, as Pozzo suggests, that we live only in a now, that we may in fact be blind to this moment, unable to see it for what it really is? Why are we unable to accept, to quote one of the most famous lines of the play, that we ‘give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’ (82)? For surely what the play relentlessly suggests is that Vladimir and Estragon, for all their despair, will be back tomorrow poised expectantly for the arrival of Godot: they may, in other words, intellectually accept the existential truth of Pozzo’s vision of humanity, but their actions speak endlessly to a belief in what Vladimir calls ‘hope deferred’ (5).18 Waiting for Godot thus finally is a play not about the absence of meaning, is not about the messiah who fails to appear, is not about the absent God: it is about asking us about our desire for such things and the difficult realization that we create meaning in the face of nothingness, to stave off that nothingness. We must notice, crucially, that Beckett is not offering a nihilistic or despairing view of humanity. He is suggesting that humankind is naturally hermeneutical, creates meaning almost instinctively, but that we must take into account that we are wholly responsible for the meanings we create, for the way, to sound a major theme in the play, we invest in and tie ourselves to significance. I suggested above that Waiting for Godot is a critique of the idea of salvation: a critique in itself cannot be nihilistic because it supposes that there is some idea of value being analyzed and that the analysis itself is vital. In this case the play wishes to get its audience to see what damage is done by maintaining a loyalty to illusory ideas and desires. Vladimir and Estragon have paid, are paying, and, it would seem, will continue to pay, a high price for their relationship to the absent Godot. At what point, Beckett asks, do we put away these painfully sustaining beliefs and move on? Beckett, as in all things in Waiting for Godot, answers the question, twice: Vladimir: Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let’s go. They do not move. Curtain.

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ENDGAME

Time was never and time is over. —Endgame Context: The essentials

Endgame, written in French between 1953 and 1957 (and entitled Fin de partie), was Beckett’s favorite play. Godot, he confided to critic Ruby Cohn, was badly constructed, ‘messy’ and ‘not well thought out’ (258).19 Endgame, which is a much more tightly structured and focused play, shares familiar themes with Godot—the problems of time, painful relations, and self-consciousness—but distills these ideas in a more forceful, one might even say brutal, manner. Indeed, Beckett spoke fondly of the play ‘clawing’ its way into the consciousness of its audience, the way it ruthlessly—though with no small amount of compassion—demonstrated what Beckett felt to be Endgame’s major theme, that ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ (104).20 Endgame is unique in Beckett’s work for coming ready-made with an interpretive key. The play’s title refers to the third and final stage of a chess match, the endgame, where most of the major pieces have been exchanged and the two kings remain. When asked about the meaning of the play by Lawrence Held (an actor playing the role of Nagg in a late 1970s production), Beckett, a fanatical chess player, responded: ‘Well, it’s like the last game between Karpov and Korchnoi. After the third move both knew that neither could win, but they kept on playing’ (Remembering Beckett: 206). Beckett’s interpretation indicates his sense that Endgame stages an extended moment of futility where unhappy outcomes are known from the outset and where, to return to a theme in Godot, habit overrules common sense.21 Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell are trapped in what appears to be an endlessly repeating end stage, a moment when nothing thrives except irritation, unhappiness, and crucially, nostalgia for an irretrievable past. Beckett is interested in extreme or limit sites, places real or psychological, where things are stripped down to a kind of barrenness, to what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’.22 The presiding metaphor of this play—endgame: the final stage of a game where

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only the essential pieces are left—is the perfect visual image of this extremity. Beckett pares things down to the essentials in a number of ways in Endgame, but most crucially he reduces the mobility of three of the four actors on stage: Hamm, the reigning tyrant of the play (and surely an echo of Pozzo in Godot’s second act), is blind and confined to a chair on wheels; Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, have lost their legs and have been placed, presumably by their son, in rubbish bins (in a clear allegory of Western culture’s treatment of the elderly): ‘The old folks at home!’ (98)23; Clov, the only mobile character in the play, moves with great, pained difficulty. Clearly, Beckett is signaling that the body’s actions, its ability to do in traditional terms, are not as crucial as what the body’s compromised state engenders: an awareness of the primacy of thought, memory, and anxious selfconsciousness. Beckett will continue to pare back the body on stage (and in his prose) over the years; but it is in Endgame that he first signals that the body is always already a liability, something that must be removed in order for him to discover the essential nature of the human. Adorno and the postholocaust

One of the remarkable effects of the play is the way this reduced stage world—a room, two windows, four actors—looks positively bursting with activity when we realize that this room, this ‘shelter’ as Hamm calls it, may be the last place on earth with human life. It may be an exaggeration to call Endgame a postapocalyptic play, but certainly we get the sense that the action occurs in a time and space, after. Something has occurred, whether it was a nuclear holocaust (they are in a shelter) or a plague, to remove all traces of life from the world.24 After Hamm complains that ‘nature has forgotten us’, Clov says ‘There’s no more nature’ (99). And after Hamm asks Clov to go to the window and ‘look at the earth’ (111), we hear this: Clov: Hamm: Clov: Hamm: Clov:

Let’s see. Zero . . . zero . . . and zero. Nothing stirs. All is— Zer— Wait till you’re spoken to! All is . . . all is . . . all is what? All is what? What all is? in a word? Is that what you want to know? Just a moment. Corpsed. Well? Content? (112–13) 42

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Later in the play, Hamm echoes Clov’s horrific description saying ‘The whole place stinks of corpses’ (124). The sense thus is that this now, for all intents and purposes—certainly for us and these characters—is the world. These are the remainders of humanity; bare, and barely accommodated, these characters represent Beckett’s darkest vision of what emerges and remains after the collapse of all societal and cultural supports. In a now classic essay, aptly titled ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, Theodor Adorno places the play in a specific historical context: After the Second World War, everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed without realizing it; humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even survivors cannot really survive, on a rubbish heap that has made even reflection on one’s own damaged state useless. (244) Certainly Hamm, who wearily announces his intention to continue ‘this farce’ (101) with his opening gambit of ‘Me to play’ (92), is a perfect emblem of Adorno’s postholocaust survivor unable to reflect effectively (in a literal sense even, given his blindness) on his own damaged state. This is a time of such desolation, a desolation which would become almost comfortable if it were not for memory, that the very idea of significance or meaning is met with derisive, corrosive laughter. When, for instance, Hamm senses, oddly, that what is occurring might actually have some kind of resonance, he asks in anguish (Beckett’s crucial word): ‘What’s happening, what’s happening?’ Clov responds: ‘Something is taking its course’ (100). The first time this occurs Hamm seems immediately to forget his anguish, but later in the play the moment repeats itself: Hamm: Clov: Hamm: Clov: Hamm: Clov:

What’s happening? Something is taking its course. Clov! What is it? We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something? Mean something! You and I, mean something! Ah, that’s a good one! (114)

Adorno suggests that Endgame signals the terminal point of meaning in postholocaust art, an end stage of even conceiving the possibility 43

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of meaning. Endgame, he argues, reduces philosophy and art to ‘cultural trash’ (241) and thus: [I]nterpretation of Endgame cannot pursue the chimerical aim of expressing the play’s meaning in a form mediated by philosophy. Understanding it can mean only understanding its unintelligibility, concretely reconstructing the meaning that it has no meaning. (243) Nostalgia and narrative: Melancholia

Adorno’s essay is a brilliant diagnosis of the condition of Beckett’s world but he does, I think, tend to override the strength, the stubborn strength, of the despair in the play. This is a play of massive longing for an impossible past, of massive nostalgia for what has been. These characters live in a corpsed world of compromised ethics and agonized relationships and all look back—impossibly—to what has been lost. More precisely, the past, as we see in especially Hamm’s central narrative, is a time, a place, where significant ethical action could have been enacted (this conditional tense is crucial) but was not. I will not reduce Beckett’s favorite play to an easy moral lesson but surely one of the things Hamm’s repeated and habitual return to the past suggests is that to live in regret, in nostalgia without consolation, is the purest form of despair. And despair, which for Beckett still carries the quasi-theological idea of distance and separation from meaning, contradicts Adorno’s sense of the utter senselessness of the play. For despair to be present means that something—the past, history—still carries the resonance, the trace, if only a spectral trace, of value. We need in other words to understand how in Endgame the recognition of the loss of meaning becomes meaningful in itself and may in part be what the play is about. Rather than presenting a play of utter negation, Beckett examines how humankind deals with what we may call the residue of meaning, the traces of loss that can never be eradicated or negated. Beckett weaves a sense of what I am calling nostalgia without consolation throughout the play. In an early moment, Nagg and Nell emerge from their rubbish bins and engage in a hideous, and quite hilarious, parody of normal companionship: Nell: What is it, my pet? Time for love? Nagg: Were you asleep?

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Nell: Nagg: Nell: Nagg: Nell: Nagg: Nell: Nagg: Nell:

Oh no! Kiss me. We can’t. Try. Why this farce, day after day? I’ve lost me tooth. When? I had it yesterday. (elegiac) Ah yesterday! (101)

Beckett’s stage direction (‘elegiac’) is crucial. In its poetic form the elegy laments the loss of somebody (usually a young man) and typically—as in Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ or Shelley’s ‘Adonais’—moves toward a moment of consolation where the poet successfully works through that loss and comes to some form of acceptance. This scene of consolation is what Sigmund Freud would characterize as the moment of ‘successful mourning’. Mourning’s success, as Freud puts it in his seminal essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, is predicated on and predicted by the ability of the mourner to contain the traumatic loss within a coherent narrative: the mourner must be able to understand loss as such and contain that loss, digest it, metabolize it, and move on.25 Mourning, in other words, allows the subject to place loss into a coherent temporal structure where it is safely distanced. Freud posited that unsuccessful mourning, what he termed melancholia, is the inability to mourn, the inability to separate oneself from the loss, from the past: the melancholic thus is continually haunted by loss, by history. In some crucial ways, and this idea plays out centrally in Endgame, Beckett’s main theme is always melancholia. Beckett signals an awareness of how melancholia pervades the world of Endgame by continually foregrounding his characters’ peculiar relation to temporality, to time. Nagg and Nell are deeply nostalgic for this ‘yesterday’ (they recall with fondness, for instance, the moment when they lost their ‘shanks’ in the Sedan) and continually revisit, as teller or listener, the past through habitually shared stories and (bad) jokes. Their lives now are almost literally nothing compared to what has been. And certainly Hamm’s central narrative, the keystone of the play, is a study in both nostalgia and melancholy, a return to a past which continually haunts the present moment. Hamm’s narrative is

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a perfect representation of the peculiar nature of Beckettian melancholia: here we have a subject haunted not simply by the past, but by a possible past, the memory of which he seems in turn consciously to manipulate and alter at whim. In Hamm’s narrative thus we have a demonstration of a kind of self-inflicted melancholia: and it is precisely the nature of this masochistic act of story-telling that is at the ethical heart of this play. It is clear from the context of Hamm’s narrative—he variously calls it his ‘chronicle’ (134) or the ‘audition’ (126)—that he compels his father and Clov to listen to a story he has told many times before. This repetition is important as is the fact that Hamm needs an audience. If, as the common Beckettian trope would have it, one exists only insofar as one is seen, Hamm seems to require his past to be witnessed in order for it to have been; like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, condemned to repeat his story of crime and punishment, Hamm in some senses has become his narrative: telling it confirms his existence. And the fact that it is this particular narrative to which Hamm compulsively returns indicates that there is something in the story that Hamm is trying to comprehend, to work through. Hamm’s compulsion to repeat, reenact, and rehearse his continual haunting by history indicates a need to master some aspect of his history, a need to lay to rest something in the past that still troubles him. But what is Hamm’s story about? What is this thing requiring mastery? As perhaps we expect, nothing is immediately certain here. The story, the details, and perhaps even the main subject of which possibly are being fabricated by Hamm, concerns a moment in his past where he had the means and power to render real aid to someone. It is thus a recalling of an instance of ethical action. More precisely, the story of a supplicant asking for help for himself and his child is one demonstrating a time when ethical action could possibly have occurred: it takes place before the cataclysm that has corpsed this world. Hamm controls all the details of the story—giving minute details of weather conditions and indicating precisely what kind of match he used to light his pipe—just as he demonstrates his ability to control the lives of the beggar and the child: Gradually I cooled down, sufficiently at least to ask him how long he had taken on the way. Three whole days. Good. In what condition he had left the child. Deep in sleep. But deep in what sleep,

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deep in what sleep already? Well, to make it short I finally offered to take him into my service. He had touched a chord. And then I imagined already that I wasn’t much longer for this world. Well? Here if you were careful you might die a nice natural death, in peace and comfort. Well? In the end he asked me would I consent to take in the child as well—if he were still alive. It was the moment I was waiting for. Would I consent to take in the child . . . (130) Of course Hamm’s story is a rather terrifying demonstration of power. He seems to have been anticipating his ability to be magnanimous to the beggar, relishing the opportunity to demonstrate his ability to care for the child—who may perhaps have been Clov—where the real father could not. I need to be very clear about this moment: I am not suggesting that Hamm himself is acting ethically here but that, to repeat, his story takes place in a time where some ethical action could have taken place. Hamm’s continual return to this moment in the past is, on one hand, a nostalgic return to potency. On the other, as we will see, it is a performance of self-criticism, even self-loathing. Because it is clear as the play continues to unfold that Hamm’s return to this story is a kind of defense: it is as if he tells the story to suggest that he did once act, however selfishly, to save another. Hamm admits, in perhaps the key ethical moment of the play, to having been absent to his own life. Clov’s response to Hamm’s self-pity is telling: Hamm: Clov: Hamm: Clov: Hamm: Clov: Hamm: Clov: Hamm: Clov: Hamm: Clov: Hamm:

I was never there. Clov! What is it? I was never there. Lucky for you. Absent, always. It all happened without me. I don’t know what’s happened. Do you know what’s happened? Clov! Do you want me to look at this mudheap, yes or no? Answer me first. What? Do you know what’s happened? When? Where? When! What’s happened? Use your head, can’t you! What has happened? What for Christ’s sake does it matter? I don’t know.

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Clov:

When old Mother Pegg asked you for oil for her lamp and you told her to get out to hell, you knew what was happening then, no? You know what she died of, Mother Pegg? Of darkness. Hamm: I hadn’t any. Clov: Yes, you had. (145–46) Mother Pegg provides the necessary ethical symmetry here. Hamm can claim, does claim repeatedly, to have helped the beggar and his son, but he had the means to help many more, as Clov insistently reminds him. Mother Pegg, who is only mentioned twice in the play, is the primary emblem of the dead past which continually haunts Hamm. She becomes the symptom of his melancholy, becomes the reason for his sense of ethical failure: ‘All those I might have helped. Helped! Saved. Saved! The place was crawling with them!’ (141). Beckett signals Hamm’s continual sense of the loss of this moment, the loss of a time when he could have been present to his ethical responsibilities, by having Hamm return again to the story of the beggar and his child in his final monologue. This narrative, the fragments of which Hamm desperately tries to shore against his ethical ruins, signals his inability to escape the claims of history: ‘Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended . . . If he could have his child with him . . . It was the moment I was waiting for’ (153). The brutal realization here, of course, is that time may be over, but time certainly was not ‘never’: Hamm did have time to act, did have the means to save, but did not. And Hamm’s condition as melancholic gives the lie to his claim that time is over: time may not be functioning here, now, as it once did, but history—time past—is continually pressing upon him, continually claiming his agonized attention. Repetition: Audience responsibility

And of course we need to interrogate further the idea, as Hamm claims, that the story is over, that time has ended for this play. Because it is clear that, like Waiting for Godot, Endgame is grounded on the logic of repetition. Not only do characters habitually return to familiar stories and jokes, seemingly unable to escape the claims of the past, but they seem aware that they are in fact in a play with a

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seemingly endless run. Indeed, one way to view the play is as a meditation—admittedly a strange conception—on what we may call, after Fredric Jameson, the prison-house of acting. Hamm and Clov are intensely aware of their status as actors (they refer to auditions, underplots, asides, and final soliloquies) and thus their state of being, let us say, condemned to act.26 Crucially, we as audience members or readers of the play are continually made aware that we give these characters life that we bring them to life, every time we attend a performance or open the text and read. When Clov turns his telescope on the audience and says ‘I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy’ (112), or when Hamm senses being looked at—‘All kinds of fantasies! That I’m being watched!’ (142)—Beckett signals, I believe, a sense of our participation and responsibility in this play. The audience in fact enacts the Berkeleyean dictum ‘to be is to be perceived’ by granting painful life to these pained characters. Like Vladimir and Estragon, Hamm and Clov are not merely emblems of Heideggerian ‘thrown’ beings, but they stand as metaphors for the idea that humankind is condemned to act repeatedly in a play not necessarily of its own choosing. Thus, when Hamm expresses a desire for the end of things— ‘Enough, it’s time it ended’ (93)—he is not merely speaking of his life, but of the play that he seems to know he is in. When Clov says ‘All life long the same questions, the same answers’ (95), he is not only referring to the habits of speech we all fall into, but to the fact that he is condemned to speak lines written for him. When Clov asks ‘What is there to keep me here?’ Hamm responds: ‘The dialogue’ (134) indicating again that they are simply carrying out the predetermined plot of a drama prescribed for them from elsewhere. Hamm expresses what is surely a key line in the play—and a central theme in Beckett’s work generally—when he says ‘If I can hold my peace, and sit quiet, it will be all over with sound, and motion, all over and done with’ (142). Hamm’s agony is the inability to be silent, the inability to stop speaking. Free will?

And it is here that Endgame begins to sound very much like a meditation on the concepts of free will and determination. The play’s central metaphor, that we all are condemned to act out endlessly repeating

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roles in a play from which we cannot escape, suggests the idea that freedom, as such, is a complete illusion (Hamm’s repeated exhortation, ‘You’re on earth! There’s no cure for that!’ takes on added meaning now). In this way Endgame can be read as a quasi-religious examination of what we call the determined life, with Beckett the playwright controlling his characters’ lives in ways some assume God controls our own. Hamm’s central narrative, read in this light (as it crucially must) now takes on an added desperation. Hamm is not only tacitly admitting to a kind of ethical failure, but in his almost maniacal manipulation of details—his threat to bring ‘other characters’ (130) into the story—he looks like he is attempting to assert a creative, existential autonomy: in the face of realizing that he is condemned to repeat his actions endlessly, Hamm tries to determine his own life by controlling the details of its history, an obviously futile gesture. Endgame thus presents an uncompromisingly complex view of the human condemned to act roles seemingly not of their choosing but at some level precisely of their devising. Hamm is here, in this existential now, both because he is an actor in a play—a traditional trope, indeed—and because his actions, specifically with regard to Mother Pegg, have contributed to his present agonized ethical reality. ‘There is no escape from yesterday’, Beckett writes in Proust, because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us . . . Deformation has taken place. Yesterday is not a milestone that has passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what were before the calamity of yesterday. (512) Beckett’s words here are, of course, a perfect diagnosis of the subject as irremediably melancholic, bound to a past which cannot be shaken, continually feeling the claims of history even as he attempts in some manner to shape that history. We shall see, in our examination of Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days, Play, and Not I how Beckett complicates his view of the melancholic subject as one who not only feels the claims of history but, strangely, becomes history by transforming into its embodied archive. In this process, one that begins I believe in Endgame’s representation of Hamm who, like the Ancient Mariner,

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has become his narrative, his history, we will see Beckett unfolding his sense that history makes us ‘other, no longer what we were’. Ultimately these late plays explore how the past deforms us and transforms us to the point where we become utterly alienated from our pasts, from time and space and, crucially, our own bodies.

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CHAPTER 3

KRAPP’S LAST TAPE, HAPPY DAYS, PLAY, NOT I

Les vrai paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdu. —Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu In this chapter I propose to explore four plays each of which contributes to a series of connected themes. Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days, Play, and Not I are concerned with what I call the ‘claims of history’; each play examines various stages of acknowledged or unacknowledged crises, crises arising precisely as characters realize the way in which they are subject to and affected by actions that have occurred in the past. These plays also continue the trajectory of Waiting for Godot and Endgame by progressively diminishing the physical body: while Krapp may have a fully integrated body, the play is ultimately concerned with the claims made by a dis-embodied voice; Happy Days famously buries its lead character in earth up to her waist in the first act and to her neck in the second; Play sees each of three characters interred in urns; and Not I, the locus classicus of theatrical bodily reduction, features only a mouth, spewing a fragmented narrative of trauma. As we examine the plays spanning the years 1958 to 1972, we notice Beckett’s relentless interest in finding the appropriate form for his ideas. What is crucial here is the way in which obsessively consistent themes (history, loss, melancholia) are explored in obsessively experimental forms: no play looks the same in Beckett’s body of work, however much the themes remain obstinately familiar. As we explore these works we should keep in mind the central relation between form and content: Why does Beckett reduce the body’s mobility and

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integrity over the course of these plays? What exactly is it about the body that requires its reduction? Finally, we need to try to come to some understanding of what exactly Beckett has produced here because these ‘plays’ are surely not plays in any conventional sense. Waiting for Godot did certainly shake the foundations of modern drama, and if we are still trying to come to interpretive grips with its claims, how are we to go about understanding a play like Not I?

KRAPP’S LAST TAPE Context: Technology

In some ways Krapp’s Last Tape does not belong in a book entitled A Guide for the Perplexed. This short play, written in 1958, is perhaps Beckett’s most accessible, one might even say, easy, play. However, an inclusion of the work here is crucial because of the interpretive light it casts on previous and future plays. Krapp’s Last Tape distills the major thematic elements of past work into a form that may seem, for Beckett, oddly sentimental. On a basic level the play is about love, lost love, and the regrets and debts such a loss incurs. As Krapp looks back—precisely, listens back—on his past, confronting and simultaneously disavowing his deliberate denial of happiness, we realize that Beckett once again is analyzing the relation of the subject to history and memory. And if in Endgame this exploration takes on the veneer of philosophy (with its issues of free will and determinism), here in Krapp’s Last Tape Beckett humanizes his interest in the melancholic subject by staging issues familiar to anyone who has ever been in love. Indeed, Beckett realized this play would perhaps end up humanizing the playwright himself: ‘People will say: good gracious, there is blood circulating in the man’s veins after all, one would never have believed it; he must be getting old’ (quoted in Knowlson: 399). If Krapp’s Last Tape has a fairly conventional theme—the regret over past action—the method by which Beckett explores his ideas strike us, even now, as remarkable. Beckett had in the late 1950s become interested in new technological developments, specifically in sound recording. The tape recorder, a model of which he saw in operation in the BBC studios just the month prior to writing Krapp’s Last Tape, provides the means by which Beckett can confront the present Krapp with past versions of himself: the tape recorder thus

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serves to pluralize, disembody, and fracture the subject.1 Indeed the mechanical reproductive capabilities of the machine directly force Krapp to realize that his prior selves are in some profound ways absolutely discontinuous with his present self. When, for instance, Krapp consults the ledger, which serves as an index of themes covered on the tapes, he reads ‘memorable equinox’ (223); the sixtynine-year-old Krapp clearly has no memory of the equinox. Nor can he remember the meaning of ‘viduity’ (225), a word his thirty-nineyear-old self uses rather pretentiously. The fact that the present Krapp must consult a dictionary to discover the meaning of the word demonstrates the temporal and psychological gulf separating the various elements of the self. Thus is Beckett able, via the machine, to make concrete the concept of memory. The tape has captured the past, has rendered it seemingly indisputably there, in a way that makes a denial of its claims painfully difficult. But, of course, as Krapp’s youthful performances in the past indicate, even these concrete manifestations of memory, perhaps especially these manifestations, are carefully constructed. The various versions of Krapp have (and are) carefully modulating their performances. And at some crucial level the play is making a central claim: all memory, all attempts to capture the present moment, technologically or merely mentally, are always already fabrications. The tape recorder simply is an objective correlative of the idea that memory, all memory, is constructed by the subject and is subject in its turn to interpretation, acceptance, or disavowal. What Beckett’s play examines in excruciating fashion is the brutal truth that we are in some ways indebted, perhaps masochistically enslaved, to memories which we have deliberately constructed. In ‘Truth and Falsity in Their Extra-Moral Sense’, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argues that the concept of truth—be it the idea of God, of justice, of meaning—is not some eternal, supratemporal concept, but one that we created and have subsequently attributed to sources external to us, forgetting our responsibility for the idea. Nietzsche famously writes: ‘truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions’ (92).2 Beckett ruthlessly explores what happens to an individual when the constructedness of memory, the fabricated archive of memory—the ‘truth’—is revealed. What, he asks, is the subject to do when the truth of his behavior is revealed? What is the subject to do when he realizes precisely his responsibility for his present state of despair and unhappiness? 54

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The melancholy archive

Perhaps one way of understanding what Krapp has created with his tape recorder—a device to which he is clearly, if painfully, addicted— is to relate his memory-work to the concept of the archive. The archive, as Derrida reminds us in Archive Fever, is not only, or even primarily, a way of preserving history. The archive, he suggests, while working ostensibly to allow access to the past, and thus allow the past in a sense to speak—as it literally does in Krapp’s Last Tape—is always oriented to the future. For Derrida, ‘the question of the archive it not . . . a question of the past . . . It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow’ (36). Archives—libraries, museums, or even monuments—are oriented to the future in the sense that they respond to what will be a need for the past. This need to understand what happened in the past is, as Derrida makes clear, always already to come: the archive’s full meaning is always a future one. And Derrida’s notion that the archive in some senses creates and preserves the past just as it creates the future (or a concept of futurity) makes sense of the first stage direction in the play: ‘A late evening in the future’ (221). Beckett had to set the play in the future for logical reasons: Krapp has been creating this tape recording once a year (on his birthday) for around forty years or so; the tape recorder was a recent invention in 1958 and so, for the sake of a kind of realism, the play is set in the future. But I think we should keep this stage direction in mind for thematic reasons as well. The central motif of the play—a later self looking back on what was with regret—is one fully dependent on the idea of futurity: Krapp at thirty-nine has prepared the ground for a future audience with himself. Future trauma

Beckett is here indicating a central understanding of the mechanism not only of memory but of trauma. Because what is traumatic is never fully recognized as such at the time of its occurrence. In Unclaimed Experience trauma theorist Cathy Caruth draws on Freud’s concept of Nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action, and argues that trauma can only be understood retrospectively: [T]rauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated 55

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nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance— returns to haunt the survivor later on. (4) Trauma thus is a concept, like the archive, oriented completely to the future. This night is, therefore, the future moment of realization that the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp can never know. This is the future moment of loss only perceivable by the present self who inherits the pain created unknowingly by the past self, the past self who now seems absolutely Other. As Derrida might argue, the thirty-nineyear-old Krapp has created an archive that has in its turn elicited a traumatic response in the future self. Because it is clear that the moments captured in ‘Box three . . . spool . . . five’ (222) are resonant ones. Here the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp details a year of ‘profound gloom and indigence’ (226) marked only by two singular occurrences. The first is an epiphany concerning Krapp’s career as a writer: The vision at last. This I fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in memory, warm or cold, for the miracle that . . . [hesitates]. . . for the fire that set it alight. What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely . . . (226) Krapp interrupts this narrative at the moment before revealing to us what his epiphany has been, but we sense from a fragmented sentence soon after that it has something to do with discovering his proper subject matter: ‘clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most—’ (226).3 The elderly Krapp here curses, signaling perhaps an acknowledgment that his ‘work’— which seems to have sold only ‘seventeen copies’ (228)—has been an abject failure. Krapp fast-forwards the tape and comes upon another narrative. Here is the central narrative in the play, the moment where the thirtynine-year-old Krapp recalls a moment where a relationship, while seemingly on the verge of dissolution, still retains the possibility of happiness. Krapp and a woman are on the water in a small boat: She lay stretched out on the floorboards with her hands under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze, water 56

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nice and lively. I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how she came by it. Picking gooseberries she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes. [Pause.] I asked her to look at me and after a few moments—[pause]—after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause. Low.] Let me in. [Pause.] We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! [Pause.] I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side. (227) When in the present Krapp speaks he attempts repeatedly to disavow the resonance of this memory, but the disavowal—which becomes a central structure in Not I—is clearly ineffective signaling as it does a desire precisely to return again to that moment of lost happiness: ‘Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that’s all done with anyway. [Pause.] The eyes she had!’ (228). A few minutes later, however, he remembers past memories of happiness, including a Christmas with his dog: Be again in the dingle on a Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the red-berried. [Pause.] Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning, in the haze, with the bitch, stop and listen to the bells. [Pause.] And so on. Be again, be again. [Pause.] All that old misery. [Pause.] Once wasn’t enough for you. [Pause.] Lie down across her. (229) Krapp’s repeated ‘be again’ and the final ‘lie down across her’ indicate why he returns so often to this archive of memory: memory allows him to be again, to exist at a time where the future contained the possibility, if not of love—which his narrative indicates he rejects—but of success at work.4 The elderly Krapp at sixty-nine has neither success at work nor love (the two things, incidentally, Freud said were crucial for happiness). All Krapp has is the ghost archive of himself endlessly and forever rejecting the possibility of happiness. The final moment of the play, surely one of the most poignant in Beckett, sees the elderly Krapp listening to himself 57

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disavowing happiness in favor of the creative ‘fire’ we know will fail fully to ignite: Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited. [Pause.] Here I end this reel. Box—[Pause.]—three, spool—[Pause.]—five. [Pause.] Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No I wouldn’t want them back. [Krapp motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence.] (229–30) This final stage direction—‘The tape runs on in silence’—is crucial. The archive has become silent but its potential for activation, like the potential for all memory to return, remains. Krapp’s taped response to his past self—‘stupid bastard’—disavows a connection to the past (thus creating a curious disavowal of a disavowal!) and may in fact be the ‘last’ tape of the play’s title. But we surely must realize that the tape that still runs silently is ultimately the last tape in the sense that it contains what are the traces of the final moments of meaningful resonance in his life. The intervening years, ones the audience is asked to imagine, have only seen the decline from the younger Krapp’s perceived potential. This last tape therefore is one to which we can imagine Krapp will continue to return precisely because it marks the boundary between a life of meaning and one meaningful only in its despair. HAPPY DAYS The image (1)

Krapp’s Last Tape, like Endgame and especially Waiting for Godot, ends with a still, almost painterly tableau: ‘Krapp motionless staring before him’. Indeed, one may argue that Beckett will be searching for the ideal image throughout his career as a dramatist, the image that represents the pure distillation of emotion and captures what Heidegger would call a moment of Being. Happy Days, though featuring the most garrulous character in Beckett, is, in my mind, the first play dominated by the iconic Beckettian image: Winnie up to her waist, and then neck, in the earth. Part of what the audience of later 58

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Beckett is asked to do is interpret these images—people in urns (Play), a Mouth (Not I), four robed figures (Quad)—as visual metaphors. We may not be able logically to understand why Winnie is embedded— encrypted—in earth but we can, indeed will, attempt to interpret the image metaphorically, asking ourselves, like Winnie’s two touristy visitors, ‘What does it mean? What’s it meant to mean?’ (294). And yet part of the intellectual frisson produced by watching later Beckett arises when what appears to be an allegorical image—Winnie in earth as metaphor for the subject trapped by the debris and detritus of modern culture; Winnie as metaphor for the subject gradually entombed by the claims of history—is given a ‘realistic’ explanation in the play, or is simply acknowledged as part of the logic of the world the character inhabits. Winnie, for instance, acknowledges a time when she was ‘not yet caught’ (291) in earth, thereby making it hard for the audience simply to read her as metaphor: she really is trapped and thus we are justified in asking, with no pun intended, what on earth can it mean when allegory collides with a bizarre kind of realism? THE GERMAN LETTER: UNWORDING THE WORD

One way of approaching the increasing strangeness of Beckett’s later works is to keep in mind his stated goal to get past language itself. In 1937 Beckett wrote his important German Letter. Here he spoke of the need of the modern writer to find the means to move past conventional means of communication: It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write in an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it . . . . To bore one hole after another in it [language], until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. (172) Of course, Beckett still is representing human experience and even in a play like Quad (1982) which has no dialogue at all, there are ‘languages’ being used (sound and image). Beckett’s restless search for the means to put an end to language and to find what he terms the 59

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‘unfathomable abysses of silence’ (172) means that his work will put increasing interpretive demands on his audience. We must now become interpreters not only of spoken language but of the attempt—in the drama through the dominance of the visual image, the image inevitably and crucially of the immobilized or fragmented body—to transcend, perhaps even to put an end, to that language. The image—of Winnie in earth, of Winnie holding aloft a flaming parasol—is perhaps all we need, all we can expect here. Beckett’s work from Happy Days onward asks his audience to listen attentively to his characters’ narratives, but also to watch carefully for the emergence of the iconic image, the image, as we will see, that inevitably is one of the body in some compromised position. Marriage and ideology

Happy Days was written in English in 1961. As Hugh Kenner suggests, it is an eminently English play in its representation of the (perhaps) stereotypical trait of the stiff upper lip.5 Certainly Winnie’s almost manic drive to remain happy, to discover that this too will have been another ‘happy day’, seems a pitch-perfect parody of the English self-conscious will to persevere in the face of quite obvious hardship.6 And indeed, the situation of Winnie and Willie is yet another Beckettian moment of self-conscious extremity: trapped on an expanse of ‘scorched grass’ (275), Winnie and Willie seem (like Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell before) to be the last inhabitants of a planet upon which some calamity has been visited.7 Certainly Winnie is trapped not only physically but, like Hamm, who also is immobilized, she is condemned to play a central role in a drama beyond her control. The bell which wakes her at the beginning of the play (and periodically prevents her from nodding off) has been interpreted as a prompter’s bell urging Winnie to act. Winnie knows that her day— her performance of normality—will end in the perfectly timed singing of a song; when she recalls her two visitors she clearly evokes her position as actor in a play, with her visitors acting as the audience’s surrogates: ‘What’s she doing . . . What does it mean?. . .What’s it meant to mean?’ (294). She, like the majority of Beckettian protagonists, has a simultaneous need for and horror of being watched: in Winnie’s case, she even seems aware of the waxing and waning attention of the audience: ‘Strange feeling . . . strange feeling that someone is looking at me. I am clear, then dim, then gone, then dim again, then 60

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clear again, and so on, back and forth, in and out of someone’s eye. Strange? No, here all is strange’ (293). At one level thus Winnie’s physical predicament is a way of concretizing the notion of entrapment which occurs as roles, perhaps not of our choosing, are thrust upon us. And by now we are familiar with the Beckettian trope of actor/character as representative of a despairing existential predicament. Winnie becomes the clearest example in Beckett of what we can call the cruelty of the gaze, the way the audience—as in Endgame—is in a sense responsible for keeping the actress/character in her position. After all, if there were no audience, Winnie would not exist, as she well knows. Happy Days, however, strikes me as acknowledging not only a painful kind of metatheatrical self-consciousness, but as offering a commentary on other forms of entrapment, other forms of cultural and ideological pressure that restrain and shape (Beckett might use the word ‘deform’) the modern subject. Beckett is here exploring and perhaps critiquing the way humankind invests itself in cultural structures and supports—literature, marriage, conceptions of time and history, material products (Winnie’s ‘things’)—all of which inevitably fail. Happy Days can thus be read as examining the terminal point of Western culture, the moment of the collapse of all supporting beliefs and structures; in so doing the play exposes how fragile (and how facile) these sustaining beliefs really are. And yet, as we by now perhaps anticipate, Winnie persists, becomes in fact the embodiment of persistence. Despite or because of her near total immobility and her acute yet inevitably disavowed sense of despair, she, like the unnamable, must and will go on. This is to say that Beckett takes his characters (and his readers) to a place of extremes yet does not abandon them utterly: there is something that remains after the end. Our task is to learn to identify those remains that may serve, negatively perhaps, to sustain us in the ‘after space’ of being. Beckett’s work, as Alain Badiou reminds us, here becomes a lesson in ‘measure, exactitude, and courage’ (40).8 Things remain

It is clear from the outset that Happy Days functions as a parody (or is an uncanny representation) of marriage. Winnie plays the garrulous wife, Willie the taciturn, bored, and at the end of the play possibly homicidal husband. This is a marriage of long standing 61

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where each partner’s actions are dictated by habit and compulsion. At some level the play examines how identities, especially that of Winnie, are absorbed by, and subsumed under, the claims of a marriage which supersedes the individual. The trap Winnie is in could easily—perhaps too easily—be read as the trap of marriage. But Beckett’s examination of Winnie is far more complex. She, as her repeated recourse to lines of great poetry indicates, is one who seems to require the thoughts of others—she quotes from Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, and Yeats among others—to make clear her own experience.9 Winnie seems unable to articulate, perhaps even to understand, her present situation except via half-remembered lines of poetry. These lines, always in danger of becoming emptied of resonance through habitual use, stand, moreover, in stark contrast to the emptiness of the present moment. These quotations evoke a time when culture meant something, when a moral universe evoked in, say, Milton’s Paradise Lost, reflected a working interpretation of experience. We are here at the end of human culture, where concepts such as good and evil—or the conception of love evoked in Romeo and Juliet—seem patently absurd: Winnie’s use of these ‘wonderful lines’ only serves to highlight the harsh reality of this terminal point. If the great works of literature are shown to be bankrupt in this waste land, the material products of this culture—mirrors, lipstick, toothbrushes, parasols—similarly fail to sustain and protect. As Winnie says ‘things have their life . . . things have a life’ (302), and she is shown, especially in the first act, to put her faith, like all good consumers, in things, the life of things, which perhaps serve to distract her from her present reality. In the second act, however, when she is buried to her neck and thus denied access to her bag—‘There is of course the bag. There will always be the bag’ (286)—Winnie’s comfort rapidly and radically declines. And of course one of the iconic images of the play—Winnie holding up a burning parasol—is the perfect moment of betrayal by the material: the parasol fails to provide protection from the relentless sun in a way that reminds us that in the end, all things—all products—eventually fall into dissolution. The clear progression in the play, earth to the waist and then neck, leads Winnie to a simultaneous understanding that all things— material objects, prayers, words—‘Words fail, there are times when even they fail’ (284)—will not sustain her in the present moment. But Winnie, despite the occasional moment when ‘sorrow keeps breaking in’ (289), works assiduously to deny what she consciously knows. 62

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When all things fail, Winnie insists that there is a remainder, something left to sustain her: ‘There always remains something. Of everything’ (300). This denial begins to take on added desperation after we and Winnie consciously realize that her day, this ‘heavenly day’ (275), is an endlessly repeating one. Things may occur during the course of the day but because they are repetitions of what has already occurred (and will occur again) nothing in itself means much. After her parasol bursts into flame Winnie offers this diagnosis of her situation: Yes, something seems to have occurred, something has seemed to occur, and nothing has occurred, nothing at all . . . The sunshade will be there again tomorrow, beside me on this mound, to help me through the day. I take up this little glass, I shiver it on a stone— I throw it away—it will be in the bag again tomorrow, without a scratch, to help me through the day. No, one can do nothing. (292) In this space of repetition where time has ceased to function (we recall Hamm’s similar complaint, ‘Time was never and time is over’) nothing can be done to effect meaning. Time, what Winnie refers to as ‘the old style’, has ceased, and Winnie’s insistence that things remain begins to sound increasingly despairing. Because it is clear that we are only ever in the space of remains here in Happy Days: the remains, the graveyard, of marriage, of culture, of time itself. Being ‘after’

Happy Days therefore explores what it is like to exist in the space (we really cannot call it a time) of the ‘after’: after culture’s collapse, after humanity’s seeming disappearance. What, Beckett asks, persists in the space of after? In some ways the answer can only be: the human subject, as repository and archive of the vanished past; the human subject as witness to the vanishing; the human subject as witness and therefore creator of this space of after. Despite the eradication of culture, of time, the memory of culture and time persists in the human subject: ‘That’s right, Willie, look at me. Feast your old eyes, Willie. Does anything remain? Any remains? No?’ (306). But of course Winnie does—and will forever—remain: she becomes the remains of the culture just as she is remaindered by time itself. It becomes possible thus to read the immobilized body in Happy Days (and forward to Play and Not I) as the precise image of the 63

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body-as-archive: we move forward from Krapp’s Last Tape, where there is an externalizing of the archive of memory (in the material object of the tape recorder), to an interiorized yet stubbornly material, phenomenally embodied, archive. Derrida suggests that the archive is a site of commencement and commandment: archives authoritatively mark off the beginnings of things (civilizations, cultures) just as they work in a sense to command and direct an understanding of the future. Beckett’s body-as-archive functions not as a site of commencement but as a sign of the end, a repository of remains that are witnessed by few, if any, in a time that cannot really be understood as such. But it is essential to realize that the body, its parts, never does completely fade from these plays. Winnie is in a curious position at the end of Happy Days: buried to the neck, she perhaps will be grateful for the repeating structure of the play that will see her partially restored to mobility. A curious but still a corporeal position: she still remains and becomes the compromised embodiment, the crypt, of an extinct culture. And the iconic images given to us by this play— Winnie encrypted to her waist; Winnie encrypted to her neck—are precisely the ones that concretize and make identifiable the idea of what we now can call archival persistence.

PLAY Allegory?

Like Happy Days, Play (written in 1962–63) is a work dominated by a singular, decidedly odd image: ‘three identical grey urns . . . From each a head protrudes’ (355). In my reading of Happy Days, I suggested we see Winnie as a repository of the defunct remains of human culture: she functions as a kind of archive of the end (of things). In a sense something similar occurs in Play. The three characters, W1, W2, M, are the bodily repositories and archives of a very personal, rather tawdry, history. Moreover, and quite obviously, they have become a kind of waste, the remains or despairing by-product of this history, endlessly condemned to recycle the same narrative of desire and betrayal. One of the many puzzling aspects of the play (even its title presents problems) arises when we try to determine where and when we are here. We have taken an obvious step forward in terms of leaving 64

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any shreds of realism behind. Given the urns, which look ominously funereal—clearly the characters are dead—and the general condition of the speaker’s faces, ‘so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of urns’(355), we are tempted to think that we are witnessing a kind of afterlife, some vaguely defined posthumous—perhaps even posthuman—existence. It is hard, as is always the case in Beckett, to state anything definitively, but the presence and function of the interrogating light, the ‘unique inquisitor’ (367), which compels the characters to speak when it shines on them, does initially lend a sense that these characters are being punished in a kind of Hell. Such a reading of the play—and it is precisely Hugh Kenner’s, who sees Play as Beckett’s version of a ‘Protestant Hell’ (153)—strikes me as raising more problems than it solves. To see a Hell here, a Purgatory, or a Limbo, is in some sense to provide a theological, even ethical, dimension to this world which is at odds with the decidedly antitheological, certainly antireligious, sensibility and tenor of Beckett’s work. We are at best in a post-theological world in Beckett, at worst a world that has never been graced by the presence of a God, benevolent or otherwise. To see Play as a modern or postmodern version of Dante’s Inferno, for instance—and it is certainly a temptation—tends to stabilize the meaning of the drama in ways Beckett’s work largely resists. Beckett’s world is not one that easily accommodates the idea of externalized ethical forces. The idea that something ‘out there’—God, for instance—works to pass judgment on Beckett’s characters seems patently absurd when we begin to realize the extent to which Beckett’s major interest is in the way our own past actions are what, if anything, pass judgment on the present moment. The allegorical real

If then the play is not an exploration of Hell or Purgatory, and the inquisitor—who functions in this ‘hellish half-light’—is not some representation of infernal punishment, what then is it? Where then are we? In some ways these questions are, and perhaps should remain, unanswerable (but of course I will provide my own Freudian answer!). Our reading of the mise-en-scene of the play—its location, setting, lighting—like that of Happy Days, is made problematical precisely by the way Beckett tempts us to allegory—it is about Hell; it is a concrete manifestation of collective guilt; it is, as I will explore below, an 65

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examination of the Freudian compulsion to repeat—and then denies that impulse. These characters know they are, again like Winnie, really trapped here; they know there is a normal life elsewhere with people ‘coming and going on the earth’ (357). This place, in other words, is not simply an allegorical space. Perhaps we can qualify this and say that Beckett’s spaces are allegorical and real simultaneously.10 This understanding is a complex one and places particular and peculiar interpretive pressures on us, but it is a way of acknowledging how Beckett’s plays invite and resist interpretation. Part of the experience of Beckett—and part of its difficulty—is being forced simultaneously to maintain multiple and perhaps contradictory reading positions. Play perfectly encapsulates this particular interpretive difficulty, one that I believe forms an important aspect of coming to an understanding of the work. I tend to think that the end result of this complex and fluid reading position is a quite simple, yet for Beckett crucial, idea: no human behavior is reducible to a single interpretation. All art that explores the complexity of human behavior will in its turn demand that we keep all interpretive possibilities open. The mise-en-scene of Play may cause us difficulty and the rapidfire delivery of the lines may initially challenge the viewer but it is clear, or becomes so after the play repeats itself, that the actual story being told here is tawdry, even banal.11 There is thus an uncanny frisson produced here between the formal setting and the content in Play, a frisson that to my mind is productive of a bizarre kind of humor and again stretches our generic expectations: is this a comedy being played out in urns? How am I to interpret such a bizarre idea? In some sense, to answer my question briefly, Beckett is exploring, as he did in Krapp’s Last Tape, what we can call the persistence of desire: in this case, desire, the claims of which we all recognize, extends beyond life into this pathetically reduced posthumous existence. Despite the radical avant-garde strangeness of the work, Beckett always does give us something recognizable—in this case, desire— from which to orient our readings. Play presents three perspectives on the same events surrounding the relationship between a married man (M), his wife (W1), and lover (W2). The events which have precipitated the crisis which has come to the three (their urn burial) seem to have involved W1 confronting the lover and her husband demanding they end the affair (notice,

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however, that we are never explicitly told what actually happened to them or why they died): W1: I said to him, Give her up. I swore by all I held most sacred— [Spot from W1 to W2.] W2: One morning as I was sitting stitching by the open window she burst in and flew at me. Give him up, she screamed, he’s mine. Her photographs were kind to her. Seeing her now for the first time full length in the flesh I understood why he preferred me. [Spot from W2 to M.] M: We were not long together when she smelled the rat. Give up that whore, she said, or I’ll cut my throat—[Hiccup] pardon—so help me God. I knew she could have no proof. So I told her I did not know what she was talking about. (356) The three are evidently under the sway of the light and are being compelled to tell this story. Like Hamm and Winnie, aware of being watched, the three here are painfully aware that their story is being forced out of them by the inquisitor. As the spot hits them the character speaks only to go silent as soon as the light shifts to another victim. Moreover, they are seemingly unaware of the other members of the triangle. As W2 puts it so plaintively, indicating her sense of utter isolation: ‘Are you listening to me? Is anyone listening to me? Is anyone looking at me? Is anyone bothering about me at all?’ (362) Freud (1): Repetition compulsion

One of the poignant aspects of Play is the terrible sense of permanence the piece imparts. When the play ends and repeats itself—Beckett’s stage directions here are brutally concise: ‘Repeat play’ (366)—we know for certain that Beckett is again signaling a kind of endlessness to this suffering.12 But if we choose, as I do, to reject the idea that we are in Hell here, how can we understand this permanence? One way, I suggest, is to see Play as exploring the idea of the permanent claims of history—of the (oftentimes traumatized) narratives we tell—on the subject. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud offers a theory of repetition that sheds some light on the situation of these three sufferers.13 In this essay Freud is attempting in part to come to an understanding of why people seem compelled to repeat actions they

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know consciously will harm them. Why, he asks, do patients traumatized in the Great War continually dream about being back in that scene of horror? The unconscious drive that places the victim back in the moment of trauma troubles Freud because it disrupts his idea that the dream functions as a fulfillment of wishes. And because no one unconsciously or consciously wishes to return to the moment of horror, Freud theorizes that trauma has disrupted the logic of the dream function. There must, therefore, be another explanation for the compulsion to repeat, and Freud’s answer is complex and troubling. People repeat actions and behavior at an unconscious level because they are trying retroactively to reenact, interpret, and ultimately master the incident which precipitated the initial trauma (we are reminded here of Hamm’s main narrative). Trauma, as I mentioned in my discussion of Krapp’s Last Tape, is not a comprehensible event at the initial moment of its occurrence; it is not, as Cathy Caruth puts it ‘available to consciousness’ (4). Trauma becomes knowable when it ‘imposes itself, again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor’ (4). In other words the survivor of trauma works her way back to the initial scene of trauma in order to understand what could not be initially understood. Freud illustrates this desire to master the initial event through his famous Fort-da anecdote. Freud, being called on to baby-sit his grandson, observes the child’s odd reaction to his mother’s departure. The child throws a wooden reel (which has a piece of string attached to it) out of his crib and utters the sound ‘o-o-o-o’ which Freud interprets as the child’s attempt to say the German word fort (‘gone’); as the child reels in the toy he utters the word da which Freud interprets as German for ‘there’. For Freud the meaning of his grandson’s behavior is clear: it works to conquer his anxiety caused by his mother’s departure by symbolically—and playfully!—repeating her absence (fort) and subsequent return (da). Instead of being in a position of passivity with regard to events, the child becomes author and master of his own anxiety and its eventual dissipation: ‘At the outset he was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took an active part’ (285). Play can be read as a concrete visual metaphor of the compulsion to repeat. The light becomes an image of the unconscious as we witness what appears to be a collective repetition compulsion. Even if 68

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the three see themselves as isolated, the light—which now can be read metaphorically as a ‘projection’ both of the initial traumatic event and the desire to master that event—unites them in our eyes at least. Beckett’s version of the repetition compulsion seems to be suggesting that our actions—translated and transferred into endlessly repeated narrative (we may again be reminded of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner)—work not only to affect the individual but here operate on a community of sufferers, not the least of whom, incidentally, are the audience members, who absolutely require the repetition of the play in order actually to understand the narrative: we are also perhaps being indicted, as so often we are in Beckett, for our desire to witness this suffering. Our desires and the effects of our desires have consequences, eternal consequences. In my reading of Play the speakers are attempting to, being forced to, understand what has happened to them: the play becomes an allegory—at one level at least—of the unconscious drive to repeat in order to master events beyond one’s control. And curiously, if we maintain our Freudian reading of the play we begin to see, perhaps counterintuitively, that this interrogating light—if understood as an image of the unconscious—becomes a curiously melancholy yet compassionate force. Play, in other words, can be read as an extended scene of compassion and sympathy if we read the light as the means by which the sufferer is being asked to understand and move away from—to work through—her pain. However, what I call the terrible permanence of the play, the fact that we know (even if the speakers do not) that they are condemned endlessly to repeat this story, lends the drama a real sense of horror. Freud holds out the hope that our repetitive actions will one day be understood precisely as a symptom of a desire to master trauma and that we will be able at some point to move beyond the trauma: comprehension leads to the end of trauma. The endlessly repeating form of Play, however, makes it clear that these characters will forever be trapped in their posthumous narratives of desire, pain, and loss. There is no moving past history for these characters because the play they are trapped in will not allow them ever to know what precipitated their present condition: the play never does tell us— or them—what actually happened to them: did one kill the others and then commit suicide? How did they die? Play thus becomes the perfect representation of Caruth’s idea that trauma is not available to consciousness: formally—in its repetition—the play will never 69

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and endlesslessly will never reveal the reason behind their present trauma. M refers to his life before here as ‘just play’ and asks when this life, this endless existence, will ‘have been . . . just play?’ (361). If his life before his death was just play, if he sees (wrongly) that his life before had no real consequence, his life here ironically is always already play because it profoundly does not have any consequence: nothing follows from a story that endlessly repeats. In Being and Time Martin Heidegger argues that a human life only becomes comprehensible because its end ‘limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein [individual being]’ (277). Like a grammatical sentence or a narrative, a life only asssumes an understandable shape when it is over: thus is Heidegger able to suggest, provocatively, that ‘Death is a way to be’ (289). M’s last line before the repetition—‘Am I as much as . . . being seen?’ (366)—signals his awareness that the light, which stands as much as a metaphor for the audience’s desire to witness as for an externalizing of the unconscious desire to repeat actions, essentially confers an endless existence upon him. His existence forever will be tied to the light/audience which compels him to narrate a story of loss which never will achieve an end. The repetition of the play thus becomes both a sign of the desire to understand— to repeat is to understand—and a symptom of the inability ever to do so.

NOT I The image as essence

In Not I (1972) Beckett confronts us with his most startling image: a disembodied mouth situated eight feet up from stage level. Standing at stage left is a shrouded figure—the Auditor—who four times in the play offers what Beckett calls a gesture of ‘helpless compassion’ (405). Beckett is said to have been inspired to create this play in part after catching sight of a woman in the streets of Morocco ‘crouched in an attitude of intense waiting’ (622).14 Dressed in a djellaba, this figure’s attitude of anxious yearning appealed to Beckett at some level (she was, it turned out, waiting for her child to return from school). And certainly this image makes sense of the presence of the Auditor who, perhaps acting as the audience’s surrogate, helplessly offers gestures of compassion each time Mouth disavows her connection to her 70

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story, each time she refuses, as Beckett’s stage directions put it, ‘to relinquish third person’ (405).15 But the central iconic image in Not I is the disembodied Mouth, Beckett’s most extreme image of bodily reduction. As Mouth spews her narrative, what at first seems inexplicable—a mouth, impossibly situated—becomes clear. Mouth is the subject reduced to its essential function: speaking. Mouth’s refusal to confront the fact that her narrative is about her—hence the title, Not I—alerts us to the play’s (absent) visual pun: the subject is not an I and thus not a seeing, perceiving eye. The cliché may have it that the eyes are the windows to the soul, but here Mouth is the sign of the subject, the sign of her identity. What Not I explores is the intimate connection between Mouth’s traumatic story—which is about how she one day began to speak after years of silence—and the image of the traumatized, fragmented body. The reduced body

I suggested in my Introduction that Beckett’s work explores the theme of the interconnectedness of subjectivity and body, the idea that our identities are contained ‘in’ the material of our bodies. Beckett may reduce the body—may immobilize it in Happy Days and Play—but traces of the body remain. As I explained in my reading of Happy Days, the traces of the body contain the traces of a vanished culture; in Play the traces of the body contain (just as the body itself is contained in the urn) the narrative of desire and loss. All these plays offer a central idea: the body must be present for identity to be maintained. This is not quite a version of Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’. Beckett’s version of Descartes’ cogito would run: ‘I have a body— or part of my body—therefore I am’. Not I is in some sense a critique of Descartes because there is explicitly no mind present here: there is only a bodily fragment. We could perhaps argue that in Happy Days and Play the mind—however reduced to uttering fragments of lost cultural or personal narratives—is present in some form. We cannot really do so in Not I: we have only a mouth impossibly uttering a traumatized narrative.16 Not I therefore is one of Beckett’s most disturbing plays. The audience, made anxious by the very image of Mouth, finds itself assaulted—and I think this is the precise word—by a narrative it cannot ever fully expect to comprehend, perhaps ultimately does not 71

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even wish to comprehend. The actress portraying Mouth is instructed to speak at an extremely rapid pace, and her story, formally echoing the fractured image of her body, is fragmented and shattered into various narrative shards. In a response to an actor who worried about the audience’s comfort, Beckett said: ‘ “I am not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I hope the piece would work on the necessary emotions of the audience rather than appealing to their intellect” ’ (625).17 What the audience primarily feels—and I speak from personal experience here—is anxiety. And this seems to me an appropriate response given that Mouth’s state is one of continual—if disavowed— anxiety as well. After the initial portion of Mouth’s narrative, detailing her premature birth and desertion by parents, her loveless life (‘so no love . . . spared that . . . no love of any kind . . . at any subsequent stage’ [406]), she speaks about one April morning in a field ‘when suddenly . . . gradually . . . all went out . . . and she found herself in the—. . . what?. . . who?. . . no! . . . she!. . . [Pause and movement 1.] . . . found herself in the dark’ (406). Notice how this initial anxious refusal to admit to herself that she is speaking of personal experience—for surely the questions she asks here, what? who?, are responses to herself—is initiated by a crucial crisis in her life: something has occurred to her—an episode of illness? an assault? a psychotic break?—that renders her ‘if not exactly . . . insentient’ then ‘dulled’ (406).18 Four times during the course of the play Mouth denies any personal connection to this trauma. Her vehement disavowal, of course, is a clear symptom of the assault and indicates that she is indeed speaking about herself. Moreover, the assault has produced Mouth’s present condition: her inability to stop speaking—we call this logorrhea—stems directly from that event in April: When suddenly she realized . . . words were— . . . what?. . . who? . . . no! . . . she! . . . [Pause and movement 2.] . . . realized . . . words were coming . . . imagine!. . . words were coming . . . a voice she did not recognize . . . at first . . . so long since it had sounded . . . then finally had to admit . . . could be none other . . . than her own . . . and now this stream . . . not catching the half of it . . . not the quarter . . . no idea . . . what she was saying! . . . till she began trying . . . to delude herself . . . it was not hers at all . . . not her voice at all . . . (408–09) 72

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What becomes clear from Mouth’s narrative is that her extreme anxiety stems more from the effects of the event in April than the actual event itself. For seventy years Mouth has been largely silent, save for an occasional outburst ‘once or twice a year . . . always winter for some strange reason’ (408). The assault has propelled her into speech, into language, and this produces in its turn her systematic denial of connection to her own narrative. The question of course becomes: why would Mouth wish to deny a connection to her own story? Why is this compulsion to speak, this uncanny and belated entry into language, cause of such anxiety? Lacan: The Real

I will try to explain Mouth’s condition of anxiety via the work of one of Freud’s great disciples, Jacques Lacan, whose theories of the Symbolic and the Real almost perfectly diagnose Mouth. According to Lacan, the human subject’s identity is mediated by her relation to three ‘registers’, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The Imaginary designates a stage in the development of the human subject where she is unable to perceive herself as an entity in her own right. She identifies herself with objects or people outside of herself; her identity is mirrored back to her via external sources. Her identity is thus, according to Lacan, largely an imaginary one because it resides outside her. The Symbolic, on the other hand, is Lacan’s term for the world of language, of discourse, that precedes and exceeds the subject. We are all born into a world that has language built into it: human discourse, ideology, systems of thought like religion, politics, or philosophy. The Symbolic realm is what allows us to enter into human culture. By adapting ourselves to the various language systems that surround and bind us, we realize our relation to others. But the Symbolic register is one that in some crucial ways denies the subject any real autonomy: discourse, language itself, is not really at our disposal to do with what we may wish. Languages have rules and conventions: coming before we were born and being there long after we are gone, language is a kind of autonomous system on its own and we are, in a sense, only along for the ride. Because we are born into language, given it rather than creating it, it is true to say that language thinks us. (This idea, one of the cornerstones of posthumanist thinking, is central to my reading of The Unnamable.) 73

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Underpinning and articulating each of these registers is what Lacan calls the Real. The Real is, as Lacan acknowledges, almost impossible to describe; as Fredric Jameson puts it, the Real is that ‘which resists symbolization absolutely’ (35).19 The Real, in other words, cannot be described in language, in symbolic terms. The Real is that which lies behind all human experience, is, according to Slavoj Zizek, the cause of all experience, and occasionally erupts into our lives, making its presence directly felt. Because we cannot understand it—we cannot even conceive of it—and because it has such an enormous effect on us, the Real is always a cause of great anxiety. And because we cannot describe the Real directly—like the face of God we cannot look at it—we must resort to metaphors to approximate it. Lacan and Freud, as Zizek suggests, use the term trauma to describe the Real. The Real, like trauma, cannot be known, is not, to recall Cathy Caruth’s words, ‘available to consciousness’. The Real, like trauma, articulates the subject’s understanding of itself: recall how Play’s M, W1, and W2 in a sense ‘become’ only their story, how Winnie ‘becomes’ the traces of her lost culture. Zizek goes a step further and suggests that the Real is the cause of the Symbolic in the sense that our language is always an attempt to get back to, to relive, the trauma of the Real which has made us who we are: ‘the Real is the absent Cause of the Symbolic’ (The Metastases of Enjoyment: 30). Perhaps one way of grasping the Real is to think of how at times trauma erupts into our lives in a way that cannot immediately be processed intellectually: a loved one suddenly dies; planes fly into buildings; an entire country is destroyed by a Tsunami. The Real is trauma always waiting to enter our lives; as it does it makes us realize—too late—precisely how fragile our comfort really is. Zizek’s idea that the Real is what articulates our lives is his way of foregrounding that we all at some level know that the Real is always there, always threatening to emerge, but that we live as if the Real is never going to make claims on us. In Lacanian terms Not I traces Mouth’s traumatic fall into the Symbolic order. The Real—as that unnamed and unnamable event in the field in April—precipitates her entry into the Symbolic, into language itself. This entry into the Symbolic is distressing for a number of reasons. Language seems to precipitate a connection to human culture that was never there. Having been deserted as a ‘speechless infant’ (406), Mouth has remained largely silent all her life, has because standing outside discourse and culture, been largely inconceivable 74

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and thus able to resist being interpellated into culture. One of the uncanny effects of this entry into speech is Mouth’s sense that she now needs to tell others about her life: the trauma is one of a forced Symbolic connection to others, a connection, moreover, which compels her to confront the lonely horror that has been her life, from her premature birth to her belated entry into language itself: then thinking . . . oh long after . . . sudden flash . . . perhaps something she had to . . . had to . . . tell . . . could that be it? . . . something she had to . . . tell . . . tiny little thing . . . before its time . . . godforsaken hole . . . no love . . . spared that . . . speechless all her days . . . practically speechless . . . how she survived! . . . now this . . . something she had to tell . . . could that be it? . . . something that would tell . . . how it was . . . how she—. . . what?. . . had been? . . . yes . . . something that would tell how it had been . . . how she had lived . . . lived on and on . . . (411) In terms we are now familiar with, this belated entry into language and the sense of a need to communicate this narrative—which she does even as she distances herself from it here—creates Mouth as a kind of archive: she becomes her own archive of experience. But, and this is of course the crux and central matter of the play, she disavows her connection to this archive. In essence Mouth enacts a refusal of history—‘what? . . . who? no . . . she!’—while embodying the effects of that history. The body—more precisely, the Mouth, ‘just the mouth’ (411)—enacts what it wishes to disavow. Freud once remarked, apropos the human subject’s inability not to reveal its secrets, ‘If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore’ (78)20: the truth, in other words, always finds a means to escape and often the body symptomatically finds ways of communicating its distress. Beckett’s image of Mouth operates in this sense metonymically (and in relation to Freud’s remark, ironically!) as a sign for the body proper, revealing itself in ways the conscious mind would not wish and would, as here, assiduously disavow. Mouth becomes the archival trace of her encounter with the Real. The Real, as the unnamable event, cannot be known as such but can only be partially glimpsed through its traumatic after-effects. Mouth’s narrative, fragmented, nonlinear, repetitive, keeps circling around the event of that April morning never naming it but only showing us its 75

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traumatic effects.21 More precisely her body—fragmented as it is—becomes the image of the Real insofar as the Real can be approximated in the Symbolic. The stunning achievement of Not I is the way Beckett is able to communicate an experience by never directly expressing it: the event takes shape in our minds in an absence, as a kind of absence. Beckett, in other words, has achieved his goal of expressing Nothing. This Nothingness, however, produces effects in the world in the same way Lacan argues the presence of the Real is always felt even if not intellectually grasped.

CONCLUSION The drama of the real

Beckett, we recall, writes that language, the Symbolic, is something that needs to be done away with in order for the truth of things behind it to be revealed. I quote again from his German Letter: As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. (172) Beckett’s words are strikingly Lacanian and do suggest that he sees his purpose as a writer to use the Symbolic realm—language—in order to reclaim something before or beyond language. I think it profitable to interpret Beckett’s desire here as being that of reclaiming a connection to the Real. Certainly Beckett did suggest that he was attempting to find ‘a form to accommodate the mess’ of human existence.22 Perhaps we can read his plays as precisely this attempt to pass through language to find the means to accommodate the Real. Like Mouth, who feels the burden of the Symbolic, Beckett feels the need to transcend—or obliterate—the Symbolic in its verbal form to achieve an approximation of the Real. It strikes me that of the drama Not I achieves what is closest to an approximation of an experience outside of language. The image of Mouth—like the image of Winnie up to her neck in earth; like M, W1, and W2 in urns—is an image of an effect of an event, certainly traumatic, which cannot, like the Real ever be named as such. I suggested that Beckett’s works, 76

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especially from Happy Days onward, become less concerned with the symbolic-as-language than with the nonintellectualized assault mediated by the uncanniest of images. The image, while still obviously working within the Symbolic realm—images are after all a kind of language—is Beckett’s attempt to transcend the limitations imposed by a received language. The image, showing through the torn veil of language, confronts the audience with a glimpse of the Real.

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Part II PROSE

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CHAPTER 4

MURPHY AND WATT

The Ego is not master in its own house. —Freud, ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis’ INTERPRETATION OF THE POSTHUMAN

In the popular and critical imaginaries, Beckett is most known for his drama, especially Waiting for Godot. But Beckett himself considered his novels, especially the so-called first trilogy (Molloy [1951], Malone Dies [1951], The Unnamable [1953]), to be his major contribution to literature. In this second half of Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed I thus turn to consider his novels and short prose. I am concerned here to track the trajectory of Beckett’s relentless experimentation with narrative and novelistic form. For surely the novels, beginning with Murphy (1938) and Watt (written 1941–45; published 1953) and ending with the so-called second trilogy (Company [1980], Ill Seen Ill Said [1981], Worstward Ho [1983]), are, at one level, all about interrogating, if not deconstructing, narrative form. The novels and short prose work toward asking what is essentially an economic question: just what is it that we, as readers, invest, or are prepared to invest, in the experience of reading the novels? Beckett begins exploring questions of economy and form in the novels written in English before his turn to French in the mid-1940s, Murphy and Watt. To begin it is important to recognize that these novels, especially Murphy, come early in Beckett’s career and as such they present what I call an uncanny novelistic shape: they seem at once to be recognizably ‘novelistic’ and to dismantle our preconceptions of what a novel should be doing. These early novels, especially Murphy, offer recognizable characters occupying recognizable spaces 81

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and times (the narrator indicates, for instance, that Murphy takes place in London and Dublin in 1936). There are plots in place in both novels (again, more so in Murphy), plots, moreover, with clearly developed trajectories: both novels, for instance, are about desire, Murphy (the character) being the object of desire and pursuit of a number of characters, Watt (the character) demonstrating a clear interpretive desire to understand his world. But Beckett is doing more than merely telling stories here. The novels present extreme interpretive challenges to the reader; both novels’ ‘plots’ and narrative ‘trajectories’ are, at one level, mere pretexts for larger philosophical concerns; both novels, more than telling stories, tell the story of the novels’ attempts to tell stories. This is perhaps all to say that Murphy and Watt are novels imbued with a radical sense of self-consciousness and self-awareness which translates and transfers to the reader’s own self-awareness. And as soon as this transfer is made, as soon as the reader becomes aware of herself as reader, a fully uncanny moment comes into being. In Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Derrida writes: ‘Let us say for the moment that the uncanny exceeds and not that it resists analysis’ (4). The following chapters in varying degrees are all attempts to come to terms with the experience of reading Beckett’s prose. I am suggesting at the outset that the experience, in a variety of ways, will always be an uncanny one. If, as Freud suggests, the experience of the uncanny is the experience of anxiety that emerges when encountering something that appears simultaneously to be familiar and unfamiliar, then the following chapters, more precisely, are attempts to come to interpretive grips with the anxiety of reading Beckett’s strange narratives. And finally, if we follow Derrida, a complicated and in its turn uncanny realization emerges: perhaps Beckett’s texts—as examples of the uncanny—will always already exceed analysis, exceed interpretation itself. In some ways this notion of the resistant text always must fold back onto the characters within these strange narratives: Murphy, who is in the grip of determining forces of desire preceding and exceeding him; Watt, who is forced to submit to the demands of serving and (impossibly) witnessing his employer, Knott; the unnamable, who is compelled, obliged, to use his word, to speak the language of others. Beckett’s texts problematize interpretation because we encounter characters who themselves lack all agency, who are thus examples of the posthuman. Beckett’s characters will strike us always 82

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as uncanny—familiar and unfamiliar—because there is something essentially missing at their center: and, as we will see, what is missing is precisely that, a center. Theories of the posthuman, originating in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, posit the subject as constructed by culture, language, drives, and ideology, forces which define the subject, fix him in place as a figure without a determining consciousness or interiority. My argument will be that Murphy, or the unnamable, stand as examples of the posthuman, in one sense of the term: preceded and exceeded by forces defining them as subjects. But the figure of the posthuman is also, as theorists as diverse as Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, or Paul Virilio, argue, always a figure of the boundary or limit: she exists just at the threshold of the recognizable, at the limit of what we expect to be the human. Again, Derrida’s idea of the uncanny as exceeding interpretation is useful here as it dovetails into our interpretive difficulties: How are we to interpret the speakers and figures in Texts for Nothing or the second trilogy, speakers who claim both to be dead ‘I’ve given myself up for dead’ (Texts for Nothing 1: 297) and alive ‘Nothing like breathing your last to put new life in you’ (Texts for Nothing 1: 298); figures who are corporeal and noncorporeal simultaneously: ‘Say a body. Where none’ (Worstward Ho: 471). It is here that the figure of the posthuman specter comes into crucial play. If Beckett has been searching for the means to put an end to language, to find the ‘literature of the unword’, perhaps the figure of the ghost—alive and dead; a body and not a body—is the inevitable objective correlative of a language, and a subjectivity, always on the verge of fading out of existence. Existing in ‘the dungeons of this moribund’ (Texts for Nothing 12: 336), the posthuman subject can only claim a spectral agency or interiority. I thus return to questions posed in my Introduction: how are we to read texts which exceed interpretation? How are we to read and make sense of texts which seem to resist, perhaps exceed, the very idea of sense itself ? The narrator of Watt (a man troublingly named ‘Sam’!), after describing Watt’s frustrating attempt to make sense of an experience, asks a question that clearly anticipates the reader’s own experience of reading Beckett: ‘What was this pursuit of meaning, in this indifference to meaning? And to what did it tend? These are delicate questions’ (227). In this moment, Beckett inscribes reading, makes a theme of reading in advance of the actual reader who, in a clearly uncanny way, is made to be a double for Watt (or is it that 83

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Watt is a double for the reader?) in her reading of a text fully resistant—and fully aware that it is resistant—to interpretation. MURPHY Form/content: Free will and determinism

Although not the first novel to be written by Beckett, Murphy was the first, in 1938, to be published.1 Written in 1935–36 while Beckett was living in London, Murphy represents what is, for Beckett, his most ‘traditional’ novel. That is to say, the novel presents actions taking place in recognizable locations (London, Dublin), in a locatable time (1936), to recognizable subjects. And while the narrator will make clear that these characters really are only characters—he refers to them as ‘puppets’ (76) in a gesture foregrounding their artifice and thus the artifice of the entire novel—we do recognize their humanity in ways it becomes increasingly difficult to do as the later novels progress. Having said this, however, one of the trajectories of the novel is to place the very question of the ‘humanity’, the ‘recognizability’ of ‘characters’ under scrutiny in a way that compels us to question the very idea of what constitutes the human subject. Murphy begins the process of interrogating the subject by placing him a novelistic context that only barely sustains him as a character; that is to say, these characters all inhabit a universe always threatening to reveal itself fully as fictional and thus to reveal in turn the very fictionality of the subject himself. In my reading of the novel the idea of the fictionality of the universe, the idea that all characters are only ever ‘puppets’ (despite, as we shall see, the narrator’s claim that Murphy himself is the exception to this rule), is intimately conjoined to the major philosophical argument of the novel: that the universe is fully determined, that the human is subject to the vagaries of desire, drives, and even fate, to the point that the very idea of agency—humans ethically responsible for their own actions—is placed radically under erasure (from this perspective, Murphy can be read as a critique of existentialist philosophy). Murphy here brilliantly links up aspects of form (narrative self-awareness) and philosophical content (determinism; a critique of human agency) by demonstrating how Murphy—and I will focus largely on his trajectory—is subject both to the whims of the author and of forces internal to the plot of the novel, forces preceding, exceeding, and ultimately determining him. 84

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What, crucially, remains uncanny about this relation between form and content is that the ‘humanity’ of the characters, despite—perhaps because of—the narrator’s at times intrusive self-consciousness, never is fully reduced: that is, the characters do not ever fully become complete artifice just as they never quite achieve the status of a ‘real’, fully ‘rounded’, subject. Shimmering between the real and artifice, Beckett’s characters work to pose complicated questions to their readers: just why are we invested in the idea of a stable subject or character? A stable world? What, precisely, is at stake in the novel’s delicate, uncanny, presentation of its world? Self-consciousness; the body as liability

It is clear from the first paragraph of Murphy that we are encountering a novel which is doing more than simply telling a story. Given that the novel was published in 1938, toward the end of the period of literary High Modernism (1918–39)—the period that sees Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), Kafka’s Das Schloss (1926)—it is not surprising that Beckett’s novel is self-conscious, self-referential, and philosophically challenging. And given Beckett’s massive debt of influence to Joyce—Beckett published ‘Dante . . . Bruno.Vico . . Joyce’, an essay in praise of Joyce’s work in 1929—it is not surprising to see an exuberant and playful use of language (an exuberance soon to be toned down) in this early work. But there is something, a hardness to the writing, a fondness for the concrete philosophical image, that marks even this early work as distinctly Beckettian. Perhaps too it is Murphy’s characteristically uncanny mixture of humor and despair that announces Beckett’s arrival. Consider the famous opening paragraph: The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of mediumsized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings. (3) 85

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As we will see, Beckett tends to front-load the opening paragraphs of his novels; that is to say, his first paragraphs tend, like the opening movement of a symphony, to announce major themes, to sound major philosophical concerns (we see this especially in the opening paragraphs of the first trilogy). In the first two sentences we hear the major themes of determinism: the sun shines because it has no ‘alternative’ but to shine (it is curious to apply the word ‘alternative’ to the sun; it humanizes it and thus suggests that determinism is a philosophical concern to all aspects of the universe, not only the human). Murphy’s ‘choice’ to sit out of the sun is revealed to be simply an illusion of choice, an illusion of freedom. The allusion to Ecclesiastes’s ‘There is nothing new under the sun’ makes it clear that this determined state of things is simply a continuation of what has always been; Murphy’s life—and eventual death—is a fulfillment of a course of action not of his doing or choice. The third sentence, with its resonant image of the cage (a medium-sized cage, at that) again works to emphasize the essential captivity of the human subject, of all human subjects. And Murphy will come to accept this determined view of things—he surrenders his agency to a bizarre astrological reading which ultimately leads to his death—suggesting, perhaps, a desire for the nullification of agency and, more troublingly, a desire for his own death. (In the final section of my analysis, I wish to suggest that Murphy can be read as a kind of commentary on Freud’s notion of the death drive, as outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.) My questions here will become: to what extent are psychological drives related to the philosophical notion of determinism? Is there a connection being suggested here—perhaps also being parodied—between instinct and design? Murphy in the dark

Murphy, to say the least, is an odd character. When we first meet him he has tied himself, using seven scarves, to a rocking chair. Here he sits, naked, rocking himself into what appears to be a meditative state. He wishes to escape the claims of the body, the desires of the corporeal, and enter into a zone of pure mind: He sat in his chair in this way because it gave him pleasure! First it gave his body pleasure, it appeased his body. Then it set him free in his mind. For it was not until his body was appeased that he 86

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could come alive in his mind, as described in section six. And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word. (4) We hear an early sounding of the Beckettian theme of the body-asliability.2 Murphy’s desire is quite literally to live the life of the mind: to do so means the body must be restrained. The narrator, in a characteristic gesture of narrative self-awareness, refers the reader to section (chapter) six of the novel where we find what is essentially an essay elaborating on the complexities of Murphy’s mind-body dualism: Thus Murphy felt himself split in two, a body and a mind. They had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight and did not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected nor how the two experiences came to overlap. (68) It becomes clear that Murphy prefers to be in his ‘bodytight’ mind and that to be in this state requires the body’s continual restraint (if he were an ascetic, we could say that Murphy mortifies his body). Murphy’s mind, the narrator suggests, pictures itself as having three zones (corresponding perhaps to Freud’s notion of the perceptual, conscious, and unconscious aspects of the mind): the light, half-light, and dark.3 In the light and the half-light Murphy is ‘sovereign and free’ (70) to contemplate himself. It is the dark zone, however, that asserts the most attraction. Here in the dark there is neither elements nor states, nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming, without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change. Here there was nothing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion. Here he was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom . . . Thus as his body set him free more and more in his mind, he took to spending less and less time in the light, spitting at the breakers of the world; and less in the half light, where the choice of bliss introduced an element of effort; and more and more and more in the dark, in the will-lessness, a mote in its absolute freedom. (70) The dark, with its removal of agency and the need for agency, sounds a great deal like being dead. Perhaps we can say that Murphy’s 87

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meditative chair-rocking allows him, attracted as he is to the state where agency and the burdens of freedom are removed, to rehearse, if only momentarily, the state of death. These are moments of selfnullification, of ‘will-lessness’, which remove Murphy, temporarily, from the claims of the world, claims, as we will see, which threaten to tie him utterly to desires of a distinctly bodily nature.4 Murphy’s desire to be in the dark in fact resonates back to an early exchange in the novel between Murphy and his teacher Neary. Neary says “Murphy, all life is figure and ground” and Murphy replies “But a wandering to find home” (4–5). The dark, in my reading, is a rehearsal for the nostalgic return to the ultimate dark, the ‘home’ that is death. Murphy’s acquiescence to will-lessness is a giving in to a drive toward death. The determined character

But we should initially attend to another resonance in this idea of the dark which unravels in chapter six. Murphy’s acquiescence to the dark does indeed sound a great deal like giving way to death, but it also sounds very much like a description of a character within a novel. When the narrator says, ‘Here there was nothing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion. Here he was not free but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom’, one is reminded of the narrator’s reference to his characters as ‘puppets’, Murphy now becoming the ultimate puppet (though, paradoxically, seemingly willfully!). What I mean to foreground here is the way the self-consciousness of the novel harmonizes with the philosophical, quasi-mystical themes of the novel: what is more determined than a character in a novel? And this novel places its main character—emplots him, we shall say—in a complex and finely wrought narrative web. Murphy plays out essentially as a quest novel with the eponymous hero as the desired goal of a series of journeys. Once a student at Neary’s Academy in Dublin, Murphy has fled to London to escape the affections of Miss Counihan; in London, Murphy has entered into a relationship with Celia, a prostitute who has, pragmatically, demanded he find a job (to work is anathema to Murphy as it distracts him from fleeing the material world).5 Back in Dublin, Neary, desperately in love with Miss Counihan (who still loves Murphy), devises a plan to track down Murphy (he sends Cooper to find him) to convince Miss Counihan that he, Murphy, no longer loves her. If convinced that Murphy has moved on, Neary hopes, Miss Counihan will agree to a relationship 88

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with him. Murphy meanwhile finds employment as an orderly in a lunatic asylum, the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. His residence being a garret with no heat, Murphy demands a brazier be brought into the room: the brazier is heated via a gas line precariously linked to a vent in the floor below. Murphy, fully aware that this heating system is unsafe, is eventually killed in a fire. It is clear from this brief summary and from my discussion of Murphy’s addiction to the dark, that Murphy is a novel about desire. It is about sexual desire (Neary’s, Miss Counihan’s); the desire for material stability (Celia’s demand that Murphy find employment); the desire to step past both sexual and material desire (we see this clearly in Murphy’s addiction to the dark). More precisely, perhaps, we should characterize the novel as an ironic examination of the results of misplaced or displaced desire; for surely Murphy, as a subject, is not the appropriate site for the expression of conventional desires, of any form of conventionality in fact. The desires of Miss Counihan and Celia, in psychoanalytical terms, cannot find their cathexes in Murphy: that is, they cannot achieve and come to fruition in their object (Murphy) because he does not have the capacity to realize, to house, their desires. Indeed the trajectory of Murphy, looked at with cynical logic, suggests that the ultimate result of the various desires failing to cathect in Murphy is Murphy’s own death: it is only because he is in London, having fled from Miss Counihan, that he meets Celia who forces him to seek employment in a place which will eventually kill him. Which, of course, is precisely, and ironically, what Murphy himself seems—perhaps unconsciously—to desire in the first place! What is clear about Beckett’s careful orchestration of desires in the novel is that there is an inevitability to the novel’s outcome—Murphy’s death—an almost parodic alignment of the forces of Eros leading to Thanatos.6 But, as I have been suggesting, we need to keep in mind that Murphy’s death is effected as much by the economy of the narrative discourse itself as by the thematic mechanisms, of sexual (or other) desire: Murphy’s end is determined—plotted in all senses of the term—as much by the self-conscious narrative voice as by the various occurrences in the novel. In order to explore this complex relationship between narrative discourse—call this the novel’s form— and the thematic of displaced desire—call this the novel’s content— I wish to examine in more detail the relation between the theme of determinism and the formal self-conscious aspects of Murphy. 89

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The self-aware novel

Because it is very clear that we are reading a novel which makes great efforts to remind us of its construction, its status, as a deliberately crafted object. We have seen already how, for instance in chapter one, the narrative voice refers us to section six (in fact the narrator twice refers us, in identical language, to section six); at the beginning of chapter two the narrative lists the physical attributes of Celia, describing her head (‘small and round’ [9]), and giving her weight (123lb) and height (5’4’’); here he uses the phrase ‘Hips, etc’ (9) and in the first sentence of the chapter writes ‘She [Celia] stormed away from the callbox, accompanied delightedly by her hips, etc’ (9): in this repetition we are made to look back on what has already been written and are reminded precisely of the fabricated nature of the text, its tissues of self-reference. Indeed the repetition of phrases—‘as described in section six’ being an early example—is a key element of the novel’s construction and serves again to foreground the written quality of the text. And repetition abounds: Murphy’s eyes, twice described as ‘cold and unwavering as a gull’s (3; 27); Wylie (a friend of Neary’s) has a key phrase, twice repeated: ‘For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse’ (38; 120); twice, Murphy’s personality is described, rather ominously, as having a ‘surgical quality’ (40; 51). These repetitions (and there are more) serve as blunt reminders of the text’s written quality just as references to the actual reader (‘gentle skimmer’ [53]), to specific passages (‘The above passage is carefully calculated to deprave the cultivated reader’ [73]), to the text’s very typography (141) work to compel the reader into a position of a kind of objective distance from the text. Beckett produces here a kind of readerly alienation-effect which works to force the reader to see the character as moving within a deliberately plotted—the narrator’s word is ‘calculated’—world. One of the effects of these repeated self-references, these metanarrative intrusions—beyond simply reminding us that we are reading—is to compel us to see the character as just that, merely a character.7

Prophecy and agency

And, of course, as I have already mentioned, the central statement of ‘calculation’ in the novel occurs in chapter seven when the narrator, 90

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apropos of one of his characters’ misery, says ‘All the puppets in this book whinge sooner or later, except Murphy, who is not a puppet’ (76). I take the narrator’s assertion of Murphy’s freedom—or at least his status as nonpuppet, which may not be the same thing as freedom—as being hugely, densely, ironic. First, not only is Murphy’s end (death) the result of (if not determined by) the desires of others (and what is the precise difference, Beckett seems to be asking, between cause and determinism?); Murphy is also strikingly attracted to the idea of prophecy, of astrological prophecy precisely, which suggests a willingness to abdicate agency in order to accommodate himself to the logic of predestiny. Second, Murphy’s addiction to the dark is a manifestation of the psychological drive toward death which in its turn suggests that Murphy is caught in the grips of forces preceding and exceeding him. The narrator’s continual intrusion in the narrative thus ultimately serves as a kind of narrative objective correlative to the idea of the determined subject: prophecy, instinct, and fictionality all combine to suggest that Murphy, indeed, is the biggest puppet of them all. But, in his relation to prophecy, Murphy does seem to assert a kind of agency. The astrological chart produced by Ramaswami Krishnaswami Narayanaswami Suk (22–4), works, like all astrological predictions, to allow the reader, in this case the all-too-ready Murphy, to see what he wishes to see. In his adherence to Suk’s chart, thus, Murphy is in the position of allowing his agency to be determined: this curious position, at once forceful, at once acquiescent, does sound a major theme in Beckett’s work: there are forces—linguistic, cultural, instinctual, (perhaps) astrological—preceding and exceeding us, forces defining us; but simultaneous with this is a sense that the subject asserts a kind of control (this complex is best, and most famously, put in the final line of The Unnamable: ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ [407]). Murphy here becomes a site of the analysis— and I would suggest a fairly serious analysis, despite the ostensible play of the novel—of agency, of self, of responsibility. Because Murphy’s rather blind acceptance of Suk’s analysis of his personality, and the advice given (some of which is patently absurd), does speak to a desire for the narrative of one’s life to have been decided a priori. The chart also seems to confirm desires already in place in Murphy: ‘Avoid exhaustion by speech’ (23); ‘With regards to a Career, the Native [Murphy] should inspire to lead, as go between, promoter, detective, custodian, pioneer or, if possible, explorer’ (23). 91

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Thus when proffered the opportunity to flee Celia and become a warden in a lunatic asylum, Murphy looks back to Suk’s reading: ‘But what made Murphy feel really confident was the sudden syzygy in Suk’s delineations of lunatic in paragraph two and custodian in paragraph seven’ (58). Reading into the prophecy, Murphy chooses to see a correspondence between references surely only related by virtue of appearing in the same document. His interpretation speaks to the desire to see shape, synchronicity, and perhaps meaning, extending to all aspects of his seemingly chaotic life, including his death. Freud (2): Beyond the pleasure principle

Murphy’s interpretation of and acquiescence to Suk’s prophecy is the conscious assertion of a desire for determinism, of there to be a determined universe. In my analysis of Murphy’s death, in the trajectory leading to his death, finally, I wish to elaborate on the unconscious level of determinism operating in him. It is here, in Beckett’s subtle parody (or is it a complex ratification?) of Freud’s conception of the death drive that Beckett begins, ominously, his analysis of the subject as subject to forces beyond his power and purview. Freud outlines his conception of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). His conception of the death drive—and his word is drive (Trieb) not instinct (Instinkt)—in some sense was forced on him by his observation of soldiers (and other victims of trauma) whose dreams kept reenacting the shock and anxiety of the original scene of trauma. These traumatic dreams violated his conception of wish-fulfillment and suggested that there was, in the repetitive return to the scene of trauma—a scene where the subject clearly was threatened with death—a force counterbalancing the pleasure principle. Balancing, perhaps negating pleasure, Eros, was the drive toward death, Thanatos. Freud hypothesized that the death drive compelled the subject to return to the state from which he arose: the state of nothingness. Freud famously writes: [I]t is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous 92

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paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’. (310–11) I recall here Murphy’s exchange with Neary where Murphy suggests that all life is ‘a wandering to find home’ (5). Murphy’s metaphor is perfectly in keeping with Freud’s notion of the death drive: both Murphy and Freud speak of life as a ‘circuitous path’, a wandering trajectory that is essentially a return to a prior state (death; inorganicism), a prior location (home). Life is thus characterized as essentially nostalgic by both Freud and Murphy: nostalgia is a longing—etymologically it is an illness (nostos: return; algia: illness)—for home, a homesickness. It strikes me that Murphy allows itself to be read—at least at one level, and one obviously not exclusive of others—as a clear demonstration of the state of moving beyond the pleasure principle: Murphy escapes the claims of Eros (the desires of Celia, Miss Counihan, and others) to find himself in death’s embrace. Murphy’s wandering to find home is complete at the very moment he moves past the claims of bodily, erotic desire. In Magdalen Mental Mercyseat Murphy finds himself in a location with subjects—mentally disturbed patients— whose states of mind he finds enormously attractive. It is here, especially in his relationship with Mr Endon, ‘a schizophrenic of the most amiable variety’ (111), that Murphy seems to have found his home at last. Toward these patients he feels only ‘respect and unworthiness’ (102); here he has found the ‘race of people he had long since despaired of finding’ (102); these patients represent, for Murphy, a ‘brotherhood’ (106). More precisely, and crucially, Murphy admires the fact that these patients, from his perspective at least, have successfully removed themselves from the claims of the real world. Murphy finds he loathes ‘the text-book attitude towards them [the patients], the complacent scientific conceptualism that made contact with outer reality the index of mental well-being’ (106). Murphy, rather, sees in their escape from the world a rejection of the ‘colossal fiasco’ (107) that is reality. Murphy’s death follows quickly his realization that these patients permanently inhabit a world his rocking chair exercise can only temporarily approximate. Thus, following a game of chess with Mr Endon—a game which sees no pieces exchanged, a purely static, pacifistic, 93

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game—Murphy performs his rounds and returns to Mr Endon’s room. Endon is catatonic at this point and does, in Beckett’s description, appear almost dead. Murphy gazes into Endon’s unseeing eyes and speaks: ‘the last at last seen of him himself unseen by him and of himself`’ A rest. ‘The last Mr Murphy saw of Mr Endon was Mr Murphy unseen by Mr Endon. This was also the last Murphy saw of Murphy . . . Mr Murphy is a speck in Mr Endon’s unseen’. (150) Murphy returns to his living quarters and, accidentally, intentionally, dies as a result of a malfunction in his gas fire. And although the coroner rules his death a ‘classical case of misadventure’ (157) we cannot help but postulate that Murphy, at long last, has wandered finally to his home. Murphy’s death

For some readers the question haunting Murphy may indeed be the question of intention: did Murphy kill himself or was it an accident? His last words to Endon—‘the last Murphy saw of Murphy’—suggest some prescience of a death to come, if not an intention to die. My own reading is quite simple: suicide and accident; death by drive. Murphy has acquiesced to larger impulses, larger drives here: having so long rehearsed the state of nothingness—of will-lessness—having so long been addicted to that (all-too-temporary) state, Murphy has encountered subjects, Endon being the primary, who inhabit a world he cannot achieve (recall his crucial feeling of unworthiness). My suggestion is that Murphy’s death is both suicide and accident in the sense that drives, by definition, exceed the agency of the subject. But Murphy, having come to realize the ‘colossal fiasco’ of the real world, has placed himself in the situation where an accident could occur. Recall that when Murphy moves into Magdalen Mental Mercyseat he demands the previous warden provide his garret with heat: because the garret itself has no gas outlet, the only solution has been to hook up a mechanically precarious line from the gas-vent in the floor below. 94

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During his first night in the garret Murphy awakes from a sleep disturbed by thoughts of the gas being used to heat his room. He thinks abut the etymology of the word gas (‘Could is be the same word as chaos?’[106]); he wonders, perhaps with desire?, if gas ‘could turn a neurotic into a psychotic’ (106); the narrator ends with this: ‘In the morning nothing remained of the dream but a postmonition of calamity’ (106). And here finally is Beckett’s description of Murphy’s death: Murphy is again in his rocking chair: The rock got faster and faster, shorter and shorter, the gleam was gone, the grin was gone, the starlessness was gone, soon his body would be quiet. Most things under the moon got slower and slower and then stopped, a rock got faster and faster and then stopped. Soon his body would be quiet, soon he would be free. The gas went on the w.c., excellent gas, superfine chaos. Soon his body was quiet. (151) Our discussion of agency and drive, of will and will-lessness, surely comes to a crucial point here. I have argued that Murphy evinces Freud’s death drive in his (willed?) return to death. But the blazingly obvious point—so obvious that perhaps it effaces itself—is that Murphy’s death has nothing at all to do with agency or drive, instinct or desire. It has everything to do with the economy—the drive, perhaps—of narrative, of the narrator’s (Beckett’s?) drive to eliminate Murphy from the text. The brilliance of Murphy as a novel arises as Beckett refracts these thematic concerns and theoretical hypotheses (agency, death drive) onto larger issues of authorial agency. That is to say, Beckett at once allows the reader to theorize potential readings—wondering about Murphy’s motives and intentions surrounding his death, for instance—and nullifies them by reminding us that Murphy is not real, has no motives or intentions at all. It is precisely here, at the point of Murphy’s death, that Beckett achieves his most uncanny effect: Murphy has been (un)real enough to die. But the economy of the narrative, its continual reminder that these characters are fabrications, puppets, cancels that reality, that death, and compels us to see Murphy as only a piece in an elaborate chess game, the consequences of which, unlike the game between Murphy and Endon, are massive. What then are we to make of this uncanny effect? How are we to read novels which work to remind us always that they are fabrications? 95

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My own sense is that Beckett, like Brecht, wishes to present art that in no way allows an escape, a release from the world; his art serves not as an avoidance of the ‘colossal fiasco’ that is reality but is a continual return to it. The metanarrative intrusions, these moments that remind us that we are only reading (but what a word ‘only’!), serve ultimately to return us to ourselves. The questions a novel like Murphy raises thus—questions of agency, of desire, of death—must formally, structurally, become our own. I asked at the outset about the stakes of reading the self-conscious novel. A careful balance between narrative seduction and a commentary on that narrative seduction surely is at play here as Beckett continually removes the sense of the ‘reality’ of his fictional world; we are asked not simply to see Murphy but are reminded of the process by which we see Murphy, a process leading ultimately to a return to our own reality. Murphy’s most uncanny effect thus may be in how it serves ultimately, and by ‘circuitous paths’, to show us our own face in the face of the strange other: the last at last seen of him himself unseen by him and of himself. WATT

Nobody bears witness for the witness. — Celan In many ways Murphy represents Beckett’s first and last attempt at what we may consider a traditional narrative. Despite the text’s insistent metanarrative intrusions, its attempt to present its characters as mere puppets, as simply part of a larger philosophical machinery; despite, that is, the author’s/narrator’s attempts to distance the reader from the emotional resonance of events, Murphy still maintains the primary novelistic convention: it tells a story. The same cannot, with any real degree of confidence, be said of Watt, one of the strangest, most anxious, most anxiety-producing novels in the modern period. Context: World War Two

A word, to begin, on the circumstances of the novel’s writing. Beckett had, in 1941, been recruited (by a friend, Alfred Peron) into the 96

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French Résistance. He joined a cell called Gloria SHH, which was part of British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and was controlled ultimately from London. Although his work was not as risky as that of other agents (he typed and translated reports) it was still highly dangerous, as James Knowlson notes in Damned to Fame (282). Indeed, in 1942 the cell was betrayed and a number of Beckett’s compatriots were arrested by the Gestapo, some to be deported to concentration camps in Fresnes, Marthhauser, or Buchenwald.8 Having received word of the betrayal—and his likely arrest—Beckett and his wife Suzanne fled Paris eventually to find their way to Rousillon, a small village in the Vaucluse region. Beckett had started writing Watt in 1941, but it was in Rousillon, in states of mind ranging from absolute anxiety to absolute boredom that the novel was completed. (In fact parts of the novel were written while Beckett was actually hiding out en route to Rousillon9.) It is, I think, crucial to emphasize the conditions of the novel’s composition for a number of reasons. The world of Watt is one where nothing makes sense, where rationality and reason have no place. It is perhaps too easy to suggest that Watt depicts a world gone mad—like Beckett’s own world in fact—but this is not too far off the interpretive mark. My interest here is to explore the implications of Watt’s encounters with this irrational world, to explore, ultimately, his encounter with Knott who represents what I call the event of incomprehensibility or unknowability. This encounter is a traumatic one as the novel makes clear. It is not simply that Watt is called upon to witness the event of unknowability: it is that this experience of impossible witnessing itself cannot be known, or narrated, despite Watt’s—and his narrator’s—best attempts to do so.10 My argument thus turns on Watt’s peculiar interpretive dilemma: how can you give narrative testimony to events which are unknowable? How can you truly witness events which entirely resist the economy of interpretation? A madness of order

The plot of Watt, if indeed ‘plot’ is a term that applies here, is quite simple. Watt comes to work as a servant for Mr. Knott replacing the departing Arsene. Watt works for an unspecified period in the house during which time he seems to undergo some kind of psychological crisis; his experiences in the house—including and most importantly his encounters with the mysterious Knott—affect his reasoning ability 97

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and his language (he, for instance, starts speaking backward); Watt departs Knott’s house, having been replaced by Mick. Beckett himself referred to Watt as a stylistic exercise written ‘in order to stay in touch’ with reality during a difficult time (Knowlson: 303). This is (perhaps) ironic given that Watt is a novel clearly about madness, about the crisis of reason. But it is not only a book exploring the psychological crisis of an individual (Watt) brought up against the unknowability of the world (Knott): Watt is a novel the very narrative discourse of which seems mad. We could, of course, simply suggest that the narrator, ‘Sam’ (a friend to whom Watt has described his experiences), is himself mad but this idea, however correct it may be from a narratological view, does not fully account for the quality of strangeness in place in the novel, a quality that, as I see it, transcends the too-simple notion of an ‘insane’ (therefore unreliable or unstable) narrator. There is a mania for order and precision in Watt, a ferocious—and quite irrational—attempt rationally to account for all varieties and permutations of experience. Early in the novel, for instance, Watt encounters a Mr Spiro, a religious eccentric (‘I personally am a neoJohn-Thomist’[189]). While Spiro is lecturing Watt, Watt’s mind wanders. As we follow his thoughts we get a sense both of Watt’s own psychological instability (a clinician would perhaps diagnose him as schizophrenic) and the simultaneous instability—the irrational rationality—of the narrative itself: But Watt heard nothing of this [Spiro’s words], because of other voices, singing, crying, stating, murmuring, things unintelligible, in his ear. With these, if he was not familiar, he was not unfamiliar either. So he was not alarmed, unduly. Now these voices, sometimes they sang only, and sometimes they cried only, and sometimes they stated only, and sometimes they murmured only, and sometimes they sang and cried, and sometimes they sang and stated, and sometimes they sang and murmured, and sometimes they cried and stated, and sometimes they cried and murmured, and sometimes they stated and murmured, and sometimes they sang and cried and stated, and sometimes they sang and cried and murmured, and sometimes they cried and stated and murmured, and sometimes they sang and cried and stated and murmured, and sometimes they sang and cried and stated and murmured, all together, at the same time, as now, to mention only these four 98

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kinds of voices, for there were others. And sometimes Watt understood all, and sometimes he understood much, and sometimes he understood little, and sometimes he understood nothing, as now. (190–91) What is crucial here is that Beckett indicates that Watt, who hears voices, is psychologically unstable before his arrival at Knott’s house. His subsequent descent into madness should thus be seen as further descent: perhaps Beckett is here indicating that the instability of the world is largely a function of its perception by the subject. Also important here is the final sentence which indicates that these voices bring about a crisis of understanding or interpretation. Beckett is clearly setting up Watt as what I call an interpreter in crisis (or crisis interpreter): the entire plot of the novel is mobilized around Watt’s desire to understand events exceeding his comprehension. Another way of thinking about Watt—and this may be so obvious as to go unnoticed—is that he functions as an uncanny double of the reader: his experience of absolute bafflement before the world mediates and mirrors our own experience of the world of Watt. The novel, as I will outline here, essentially places Watt is a series of interpretive moments. His (failed) interpretive acts anticipate, double, and problematize our own interpretations of these same events. Watt, therefore, is the first of what elsewhere I have referred to as the ‘specular double’ of the reader: his interpretations of events by necessity become our own.11 And as the specular double is dismantled, so, in a sense are we: by forcing this link between character and reader Beckett essentially normalizes epistemological instability—this is the way the world operates—to the point of producing a great readerly anxiety. Witnessing

As mentioned Watt is not the first servant of Mr Knott. Ultimately this is to say that Watt is not the first to experience the epistemological, psychological, or metaphysical breakdowns the encounters with Knott produces. Watt’s first encounter in the house is with the departing Arsene (who in his turn had replaced Vincent). Arsene’s lengthy, rambling, introductory speech to Watt makes clear, among other things, that Knott is the only figure in the household ‘who neither comes nor goes’ (214); in contrast to the flux of rotating servants, Knott is a continual presence, seeming to ‘abide in his place, for the 99

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time being’ (214). Knott, however, is ‘obliged’ (215) to have servants care for him ‘being quite incapable of looking after himself’ (215). Arsene, speaking of himself in the third person, describes the task of being Knott’s servant: he comes to understand that he is working not merely for Mr. Knott in person, and for Mr. Knott’s establishment, but also, and indeed chiefly, for himself, that he may abide, as he is, where he is, and that where he is may abide about him, as it is . . . calm and glad he witnesses and is witnessed. For a time. (201) Part of the responsibility of caring for Knott is that of bearing witness to the household, to Knott himself. In fact the relationship is more dialectical than that: the servant witnesses and is in turn witnessed. Arsene alludes here to Bishop Berkeley’s esse ist percipi (to be is to be perceived), and implies that part of Watt’s job is to confirm Knott’s very being (and in turn have his being confirmed). Arsene’s final ‘for a time’ is crucial because as the system of servant rotation implies, and as Arsene makes clear (although not directly clear), this system of being witness/being witnessed cannot be sustained for long. Arsene describes how a day came when he sensed a great change had occurred in him, a change he implies that compelled him to leave Knott’s household: Something slipped. There I was, warm and bright, smoking my tobacco-pipe, watching the warm bright wall, when suddenly somewhere some little thing slipped, some little tiny thing . . . It was a slip like that I felt, that Tuesday afternoon, millions of little things moving all together out of their old place, into a new one nearby, and furtively, as though it were forbidden. (202)12 Arsene implies quite strongly that this epiphany is related somehow to his task of witnessing. And certainly, as we will see as we trace through Watt’s various interpretive encounters—all leading inevitably to his own encounter with Knott, who unbinds all holds on reality— Watt himself will undergo a radical epistemological/interpretive crisis during his tenure in Knott’s household. Knott ultimately represents, to recall my main theme here, the call, the obligation, to witness the unwitnessable, the obligation, as it were, to bear unbearable witness.

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In a crucial early event in the novel Beckett clearly sets Watt up— perhaps in all senses of that metaphor: Watt becoming here a kind of unwitting victim of an impossible task—as the obsessive interpreter, the subject desperate to extract meaning from encounters which may not in fact have any meaning at all. Two piano-tuners, Gall Senior and Junior, have come to the house to tune Knott’s piano; after their examination of the instrument, they engage in the following, rather ominous, discussion which Watt overhears: The mice have returned, he said. The elder said nothing. Watt wondered if he had heard. Nine dampers remain, said the younger, and an equal number of hammers. Not corresponding, I hope, said the elder. In one case, said the younger. The elder had nothing to say to this. The strings are in flitters, said the younger. The elder had nothing to say to this either. The piano is doomed, in my opinion, said the younger. The piano-tuner also, said the elder. The pianist also, said the younger. This was perhaps the principal incident of Watt’s days in Mr. Knott’s house. (225) Watt’s lengthy meditation on this ‘principal incident’ (but note it is only perhaps the principal incident; others as or more important could have occurred!) verges on a parody of the interpretive process. The incident is crucial because it resembles ‘all the incidents of note proposed to Watt during his stay in Mr. Knott’s house’ (225); that is to say, all incidents lose their significance (if meaning there was in the first place) and develop ‘a purely plastic content’ (225); the incident loses ‘in its nice processes of its light, its sound, its impacts and its rhythm, all meaning, even the most literal’ (225). Beckett establishes Watt as one who needs to extract some resonance from events: more precisely Watt needs to be able, at least, to verify that an event as such occurred. Watt feels ‘the need to think that such and such a thing had happened then, the need to be able to say, when the scene began to unroll its sequences, Yes, I remember, this is what happened then’ (227). Watt, in other words, needs to be

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able to figure himself as, again, witness to events. Crucially, Watt has difficulty with events that seem not to mean anything: And Watt could not accept them for what they perhaps were, the simple games that time plays with space, now with these toys, and now with those, but was obliged, because of his peculiar character, to enquire into what they meant, oh not into what they really meant, his character was not so peculiar as all that, but into what they might be induced to mean, with the help of a little patience, a little ingenuity. (227) This is a crucial description of Watt. Beckett figures Watt’s interpretive practice as an assertion of power, a will-to-meaning that reduces the object (the person, event) to something other than what it is: ‘This fragility of the outer meaning had a bad effect on Watt, for it caused him to seek for another, for some meaning of what had passed, in the image of how it had passed’ (226). Watt discovers, and I will argue that there is an ethical component to this discovery, that the Other cannot—should not—be ‘induced to mean’ but must remain the absolute Other, the absolute Stranger. Precisely, Watt learns to accept the event of nonmeaning, the event of nothing: ‘Watt learned towards the end of his stay in Mr. Knott’s house to accept that nothing had nothing, that a nothing had happened, learned to bear it and even, in a shy way, to like it. But then it was too late’ (231). Levinas: Witnessing the unwitnessable

These last words—‘But then it was too late’—indicate that accepting the event of nothing comes, or can come, at a high cost. The task of witnessing the unwitnessable and allowing the object to remain absolutely Other—that is, to not reduce it to meaningfulness—is an extraordinarily complicated obligation. The human subject, as Nietzsche argues, is naturally interpretive, naturally given to find meaning in the world around us; interpretations, he reminds us, are always acts of power.13 We tend, in what is essentially an assertion of a kind of interpretive power, to accommodate unfamiliar experiences by associating them to things from our experiences. In this way the foreign becomes familiar confirming, perhaps, M. Merleau-Ponty’s idea that ‘there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision’ (139).14 But Watt is called on to resist this urge to induce meaning and thus Beckett asks 102

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some extraordinarily difficult questions: How do you allow the Other to be the Other? What is the process by which the Stranger is permitted to be the Stranger? I wish to approach these questions—and ultimately the thorny question of Knott, the novel’s central image of absolute alterity or Otherness—via the thinking of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, primarily as set out in Totality and Infinity. Levinas, a philosopher of the phenomenological school (he studied under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology and teacher of Heidegger), spent a great deal of time thinking through the problem of the Other. Precisely, he was concerned to define the proper ethical stance the self should maintain in relation to the Other, the Stranger. Levinas maintains that one’s relation to the Other begins with the apprehension of its face; the ‘epiphany of the face’ (214) which translates the essence of the Stranger; the face which, in its singularity, resists any act of power. Levinas seems here to understand power to mean both phenomenal, real, power—the power to physically destroy or de-face— and interpretive power, the power to reduce the singularity of the face of the Other to something less strange, less unfamiliar, less threatening (interpretation of the Other becomes another kind of de-facement). Levinas’ central ethical claim, thus, is that the Stranger must remain the Stranger. The face of the Other must not be interpretively reduced: ‘The face resists possession, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp’ (197): the face defies ‘my ability for power’ (198). This relation to the Other, however fundamental, however essential, is one involving risk; there is a risk in exposing oneself before the absolute Other, the absolute Stranger; there is a risk in maintaining the threat of foreignness as such, as a real condition of the world. Hence Levinas speaks of ‘the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself’ (39) and the ‘traumatism of astonishment’ (73) that exposure to the Other can and should induce. For Levinas, it seems, the relation to the Other, to that which is ‘refractory to every typology, to every genus, to every characterology, to every classification’ (73) is the essential relation in the world because it is fundamentally a revelatory experience: ‘The absolutely foreign alone can instruct us’ (73). How then do we negotiate a relation to the Stranger without reducing his singularity? Through language, through discourse, argues Levinas. It is within conversation properly executed so as to maintain a tension between two unique viewpoints—what Hans-Georg Gadamer 103

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calls the ‘hermeneutical conversation’—that a bridge can be forged. It is, crucially, within the conversation that I am revealed as I to the Other, that I am revealed to myself, that the Other is tentatively known: It is only in approaching the Other that I attend to myself . . . in discourse I expose myself to the questioning of the Other, and this urgency of the response—acuteness of the present—engenders me for responsibility; as responsible I am brought to my final reality. (178) Levinas’ crucial point is this: in my discursive, conversational, relation to the Other, I become aware of my responsibility to him, to ‘the call of the other’ (178). The Stranger obliges me to enter the conversation in order that his essential foreignness is maintained, in order that I understand myself as defined in relation to him and his strangeness. Thus we arrive at questions central to Watt. What happens when the face of the Other is unknowable, unperceivable (Levinas seems always to assume the face can be recognized as a face, that an Other is locatable)? What possible relation can be forged between self and Other when all possibilities of discourse, language, and conversation, are removed? How do you negotiate a relation to the Stranger who is absolutely fugitive? Interpreting Knott

For surely Knott is the Other who can never be approached, but, as the narrator makes clear, who absolutely requires witnessing. Here is Watt’s understanding of Knott’s needs (this, for me, is the critical passage in the novel): For except, one, not to need, and, two, a witness to his not needing, Knott needed nothing, as far as Watt could see . . . And Mr, Knott, needing nothing if not, one, not to need, and, two, a witness to his not needing, of himself knew nothing. And so he needed to be witnessed. Not that he might know, no, but that he might not cease . . . . But what kind of witness was Watt, weak now of eye, hard of hearing, and with even the more intimate senses greatly below par? A needy witness, an imperfect witness. The better to 104

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witness, the worse to witness. That with his need he might witness its absence. That imperfect he might witness it ill. That Mr. Knott might never cease, but ever almost cease. (334–35) What kind of witnessing is this that maintains Knott always on the verge of ceasing? Perhaps the answer lies in Knott himself, who from Watt’s earliest experiences of him to his final, is absolutely protean in appearance: the figure of which Watt sometimes caught a glimpse, in the vestibule, in the garden, was seldom the same figure, from one glance to the next, but so various, as far as Watt could make out, in its corpulence, complexion, height and even hair . . . that Watt would never have supposed it was the same, if he had not known that it was Knott. (288) Late in the text we have the following description of Knott; it is one which conveys at once the difficulty of witnessing Knott and Watt’s absolutely desperate, mad in fact, attempt rationally to codify all aspects of Knott’s appearance. I will quote only a few lines from this two-page (!) description keeping in mind Levinas’ idea of the Other as ‘refractory to every typology, to every genus, to every characterology, to every classification’: With regard to the so important matter of Mr. Knott’s physical appearance, Watt had unfortunately little or nothing to say. For one day Mr. Knott would be tall, fat, pale and dark, and the next thin, small, flushed and fair, and the next sturdy, middlesized, yellow and ginger, and the next small, fat, pale and fair, and the next middlesized, flushed, thin, and ginger, and the next tall, yellow, dark and sturdy, and the next fat, middlesized, ginger and pale, and the next . . . (340) Knott thus is the Other whose face keeps changing, who cannot be known as such.15 Moreover, Beckett makes clear that there is no fundamental contact between Watt and Knott: ‘Between Mr. Knott and Watt no conversation passed’ (339). Without the essential linguistic contact between self (Watt) and Other (Knott) there can be no fundamental revelation (epiphany) of either self to Other, or self to self (Watt, moreover, is hard of hearing!). The relationship between Watt 105

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and Knott can only be one where response and responsibility fails. Knott is, therefore, the unwitnessable event, the inassimilable Other, the emblem of the event of knowing which comes to nothing, to naught/nought/Knott.16 The trauma of nothing

Levinas maintains that the encounter with the Other begins in trauma, is a traumatism of astonishment, but that discourse modulates trauma into response and responsibility. Watt’s encounter with Knott, I would argue, begins and ends in trauma, in a realization that no contact is possible. The dialogue that should have taken place between Watt and Knott is displaced into the narrative of that failure, the narrative that Sam receives from Watt years after the fact: Sam, who testifies that he does not understand all of Watt says to him, thus becomes the imperfect witness to an imperfect witnessing; in this way Watt becomes a doubled testimony of an impossible event. It is in Sam’s narrative account that we see the truly lethal effect of Knott on Watt. If no conversation is possible between them, if language and dialogue fails, Watt’s own language also begins to disintegrate, to ‘fail him’ (236), as the narrator puts it. Toward the end of his stay at Knott’s house Watt begins to speak in increasingly bizarre ways: he, first, speaks backward, reversing the order of words; he moves on to reversing the order of letters in words, then the order of words and letters. This produces strange, yet translatable, sentences like: ‘Lit yad mac, ot og. Ton taw, ton tonk. Ton dob, ton trips’ (305). Knott, it seems, has removed the possibility of his witnessing and the clear narrative account of that failed witnessing, that impossibility. And yet, even within these strange linguistic disruptions, we can hear the persistence of Watt’s desire to serve, to offer himself to the strange Other: Of nought. To the source. To the teacher. To the temple. To him I brought. This emptied heart. These emptied hands. This mind ignoring. This body homeless. To love him my little reviled. My little rejected to have him. My little to learn him forgot. Abandoned my little to find him. (303) These sentences, which sound at some level like a devotional poem or prayer, speak to Watt’s drive to place himself in relation to something 106

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which exceeds him even as he knows this desire is a failing one.17 There is something enormously moving in Watt’s pathetic devotion, something speaking to his recognition of Knott’s need for human contact and a concomitant recognition of his own need to bear witness to that need. Watt, finally, is a deeply melancholic story about the impossibility of knowing the Other and the effects on the self of the recognition that events and people may always exceed one’s interpretive grasp. In the addenda to Watt—a compilation of material which ‘only fatigue and disgust’ (373) prevented the author from incorporating into the main text—Beckett includes lines echoed in the above-quoted passage: ‘of the empty heart/of the empty hands/of the dark mind stumbling through barren lands’ (376). He also includes a fragment of what appears to be a poem—written perhaps by Watt? By Sam? By Beckett?—seemingly about Watt’s experience: who may tell the tale of the old man? weigh absence in a scale? mete want with a span? the sum assess of the world’s woes? nothingness in words enclose? (373) In some fundamental way this image of a dark mind stumbling through barren lands, these questions of the efficacy of narrative to translate experiences of absence and nothingness, while central to the trajectory of Watt, become the principal and guiding questions of the work Beckett considered his most important, the first trilogy. Watt thus is a turning point in Beckett’s career as a writer for it is here—in the image of a mind confronting the unknowable, a mind desperate to know and interpret the darkness of experience, a mind confronting the limits and boundaries of what his language can do— that Beckett’s true task—to find the means to translate, to enclose nothingness in words, to find, as he puts it in his German Letter, a ‘literature of the unword’—is partially realized.

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CHAPTER 5

MOLLOY, MALONE DIES, THE UNNAMABLE

The trace I leave signifies to me at once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me. —Derrida, Learning to Live Finally Beckett himself considered the three novels comprising the so-called first trilogy, Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), The Unnamable (1953), to be among his most important work.1 Certainly it is here that Beckett subjects the novel to its most intensive critique: in fact to call these texts ‘novels’ is really to push the definition of the term to its breaking point. Nothing much happens in these works: In Molloy, Moran pursues Molloy never to find him (it may be that Moran and Molloy are one and the same person); in Malone Dies, Malone lies in his bed telling himself stories as he awaits his death: these stories, as he admits, are ineffective and downright dull: ‘What tedium’; in The Unnamable we are confronted with a character (or characters: he is a radically unstable entity shifting into other personalities, names, and materialities) who does not resemble anything fully human (indeed one of his names is ‘Worm’): the unnamable speaks seemingly without direction or focus from within an unidentifiable space and time (it may be a kind of afterlife, perhaps Malone’s) and presents what is the most challenging narrative in the history of the novel. If, in 1937, Beckett proposed creating a ‘literature of the unword’, he did, in 1953, perhaps succeed. In what follows I discuss each novel in turn but we should keep in mind that these novels really do form one large narrative: Molloy and Malone, for instance (as well as characters from previous novels, published and unpublished2) appear in the final novel of the trilogy. It is clear, from one reading at least, that the speaker of The Unnamable 108

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is a kind of author-figure who is responsible for having written the previous two novels. Given that The Unnamable is the culmination of the previous novels, moreover, and given the speaker’s radically diminished status, I propose to analyze how the novels work toward a position of what we can call a posthumanism. We begin in Molloy with characters fairly intact in body and (in some sense) in mind. Molloy and Moran, are in some control of their bodies, are able to move, to ride bicycles but, crucially, their bodies are failing. In Malone Dies we are met with the immobile body, the dying body. In The Unnamable we have no stable body—or subject—at all. Perhaps we are in a posthumous space here in this final novel: certainly we have arrived at the limits and ends of the human as embodiment. My interest here is to trace Beckett’s reduction of the body over the trilogy to suggest that his real interest lies in discovering precisely what it means to be, to exist, at the very limit of the body, at the very limits of life itself. Beckett’s posthumanism—his radical critique of the idea of a materially integrated, fully self-coincidental human—is never a clinically cruel diminishing of the self for its own sake, never an enjoyment of reduction as such. I believe Beckett’s true humanity resides in his compassion for the suffering, dying, posthumous subject, the subject who, at the extreme limit, maintains, and has no choice but to maintain, a radically compromised dignity. MOLLOY Molloy and the detective narrative: The critique of reason

My reading of Molloy begins with a simple observation: the work is a parody and critique of the epistemological assumptions of the detective novel. In some ways it is possible to widen this observation and suggest that Molloy works to parody and critique the generic conventions of the novel as a whole, especially the novel in its classic realist form. The classic realist novel takes place in a specified time and place; its characters are integrated at least enough for us to recognize that they have histories, cultures, and backgrounds (think of how Dickens, for instance, locates his characters within a cultural and historical milieu from the outset of his novels); there is a plot, which is to say that something concrete with concrete consequences happens (Pip finds out who his real father is in Great Expectations; Anna commits suicide in Anna Karenina; Napoleon invades Russia in War and Peace). Molloy will undercut all these conventions about 109

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character, setting, and plot in ways that critique both the novel form and its implicit philosophical assumptions. But, as I say, things are more focused in Molloy because it, generically, functions as a detective story of sorts. Molloy is a novel in two parts. In part one we are presented with Molloy, who comes to consciousness in his mother’s room (not knowing how he came to be there): Molloy’s narrative is a first-person recollection of his attempt to locate his mother and it recounts various incidents and encounters on this journey. Part two is narrated by Moran, a detective who works for an employer, Youdi, who best can be described as mysterious. By means of a messenger, Gaber, Youdi instructs Moran to seek out Molloy for reasons that are not ever specified. Moran’s narrative concerns his search for Molloy, a search that ends with a violent encounter in the woods with a man who may or may not be Molloy (Molloy himself recounts a similar incident with a man in the woods). Molloy thus maintains the structure of the detective novel (a detective assigned to track down—to find the traces—of his quarry) only radically to deconstruct the content (the detective never finds his object; the detective undergoes a process of psychological decomposition which dismantles the philosophical justification of his authority as interpreter: his reason). In phenomenological terms, our ‘horizons of expectations’ are radically undercut as Molloy proceeds. So, to begin, what are the assumptions of the detective story, what does the detective story say about the world and our relation to it? The primary assumption of the detective story is that the world is knowable, is readable: that is, the world is open to the power of (the detective’s) observation and can be interpreted accordingly. The criminal’s actions may at first appear mysterious, even uncanny, but the detective is able, through the process of ratiocination, of reasoned observation, to make sense of what appears at first glance to lack sense: there is a mystery, there is a solution. These narratives, from Conan Doyle, to Agatha Christie, from Caleb Carr to Matthew Pearl, thus provide, to speak of their appeal to readers, the temporary sense that there is order in the universe. A second assumption, one that may strike us as being too obvious even to mention, is that the world in the classic detective story operates according to recognized assumptions about reality. In the classic realist detective story, for instance, time operates in a rigorously linear fashion: the crime is committed in the past, the criminalist solves the mystery in the present. This is, ultimately as much to say that 110

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in narrative terms the detective story—again, in its classic realist form—is fairly conservative: there are no complex and confusing manipulations of time and narrative perspective; our narrator is uniformly reliable. The final assumption I wish to emphasize here, especially because it is so clearly deconstructed in Beckett’s novel, is that the detective story is premised on the idea of a clear ontological and moral distinction between pursuer and pursued. The detective story assumes a fundamental epistemology: there is a clear distinction between subject (detective) and object (criminal). This basic assumption is one that governs and dictates how the world is seen and interpreted (at least in the West). We organize our experiences of the world according to the logic of oppositional thinking; we define ourselves, more precisely, against that which we are not: there is good and there is evil, black and white, man and woman, past and present, detective and criminal, Moran and Molloy. Identity crisis

My aim here is to illustrate how Molloy dismantles the logic of oppositional thinking by analyzing the representation of the subject/object binary in Molloy, that is, the opposition between Molloy and Moran. If, as I am suggesting, Molloy operates to dismantle the logic of oppositions—and it does so in many ways—then we can read the novel as a critique of the very premises of Western metaphysics, the very organizing principles of Western thinking. And perhaps the reader’s sense that Molloy is in some ways undermining their assumptions about the world accounts for the real anxiety the novel instills. This anxiety begins as the reader is confronted with unknowable characters who recount unstable and uncanny narratives. Consider, for instance, the opening paragraph. The reader is presented with a character in a room, his mother’s room. Molloy does not know how he got in the room; he doesn’t really know why he is in the room, save for the fact that he seems to be a writer of sorts who is paid for work he does not understand: ‘I’ve forgotten how to spell too, and half the words’ (4). One of the things we begin to suspect about Molloy is that he has no self-understanding: he cannot recognize his past, his history, just as he cannot recognize his present state. The reader’s anxiety is heightened once she recognizes that all we know about this world is filtered through a mind that is falling 111

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to pieces. And, as we will soon see, the one character we would expect to be able to stabilize this world—the rational detective—is himself at least as unstable as his quarry. Molloy (we only learn his name several pages on [18]) begins to recount instances from his past, perhaps in an effort to learn retrospectively how he indeed arrived in his present state, but his narrative is peppered with mysterious, gnomic, statements that detain the reader: ‘This time, then once more I think, then perhaps a last time, then I think it’ll be over, with that world too’ (4). What are we to make of this? He indicates that there will be three instances (this time, once more, then a last time) where something will occur before something ends: we presume Molloy refers to his life as the thing which will end and that there will be an interval where—and here I insert my own reading—three narratives will fill the time between the present moment and his death. Perhaps these narratives are Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. But if, as I have suggested, the unnamable is the ultimate writer of the trilogy (of course he is not: Beckett is) how can Molloy anticipate these forthcoming narratives? Does Molloy know he inhabits a fictional universe? If this question cannot yet be answered (it perhaps will be when we arrive at The Unnamable) we can at least suggest that for Molloy the recounting of one’s life always will involve some aspects of fabrication, of fictionalizing. As he recounts his witnessing of the meeting of A and C (‘So I saw A and C going slowly towards each other, unconscious of what they were doing’ [4])—and there are suggestions that he is remembering an encounter between himself and another figure, perhaps Moran—he writes: ‘Perhaps I’m inventing a little, perhaps embellishing, but on the whole that’s the way it was . . .. But perhaps I’m remembering things’ (4–5). This is a crucial line in Molloy, and indeed in Beckett: there is no real distinction between history and fiction. The work of memory, in other words, is a creative act: the act of writing the story of a life based on memories that are perhaps inventions thus makes what Molloy tells us highly suspect: ‘Saying is inventing’, Molloy tells us, ‘Wrong, very rightly wrong’ (27). And, as any reader of Beckett’s prose soon discovers, not only is the narrative as a whole an unstable structure, but individual sentences threaten to undermine themselves. As Molloy realizes the degree to which he is fictionalizing we read ‘What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I’m not sure of it’ (9). This is one of numerous instances where a character will assert something only 112

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to deny it: he knows he needs stories, he is not sure that he needs stories. Here is another example: Molloy is describing the dog which follows A or C (he can’t remember who): ‘A little dog followed him, a pomeranian I think, but I don’t think so’ (7). The classic example of what I call this self-cancelling rhetoric is in the final lines of Moran’s narrative: he has returned home after attempting to find Molloy and is composing his report for Youdi: ‘Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining’ (170). The lines echo and in turn deconstruct the actual first lines of Moran’s section of Molloy: ‘It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows’ (87). What do we make of these sentences which undermine themselves? Molloy thinks it was a pomeranian, but thinks not; Moran says it was raining, but it is not. I tend to read these individual sentences symptomatically. That is, they suggest a larger instability in the subject, an instability, ultimately, in the narrative as a whole. This instability is more than simply what results when we cannot be sure if one thing is true or not; it is an instability that arises when we realize that both things could be true: it was a pomeranian, and it was not; it is raining and it is not. Beckett compels us into maintaining both possibilities in a kind of permanent suspension where nothing certain can be known and nothing can be denied with any certainty. And Molloy, as a subject—or object of Moran’s quest—is a case in point. He is an example of a subject who in some ways is beyond knowing. Lacking history and an identity, Molloy verges into a kind of ontological oblivion, as he himself acknowledges. Part of this sense of oblivion comes from the fact that Molloy has, it seems, lived a life of a tramp, marginalized from culture. As such he has, as he puts it, ‘been living so far from words so long’ that it becomes difficult for him to understand the world; lacking language, he admits that ‘even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate’ (27). At another point Molloy offers this reflection on his attempts to remember his past: ‘But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life’ (21). Molloy may in fact be speaking metaphorically here—he may, that is, be speaking of himself as one who has retired to his room to write and thus removed himself from the world—but there is also a sense in which this metaphor of ceasing to live speaks to the difficulty of thinking about Molloy: he has 113

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a name, but his identity is wrapped in a namelessness; his has no clear past, but speaks incessantly about it; he is not dead, but metaphorically this is: ‘my life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that?’ (31). This final statement is in some ways the crucial diagnosis of Molloy’s delicate ontology. And what is Beckett doing by offering us this figure in Molloy? My sense is that he is setting the stage for Moran, the detective. He is offering the reader a character who we know in advance is an absolute cipher and as such will present manifest difficulties for anyone attempting to figure him out, to track, trace, or interpret him. Molloy, in other words, is being set up like a text—perhaps he stands as the emblem of Molloy itself—that cannot be interpreted by the reader and Moran. If one of the trajectories of the text is Beckett’s decomposition of the subject-object structure (we will arrive at this momentarily) we should begin to realize that he is also decomposing the individual poles of the opposition: Molloy is a figure who cannot really be known because his ontological status, his position as subject or agent, is, at best, fluid.3 Molloy’s description of himself, living a life that is over and that is not over, sets himself up as the precursor of the fully posthuman subject we will meet in The Unnamable: how can we—or Moran—ever hope to understand the time, the temporality, of a subject whose life is over and still occurring? ‘Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be’ (44). Moran: The crisis of detection

Our first encounter with Moran suggests that perhaps he possesses the appropriate qualities for figuring Molloy out. He seems at first to be rational, to be able to identify himself (‘My name is Moran, Jacques’ [87]), and to recount his past with some degree of clarity: ‘I remember the day I received the order to see about Molloy’ (87). But we soon discover that Moran, like Molloy, is recounting a narrative in which he has come as close as possible to losing all sense of himself (the fact that both Molloy and Moran will suffer some loss of identity is perhaps the major clue that they are one and the same person). We begin distrusting Moran after he admits that his testimony of his experience is perhaps not that reliable: ‘All this is not very clear’ (102), he admits. Further, he seems to know Molloy 114

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already or to know another figure who resembles him: ‘Molloy, or Mollose, was no stranger to me . . . Perhaps I had invented him, I mean found him ready made in my head’ (106–07).4 Moran’s syntax reminds us of Molloy’s previous statement (‘Perhaps I’m remembering, perhaps I’m inventing’) and leads us to suspect, first, that this narrative is all a massive embellishment, and, second, that Moran and Molloy, again, may be closer to each other than Moran himself even knows. What is crucial here at the outset of his narrative is that Moran is unable to know the status of the object he seeks: That there may have been two different persons involved, one my own Mollose, the other the Molloy of the enquiry, was a thought which did not so much as cross my mind, and if it had I should have driven it away, as one drives away a fly, or a hornet. How little one is at one with oneself, good God. (108) This last sentence does sound the major theme of the fluidity of identity that is the concern of Molloy as a whole: it does also work to suggest that, like Molloy, who has no real identity (Moran suggests at one point that there are five versions of Molloy: the one inside Moran, Moran’s imaginary Molloy, Gaber’s version of Molloy, Youdi’s version of Molloy, and the real Molloy [110]!), Moran is similarly a mystery to himself, at odds with himself, as it were. Our question thus becomes: how can a detective pursue a figure of absolute mystery if he himself lacks a stable grounding in the world, in himself ?5 The answer, of course, is that he cannot. And it becomes quite clear as Moran’s narrative progresses that Beckett is interested in watching Moran’s sense of self gradually decompose as Moran realizes that what he seeks may not exist ‘out there’ in the real world, but within a self that is already in crisis: ‘Between the Molloy I stalked within me thus and the true Molloy, after whom I was so soon to be in full cry, over hill and dale, the resemblance cannot have been great’ (110). As his quest progresses, Moran, accompanied bizarrely by his son (also named Jacques: ‘This cannot lead to confusion’ [87]), begins to disintegrate and his sense of self begins to evaporate. Shifts in narrative person indicate the delicate imbalance in Moran’s own mind (he begins, for instance, to speak of himself in the third person as if separated from himself ‘It was then the unheard of sight was to be seen of Moran making ready to go without knowing where he was 115

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going’ [118]); he admits, again, to not being able to tell his story ‘Stories, stories. I have not been able to tell them. I shall not be able to tell this one’ (132)6. At one point late in his narrative, Moran, deep in the woods, looks at his reflection in the water. This is a crucial moment in which Beckett signals, again, the fragility of Moran’s identity: I tried again to remember what I was to do with Molloy, when I found him. I dragged myself down to the stream. I lay down and looked at my reflection, then I washed my face and hands. I waited for my image to come back, I watched it as it trembled towards an ever increasing likeness. Now and then a drop, falling from my face, shattered it again. (140) Moran, defining himself in some ways by his quest (I tried again to remember what I was to do with Molloy) watches, in an obvious parody of the Narcissus myth, as his own identity never quite coheres into a full image. Following this moment Moran admits that he is ‘so changed from what I was’ (142) and is resigned ‘to being dispossessd of self’ (143). Directly following these admissions, Moran meets a man in the woods, a dim man, ‘dim of face and dim of body, because of the dark’ (144). The man, whose face ‘I regret to say vaguely resembled my own’ (145), presents a vague threat to Moran and thus—we assume this although there is an ellipsis in Moran’s narrative—Moran beats him: ‘I found him stretched on the ground, his head in a pulp’ (145). It is a curious encounter made all the more mysterious by the fact that the reader surely recalls that Molloy too encountered a man in the woods: Molloy, however, recalls beating his man: ‘So I smartly freed a crutch and dealt him a good dint on the skull’ (78). What are we to make of these encounters? Is it possible that Molloy is recalling details from the attack that Moran, for some reason, has repressed? Is it possible that Molloy and Moran are in fact recounting the same narrative and thus are indeed the same person? If they are, Beckett has effectively deconstructed the binary that would seem to define the logic of both the detective narrative and of subject-object oppositions: the detective, unknowingly, is in search of himself. But Beckett is not content simply to dismantle the subject-object binary by allowing us to blur Molloy and Moran’s identities. There are details in both narratives that would seem to prevent such an easy 116

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identification: Moran has a son, for instance, while Molloy only vaguely remembers having one (and we are invited to distrust his memory); Molloy has a mother, never mentioned by Moran.7 We could simply suggest that Moran and Molloy forget or repress these crucial details but, finally, such a reading works against the spirit of the text. Beckett wishes us to consider the relation between Molloy and Moran precisely as a problem: what, he asks, is it ever possible to know about someone else? To what degree is our knowledge of another always ever a projection of our own epistemological framework, prejudices, and desires?8 Moran puts it nicely at the very outset of his narrative: ‘For who could have spoken to me of Molloy if not myself and to whom if not to myself could I have spoken of him?’ (107). As Moran’s narrative shudders to its close, and as he deteriorates mentally and physically (Moran himself speaks of his ‘disintegrations’: his legs are starting to fail; his testicles, strangely, are hanging ‘a little low’ (151): ‘Physically speaking it seemed to me I was now becoming rapidly unrecognizable’ [164]), we come to a point of return: Moran has come home in a state resembling Molloy’s at the outset of his own narrative. Moran, like Molloy, sets out to write a report that will be given to his master Youdi (and of course we recall the texts written by Molloy). His report, as we have seen previously, contradicts facts, and from what he have learned about Moran’s decomposition of self, will only be as contradictory as the narrative we have just read: ‘Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining’ (170). There is a kind of Moebius strip effect in place here, of course: this final line of the report he will submit to Youdi is the first line of the narrative we have just read. Report and narrative, within which the contents of that report are gathered, blur and blend into each other, offering another instance where oppositions between experience and its testimony, between history and narrative, are radically deconstructed. What Molloy finally gives us is an exemplary instance of discourse failing in direct relation and proportion to the bodily and mental failures of the subject who purportedly controls discourse. Which is as much to say that Molloy, in its dismantling of subject-object relations, of narrator and narrated, works effectively to dismantle the epistemological claims of narrative. As the body fails, so does narrative. As Moran disintegrates, as Molloy begins to wonder if he indeed is alive, we clearly move into a space where the body is at best 117

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a liability, at worst, perhaps, something to be discarded. Beckett’s conflation of the ideas of bodily and narrative disintegration suggests that the idea of the posthuman, which here is only hinted at, always involves more than simply a dismantling of the material body and a concomitant thematizing of this process. To understand fully Beckett’s posthumanism means that we need to understand how the posthuman must, indeed is obliged to, narrate the history of the body’s decline into the posthumous: to comprehend the posthuman subject, in other words, means we need to confront a fully posthuman narrative. Hence we arrive at Malone Dies. MALONE DIES The limit

In the Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot writes: ‘The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience— it is the limit of writing [limite de l’ecriture]’ (7).9 I wish to focus my discussion of Malone Dies through the various implications of Blanchot’s sentence because it touches on so many of the important themes of this short novel: writing, death, the limit. My beginning point here, again, is a simple observation: Malone is trying to do the impossible; he is trying to record the instant of his death, to borrow again from Blanchot.10 Malone, as we have seen, is aware of his impending death and has informed us that in order to fill the time between this moment and that of his death he will tell stories: While waiting I shall tell myself stories, if I can. They will not be the same kind of stories as hitherto, that is all. They will be neither beautiful nor ugly, they will be calm, there will be no ugliness or beauty or fever in them any more, they will be almost lifeless, like the teller. (174) Malone continues writing until the moment when, we may presume (and again this may only ever be a presumption), he dies. But we should listen carefully to the valence of the book’s title, Malone Dies: the narrative as a whole is a record of Malone’s death and thus the final moments of the novel, when his pencil slips finally out of his grasp, is only one of many moments recording the decline: Lemuel is in charge, he raises his hatchet on which the blood will never dry, but not to hit anyone, he will not hit anyone, he will not 118

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hit anyone any more, he will not touch anyone any more, either with it or with it or with it or with or or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will never or with his pencil or with his stick or or light light I mean never there he will never never anything there any more. (280–81) And truly the paradox of Malone’s enterprise is ‘hammered’ home in these final moments. We have no way of knowing what has happened here: perhaps Malone is dead, perhaps his pencil has slipped out of his grasp (as it has before: [216]). What should at the very least be clear from the trajectory of the novel is that Malone ‘exists’ (in this paradoxically prolonged state of dying) insofar as he is able to write. He is his narrative; his narrative is his life, his death. When his narrative ends, after progressing to a fragmented and fragmenting conclusion, so too does Malone. Thus the attempt to record the moment of his final, ultimate, death is a patent impossibility. One can perhaps be writing when one dies, but one cannot write the moment of death. One cannot record, speak, or give voice to the moment of death because it is, for us all but especially for Malone, the moment of the radical absence of voice, of writing: ‘I am lost. Not a word’ (256). Writing as play

But we can argue that the energy of this strangely enervated text— Malone claims to have no energy and thus that his texts have no energy—comes precisely from the delirious sense that Malone, already existing at a kind of limit point (the verge of death), is taking the reader as close as possible to that very limit and, perhaps, beyond. Part of the frisson produced by the end of Malone Dies comes from the realization that the narrative really does not end. The unnamable’s narrative begins with the line ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ (285) as if anticipating the reader’s questions about Malone: where has he gone? Where is he now? The speaker of the first lines of The Unnamable, thus, for all intents and purposes, may as well be Malone. The energy in Malone’s text, in other words, resides 119

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precisely from the equation he draws—and Blanchot also notices— between writing and the ultimate limit experience: death. Perhaps the best place to begin here is to observe how Malone himself conceives of his writing. He makes it quite clear from the outset that writing—telling stories—will be a form of play. It is, as he says, a kind of game: ‘Now it is a game, I am going to play. I never knew how to play, till now. I longed to, but I knew it was impossible . . .. I shall never do anything any more from now on but play’ (174). He will tell four stories ‘One about a man, another about a woman, a third about a thing and finally one about an animal, a bird probably’ (175): this itinerary soon will be changed ‘There will therefore be only three stories after all’ (176). What becomes clear as Malone begins telling the story of Saposcat (who perhaps represents Malone as a child) is that he intends these stories to function to remove himself from his present state, the knowledge of his impending death. Narrative, narrative play, precisely, is a way of stepping outside of himself, if only temporarily. Part of his difficulty, however, is that the stories he tells fail to alleviate his boredom (of waiting): ‘What tedium’ (181; 186; 210); ‘Mortal tedium’ (211).11 These stories work in effect to bore himself to life, back to an awareness of himself rather than working to take him away. And as he states, perhaps these stories are only ever really about his own life anyway: ‘What tedium. And I call that playing. I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself’ (183). This is a critical line, if not the critical line, in Malone Dies. Here Malone conjoins the idea of playing/narrative creation and the inability to move past the self. The implication is that successful play would work to remove the self from itself: writing, in other words, would effect a kind of effacement of the self (writing thus works as a kind of death of the self, an idea to which we shall return). Malone is not alone in his thinking about the nature of play. Two major thinkers of the past century, one a sociologist, the other a philosopher, give important attention to the idea that play has a crucial effect on the self’s relation to itself and to its world. Johan Huizinga, in his classic Homo Ludens, notes that play is a form of ordering; whether it is a game of chess, the seemingly chaotic play of children, or an organized sporting event, play asserts a kind of order into the world: Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates 120

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order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. (29) Play becomes a way of asserting control over experience by providing a structure. And Malone seems to know this intuitively: ‘And I even feel a strange desire come over me, the desire to know what I am doing, and why’ (188); ‘I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end. It is in order to know where I have got to, where he has got to’ (201).12 Play thus is a conscious—the word is crucial—effort to order experience, to know history. And yet Malone’s desire to forget himself, to lose himself, seems contradicted by the idea of consciously wanting to know, to order, experience. Here Malone’s thinking about play harmonizes with that of Hans-Georg Gadamer. In Truth and Method Gadamer notes that play, beyond offering order to the world, functions to efface the self: in playing, all those purposive relations that determine active and caring existence have not simply disappeared, but are curiously suspended. The player himself knows that play is only play and that it exists in a world determined by the seriousness of purposes. But he does not know this in such a way that, as a player, he actually intends this relation to seriousness. Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play. (102) Malone’s frustration that he is unable to play successfully (‘And I call that playing’) is in harmony with Gadamer’s idea that the self, to play, must lose himself in play: ‘I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself ?’ Malone thus offers two ideas about play, perhaps two contradictory ideas: on the one hand play is a conscious assertion of order. As such the self must, logically, be in place doing the ordering. But on the other hand Malone clearly wishes to tell effective stories that take him away from himself, freeing the author from what amounts to a kind of inevitable and unavoidable narcissism. It seems to me that this is the crux of Malone’s problem. He wants both aspects of play to be in place as the stories proceed. He wishes to order, shape, and comment on his stories (indeed he is the stories’ first critic, and a harsh one at that!); and he wants not to be there at all. How can this aporia— a word meaning impasse: a word favored by Derrida and used by Malone himself (175) and by the unnamable (280)—be resolved?13 121

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Writing into death: The unword

In some ways logically it cannot, at least until Malone himself dies. And this, for me, is where Beckett’s novel aligns itself with Blanchot. Both Malone and Blanchot are concerned with the relation between writing and its limit; both also understand that the relation between the self and writing is one always shaped by the writer and the writing’s relation to the disaster, to death, the ultimate limit space. But the disaster, as Blanchot tells us (reminding us of the logic of trauma), is unrepresentable, is what escapes writing and is therefore unexperienced. This is what Blanchot means when he writes ‘There is no reaching the disaster’ (1). But in some ways Malone does reach the disaster, and does represent it, does he not? The novel reaches its maximum impact at the moment it (seemingly) ends. This blank space at the close of the novel after ‘never anything/there/any more’ (281) is what the novel has in some sense been trying to achieve, to create, to write. Malone through his stories, these small rehearsals for death, has been trying to remove himself from his own narcissistic identification with himself. He has tried, thus, not to be present at his own life or his own death. This blank space where writing, and thus being, ceases, is what he has aimed for, is the ideal space of the posthumous—posthuman— unword, what Blanchot calls ‘Ruin of words, demise writing’ (33). The achievement of the posthuman space, the space of death, comes at a high cost, obviously. Malone’s text is testimony—a last will and testament, actually—to the difficulty of shaking off the self that insistently makes itself present in the author’s writing. The final story that Malone tells before his death is the story of the murder of several mental patients at the hands of the schizoid Lemuel (who, again, like Saposcat, may be avatar of Malone himself). Lemuel murders these patients at what appears to be the very moment that Malone himself expires. This conjoining of fictional murder and the death of the writing subject should signal to us the uncanny relation between the writer and his writing.14 In one sense we could argue that by murdering his characters—characters who perhaps always serve only to remind Malone of himself, always, at any rate, working to bring himself back to himself—is a way of killing himself. Writing becomes suicide and thus the posthuman condition, the movement into the space of the unnamable—which perhaps is one ‘name’ for the space of death—is achieved by the murder of writing itself. Surely this is a radical idea and yet surely it makes sense of Malone’s own 122

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observations about his own writing: ‘A thousand little things to report, very strange, in view of my situation, if I interpret them correctly. But my notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record’ (252).These stories, these little failing rehearsals for death, must themselves be eliminated in order for the writing subject to die and finally escape himself. Malone Dies thus seems to bring an end to the writer and any semblance of narrative itself. What, then, can Beckett possibly offer us in The Unnamable? THE UNNAMABLE The Posthuman

In Culture After Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity, Iain Chambers writes: ‘To accept the idea of post-humanism means to register limits; limits that are inscribed in the locality of the body, of the history, the power and the knowledge, that speaks’ (26). In crucial ways Beckett’s works interrogate what it means to be, to exist, at the limit point: Malone’s attempt to inscribe the moment—the limit—of his own life as it becomes his death is a major emblem of this idea. But surely the text that would seem most effectively to embody the idea of the posthuman is The Unnamable, the novel which brings the human to and past its terminal point. And Chambers’ ideas are a good starting point: because in some ways aspects of the body are still in place in The Unnamable, if only to register its limits; some kinds of history and knowledge similarly are in place again if only to register their effacement. This is perhaps to say that for Beckett the posthuman condition is that which acknowledges the extreme limits and limitations of the human—its body, its history, its language, power and knowledge—but it is also one that suggests that because the body persists, despite itself, to spite itself, a full erasure of the human (and its language) is never possible (a theme to be touched on again in Texts for Nothing). Hence, from one perspective, the famous final lines of the novel can be read as a despairing acknowledgment of the failure to bring about a final end of the human: ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (407). What then does this exploration of the posthuman condition mean for the reader? Perhaps, as for the speaker of the novel itself, our first experience of the unnamable’s world is one of confusion: ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ (285). Notice how in these first words, 123

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Beckett dismantles the presuppositions of the conventional novel: instead of giving us the traditional novelistic markers of temporality and identity (‘Call me Ishmael’), Beckett gives his speaker only questions, questions, moreover, shared by the reader himself. And immediately we move beyond questions into direct contradiction. ‘Unquestioning’ (285), the unnamable says after having asked three questions; ‘I, say I. Unbelieving’ (285), he says in a phrase which again dismantles the stability of identity. And surely the most crucial assertion in this first paragraph, as for the novel as a whole, is the unnamable’s inability to name himself, that is, his inability to identify his language as his own: ‘I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me’ (285). We have thus a speaker unsure of where he is, who he is, when he is. We have a speaker not sure that he even is speaking and certainly not able to identify himself as either the speaker or the object of discourse. This is all perhaps to say that, at the outset, for Beckett, the posthuman condition means something like the dismantling of identity and the inability fully to speak of this process of self-dispossession (we have seen hints of this in Moran’s psychological/physical breakdown in Molloy and in the fragmentation of language at the end of Malone Dies).15 Perhaps the easiest way to begin thinking about the posthuman condition is to assert that, for Beckett, to be posthuman is to be postnarrative; that is, to be posthuman is to be in a space where it is impossible to locate oneself within discourse. Notice, for instance, how the sense of the final long sentence in the first paragraph absolutely evaporates as the speaker loses his thread: The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter. (285–86) The unnamable cannot narrate, which is to say, looking at the etymology of the word, the unnamable cannot know or tell his story. But yet, and this is crucial for his construction ‘in’ in the posthuman, he is ‘obliged to speak’ (286). Our task here will be to think about the nature of this obligation as it plays out in this terminal, limit, narrative.

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Speaking/being spoken

Terminal may be the best metaphor here, given the sense readers have that we are in a kind of afterlife. The fact, for instance, that the unnamable sees Malone, who we have presumed dead—‘Of his mortal liveliness little trace remains’ (286)—lends support to the idea that we are quite literally in a posthuman, if not posthumous space. And yet, we are not quite there, not quite at the end: ‘Is this not rather the place where one finishes vanishing?’ (287) the unnamable asks, pointing out that perhaps this is more of a liminal space, a limbo where some trace of the past remains, where the posthuman condition is yet to be achieved.16 What does become clear to the reader is that this text will not tell any coherent story, will not offer even the stuttering failing narratives of Malone Dies, will not offer the aporetic narratives of Molloy or Moran. Here we have simply an extended meditation on the condition of being within an unidentifiable space and time with a radically unstable narrator who spends a great deal of energy thinking about the relation between his position as subject—who he is—and his language. Most curious is the speaker’s assertion that his voice is not his own: This voice that speaks, knowing that it lies . . . It issues from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can’t stop it, I can’t prevent it . . . It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak. (301) I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. (308) I am walled round with their vociferations, none will ever know what I am, none will ever hear me say it, I won’t say it, I can’t say it, I have no language but theirs . . . (319) I say what I am told to say. (339) Is there a single word of mine in all I say? (341) the words are everywhere, inside me, outside me, well well, a minute ago I had no thickness, I hear them, no need to hear them, no need of a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop, I’m in words, made of words, others’ words, what others, the place too,

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the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me, I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, I’m all these flakes . . . I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling . . . (379–80) My own reading of the speaker’s aporetic sense of agency begins with the idea that what he is really speaking about is the relation between language and identity. In some sense we exist insofar as we are able to speak ourselves into being; we exist insofar as we can identify—that is speak about—ourselves; we exist insofar as we can speak about a history, a context. ‘Language is the house of being’ (213), says Heidegger.17 Gadamer puts it another way: ‘Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all’ (Truth and Method: 443). The unnamable’s difficulty resides here: he senses that his language is not his own, that instead of speaking himself into being, he is being spoken into being. He has a curious sense of language as a kind of foreign presence, a virus, if you will, that controls him, rather than a tool that he may control to fix himself in the world.18 A correlative to this sense of language exceeding his grasp is the fluidity of his identify: he refers to himself (or of characters, ‘vice-existers’, who perhaps represent himself) as Basil (303), Mahood (303), and Worm (331), surely this last being a name signaling the absolute loss of anything recognizably human. But I wonder if what the unnamable is sensing here—the fact that language seems to control him—is in fact an accurate representation of what it means actually to be a human subject. Who really can claim to control language? None of us invented the words we speak; none of us really think consciously of the language we use as we use it. Language, to borrow a metaphor from Roland Barthes, precedes and exceeds the human subject.19 It was there before you were born, it will be there after you are gone: you are, in some sense, simply along for the ride. The unnamable’s sense that he is made of others’ word is, frankly, an accurate reflection of being human, but given that the unnamable’s is such a dramatic presentation of a condition of coming after, the posthuman, can we not thus begin to read the text as a suggestion that being human is in some sense always already to be posthuman in one’s relation to language? That is, does The Unnamable not finally suggest that being human is always to be forced to 126

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relinquish control over one’s sense of self insofar as the self is language? The novel suggests therefore that our identities are already formed by a preexisting order of things—that is, discourse—and the human simply ‘catches up’ to what is already in place.20 We are always in the space of coming after a system of language which preconditions our being and that finally and fundamentally, therefore, must create us as discontinuous beings. As the unnamable says: ‘I. Who might that be?’ (330). The truly unsettling effect of this question, as for all instances where the unnamable speaks of himself in the first person (which is often), is that this signifier ‘I’, one we assume to be absolute in its reference to the speaking subject, now floats free of his control: this word ‘I’ is not his and thus even these extended meditations on being dispossessed of language cannot be said to reflect truly his condition, which, unsettlingly, is our condition.21 Subject as character

The unnamable, as ‘character’, thus is an allegory of all humans, an allegory of what it means to be within language that precedes and exceeds you: we may suggest here that Beckett, by demonstrating our own resemblance to the unnamable’s condition of being in language, has in fact succeeded in critiquing any facile opposition of human/ posthuman. But the unnamable is also a representation of a specific kind of human, one with an acute relation to language. The text is woven through with suggestions that the speaker of this text is in fact the creator of the previous novels in this trilogy. ‘All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone’ (297). As we read these lines we may pause and think again of what the unnamable has said about being spoken into existence: what is a more perfect representation of the idea of being spoken, written into existence, than a character within a novel? Murphy, Molloy, and Malone now look to have no agency at all because they are merely characters within a novel (indeed, this is precisely what I argued in my chapter on Murphy!). What now is clear is that the unnamable is, first, perhaps the author of these previous characters and, more uncannily, alive to the sense that perhaps he also is a character within a novel similarly being 127

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spoken by a voice, an authority, an author, preceding and exceeding him. The Unnamable thus becomes a novel of acute self-consciousness, self-awareness, and self-reflexivity: a novel with a character who is an author meditating on being a character within a novel. And perhaps now we can begin to see his shifting from one identity to another— from Basil to Mahood to Worm—as the unnamable’s desperate attempt to assert a kind of agency within the limited space of interiority he has been given. Within this ‘oubliette’ (362), this dungeon of his own diminished and forgotten interiority, the unnamable is able, indeed compelled, to assert himself in the face of his own absolute weakness. The unnamable, like a great number of Beckett’s characters, wishes to stop speaking, which amounts to the desire to stop being: but his sense of being within the control of another, within the authorizing language of another, within the novel of another, makes his desire an absolute impossibility: Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing. (296) We can thus piece together a sense of the aporia of being a subject within Beckett. The subject is always subject to the authorizing control of another; the subject is controlled by the authorizing discourse of another who precedes and exceeds him; the subject, nevertheless, is compelled—obliged—to speak knowing that his language is not his own (surely we are reminded of Not I). If language is the house of being, the Beckettian subject is homeless. Yet, he is forced to speak of this condition of distance. And we should, of course, recall Beckett’s own sense of his relation to language and the artistic impulse. In Three Dialogues he has said that he prefers: ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (139). Surely this summation of the artistic obligation is strikingly similar to the condition of being that the unnamable traces: homelessness, distance, from desire, power, and language. If I am correct in positing a definition of the posthuman as that which cannot control language, is it possible that 128

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Beckett outlines here a sense of the artist as posthuman? If we translate his self-diagnosis to the representation of the unnamable as artist, the answer of course is yes. I wish to conclude here by suggesting that The Unnamable brings us as close as possible to the posthuman condition if we take that condition to mean the following: an absolute diminishing of the material, phenomenal body; a distance from discourse (what I am calling ‘homelessness’); an existence on the limit, ‘in’ the limit, of what it means, thus, to be human. In some sense the unnamable has become merely a series of impulses, a reflex action of a language that dictates his movement, his thoughts. He has not fully left behind the materiality of the body (he speaks of his tears, hands, knees), but we never feel his body cohere. He is, to borrow once more and finally from Blanchot, a subjectivity without a subject: he is a free-floating consciousness attached to no particular body or agency but at times exhibits a kind of compromised interiority (he does, we cannot forget, actively meditate on the condition of being spoken). Here is Blanchot: One ought perhaps to speak of a subjectivity without any subject: the wounded space, the hurt of the dying, the already dead body which no one could ever own, or ever say of it, I, my body. This is a body animated solely by mortal desire: the desire of dying— desire that dies and does not thereby subside. (30) The unnamable says ‘I think I’ll soon be dead, I hope I find it a change’ (389) indicating, with brutal humor, that he inhabits a condition that is perhaps already posthumous; he has indicated, as we have seen, his distance from himself, his identity and body: ‘I. Who might that be?’ His sole desire, if desire is the correct word—perhaps ‘compulsion’ is a better word, perhaps ‘obligation’—is to find the means to end his language: ‘the search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue’ (293). Spoken against his will, the unnamable’s desire is to find the end of speech which, as for Malone, will mean the end of his being. His desire, therefore, truly is for the desire of the Other to cease. For is it not clear that it is the language of the Other that animates him? Is it not clear that this viral language seems to exhibit the desire to keep the unnamable alive? Is it not clear that this desire of language, be it the desire of the author’s language, or merely language altogether, is what must stop in order for the unnamable finally to fade away? 129

CHAPTER 6

TEXTS FOR NOTHING, THE SECOND TRILOGY

But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying. —Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia

TEXTS FOR NOTHING

In the final sentence of his recent book How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, who has never paid much attention to Beckett’s work, unexpectedly links the unnamable’s inability to cease being with the Lacanian notion of the drive: This simple persistence against all odds is ultimately the stuff ethics is made of—or, as Samuel Beckett puts it in the last words of the absolute masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, The Unnameable (sic), a saga of the drive that perseveres in the guise of an undead partial object, ‘in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’. (119–20) Zizek is correct to note the link between Lacan and Beckett, but I wonder if his comment might apply more accurately to the work which immediately followed The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing. Published in French in 1955 (in English in 1967) these thirteen short texts are uncannily similar in tone to The Unnamable. It is as difficult to know where and when these stories occur; the narrator is never fully identifiable; there is no plot to speak about; the subject of the texts—the speaking subject, what Zizek calls the ‘undead partial object’—is as likely an exemplar of Blanchot’s subjectivity without any subject as the unnamable. Beckett himself referred to the texts as 130

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‘the grisly afterbirth of L’innomable’ (Brater: 254) thereby genetically linking the two texts.1 He also, importantly, considered Texts a failure: in an interview with Israel Shenker he said he had hoped Texts for Nothing would enable him to ‘get out of the attitude of disintegration [of the trilogy] but it failed’ (‘An Interview’: 148). I here will consider these texts as furthering Beckett’s own drive to put an end to the human subject and as part of his attempt to find the ‘literature of the unword’, that quest that had haunted him since 1937. Texts for Nothing, as well as the texts comprising the so-called second trilogy, thus will be read here as continuing Beckett’s exploration of the link between posthuman subjectivities and posthuman discourse. The failure to end

Perhaps Beckett’s idea that Texts represents a failure of sorts is the best place to begin. He considers them a failure because they were unable to get past the attitude of disintegration in the trilogy, especially, I suggest, in The Unnamable. This sense of failure would imply that he had hoped, perhaps, that Texts would see an integration of sorts. But it is hard to think that Beckett wished simply to revert to a more coherent view of the subject, of the human. I am thus tempted to see the regret that Beckett expresses as symptomatic more of his sense that he has failed to put an end, finally, to the human. That is to say, the sense of failure to get past this attitude of disintegration expresses not a vain hope that the subject would again cohere but a frustration that the subject persists despite Beckett’s best efforts to destroy it. Zizek’s idea of the ‘undead partial object’ is the perfect metaphor for Beckett’s subjectivity without subject, given that the speaker of these texts will variously represent himself as alive and dead and only partially embodied, ‘almost restored to the feasible’ (4: 308), and yet strangely insistent on claiming a kind of life. The speaker of these texts here becomes the lingering ‘nothing’ to which the title, perhaps, refers: he is a no-thing rather than a no-one because he has moved past all claims to a fully human position. Our task as readers of these texts, therefore, is to try and understand the peculiar state of the speaker, a state that confounds and defies the author himself. And my suggestion is that we must begin by linking these texts—as Beckett himself does—back to The Unnamable. In that text the subject truly only existed insofar as he was spoken by 131

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an agency preceding and exceeding him. More, he seemed to inhabit a time and space not immediately (or ever) identifiable: he may be in a kind of temporal-spatial limbo, a no-man’s land (or time) ‘after’ death. If that position were not complicated enough, consider now the position (or positions) of the speaker (or speakers) of Texts for Nothing. In the first line of the first text the speaker, alluding clearly to the last line of The Unnamable, makes it clear that he has failed to take the unnamable’s ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ to heart: ‘Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more, I couldn’t go on’ (1:295). He suggests that, while he does have a body (‘I say to the body, Up with you now’ [1:295]), the body may itself be dead ‘I am down in the hole the centuries have dug’ (1:296) where faces look down on him ‘as in a graveyard’ (1:296). Having ‘given myself up for dead all over the place’ (1:297) it seems the speaker further complicates the ontological position of the unnamable. Perhaps the best way to think of the speakers of these texts is as a spectral subject: the speaker has died but, like a phantom, is still haunting the world, and, what is more, haunting himself: ‘nothing like breathing your last to put new life in you’ (1:298). Our subject exists in what we could call the aftermath of ontology: he is beyond life, beyond death, beyond time, beyond space. But yet these texts make references to real geographical locations (The Gobi desert [3:302]; London [6:313]; Ireland, Paris [8:322], to people (Mr Joly; the Graves brothers [2:300; 301]). There is an uncanny sense in which these texts manifest the most perplexing subjectivity in Beckett (a living subject who is dead) and place that subjectivity in a recognizable world. Our task is to begin thinking about what it would mean to be a spectral subject, to attempt, that is, to think through the logic of the state beyond ontology—‘no souls, or bodies, or birth, or life, or death’ (10:329)—but which persists within a world that we know. ‘Fantasies of non-being’

Hugh Kenner usefully referred to Texts for Nothing as thirteen ‘fantasies of non-being’ (119). And in some ways this description is still the best. I think it is possible to begin sifting through these texts to see how Beckett offers a variety of these phantasmic positions, how he offers a series of meditations on what it means, or what it would

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mean, not to be.2 For instance, some of these texts read like the thoughts of a prisoner: ‘Do my keepers snatch a little rest and sleep before setting about me afresh’ (6:313); or perhaps these texts represent the disordered thoughts of an Alzheimer’s patient (but one who, painfully, is aware of his mind slipping away from him): What can have become then of the tissues I was, I can see them no more, feel them no more, flaunting and fluttering all about me and inside me . . . The eyes, yes, if these memories are mine, I must have believed in them an instant, believed it was me I saw there dimly in the depths of their glades. (6:314–15) Perhaps the speaker is simply one suffering in the aftermath of a massive, yet unnamed (perhaps because unnamable) trauma, a trauma that has disordered his sense of time and space: Yes, my past has thrown me out, its gates have slammed behind me, or I burrowed my way out alone, to linger a moment free in a dream of days and nights, dreaming of me moving, season after season, towards the last, like the living, till suddenly I was here, all memory gone. (8:320–21) These fantasies—of being a prisoner, of being a patient, of suffering an unknowable trauma—all amount to the same thing: the subject is cast into a time and space (but as he says ‘time has turned into space and there will be no more time’ [8:320]) where he is no longer fully present to himself, to the world. To use the speaker’s own gruesome image (and one to which I will return), the speaker of these texts has died, several times, rehearses his death several times, is dead in more ways than one: ‘prayers will be offered for my soul, as for that of one dead, as for that of an infant dead in its dead mother, that it may not go to Limbo’ (5:312). As the speaker says in Text 11, ‘I am dead, but I never lived’ (11:333). One can only die if one has lived: what therefore does it mean for one not to have lived and to have died? We will find ourselves on familiar, if unstable, ground here when we read this sentence back into the preceding novel: if this speaker in some ways is genetically related to the unnamable, it becomes clear that he, of course, has not lived, because no fictional character ever lives. And thus we

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come to yet another version of the fantasy of nonbeing: the fantasy of being a character and, what will amount to the same thing, the fantasy of being an author. Dead characters/dead stories

In Text 10, the speaker, describing his state of being beyond ontology says: ‘no souls, or bodies, or birth, or life, or death, you’ve got to go on without any of that junk, that’s all dead with words, with excess of words’ (10:329).3 The speaker seems here to imply that language is never adequate to its task of describing the present state of (non) being. But he also suggests that language is really all we have to go on, all we have, in other words, to comprehend what cannot be comprehended. These texts, to use a word that the speaker himself uses frequently, are ‘impossible’: they describe the ‘impossible night’ (12:335) of temporality; the ‘impossible body’ (12:335) of the posthuman subject; the ‘impossible voice’ (11:334; 12:339) of that which speaks about being unable to speak. And yet, this character, this speaker, this function—and perhaps this is the best word to describe the posthuman subject—is still animated by language, if only to be buried under its ‘wordshit’ (9:325). The posthuman subject animating these texts is acutely aware of himself as a function of language, as speaking another’s words: ‘all I say will be false and to begin with not said by me, here I’m a mere ventriloquist’s dummy’ (8:321). Here the subject sees himself as an observer of a life not quite his own, yet not quite removed from his own: ‘I’m the clerk, I’m the scribe, at the hearings of what cause I know not. Why want it to be mine, I don’t want it’ (5:309). Trapped within what appears to be (at least in Text 5) a posthumous courtroom, the speaker writes about a life that has been (his own) and upon which some kind of judgment is being passed: That’s where the court sits this evening, in the depths of that vaulty night, that’s where I’m clerk and scribe, not understanding what I hear, not knowing what I write. That’s where the council will be tomorrow, prayers will be offered for my soul, as for that of one dead, as for that of an infant dead in its dead mother, that it may not go to Limbo. (5:311) The subject of Text 5 thus seems to be an author-figure of some sort. And while it is possible to think of Texts for Nothing as having 134

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a continuous speaker who bears the same voice across all thirteen texts, this seems a massive assumption given Beckett’s obvious fascination with the idea of the fragmented subject. I wonder if one way of thinking through the thorny complexities of these texts, complexities involving a dizzying switching between narrative and subjective perspectives (sometimes within the same text), is via the idea that Texts for Nothing is a series of monologues spoken by characters aware of their author. What we have here, more precisely, is a presentation of a series of monologues spoken by characters all meditating on their status as characters and all, in some way, thinking about their author/creator who, not accidentally of course, bears a sharp resemblance to the fictionalized author-figure of The Unnamable. I imagine Texts for Nothing, further—and here things get a bit more complicated!—as texts spoken by characters who are aware that they are characters, but who speak not necessarily the words of their author. This is a massive complication: these texts are to be imagined as if the characters, momentarily, could speak for themselves. Some texts, as for instance, Text 4, see the subject thinking through what it means to be a character in another’s text, wondering what it would mean to achieve some kind of freedom from the tyranny of the author: ‘Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me?’ (4:306). The subject here goes on to think about the author function: The truth is he looking for me to kill me, to have me dead like him, dead like the living. He knows all that, but it’s no help his knowing it, I don’t know it, I know nothing . . . He thinks words fail him, he thinks because words fail him he’s on his way to my speechlessness, to being speechless with my speechlessness, he would like it to be my fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He tells his story every five minutes, saying it is not his, there’s cleverness for you . . . If at least he would dignify me with the third person, like his other figments, not he, he’ll be satisfied with nothing less than me, for his me. (4:306–07) We begin to realize that what this subject is referring to are the complexities of the unnamable’s repeatedly stated position that he is not the one speaking his own story. Text 4 works at once as a kind of commentary on The Unnamable—as a harsh critique of the idea 135

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of the author repudiating his responsibilities for his words, his stories, his characters (Molloy and Malone are in fact mentioned by name [4:307])—and as an indication that we have moved beyond even the unnamable’s position of radical passivity before the forces of a discourse which precedes and exceeds him. We now have moved beyond the terminal narrative of The Unnamable into a series of texts that fictionalize that already densely fictionalized and fictionalizing world. What becomes clear thus is that each speaker of Texts for Nothing is doubly spoken: he is a character within the imagination of another character (the unnamable) who is himself being imagined by Beckett. I wonder if that disturbing image of the baby dead within a dead mother now becomes clear? Our speaker is a character within a character whose author is trying to write him into silent ‘inexistence’ (4:306). ‘Long live all our phantoms’

And thus, for this all to end, for silence to come to these doubled speakers, language must fail on multiple levels, for multiple subjects, multiple agencies. But knowing as we do that this is an impossibility, that language cannot erase itself while speaking about that erasure (we recall Malone Dies), these texts begin to take on the veneer of a deep mourning, a mourning for the failure of language to end, an impossible mourning for the subject who cannot die because his language has not the sufficient strength to kill him. Being will not cease because language, these ‘Vile words to make me believe I’m here’ (11:332), will not cease. In Text 8 the speaker describes his words thusly: And I should hear, at every little pause, if it’s the silence I say when I say that only the words break it. But nothing of the kind, that’s not how it is, it’s for ever the same murmur, flowing unbroken, like a single endless word and therefore meaningless, for it’s the end gives the meaning to words . . . But get on with the stupid old threne . . . (8:320) The speaker’s life has no meaning because it lacks an end (we recall the Heideggerian notion that death is what gives meaning to life because it gives life its final shape, its ultimate narrative pattern). The speaker’s word ‘threne’ is crucial; it is a variation on the word 136

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‘threnody’, a song of lamentation. The speaker knows he is mourning, but this, like everything, is an impossible mourning because his life cannot end, cannot even really be said to have begun, given his overtly fictionalized status. But he still hopes for what he calls a ‘desinence’: ‘But it will end, a desinence will come, or the breath fail better still, I’ll be silence’ (8:321). His desinence—the word means ‘grammatical ending’—will only come if the breath of the author will fail; in this case the speaker needs the author-figure and, perhaps Beckett himself, to die in order for his life to be over.4 We should, finally, make note of the last words of these strange, deeply sad, texts: we should listen carefully to how Beckett signals an end for what cannot ever really end (for how can the spectral subject die? How can a phantom die being already dead?); we should attend to how Beckett, perhaps against his own desire and best interests, signals that the impossible voice continues even beyond itself, beyond its own life and its own death. Texts for Nothing, as the final words of Text 13 make manifestly clear, should finally be read as series of impossible epitaphs, crypt-markers enclosing what is dead yet cannot die: And were the voice to cease quite at last, the old ceasing voice, it would not be true, as it is not true that it speaks, it can’t speak, it can’t cease. And were there one day to be here, where there are no days, which is no place, born of the impossible voice the unmakable being, and a gleam of light, still all would be silent and empty and dark, as now, as soon now, when all will be ended, all said, it says, it murmurs. (13:339) Notice how the desire for silence—and were the voice to cease—is articulated only to be vitiated, emptied out, in the inevitable realization that voice—the voice of the author, of character—cannot ever speak itself into oblivion. To speak the unword, to cancel the self within the protocols of speech and narrative—plainly: to speak the end of speech—is an impossibility even, and perhaps especially, within the space of death: ‘Long live all our phantoms’ (5:311). THE SECOND TRILOGY COMPANY

Thirty years come between Texts for Nothing and the so-called second trilogy, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho.5 In this period 137

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Beckett worked assiduously to decompose the protocols of prose beyond the terminal points of the first trilogy, producing texts like How It Is (1960), All Strange Away (1963–64), Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), and Fizzles (1973–75). I read these texts as all contributing to the overarching goal of the literature of the unword, working as they do to unsettle readerly expectation of content and genre. Indeed these texts at times read more like poetry than prose, but to call them poetry is simply to fall into the temptation to classify texts that are perhaps beyond generic classification. How for instance, should we read these lines of How It Is? past moments old dreams back again or fresh like those that pass or things things always and memories I say them as I hear them murmur them in the mud (411) Where do we place our emphasis, imagine line markers and syntax to be functioning? As always Beckett sunders genre, grammar, and syntax, and in turn teaches us how to read all over again.6 But there is something truly uncanny about Beckett’s late prose. As it becomes less and less novelistic, as it verges away from the protocols of narrative and even syntax, the emotions of the prose become more acutely human; as the subject, the self, becomes more ghostly, spectral, fully posthuman (if not posthumous: by now we must recognize how Beckett empties the idea of ‘death’ of all meaning), the subject’s world—his losses, terrors, his desolate sadness—becomes absolutely recognizable and evokes a terrific, if not terrifying, sympathetic response. Solitude Company, for instance, surely is one of the most powerful, moving explorations of loneliness and aging in literature. And Beckett is clear about what this text is ‘about’: it is about the need, desire, for company, for the presence of another being, an other, simply, who may confirm one’s own desires, one’s own identity.7 It is, more precisely, an enormously self-conscious meditation on one’s need for company.8 For, as it becomes apparent almost immediately, the subject in this narrative is split into a variety of positions, selves, agencies: narrator, hearer, and the voice who dictates the hearer’s memories to him. As it splits the subject thus, Company externalizes memory, places it outside the subject, alienates it, questions it. What then is this situation 138

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where one’s memories are externalized? Is Company, like Texts for Nothing, a meditation on the process of losing one’s memory? A meditation on amnesia? An exploration of the disordered logic of an Alzheimer’s sufferer? 9 Despite its manifest complications Company offers itself as unexpectedly readable, interpretable. It tracks the way in which an individual, old, isolated, his mind drifting, meditates on the process of inventing himself a companion: this companion, as becomes painfully clear, is really his own former self dictating his own memories back to him. The narrator puts it thusly: Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company. Leave it at that. He speaks of himself as of another. He says speaking of himself, He speaks of himself as of another. Himself he devises too for company. (435) The narrative thus modulates between the narrator thinking through the logic of the mind working to assuage its own loneliness and the voice presenting a variety of memories to the hearer who has no choice but to listen. Obviously, there is something rather pathological about all this: if the narrator, voice, and hearer, really do comprise a single entity, we are presented with a subject shattered into (at least) three elements, but who is absolutely aware of this process of discontinuity. Perhaps more accurately, one aspect of his interior self— the narrator proper—seems to have an awareness of the situation the other aspects do not, or simply do not care to, acknowledge. Most importantly, the hearer’s memories have been separated from him: the narrator suggests at one point that the narrative is working to have the hearer recognize these memories as his own: ‘To have the hearer have a past and acknowledge it’ (438). What does this constellation of subjectivities imply? At one level we are on familiar ground: a subject who is disconnected from his past. This complex should again remind us of the speaker of Texts for Nothing: ‘My past has thrown me out’; we should also recall Mouth in Not I, who absolutely refuses to acknowledge her past as being her own (or Krapp, defiantly disavowing the emotional claims of his own past). But Mouth denies her past out of absolute terror of a trauma that preceded her fall into the Symbolic realm of the social, of society itself. Our subject here in Company, on the other hand, seems not to be refusing to acknowledge his past, but is perhaps unable to do so. 139

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But there is one line in Company that problematizes things; the narrator refers to the hearer as ‘devising figments to temper his nothingness’ (443) as if the hearer is creating other subjectivities as a way of strengthening his loneliness, his nothingness (‘to temper’ can mean to make strong). Perhaps the narrator understands that the process of creating company really only ever reinforces the solitude of the creator given the manifest fictionality of the created being. And this is where things get complex. On one hand we are back into Beckett’s favorite thematic arena: the author meditating on the process of creating fictions. But here in Company Beckett has taken this metafictional trope and applied it directly to a single subject who is figured not necessarily as an author of fictions (unlike, say, the narrator of The Unnamable, or the speaker in Texts for Nothing who figures himself explicitly as a ‘scribe’). In other words, Beckett is now thinking about the idea that all subjects, not only authors, are creators of fictions—memories, pasts, histories—that serve only to temper solitude, nothingness. Beckett’s Company here begins to ask some very difficult questions: Who or what really is in control of our memories, and thus ourselves? Do we, or does some other entity, create our pasts? If the past is a creation, a fiction—a ‘fable’, to use the narrator’s own word—what precisely is the truth value of our past and our present version of ourselves? These questions about memory should remind us of a similar question posed in regard to language in The Unnamable. There we explored the idea that the subject is subject to the language of a system—Lacan would call it the register of the Symbolic—that precedes and exceeds him: in this sense the subject is a created entity rather than one who creates his world. In Company the narrator speaks of the ‘Devised deviser devising it all for company’ (443): the subject is a deviser in the sense that he in some ways constructs his own (illusive) reality; he is devised in the sense that his notion of self is dependant upon being communicated in the language of memory that he himself does not control. The idea that language precedes and exceeds the subject, while perhaps abstract, does make a kind of logical sense. What happens, however, when we begin to look at the idea that memory precedes and exceeds the subject? What happens, precisely, when memory is externalized and alienated? We have above considered that Company may be an extended analysis of illness, of an illness like Alzheimer’s; perhaps the subject, like the subject in 140

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Texts, is suffering from some kind of trauma that has split him into three constituent, yet alien, aspects of himself; perhaps Company really is simply about the process of growing old (Beckett was in his seventies when he wrote the text); perhaps with age comes a heightened sense of one’s memories as belonging to ‘another country’.10 Spectral subjects I think these readings are all possible but I also think we need to pay careful attention to the trajectory of Beckett’s career and keep in mind that he is always working his way toward an effacement of the subject, to an eradication of body and voice. Given this trajectory, Company is a stop on the way to a kind of posthumanism, where the subject, now sundered into many aspects, cannot with any degree of certainty be called a subject. If, as we have been arguing throughout this study, memory is what constructs the self, if memory allows the subject to place himself within the stream of temporality—time and history—we have here in Company, a subject divorced from his own memory and thus one who cannot with any real comfort be called a subject. I wish to be clear about this idea; I am not suggesting that one suffering from memory loss—an amnesiac, an Alzheimer’s patient—is not a person in the ethical, moral, or legal senses of the term. I am suggesting that Beckett is centrally concerned with the question of what makes a person in the philosophical sense of the term. How precisely, he asks, are we expected to comprehend—to read, interpret, and understand—the subject whose memories are not his own? The subject without memory? My own suggestion is we are again encountering a version of the spectral subject, the subject who, if not dead in this case, lives far from memory and thus far from what creates him as fully present to his own life. But this is a position, while at some level surely desirable in as much as it creates the illusion of company, that the narrator realizes cannot be sustained (to be specter to one’s own life must surely be one definition of madness). To maintain oneself on the limits of the human—recall our definition of the posthuman: to exist at the limits—places a burden upon the resources that sustain that illusion: the imagination and its adjunct, language: ‘Huddled thus you find yourself imagining you are not alone while knowing full well that nothing has occurred to make this possible. The process continues none the less lapped as it were in its meaninglessness’ (449).Where language fails, the illusion of the past divorced from the hearer will 141

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concomitantly fail. This acknowledgment must, inevitably, painfully, reconstruct the subject in his absolute solitude: loneliness is the ferocious price the acknowledgment of history demands. By forgoing the illusion of company—that is, by refusing the comfort of a plural self in his fictions, his ‘fable’ (450)—the subject coheres into an absolute solitude, as the final lines make clear: Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the end. 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. (450) These final lines, with their repudiation of the power of language— the fable—to sustain the illusion of plurality, recalls us to the familiar Beckett trope: failure, here, precisely, the failure of desire. Like Malone’s stories, which fail as play, fail to erase the self, the subject’s fables here fail to sustain the illusion of company and thus only ever serve to temper a nothingness within which the self will forever remain, desiring what can only ever remain impossible. But can a self coherent in its singular loneliness, a self no longer able to hallucinate its own discontinuity, be called a posthuman subject any longer? Our subject has arrived at a painful realization of its own continuity, its own singularity: it really does not exist at any kind of limit where its memories precede him from another source. We may, simply as a parting aporetic observation notice, however, that it is still the voice that dictates this failure to the hearer: ‘you as you always were’. Fables may fail to sustain the illusion of company but some remnant, some trace, of company—of some posthuman fragmentation of interiority—surely is always present in the mind which, as for all minds, reflects upon itself if only to be reminded of what it cannot ever attain. ILL SEEN ILL SAID

The image (2) As we read Ill Seen Ill Said and take note of its structure—in this case its nonlinear, nonnarrative structure—we may, perhaps should, recall the trajectory of Beckett’s drama from plays with (more or less)

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embodied characters to plays that operate only as a pretext for a dominating image (Not I, Play, Happy Days). Beckett’s drama attempts to pare down the presence of the human—and recognizable human drama—in favor of an image that characterizes the integral element of the subject: a mouth, a head in an urn, a body, embedded in dirt. Beckett is doing something related in his final prose. He is removing all claims to narrative—story, character, plot, even the syntax of a language that would support these things—in favor of a dominating series of images, or even mood. It is true that the earlier prose began removing the conventions of narrative but even in the radical experiments of the first trilogy—and I would argue even up until Company— we have a sense that syntax, grammar, and language, if failing, were still, in a way, functioning to reflect a subjectivity that we somehow could recognize as failing. In texts like Ill Seen Ill Said or Worstward Ho Beckett moves into a language and narrative form that approaches a deadly stillness, where a voice dictates—paints, almost—the vague parameters of the subject from an almost inhuman distance. Beckett here shatters his prose into discrete short paragraphs and fragmented phrases that work effectively to deny the very idea of a continuous narrative, or continuous subjectivity: as the subject becomes a ghost, the language describing the ghost itself is spectralized, becomes only a trace of what it once was. No real stories, no identifiable memories are easily linked back to the human subject: she is radically silent, spectrally still, possessing the imagistic quality of a series of photographs.11 To speak of plot in relation to this text thus is an absurdity. We must rather speak of what images are presented to us: an old woman alone in an isolated cabin; the same woman at a gravesite; the woman watched by twelve real, imagined, or dead figures; the woman watched by a single man who may or may not be the ghost of her dead husband; the woman pursued by an eye, a witness to her solitude. This woman, the narrative voice tells us, is dead—‘of course she is’ (464)— but for the purposes of this story it is ‘more convenient’(464) that she remain alive to have ‘the misfortune to be still of this world’ (453). Thus, she is alive and not alive; she exists at the whim of narrator who needs her to ‘be’ in order to accomplish some task. And we should be clear that the narrator is aware, and communicates this awareness, that he is able to manipulate this figure for his own purposes ‘Have her sit? Lie? Kneel? Go?’ (466); but he also

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makes clear that this is not a fiction, even as he highlights his function as an author and authority figure: Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed . . . . If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. (456) Yet later he adds: ‘Not possible any longer except as figment. Not endurable’ (459). I wonder if this expression of a desire to move beyond the real into fiction is the narrator’s way of expressing a kind of compassion for the reality of this woman and her suffering, a way of displacing and disavowing a suffering for which he, as author, is responsible. And certainly there is an element of cruelty to this story that speaks to the element of cruelty in all fictions, all creations: the author is bringing a subject into being and placing her, ‘throwing’ her, to borrow again from Heidegger, into a world not of her choosing. Seeing badly/witnessing badly And our narrator admits further that his representation, and here we look to the title of the narrative, is ineffective: the events are ill seen and ill said, badly witnessed, badly represented. The narrator several times draws our attention to the fact that words are not adequate to his task of representing this woman: ‘what the wrong word?’ (454; 455; 470) he asks. And this text is all about representing things seen: it thus, and here we may recall the thematic of Watt, is all about witnessing, ineffective witnessing, cruel witnessing. Recall that this woman is being watched by at least three constituencies: twelve figures, a man, an eye. These witnesses recall us to a primary theme in Beckett, one traced through the drama and the fiction (and indeed into Film) and summed up perfectly in a line from Play: ‘Am I as much as being seen?’ Do I exist solely because of the gaze of the Other? The Other’s gaze thus, like the author’s imagination, brings the subject into being and, as we previously discussed, this is an onerous responsibility, given the fact—and this is a central concern in Endgame—that characters often wish not to be in the world that is witnessed into being on their behalf. In Ill Seen Ill Said, however, Beckett complicates things somewhat. First he suggests that the woman has a degree of power over her viewers: ‘She shows herself only to her own’ (453) the narrator says, 144

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implying that she chooses to display herself within a context of the familiar; perhaps she only shows herself to the specters, the spectral witnesses, of her own past. But the narrator moves on to say ‘But she has no own. Yes yes she has one. And who has her’ (453). This line, puzzling, suggests a myriad of readings. This ‘one’ may be the specter of her lost husband; the ‘one’ may be herself (we are reminded of the logic of solitude in Company, how loneliness leads to the creation of Others by the self); the ‘one’ may be the author calling her into being; the ‘one’ may in fact be you, the reader, who conjures her in your own imagination.12 The narrator makes clear that the woman’s audience may be under her control to a degree by suggesting that all her viewers, but perhaps primarily the male viewer, are imaginary: the narrative voice refers to him as ‘the imaginary stranger’ (453). Perhaps she, like the subject in Company, is imagining herself pursued by ghosts of a past long dead but conjured into being once more: and thus the text becomes another melancholy meditation on the economy of loneliness. The seeing eye But there is more happening here. Beckett is not only concerned with tracing the economy of loneliness in a solitary figure; he is not, that is, only observing how the subject conjures specters for company. He is interested in what can be called, perhaps paradoxically, the life of the specter. If the subject needs to be witnessed in order to exist (even against her will) the witness also needs to watch. On one hand, from the perspective of the subject being witnessed, to be is to be perceived; from the specter’s perspective, however, to be is to perceive. To be precise, to be is to be unable not to perceive, not to gaze, not to watch. As Ill Seen Ill Said proceeds it becomes clear that our attention is being drawn as much to the eye as to the woman. It becomes clear, moreover, that the eye really has the power to perceive this world—including this woman—into existence, into being. Late in the text the narrator describes again the woman’s cabin; it seems to have changed for the worse, but oddly not to have altered in any fundamental way: ‘When all worse there than when first ill seen. The pallet. The chair. The coffer. The trap. Alone the eye has changed. Alone can cause to change’ (468). This is a crucial line indicating as it does that the eye has the power to alter the reality of this reduced, denuded, world. The power to perceive is the power to alter the reality of things. And yet, for all its power, the eye is still dependent on 145

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the world it creates, is still tied (and we recall Beckett’s fascination with the economy of these terrible bindings [Lucky/Pozzo; Vladimir/ Estragon]) to the world it simultaneously creates and haunts. The penultimate paragraph of Ill Seen Ill Said makes this clear: the woman seems to have disappeared, perhaps having undergone some kind of burial, self-burial, or death: ‘Alone the face remains. Of the rest beneath its covering no trace’ (469); the eye is left to perceive or create an absent world and the narrator ruminates on the link between the eye and this emptiness: Absence supreme good and yet. Illumination then go again and on return no more trace. On earth’s face. Of what was never. And if by mishap some left then go again. For good again. So on. Till no more trace. On earth’s face. Instead of always in the same place. Slaving away forever in the same place. At this and that trace. And what if the eye could not? No more tear itself away from the remains of trace. Of what was never. Quick say it suddenly can and farewell say say farewell. If only to the face. Of her tenacious face. (470) In some sense this paragraph presents in miniature the trajectory of Beckett’s entire career as a writer. If this eye can be allegorized as the author perceiving the world into being, here the eye is figured as working toward the eradication of the human from that world: if some trace of things remains, the narrator says, the eye will come and effect its erasure ‘Till no more trace’. Beckett’s career has been working toward a kind of posthuman position as well, dismantling the subject and the subject’s language until only traces of it remain, specters of broken grammars supporting broken people. But, the narrator asks, what if the eye cannot tear itself away from the remains of the human, what if the eye, like Beckett, is continually haunted by, just as he haunts, the specter of the human ‘Slaving away forever in the same place’? This idea seems terrible to the narrator and so: ‘Quick say it suddenly can and farewell say say farewell. If only to the face. Of her tenacious face’. The face that Beckett, like Levinas, knows is the seat of the human, the place of the essence of what makes us human, is tenacious and will remain if only in trace, ‘drawn by a phantom hand’ (470), asserting itself to the eye, to Beckett, to us all. There is a desire for the eye, for Beckett, to eradicate the face, all traces of the human ‘Sky earth the whole kit and 146

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boodle’ (470), but the human persists if only in spectral form, if only as a trace animating the very writing, the very witnessing, that testifies to its stubborn persistence.13 WORSTWARD HO

In some ways Beckett’s career as a prose writer, perhaps a writer altogether, finds its terminus in Worstward Ho. I have been arguing that since 1937 Beckett has been searching for the means to move beyond conventional literary discourse, beyond, perhaps, even language itself. Part of our trajectory, therefore, has been to explore how for Beckett language is intimately tied up with being: in simple terms, language is what makes the human; language supports being. A hypothesis follows: if you dismantle language, if you find what Beckett calls the ‘literature of unword’, perhaps then you also dismantle the human, or at least you dismantle one avenue into understanding the human qua human. Thus we have asked questions: what would it mean to be without language? Without memory? As Beckett became interested in separating the human subject from its memories and its language he also altered our conception of the human: we have therefore begun speaking of the posthuman, that agency existing on the very limits of what we can comprehend and understand. Worstward Ho, though not Beckett’s final prose work (that is 1988s Stirrings Still), is the most fully realized attempt to articulate a language that refuses to support and reflect a recognizably human world, a language that barely can function as a language at all. This is a text, therefore, that I wish to characterize as moving as closely as possible to Beckett’s goal of the literature of the unword. In The German Letter Beckett expresses boredom with the literary conventions of ‘Grammar and Style’ (171): Worstward Ho will work toward their cancellation; in the Letter he expresses an unease with the very idea of language as such: ‘As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute’ (172): Worstward Ho will do its best to cancel language’s claims to represent experience and the world by dissolving the very ‘materiality of the word surface’ (172); in the Letter Beckett expresses the desire, the paradoxical, impossible, desire, to reach the ‘literature of the unword’: Worstward Ho, in its radical decomposition of grammar, style, syntax, and story comes as close as we can to 147

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a literature that seems to erase itself as it proceeds. But, and here is the paradox, it is still a literature, it is still a language: the unword, despite its threatened erasure, is still a word. The least an author can do The content of this late text is simple enough. A narrator posits a series of figures: a solitary figure, a man and a boy, a man with his head in his hands. The narrative describes how these figures come into being in terms that make it clear that Worstward Ho is yet another meditation on the author’s creative responsibility. These figures are posited, but as pure figments, pure fictions, in a language barely able, or willing, to sustain them. Thus: Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (471) These famous opening lines contain the maximum compression of parody, for surely Beckett, through a language literally fragmented, is saying something like this: As an author I must posit a subject, a character, and a space within which this character may ‘exist’. This attempt, I acknowledge, will fail and will fail perhaps more gloriously than before (we note with wry amusement how failure becomes a category of a kind of perverse success in Beckett). Surely here we are reminded of Malone’s attempt to tell his four stories: and perhaps Malone Dies is what the narrator is referring to with ‘All of old’. But where Malone hoped to succeed in his literary play by cancelling himself, our narrator here wishes to posit his figures only in an attempt to imagine the worst possibility for them: the title here is the narrator’s rallying cry to himself: Worstward Ho!14 And as a crucial first step into this exploration of the worst, the narrator asks: What is the least I have to give my human characters in order for them to experience the worst that is possible? What is the ‘mere minimum’ (472) of language, of body, of interiority required of the human for it to register its position within this ill-defined ‘beyondless’ (473) space? (and what a perfect word for the idea of the posthuman limit: beyondless). The narrator seems to desire to give his figures only those characteristics that would define them as minimally 148

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present. This requirement seems to be the capacity to feel pain and here perhaps is Beckett’s essential definition of what it means to be (post)human: It stands. What? Yes. Say it stands. Had to up in the end and stand. Say bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground. So as to say pain. No mind and pain? Say yes that the bones may pain till no choice but to stand. Somehow up and stand. Or better worse remains. Say remains of mind where none to permit of pain. Pain of bones till no choice but up and stand. Somehow up. Somehow stand. Remains of mind where none for the sake of pain. Here of bones. Other examples if needs must. Of pain. Relief from. Change of. (471–72) I read into this paragraph two resonances typical of Beckett. First, there is a frustration in the fact that the human must be involved in this narrative at all: surely after all these years of searching there must be a way of creating narrative without the interference of, or interest in, the human, a narrative without a subject, as it were. Second, the narrator’s careful articulation of the least possible evinces a real compassion for the subject that he seems simultaneously to despise. The figures in Worstward Ho are what Slavoj Zizek would call the ‘indivisible remainder’: the leftovers, the aftermath, of the effort to eliminate the human, its ontology, its claims to subjectivity. The human, in other words, cannot ever be effaced in Beckett and because of this it seems to stake an emotional (if not ethical) claim on the narrator. Failing words And of course immediately attending this impossible attempt to efface the human is the desire to remove the claims of language as such, to call it into ‘disrepute’ as a means perhaps to snuff out the human once and for all. If the linguistic means of representing the human are not available perhaps the human will cease to be, cease to assert claims on the author. Beckett signals his language’s fragility, its essential weakness, in a number of ways in Worstward Ho. He will at times have his narrator simply give up on a sentence as if the effort to continue is too much or as if language simply cannot do its job: ‘The void. How try say? How try fail? No try no fail. Say only—’ (474); ‘The eyes. Time to—’ (478); ‘Worst in need of worse. Worse in—’ (479). The dashes here represent what cannot be represented (just as 149

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the blank space on the final page of Malone’s narrative attempts to represent the space of death, a space beyond language). The narrator acknowledges from the beginning that what will be communicated here will always ever be inaccurate, a misspeaking of sorts: ‘Say for be said. Missaid. From now say for be missaid’ (471); he speaks of ‘worsening words’ (478) which cannot be traced back to an origin and whose authority thus cannot ever be guaranteed: Worsening words whose unknown. Whence unknown. At all costs unknown. Now for to say as worst they may only they only they. Dim void shades all they. Nothing save what they say. Somehow say. Nothing save they. What they say. Whosesoever whencesoever say. As worst they may fail ever worse to say. (478) Language itself has become spectral, ‘void shades’: as such what language proposes to represent can only ever be spectral, can only claim a moment’s ineffable existence as a figment in the mind of an author. It is crucial here then that the narrator posits another figure in the story who seems to be a representative of the author. The narrator posits a ‘Head sunk on crippled hands . . . Eyes clenched. Seat of all. Germ of all’ (472).15 We are invited to read this posited figure as imagining what we see in Worstward Ho and thus to trace the text’s language back to him and stabilize it. But no sooner is this figure posited then he is effaced, is figured in his turn as always already spectral, always already failing to imagine fully: ‘No future in this. Alas yes . . . Shades with the other shades’ (472; 475). How, the narrator asks, can an author be the source of the story and a part of the story?16 He cannot be, and thus as soon as the central narrator, the central author, imagines his own double in his story, he— is this possibly Beckett?—in his turn becomes spectral: where before characters were specters, where language becomes spectral, now the author himself is a ghost haunting his narrative both from within and from without. Eliminating the author is perhaps Beckett’s last attempt to eliminate language, his own language, once and for all: On back better worse to fail the head said seat of all. Germ of all? All? If of all of it too. Where if not there it too? There in the sunken head the sunken head. The hands. The eyes. Shade with the other shades. In the same dim. The same narrow void. (475)

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What then is the worst? What does it mean to be within the worst? The text does not, perhaps as we may expect, tell us explicitly, but from what I have been suggesting the worst perhaps is the fact of being here as the ‘indivisible remainder’, the specter who cannot ever vanish. The worst is to be conjured into a world where pain is the only symptom of your humanity and where even the knowledge of the fictionality of things provides no comfort given that the author too—the seat and germ of all—is now in this ‘hellish half light’ (Play) suffering alongside his creation. Desire and the posthuman But perhaps what is really worse than this already terrible position is that a desire for this to be over articulates itself in the midst of this pain. We may recall Freud’s theory of the death drive: ‘the aim of all life is death’ (311). The goal is to return to the state of nonbeing that preceded life. A similar trajectory is posited in Worstward Ho: a desire, and needless to say an impossible desire, for it all to be over, that ‘all go’ (481). But notice how this longing for the end is simultaneously a longing, a desire, for longing itself: Beckett seems to posit that perhaps the worst condition of the human is to be in state of desire for desire itself. Here then are perhaps the most important lines in Beckett: Longing the so-said mind long lost to longing. The so-missaid. So far so-missaid. Dint of long longing lost to longing. Long vain longing. And longing still. Faintly longing still. Faintly vainly longing still. For fainter still. For faintest. Faintly vainly longing for the least of longing. Unlessenable least of longing. Unstillable vain last of longing still. Longing that all go. Dim go. Void go. Longing go. Vain longing that vain longing go. (481) I read this passage as reflective of a larger condition of the posthuman and a cancellation, perhaps, of that condition: even as the mere minimum is given to the subject in order for it to register the worst of things, desire inevitably emerges as the ultimate indivisible remainder, a thing that cannot ever be removed fully and which forces the subject to imagine the possibilities beyond its limited scope. Desire becomes the thing which perhaps threatens once again to

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animate the subject as fully, rather than post, human. And the desire is complex: it is the desire to go, to end, to die. It is, however, also the desire that acknowledges that it is vain, empty, impossible. An impossible desire to end is still a desire, however, and thus the terrible line: ‘Vain longing that vain longing go’. The subject now wishes that the impossible desire to end itself will vanish. But notice how this desire simply works to remind the subject just how invested he is in this world. It is of course difficult to locate the source of this desire in Worstward Ho: is it the figures themselves (the old man and boy) who wish to go, who wish for desire to end? Is it perhaps the head-clasped author-figure, the seat and germ of all, who is imagining this? The text seems to suggest a link between the one who imagines this world into being and the possibility that he may efface that very world: ‘Back unsay better worse by no stretch more . . . Ooze back try worsen blanks. Those then when nohow on. Unsay then all gone. All not gone’ (481–82). Yet even as the author-figure imagines the possibility of erasing his work—‘unsay then all gone’—he realizes that nothing can eliminate this world, this creation, this expression of minimal desire: ‘All not gone’. ‘Nohow naught’ In the final lines of Worstward Ho we read: ‘Nothing to show a child and yet a child. A man and yet a man’ (484); having rather arbitrarily brought in a female figure (who reminds us of the woman from Ill Seen Ill Said) the narrative proceeds: ‘Nothing and yet a woman’ (484). There is nothing, and nothing to say, and yet from this void something inevitably emerges even at a minimal level, ‘Never to be naught’ (484). ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’, Beckett once wrote and yet the desire to efface that nothing, to unsay the nothing, can only ever produce the traces of that attempt, can only ever create anew the process: unsaying is still a saying by which nothing emerges to stake a claim on the real. Worstward Ho thus emerges ultimately as a commentary on Beckett’s own desires as an author to eliminate literary language as such. For surely the desire to eliminate language can only be expressed within language ‘Worsening words whose unknown’ (478): and thus the very attempt to efface language inscribes language if only as something to be, in its turn, dismantled. But to do so, to posit a language to be effaced, is still to posit language: longing, desire, thus always work to reinscribe the very thing the author wishes 152

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to be gone. That desire itself is ‘unstillable’, vain, impossible. Desire forces language, like a revenant, back to what has been and what will always be: the spectral subject (author or character: but in Beckett’s late text is there any discernable difference?) who, a ghost to itself, to its own life, its own text, is never fully gone, never fully will be gone: ‘Shades cannot go’ (482).

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We can bear neither the void, nor the secret. —Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime THE AESTHETICS OF SUFFERING

In his 1931 study of the work of Marcel Proust, Beckett suggests that habit conditions the human subject to the world. Habit masks the reality of things—despair, loss, pain—and allows us to live in a state of relative equanimity. Indeed, for Beckett almost every experience is mediated through habit: all our reactions to things, good or bad, are habitual which means that we spend very little time actually thinking about our experience of the world. We live radically blinkered to what Lacan would call the Real, that register of ever-present trauma that underpins all experience. Here is Beckett: ‘Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals’ (515). Habit, Beckett continues, is basically the default emotional and intellectual register of the human but our experience of habit is one mediated by two related states: suffering and boredom. The state of boredom, ‘the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils’ (520), is where most humans find themselves most of the time: boredom is really simply an adjunct of habit. Breaking through the gloom of habit and boredom, however, is suffering, the ‘omission of [the] duty’ to habit (520). Suffering, Beckett writes, ‘opens a window on the real’ (520). And while Beckett’s language is not quite Lacan’s (or not yet quite like Lacan’s) the idea that suffering reveals the Real to us is a crucial one, not least because Beckett figures suffering as ‘the main condition of the artistic 154

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experience’ (520). Now Beckett’s phrase here is crucial: ‘the main condition of the artistic experience’ refers both to the condition of the artist—to create is to suffer—and to the experience of that art by the reader or viewer: to witness is to suffer, to interpret that which resists interpretation is also to suffer. Suffering thus is the condition of the creation of art and the experience of that art. Beckett may repudiate suffering, may suggest that suffering is to be avoided, but he also valorizes suffering precisely because it reveals the truth of experience to us. We have been speaking here about a variety of suffering in Beckett’s work: the painful consciousness of being bound by and to ideas not necessarily of our own choosing (Waiting for Godot); the consciousness of one’s painful relation to history (Endgame; Not I; Play); the consciousness of opportunity deliberately rejected (Krapp’s Last Tape); the consciousness of the self decomposing (Molloy); the consciousness of the inability of ever fully effacing the self (Malone Dies); the painful awareness that, even in death, history and desire continue to haunt the subject (The Unnamable; The Second Trilogy). Self-consciousness, which really does translate in Beckett to a radical state of anxiety, underpins a great deal of his work and, to speak plainly, is what is important about his work. Anxiety, pain, and suffering are crucial because for Beckett they reveal what is important, what is true about the human: pain reveals what the human can endure and thus what ultimately comprises and defines the human. We are, in other words, the sum of our pain. Knowing the economies of the losses that make the human, knowing how loss defines the human and how the human in turn responds to loss, is one way of approaching the complexity of the human animal. Beckett, for all his interest in the limits of the human, in what I have been calling the posthuman, thus really does remain fundamentally a humanist. Indeed, the trajectory of his career demonstrates that posthumanism, defined in a limited sense as the elimination of the human—its body; its claims to a transparent consciousness—is a patent impossibility: traces of the human, of the (spectral) body, of (spectral) desires, insistently reanimate what seems to have vanished. I say Beckett remains fundamentally a humanist, but this statement needs qualification. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Beckett is a reluctant humanist and remains one despite his own wishes. If my suggestion that Beckett has, since 1937, been attempting to decompose language, to find a literature of the unword, is correct; 155

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if my suggestion that language in Beckett consistently defines the human is also correct; and if I am right to notice how the human in Beckett is consistently a speaking subject (even after death); then we must acknowledge that Beckett’s career is an extraordinarily complex kind of failure. Because this concerted and at times violent attempt to eliminate language and the human only serves to fetishize the object being vilified. A career attempting to efface language and the human is really a career speaking of language’s absolute and remorseless centrality; the human always remains, as I have been suggesting, if only as phantom, as trace, as specter. Concomitantly, the language animating that trace itself is never fully eliminated despite a logical and ruthless trajectory toward the ‘worsening words’ of the late texts. Perhaps the simplest way to express this complexity is thus: the human remains— as human remains—despite Beckett’s best efforts to eliminate it. Beckett therefore does emerge as a peculiar artist indeed. He is a writer who wishes to eliminate the very thing—language—which defines him vocationally, and if the themes of his work reflect into his own world, as a human: in a way it is accurate to suggest that Beckett’s career is a kind of sixty-year suicide attempt. And surely this distrust of language and writing must inform the reading of his work, must in some ways shape our response. Surely Beckett’s oft-stated hatred of the writing process must account for the radically self-conscious nature of the work.1 And, as I have been suggesting, the work’s selfconsciousness serves crucially to activate our awareness of our own position as readers of these texts. When Clov, for instance, directly indicates the audience ‘I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy’; or when Malone interrupts his narrative with ‘what tedium’ (a sentiment the reader herself might be sharing at precisely the same point!), we are forced to reflect on what is at stake in our response to these uncanny wor(l)ds of suffering. This is all to say that Beckett’s interest in what I am calling the aesthetics of suffering must force us—and perhaps especially any scholar who spends a great deal of time thinking about Beckett—to ask a difficult question: why do we, as readers, enter Beckett’s disconcerting world? THE RESISTANT TEXT

It is clearly not for reasons we may enter into other texts and narratives. We are not reading Beckett for an easy escape from the world; indeed, as I argued in my reading of Murphy, Beckett’s writing works 156

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only to remind us of the reality of our own world. Difficulty is part of the economy of reading Beckett’s work: difficulty of subject matter, but also difficulty of reading itself. Who, struggling through the tortured syntax of Worstward Ho, is ever fully lost to himself, lost in the way he might be in an Auster or McEwan or Murakami novel? Who, reading those seemingly interminable paragraphs of The Unnamable is not tempted to skip a few lines here and there? (I of course never am.) One must be dedicated and disciplined to read Beckett well; one must, ideally, read at most a page at a time, linger over the various resonances of sentences, contemplate at length the darkly humorous pain the text offers. But this is not yet to answer my question: why do we enter into this difficulty, this perplexity? What is to be gained, speaking of economics, by this experience, an experience that becomes a kind of interpretive suffering? I want to approach this question in two ways by returning, perhaps predictably, to Beckett’s German Letter and to a sentence I have to this point passed over. After speaking of his desire to discover this literature of the unword Beckett writes: ‘An assault against words in the name of beauty’ (173). I have, over the course of years of teaching Beckett, often been asked about my obsession with such a ‘dark’ and ‘depressing’ author. After explaining that I find his work uplifting rather than depressing (and after receiving some odds looks: I usually am teaching Malone Dies at this point; and what, my students correctly ask, is uplifting in a story about a man paralyzed, dying, and telling feeble stories?), I explain that there is something beautiful about Beckett’s world, that his assault on conventions of genre and traditionally held—thus comforting—notions about the nature of language (that it, for instance, is ours to wield as we see fit) is all done in the name of beauty. It follows then that I must explain the nature of Beckett’s beauty. I believe that Beckett’s work is beautiful—and here I run dangerously close to displaying an untheorized Romanticism—because it is unavoidably true. This position of witnessing the decay of the body, of witnessing the insistent continuity of desire and memory—of desire as memory—is where we all will be, sooner or later: that is to say, Beckett’s work anticipates a state of the human which is inevitable. We may not all become Malone, or M, W1, or W2 of Play, or Mouth of Not I, but who can claim not to have encountered a version of these types, obsessed with their pasts, disavowing what is so patently and obviously true? 157

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Beckett decided early in his career (it was 1945, while staying with his ailing mother in Foxrock) that his subject matter would be one of darkness rather than light. Beckett’s revelation, that his own ignorance, impotence, and ‘stupidity’ (319), as he put it to his biographer James Knowlson, were valid subject matter for artistic exploration, leads quite logically to an interest in failure, the extremity of knowledge, the spectral and suffering subject. And this fascination with the specter, the ‘mere minimum’ of the human, with its suffering, becomes beautiful to the degree that Beckett commits himself fully to facing that pain unflinchingly, honestly, without sentiment, and without giving way to hope or easy despair. I mentioned in my Introduction that Beckett’s work is difficult because the world he depicts is difficult to bear. I also suggested that Beckett’s work maps out a trajectory of real artistic courage: what is more courageous—and is not courage always beautiful?—than facing the worst we can imagine? A second aspect to what I am calling the beauty of Beckett’s world is its manifest complexity. We are consistently confronted with images and ideas which resist an easy reading: is the speaker of Texts for Nothing alive, dead, or, confoundingly, both? Why is Winnie buried in the earth? Why is Mouth so physically reduced? Does Murphy kill himself or is he a victim of an accident? Is Watt simply insane or is it possible that Knott really does change appearance from one moment to the next? I have offered tentative responses to these questions but will assert here that my readings are only ever provisional: that is to say, they are open to interpretation and challenge. In this way I make clear that I am never fully satisfied, indeed never should be, with any reading. Perhaps another way of putting this is that Beckett’s texts resist interpretation insofar as they offer different meanings at different stages of the interpreter’s reading life. My reading of Beckett when I was twenty-eight is not quite the same as it is when I am forty. This is of course true for the reading of any author but with a writer such as Beckett—one whose work is mobilized precisely around issues of aging, decay, and death—it seems especially so. CODA: ‘NEITHER’

One will never exhaust the possible interpretations of Beckett’s work and thus it remains—in all senses of the term—a site of continual attraction and beauty. To conclude this study I wish to offer an example 158

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of a resistant text, one which has haunted me for years precisely because it confounds any obvious reading. Beckett wrote ‘neither’ for American composer Morton Feldman in 19762; it was first published in the Journal of Beckett Studies in 1979. Stanley Gontarski includes the piece in his edition of The Complete Short Prose, but one could easily argue that ‘neither’ is a poem. Like How It Is, or even the texts comprising the late trilogy, this piece defies generic classification. I quote the text in full: 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. (425) Perhaps the first thing we notice about this text is the absence of a readily identifiable subject and of any action (indeed there are no verbs in the first lines): just who is the one ‘moving’ (notice how I have to posit my own verb!) from inner to outer shadow? Beckett omits the grammatical marker of agency here which leaves us with a curiously suspended state of action or being. The poem seems, that is, to occur to no one, seems to reflect no one’s state of mind; perhaps more accurately, the ‘action’ seems to occur by its own volition. We may here recall Blanchot’s notion of subjectivity without a subject, for surely we have here a case of a complex psychological state taking place in the seeming absence of any subject. And while Beckett does use the word ‘self’ we notice that the self is impenetrable and, moreover, moves to its opposite, the ‘unself’. If we imagine, perhaps, that the self has moved from itself to its opposite—but what does that mean? Has it united with its other? Another person? Its own death? Its absence of itself ?—this movement is initiated by neither the self nor the unself: it is motivated by something else entirely. We are reminded of the idea that agency is always ever dictated by some extra-subjective force. We have here the state of the ‘neither’, 159

BECKETT: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

a kind of neutral space, of not being one thing nor another, which seems to dictate the action or movement. The third line attempts to concretize this abstract idea of movement, or transition (perhaps to death) via the metaphor of the door which closes when approached and opens when one moves away; the door is an image of the liminal, the transition from one state to another but here the threshold cannot readily be achieved: the self is ‘beckoned back and forth and turned away’. And notice again how the subject is in a state of passivity here, receiving the beckoning and being actively turned away. We are left, again, with the self in a kind of suspended animation, in a liminal space which cannot be left behind: the self, in one reading, is neither one thing nor another, perhaps neither alive nor dead. Perhaps we have here, in miniature, another representation of the spectral ontology of the unnamable or the speakers of Texts for Nothing. The subject is blind to any sense of progress, ‘heedless of the way’, and seems not to care about which state of being—death or life?— asserts itself with authority: ‘one gleam or the other’. Lines seven and nine bracket the self with sound (which is ‘unheard’, but not necessarily, silent) and then silence: ‘unheard footfalls only sound’; ‘then no sound’. Within this bracket the self fades: ‘absent for good from self and other’. It seems as if the subject—if this is indeed the word—has achieved a kind of liberation: it is now no longer caught between the binary of self and other; life and death; self and unself. The distinctions between these states have vanished. But notice that this vanishing is completely arbitrary and occurs without motivation, without reason: it simply occurs, further suggesting the subject’s utter passivity or powerlessness before the transitions being enacted upon it (or being sought by it). The state of being, now, is the state of ‘neither’. That this state is ‘unheeded’ seems logical: of course it would be because there is now no subject to notice where it is; the subject is fully effaced. Notice too how the last words of the penultimate line ‘unheeded neither’ seem at once to refer back to the subject, now ‘neither’ one thing nor another, and forward to the final image of the ‘unspeakable home’. I recall here Freud’s notion of the aim of all life being death. Beckett’s ‘neither’ is a poem of a kind of nostalgia, a desire to return. If nostalgia is a form of homesickness, a desire to return home, notice how the subject seems to have achieved this: it has arrived at its unspeakable home, the place where it is effaced, the place where, 160

CONCLUSION

because not able to heed, or speak, it is unable, or perhaps even unwilling—speechlessness is a desired goal in Beckett—to register its own arrival. And yet, as always, the text itself offers itself to us as an approximation of a state, of a site, that cannot be expressed. Having removed the subject from the poem Beckett has effectively made the reader, that is, you, the space where the unnamed subject comes into being: we put its journey together just as we—as I have done here— attempt to interpret the subject into coherence. But, as always in Beckett, there are remainders, indivisible remainders, to any reading. In texts as focused on specters as Beckett’s are it is perhaps to be expected that spectral remains impinge upon any readings, insistently, yet quietly, tracing what will not be readily assimilated into any interpretation. My suggestion that this text is a meditation on the transition to a space beyond opposition, beyond, that is, the oppositional logic of Western thinking (good/bad, man/ woman, self/Other) cannot allow what is a very abstract idea to stand simply as an abstraction. I therefore posit this ‘space beyond’ as a kind of ‘death’ but Beckett’s text in no way suggests this directly: ‘unspeakable home’ becomes, for me, a figure, a trope, of Freud’s return to death but notice how fragile that assertion is given how Beckett, here in ‘neither’ and elsewhere (Texts for Nothing especially), dismantles the comfort of the simple notion of ‘death’ standing as a transition from ‘life’. Beckett’s ‘unspeakable home’ is not simply death (as if the space of death is ever simple to speak of!) but is precisely a metaphor for (and a displacement of) an idea inassimilable to the philosophical underpinnings of our language: we cannot conceive of this space because we cannot speak of it. ‘neither’, like a great number of Beckett’s works, is about the attempt to achieve the impossible because the aim, the end, as it is represented in a text which cancels the very concept of beginnings and endings, itself cannot be formulated in language. Beckett will name this space beyond beginning, beyond ending, with the word ‘unspeakable’, but the word itself simply must signal its own weakness, its own failure, its own inability to name what must be named; ‘unspeakable’ is a word that is present merely as an indication of an absence, a nothing, an impossibility: the word is a blank space for an idea which cannot be but must be expressed. Here, in this one word which captures an entire philosophical world-view; in this one word which in turn defies our interpretive will-to-power; here, surely, is the literature, and the beauty, of the unword. 161

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1 2 3 4

5

6

7 8

9

10

11

12 13 14

15

See Knowlson (323–24) on Beckett’s turn to French. Colin Duckworth ‘The Making of Godot’: 89. ‘The Uneventful Event’ Irish Times February 18, 1956. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. Eds. C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski: 621. In his essay ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ Adorno suggests that Endgame represents the ‘final history of the subject’ (271) and reads the play as representing the remnants of a ‘culture rebuilt after Auschwitz’ (267). Alvarez writes that The Unnamable is a ‘stage-by-stage assassination of the novel in all the forms in which it is traditionally received’ (Samuel Beckett: 68). Written in 1932 and not published until 1992. Interview with Tom Driver. In Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage: 217–23. Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration. Eds. James and Elizabeth Knowlson: 47–8. Beckett may be parodying himself in Krapp’s Last Tape: Krapp, listening to a thirty-year-old tape recording of his own voice, has to pause and consult a dictionary to discover the meaning of a word (‘viduity’) he once knew. According to Martin Esslin, author of The Theatre of the Absurd, Beckett approved an early draft of Esslin’s chapter on his own dramatic work saying ‘I like this because you raise many hares without pursuing them too far’ (Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: 149). See Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice, Chapter 3. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. See Shane Weller’s interesting discussion of the German Letter in A Taste for the Negative: 56–60. ‘The Melancholy Archive: Jose Saramago’s All the Names’ Genre XXXVIII (Summer 2005). WAITING FOR GODOT AND ENDGAME

1

Beckett had written a play, Eleutheria, in 1947 but it has never been performed. It was published in English in 1995. 162

NOTES 2

3

4

5 6

7 8 9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

In her biography Deirdre Bair notes that Beckett’s friends worried about Beckett’s health while he was writing the second novel of the trilogy, Malone Dies. She suggests that ‘everyone close to him feared that he might quite literally die when it was finished’ (376). Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson published positive reviews of the play on August 7, 1955, which, as James Knowlson notes in his magisterial biography Damned to Fame, did ‘everything’ (374) to change the public perception of the play for the better. The initial run in Paris was extended to over 300 productions. Beckett predicted that American productions of Godot would eventually succeed, noting that even the ill-fated Miami production saw improvements in ‘audience and business’ (Knowlson: 379). See also Jonathan Kalb’s discussion of the first American performances of Godot in Beckett in Performance (24–5). A Reader’s Guide. Act Without Words opens with a character ‘flung backwards onstage from right wing’ (87) in an act which literalizes Heidegger’s notion of thrownness. For a New Novel. Four Quartets: ‘Burnt Norton’ (44–5). It would seem that critics, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Kenner, forgetting his own reading of the play, goes on to suggest that Godot can be read as an allegory of France under the Nazi Occupation. Vladimir and Estragon become resistance fighters (albeit rather inept resistance fighters) waiting for a contact, Godot. Kenner draws some authority for this reading from the fact that Beckett served with the French Résistance in 1941 and was forced to flee Paris after his resistance cell was betrayed. Other pseudo-couples include the title characters from the novel Mercier and Camier, and Hamm and Clov in Endgame. In Proust Beckett writes, ‘Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit’ (515). Beckett maintained an interest in Bishop Berkeley’s idea that ‘to be is to be perceived’ (esse est percipi). His 1963 film project, Film, is based around Berkeley’s idea (it presents a man who ‘experiences anguish of perceivedness’ (163)); in Play (also 1963) a character asks ‘Am I as much as . . . being seen?’ echoing Berkeley’s idea; Berkeley is mentioned in Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot: ‘since the death of Bishop Berkeley’ (29). Vladimir’s anxiety at the close of the two acts in Godot is for the Boy to acknowledge that he has in fact seen Vladimir and Estragon. And notice how Vladimir picks up Pozzo’s speech patterns, particularly his terms of abuse: ‘Pig!’. This is of course not to deny the possibility of reading the play through a more specifically Judaic notion of the messiah. We should note that Pozzo quotes from Saint Paul’s letter when confronting Vladimir for having the temerity to ask him questions: ‘A question! Who? What? A moment ago you were calling me Sir, in fear and trembling. Now you are asking me questions’ (23). On Derrida’s relation to Beckett see his fascinatingly elliptical interview in Acts of Literature: 60. 163

NOTES 17

18

19 20

21

22 23

24

25

26

The best discussion of repetition in Beckett remains Steven Connor’s seminal Repetition, Theory and Text. See especially Chapter 6: ‘Presence and Repetition in Beckett’s Theatre’. Early in the play Vladimir bungles a quotation from Proverbs 13:12 :‘Hope deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?’ (5). The actual passage reads ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is the tree of life’. Just Play: Beckett’s Theater. Beckett wrote of Endgame’s power to ‘claw’ in a letter to Alan Schneider (June 21, 1956). Beckett here also drew a contrast between Endgame and Godot saying that Endgame is ‘more inhuman than Godot’ (No Author Better Served: 11). On the trope of habit in Endgame see Eric P. Levy’s recent Trapped in Thought (170–72). See Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Beckett himself maintained that Nagg and Nell were placed in rubbish bins purely for technical purposes: he needed them to be able to appear and disappear without the distraction of conventional entrances and exits (Bair: 469). Kalb writes that Endgame is ‘not about life after nuclear holocaust, which neither Beckett nor anyone else could possibly depict; it about our own lives, which are lived under the threat of disaster, nuclear or otherwise’ (81). I borrow from Derrida’s The Ear of the Other for the metaphor of mourning as a kind of consumption of loss. He writes ‘In the work of mourning, the dead other . . . is taken into me: I kill it and remember it . . . I digest it, assimilate it’ (58). In this sense Beckett takes the central existential concept—that humankind is, as Sartre puts is, condemned to be free—and turns it on its head. There is no freedom on a stage. KRAPP’S LAST TAPE, HAPPY DAYS, PLAY, NOT I

1

2 3

4 5

In Damned to Fame (398) James Knowlson claims Beckett listened to tape recordings of actor Patrick Magee in January 1958. For a discussion of Krapp’s fragmented sense of self, see Paul Lawley’s ‘Stages of Identity’: 90. Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays. Commentators and biographers have often noted that Krapp’s ‘vision’ resembles one that Beckett himself had in 1945 while staying with his ailing mother in Foxrock. Here, as he told biographer James Knowlson, he had a vision of his own ignorance, impotence, and ‘stupidity’ (319). He would mark this moment as his realization that his task as a writer, as opposed to that of Joyce, was ‘in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding’ (319). Compare to Paul Davies’ reading of these lines in Beckett and Eros: 149. In A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. See Kenner (147) on the Englishness of the play. Compare Kenner to Shane Weller’s idea that Winnie represents

164

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7

8

9 10

11

12

13

14 15

16

17 18

19 20

21 22

a version of Schopenhauer’s ‘cheerful child woman’ (Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity: 179). According to rehearsal notes kept by Martha Fehsenfeld of the 1979 Royal Court Theatre production of Happy Days, Beckett saw Winnie as ‘a bit mad. Manic is not wrong, but too big . . . A child woman with a short span of concentration—sure one minute, unsure the next’ (Images of Beckett: 108). The early manuscripts show Willie reading newspaper headlines about rocket attacks: ‘Rocket strikes Pomona, seven hundred thousand missing’ . . . ‘Aberrant rocket strikes Man, one female lavatory attendant spared’ (quoted in Gontarski: The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts: 80). Surely a trace of the idea that this world has been obliterated by military attack lingers in the finished play. On Beckett. For a reading of Badiou’s Beckett, see Andrew Gibson’s Beckett and Badiou. See Lawley (90) on Winnie’s habitual allusion making. Ruby Cohn notes how the interaction of light and actor blurs the boundaries between the stage world and the real world (‘The Femme Fatale on Beckett’s Stage’: 167). For an acute discussion of the materiality of the body in Beckett’s drama see Katherine M. Gray’s excellent ‘Troubling the Body’. Beckett insisted the lines be delivered rapidly and in a flat monotone. The audience, like that of Not I, is not meant to grasp the story immediately. We are asked to absorb the impact of the image as our first interpretive task. On this question see Katherine Worth’s ‘Past into Future’ who argues that there is indeed some kind of future being proffered in this play. Compare my Freudian to Anna McMullan’s Lacanian reading of this play in Theatre on Trial: 17–25. Quoted in Bair’s Samuel Beckett: A Biography. On Mouth’s refusal to speak of herself directly, see Keir Elam’s ‘Dead Heads: Damnation-Narration in the “Dramaticules”’: 151. For an important reading of Not I and the question of trauma see Katherine Weiss’s ‘Bit and Pieces: The Fragmented Body in Not I and That Time’. Yoshiki Tajiri offers an interesting reading of Mouth as prosthesis in Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: 105. Quoted in Bair’s Samuel Beckett: A Biography. When Jessica Tandy, who portrayed Mouth in the world premiere, asked if Mouth had been raped in the field, Beckett was shocked: ‘ “How could you think of such a thing! No, no, not at all—it wasn’t that at all” ’ (Bair: 624). Typically, however, Beckett refused to explain what happened to Mouth. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. ‘Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. VII. On Mouth’s relation to language see Ann Wilson’s ‘Her Lips Moving’. Interview with Tom Driver: Samuel Beckett the Critical Heritage: 219.

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MURPHY AND WATT 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10

11 12

13

14 15 16

A Dream of Fair to Middling Women was written between 1931 and 1932. The novel was not published until 1992, three years after Beckett’s death. For an energetic reading of the body in Murphy see Gavin Dowd’s recent Abstract Machines: 85–6. For the Freudian and Jungian influences on Beckett’s representation of Murphy’s mind See Knowlson, Chapter 9. For another reading of the structure of Murphy’s mind see J. E. Dearlove’s Accommodating the Chaos, Chapter 2. J. D. O’Hara and Chris Ackerley find traces of Beckett’s interest in Schopenhauer (especially the philosopher’s idea of will-lessness) in this image of the dark. See O’Hara’s Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives and Ackerley’s special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies:The Demented Particulars. For further analysis of Schopenhauer and Murphy see John Wall’s ‘Murphy, Belacqua, Schopenhauer, and Descartes’. For a reading of Murphy’s relationship to work see Gibson’s Beckett and Badiou, Chapter 4. Freud posits two forces determining the course of the subject’s life, the drive toward pleasure (Eros), and the drive toward death (Thanatos). As he grew older and more pessimistic about the course of human history, Freud began to theorize that humanity is more determined by the destructive impulse than that of pleasure. Hence his seminal work: Beyond the Pleasure Principle. See Brecht on Theatre for an elaboration of Bertold Brecht’s idea of the alienation-effect. Knowlson, 282. Knowlson, 288. Leslie Hill describes Watt beautifully: ‘Watt unfolds as an intricate cartography of language, a fictional inquiry into what constitutes the foundations of language and the real world, language and human subjectivity’ (Beckett’s Fiction: 20). Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett, Chapter 1. For a reading of the importance of this speech see Paul Stewart’s Zone of Evaporation, Chapter 2 (especially 69). See also John Calder (The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett): Calder suggests that Arsene’s speech anticipates the monologues of the trilogy; looking at Arsene’s name Calder suggests, somewhat unhelpfully, that the speech is ‘like a prolonged fart’ (31). In The Will to Power, for instance, Nietzsche writes: ‘interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something’ (342); ‘All “purposes,” “aims,” “meanings” are only modes of expression and metamorphoses of one will that is inherent in all events: the will to power’ (356): most bluntly, he writes: ‘All meaning is will to power’ (323). The Visible and the Invisible. For a reading of Knott as an emblem of ‘infinity’ see Gibson: 157. For a divergent reading of the role of otherness in Watt see Daniel Katz, Saying I No More: 49. 166

NOTES 17

On the religious element in Watt see Lawrence Harvey’s Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, especially 364ff. MOLLOY, MALONE DIES, THE UNNAMABLE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11 12 13

14

15 16

Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: 382. It should be noted, as do Gontarski and Ackerley in The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (citing letters to John Calder and Barney Rosset [586]), that Beckett did not approve of the term ‘trilogy’ to describe these novels. The characters Murphy and Watt are named in The Unnamable (326) as are Mercier and Camier (297) the eponymous characters from a novel composed between July 1945 and October 1946 but not published until 1970. Eric P. Levy writes that in Molloy ‘selfhood disintegrates into relations whose terms are unstable and readily confused’ (207). On this idea that Moran creates Molloy compare Paul Stewart’s Zone of Evaporation: 107. In The Poetics of Prose, literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov suggests that one of the conventions of the detective story is ‘the vulnerable detective’ (51), a figure who is open to physical attack and is often battered by his opponents during the course of his investigation. Perhaps Moran reflects part of this tradition, but surely his vulnerability is more metaphysical than physical. Moran here names characters from previous Beckett novels: Mercier and Watt. Moran is perhaps representing himself as the author of these novels. Porter Abbott has a very useful chart listing the links between the two characters in The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect (100). See also Rubin Rabinovitz’s ‘Repetition and Underlying Meanings in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy’ for another mapping of the relation between Molloy and Moran. Gadamer discusses the idea of prejudice as a kind of knowing in Truth and Method; see Part III, Chapter 1: 397. Blanchot is a canny reader of Beckett. His essay on the trilogy ‘ “Where Now? Who Now?” ’ as well as his reflections on How It Is in The Infinite Conversation are touchstones for any philosophical treatment of Beckett’s fiction. The Instant of My Death is a short narrative Blanchot published in 1994. On boredom in Malone Dies see Joe Brooker’s ‘What Tedium’. See Steven Connor’s acute discussion of these lines in Samuel Beckett: 68. For another reading of the function of play (as a return to the infantile state), see Hill: 102. For a reading of the role of narrative as such, see Brian Duffy’s ‘Malone meurt’. Calder sees Beckett ‘imitating God’ ‘whose creations are just as random, wild, cruel, and destructive’ (118) in these final moments of Malone Dies. See again Stewart’s Zone of Evaporation, Chapter 4. Calder sees the unnamable as a ‘mind slowly fading out after the body has gone cold’ (119). 167

NOTES 17 18 19 20

21

Letter on Humanism. On the unnamable’s relation to language see Connor: 74. ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image Music Text: 145. I like Leslie Hill’s description of the unnamable’s condition: ‘There remains, to speech, an excess, a supplement, a waste which cannot be pronounced or incorporated within words’ (82). On this issue of language as waste see my essay ‘ “Wordshit, bury me”: The Waste of Narrative in Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing ’. See Daniel Katz’s ‘Saying I No More’: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett for an extended analysis of this issue, what he calls ‘the most perfect aporia’ (112). See especially 98ff., 104, and 112–13. TEXTS FOR NOTHING, THE SECOND TRILOGY

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

For further discussion of the link between Texts for Nothing and the first trilogy see Paul Sheehan’s ‘Nothing is More Real’. In Beckett Writing Beckett, Porter Abbott suggests that we read these texts as a variation on the ‘meditative personal essay’ (90). In ‘Beginning Again’ Abbott offers another useful reading of Texts as a kind of ‘post-narrative’. This line should remind us of Moran’s ‘It seemed to me that all language was an excess of language’ (Molloy: 116) For an extended analysis of the trope of mourning in Texts for Nothing see my ‘Does Mourning Require a Subject? Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing’. Kateryna Arthur makes a link between Texts for Nothing and Company in her excellent ‘Texts for Company’. See Enoch Brater’s ‘Voyelles, Cromlechs and the Special (W)rites of Worstward Ho’ for a discussion of the problematics of reading late Beckett. See Paul Davies’ The Ideal Real, Chapter 8, for a useful discussion of the readability of this text. Carla Locatelli’s Unwording the Word remains the most theoretically sophisticated reading of The Second Trilogy. See, for instance, her discussion of the ‘I’ as it creates company: 157–87. Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, Arthur suggests that Company is a form of ‘schizophrenic’ writing. Her analysis is one of the best I have seen on Company. While I avoid biographical readings generally, we should note that a great number of the memories and details from family life in Company are Beckett’s own: Beckett’s own father left for a walk during Beckett’s birth; Beckett, like the ‘you’ in Company was born on Good Friday; Beckett too once asked his mother about the distance to the sky and was given a ‘cutting retort’ (96). For a discussion of these elements of Company see Abbott (Beckett Writing Beckett) and Brian Finney’s ‘Still to Worstward Ho’. I am reminded of Chris Marker’s 1962 film masterpiece La Jetee. Marker tells his story, with the exception of one brief moment, through a series of still photographs. Marker sets up an uncanny frisson by playing against the expectations of a medium, film, which fetishizes movement. 168

NOTES 12

13

14

15 16

Susan Brienza seems convinced that Ill Seen Ill Said is ‘obdurately about writing’ (Samuel Becket’s New Worlds: 239). On this point see Nicholas Zurbrugg’s excellent ‘Ill Seen Ill Said and the Sense of an Ending’. Beckett is playing with various allusions here: his title looks back on Webster and Dekker’s play Westward Hoe (1607) and to Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1884). See Locatelli on this image of the ‘Seat of all. Germ of all’: 253. On this point see Gontarski’s excellent Introduction to Nohow On, especially xxiv–xxv. CONCLUSION

1

2

I might simply remind the reader of Beckett’s agony while writing Malone Dies or refer her to Beckett’s correspondence with friend Alan Schneider to demonstrate Beckett’s loathing of the writing, revision, and translation processes. In a letter of June 1958, Beckett refers to the effort of translating The Unnamable into English: ‘I’m disgustingly tired & stupefied since finishing L’Innomable and writing seems more than ever before a quite impossible enterprise’ (47); in a letter dated September 12, 1960, Beckett details his frustration with the writing of Happy Days ‘I am badly stuck in the new play’; ‘Too depressing and difficult to write about’ (77). In a letter dated January 19, 1962, Beckett refers to the translation of How It Is as ‘the most distasteful job I ever took on’ (119). ‘neither’ was recorded in 1990 by the Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester under the direction of Zoltan Pesko. It is labeled an ‘Opera’ with ‘Words’ by Samuel Beckett and music by Morton Feldman. The blurb on the CD cover (written by Art Lange) suggests that although the piece is billed as an opera ‘it makes use of none of the conventions of traditional opera. There is no story, no mise-en-scene’.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES Beckett, S. (2006), Act Without Words I. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume III, Dramatic Works. New York: Grove, pp. 189–94. — (2006), Company. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume IV, Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism. New York: Grove, pp. 427–50. — (2006), Endgame. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume III, Dramatic Works. New York: Grove, pp. 89–154. — (2006), Film. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume III, Dramatic Works. New York: Grove, pp. 369–82. — (2006), Happy Days. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume III, Dramatic Works. New York: Grove, pp. 273–308. — (2006), Ill Seen Ill Said. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume IV, Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism. New York: Grove, pp. 451–70. — (2006), Krapp’s Last Tape. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume III, Dramatic Works. New York: Grove, pp. 219–30. — (2006), Malone Dies. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume II, Novels. New York: Grove, pp. 171–281. — (2006), Molloy. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume II, Novels. New York: Grove, pp. 3–170. — (2006), Murphy. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume I, Novels. New York: Grove, pp. 3–168. — (2006), Not I. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume III, Dramatic Works. New York: Grove, pp. 403–13. — (2006), Play. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume III, Dramatic Works. New York: Grove, pp. 353–68. — (2006), Proust. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume IV, Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism. New York: Grove, pp. 511–54. — (2006), Texts for Nothing. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume IV, Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism. New York: Grove, pp. 295–339. — (2006), Three Dialogues. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume IV, Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism. New York: Grove, pp. 295–339. — (2006), The Unnamable. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume II, Novels. New York: Grove, pp. 285–407. 170

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— (2006), Waiting for Godot. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume III, Dramatic Works. New York: Grove, pp. 1–87. — (2006), Watt. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume I, Novels. New York: Grove, pp. 171–379. — (2006), Worstward Ho. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume IV, Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism. New York: Grove, pp. 471–85. — (1983), German Letter. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ruby Cohn (ed.). London: John Calder, pp. 170–73.

SECONDARY SOURCES Abbott, H. P. (1996), Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. — (1995), ‘Beginning again: The post-narrative art of Texts for Nothing and How It Is’, in John Pilling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 106–23. — (1973), The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ackerley, C. J. and Gontarski, S. (2004), The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove. — (1988), Journal of Beckett Studies: The Demented Particulars. Volume 7, 1–2. Adorno, T. (1991), ‘Trying to understand Endgame’, in Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans), Notes to Literature. Volume One. New York : Columbia University Press, pp. 241–75. Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Alvarez, A. (1992), Samuel Beckett (2nd ed.), London: Fontana. Arthur, K. (1987), ‘Texts for Company’, in James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (eds), Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 136–44. Badiou, A. (2003), On Beckett. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano (eds). Manchester: Clinamen Press. Bair, D. (1990), Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York: Summit Books. Barthes, R. (1998), ‘Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives’, in Richard Howard (trans), The Semiotic Challenge. New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 95–135. — (1997), ‘The Death of the author’, in Stephen Heath (trans), Image Music Text. New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 142–48. Baudrillard, J. (1996), The Perfect Crime. London: Verso. Besley, C. (1980), Critical Practice. London: Routledge. Blanchot, M. (2003), ‘Where now? Who now?’, in Charlotte Mandell (trans), The Book to Come. Stanford: Stanford University Press. — (1995), The Writing of the Disaster. Ann Smock (trans). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 171

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— (1994), The Instant of My Death. Elizabeth Rottenberg (trans). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Boulter, J. (2005), ‘The Melancholy archive: Jose Saramago’s All the Names’, Genre, XXXVIII 1–2, 115–43. — (2004), ‘Does mourning require a subject? Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing’, Modern Fiction Studies, 50.2, 332–50. — (2002), ‘ “Wordshit, bury me”: The waste of narrative in Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 11.2, 1–19. — (2001), Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Brater, E. (1987), ‘Voyelles, cromlechs and the special (w)rites of Worstward Ho’, in James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (eds), Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 160–74. Brienza, S. (1987), Samuel Beckett’s New Worlds. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Brooker, J. (2002), ‘What tedium: Boredom in Malone Dies’, in Daniela Caselli, Steven Connor, and Laura Salisbury (eds), Other Becketts. Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, pp. 29–39. Browne, T. (1937), The Religio Medici and Other Writings. London: J. M. Dent. Calder, J. (2001), The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder. Caruth, C. (1996), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chambers, I. (2001), Culture After Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity. London: Routledge. Cohn, R. (1990), ‘The femme fatale on Beckett’s stage’, in Linda-Ben-Zvi (ed.), Women in Beckett. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 162–71. — (1980), Just Play: Beckett’s Theater. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Connor, S. (1998), Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text. Oxford: Blackwell. Davies, P. (2000), Beckett and Eros: Death of Humanism. Houndmills: Macmillan. — (1994), The Ideal Real: Beckett’s Fiction and Imagination. London: Associated University Press. Dearlove, J. E. (1982), Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Nonrelational Art. Durham: Duke University Press. Derrida, J. (2007), Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Hoboken: Melvillehouse Publishing. — (1998), Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Peggy Kamuf (trans). Stanford: Stanford University Press. — (1995), Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Eric Prenowitz (trans). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — (1995), The Gift of Death. David Wills (trans). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — (1992), Acts of Literature. Derek Attridge (ed.). London: Routledge. — (1985), The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Peggy Kamuf (trans). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Dowd, G. (2007), Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy After Deleuze and Guattari. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 172

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Driver, T. (1979), ‘Interview with Tom Driver’, in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, pp. 217–23. Duckworth, C. (1967), ‘The making of Godot’, in Ruby Cohn (ed.), Casebook on Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, pp. 89–100. Duffy, B. (1997), ‘Malone meurt: The comfort of narrative’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 6.1, 25–47. Elam, K. (1995), ‘Dead heads: Damnation-narrative in the “dramaticules’’’, in John Piling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 145–66. Eliot, T. S. (1971), Four Quartets. The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950. New York: Harcourt. Feyerabend, P. (1993), Against Method. London: Verso. Finney, B. (1987), ‘Still to Worstward Ho’, in James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (eds), Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 65–79. Fowles, J. (1969), The French Lieutenant’s Woman. New York: Signet. Freud, S. (1991), Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Angela Richards (ed.), The Penguin Freud Library. Volume 2. London: Penguin, pp. 269–338. — (1991), ‘Mourning and melancholia’, in Angela Richards (ed.), Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Penguin Freud Library. Volume 2. London: Penguin. — (1953), ‘Fragments of an analysis of a case of hysteria’, in James Strachey (trans), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. VII. London: Hogarth Press. Gadamer, H. G. (1989), Truth and Method (2nd ed.). Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G., Marshall (trans). New York: Continuum. — (1976), Philosophical Hermeneutics. David E. Linge (trans). Berkeley: University of California Press. Gibson, A. (2006), Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gontarski, S. (1996), ‘Introduction’. Nohow On. New York: Grove, pp. vii–xxviii. — (1985), The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gray, K. M. (1996), ‘Troubling the body: Toward a theory of Beckett’s use of the human body onstage’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 5. 1–2, 1–17. Harmon, M. (ed.). (1998), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Harvey, L. (1970), Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haynes, J. and Knowlson, J. (2003), Images of Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1977), ‘Letter on humanism’, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. New York: HarperCollins. — (1962), Being and Time. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans). New York: Harper and Row. Hill, L. (1990), Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 173

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Huizinga, J. (1970), Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. London: Paladin. Jameson, F. (1981), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. — (1972), The Prison-House of Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kafka, F. (1991), The Blue Octavo Notebooks. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (trans). London: Exact Change. Kalb, J. (1989), Beckett in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katz, D. (1999), Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kenner, H. (1973), A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. London: Thames and Hudson. Knowlson, J. (2006), Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration. James and Elizabeth Knowlson (eds). New York: Arcade. — (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lawley, P. (1995), ‘Stages of identity: From Krapp’s Last Tape to Play’, in John Pilling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 88–105. Levinas, E. (1969), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Alphonso Lingis (trans). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levy, E. P. (2007), Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Locatelli, C. (1990), Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McMullan, A. (1993), Theatre on Trial: Samuel Becket’s Later Drama. London: Routledge. Mercier, V. (1956), ‘The uneventful event’, Irish Times, 18, 6. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968), The Visible and the Invisible. Alphonso Lingis (trans). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Nietszche, F. (1968), The Will to Power. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (trans), New York: Vintage. — (1964), ‘Truth and falsity in their extra-moral sense’, in Maximilian A. Mugge (trans), Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Russell and Russell. Rabinovitz, R. (1990), ‘Repetition and underlying meanings in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy’, in Lance St. John Butler and Robin J. Davis (eds), Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays. Houndmills: Macmillan, pp. 31–67. Robbe-Grillet, A. (1989), For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Richard Howard (trans). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Sheehan, P. (2002), ‘Nothing is more real: Experiencing theory in Texts for Nothing’, in Daniela Caselli, Steven Connor, and Laura Salisbury (eds), Other Becketts. Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, pp. 89–104.

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Shelley, P. B. (1930), ‘A defence of poetry’, in Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (eds), The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Volume VII. London: Ernest Benn, pp. 107–40. Shenker, I. (1979), ‘An interview with Beckett’, in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, pp. 146–49. Stewart, P. (2006), Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Tajiri, Y. (2007), Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism. Houndmills: Palgrave. Todorov, T. (1977), The Poetics of Prose. Richard Howard (trans). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wall, J. (2000), ‘Murphy, Belacqua, Schopenhauer, and Descartes: Metaphysical reflections on the body’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 9.2, 21–61. Weiss, K. (2002), ‘Bits and pieces: The fragmented body in Not I and That Time’, in Daniela Caselli, Steven Connor, and Laura Salisbury (eds), Other Becketts. Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, pp. 187–95. Weller, S. (2006), Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity. Houndmills: Palgrave. — (2003), A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism. London: Legenda. Wilson, A. (1990), ‘“Her lips moving”: The castrated voice of Not I’, in Linda Ben-Zvi (ed.), Women in Beckett. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 190–200. Worth, K. (1987), ‘Past into future: Krapp’s Last Tape to Breath’, in James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (eds), Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 18–34. Zizek, S. (2007), The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso. — (2006), How To Read Lacan. London: Granta. — (2005), The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality. London: Verso. Zurbrugg, N. (1987), ‘Ill Seen Ill Said and the sense of an ending’, in James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (eds), Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 145–59.

FURTHER READING Abbott, H. P. (1973), The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect. Berkeley: University of California Press. Abbott’s introduction to Beckett’s prose ranges from the early fiction through the major novels: Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, How It Is. He also gives important attention to Texts for Nothing and the neglected Mercier and Camier. An analysis of what Abbott calls ‘imitative form’, the book looks at how the form of the fiction works particular effects on the reader.

175

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Adorno, T. (1991), ‘Trying to understand Endgame’, in Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans), Notes to Literature. Volume One. New York : Columbia University Press, pp. 241–75. Adorno may have written ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, but Beckett is one writer Adorno allows to express his response to the conditions of contemporary experience, to the post-Holocaust world. Surely one of the most important philosophical readings of Beckett, Adorno reads Endgame as accurately reflecting a world in which the very idea of meaning is no longer tenable. Blanchot, M. (2003),‘Where now? Who now?’, in Charlotte Mandell (trans), The Book to Come. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Blanchot, along with Adorno and Badiou, has given the most philosophically nuanced readings of Beckett. This short essay reads Beckett’s first trilogy, especially The Unnamable, in terms of its aporias—its impasses— of voice and place. Blanchot is interested in exploring the question of subjectivity and interiority: Who speaks these novels? How do we respond to novels when we cannot locate a writer or speaker? Cohn, R. (1980), Just Play: Beckett’s Theater. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Cohn is one of the most important senior critics of Beckett. This text, a reading of all the major plays, stands as an advanced critical introduction to the drama. Cohn is interested in exploring the theatricality of the plays, the manner in which a kind of self-consciousness arises in the plays’ awareness of themselves as theatrical experiences. Connor, S. (1998), Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text. Oxford: Blackwell. Connor’s book is the high-water mark of deconstructively inflected readings of Beckett and is a comprehensive exploration of the major prose and drama. It reads the work alongside the trope of repetition, repetition which at once marks an experience as crucial—it is doubled and thus takes on a kind urgency—and marks that experience as essentially absent given that it is now no longer unique. Connor analyzes how repetition in Beckett functions to destabilize yet also to fetishize experience. Gontarski, S. (1985), The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. With Cohn, Gontarski is the most important senior Beckett critic. The Intent of Undoing draws on Gontarski’s interest in the shifting identities of Beckett’s texts as they pass through editorial and authorial changes. Gontarski has done the crucial work of offering genealogical analyses of the Beckett text drawing important attention to the organic nature of textual evolution. Hill, L. (1990), Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In some ways a companion to Abbott’s Form and Effect, Hill’s philosophically nuanced book is an attempt to think through what he calls ‘textual affects’, how the verbal and textual complexities of Beckett’s prose (and the book analyzes the major prose works) work on the reader’s interpretive responses. 176

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Kenner, H. (1973), A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. London: Thames and Hudson. The best general introduction to Beckett’s work, Kenner’s text suffers only from having been published in 1973. Thus he is unable to offer readings of the work of the late 1970s and 1980s. Kenner’s work is the most accessible reading of Beckett’s work available: forgoing philosophical fogginess or trendy theoretical obfuscation, Kenner reads the work in its historicalliterary contexts and offers reasoned interpretations of the most challenging texts from the drama to the prose. Katz, D. (1999), Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. A brilliant recent analysis of the major prose, Katz offers a reading of Beckettian subjectivity inflected through the poststructuralisms of Derrida, Blanchot, and others. Katz is concerned to work out the various complexities that arise when the Beckettian subject speaks: Who or what is it that controls the ‘I’ of the speaker? How does a Beckettian subject negotiate an identity if her language precedes her or exceeds her control? Katz’s text balances complex philosophical interpretations against close, enormously smart readings of the texts. Knowlson, J. (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster. The best biography of Beckett, superseding and eclipsing all other biographies. Damned to Fame is simply one of the best literary biographies of a modern writer, rivaling even Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce. Knowlson’s research is impeccable and massively detailed. Knowlson never simply reads the literary work as a reflection of biographical details, but rather he allows the story of Beckett’s life to complement the various excellent readings of the work. Locatelli, C. (1990), Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. This is a curiously titled book, given that Locatelli offers a substantial and excellent chapter on Beckett’s theater since the 1970s. Nevertheless, Unwording the World is one of the best and theoretically challenging books on Beckett’s late works available, mobilizing as it does a complex poststructuralism to offer a genealogy of Beckett’s radical experiments in prose and drama. Her analysis anticipates and complements the work of Katz and supplements the gaps in Kenner’s work.

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INDEX

absent God 34–6, 40 action 29 Adorno, Theodor 2, 43–4 aesthetics of suffering 156 after, existence in 63–4 Agamben, Giorgio 41 agency authorial 95–6 Murphy 90–2 The Unnamable 125–6 agony 18 Albee, Edward 4 Alighieri, Dante 65 allegorical real 65–7 allegory 64–5, 127, 146 Alvarez, Al 3 anxiety 2, 72–6 aporia 121, 128 archival persistence 64 the archive 22–4 Archive Fever (Derrida) 22–3, 55 archives 55, 56, 63–4, 75 Arsene 99–100 art 11–12 artist, as posthuman 129 artistic experience 155 assumptions, detective narrative 110–11 astrology, Murphy 91–2 audience 38–9 Happy Days 60–1 necessity of 46

Not I 72 responsibility 48–9 Auster, Paul 4 authorial agency 95–6, 135 autonomy 50 Badiou, Alain 61 Banville, John 4 Barthes, Roland 126 Baudrillard, Jean 154 beauty 157–8, 161 Beckett, Samuel background and influence 1–4 biography 1 centenary 7 early works 1–2 French Résistance 96–7 influence on drama and fiction 3–4 Nobel Prize 2 relation to language 128 resisting interpretation 9–10 style 4–7 use of language 5 visit to Germany 19–20 why read? 157–8 Being and Time (Heidegger) 30, 70 being spoken, The Unnamable 125–7 belief 38, 39–40 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 67–8, 92–4

INDEX

death drive 89, 92, 94, 151 deconstruction, as major theme 8 deferred action 55–6 denial 62–3, 139 Derrida, Jacques 22–3, 35–6, 55, 56, 64, 82, 83, 108 Descartes, Rénè 71 desinence 137 desire 66, 82, 89, 151–3 despair 44 detective narrative, Molloy 109–11 determinism 49–50, 84–5 dizziness, interpretive 7 drama of nothing 29–31 drama, of the real 76–7

binary, subject-object 114, 116–17 Blanchot, Maurice 118, 120, 122, 129, 130, 159 body as archive 63–4 diminishing 52–3, 109 elimination of 12 Endgame 41 and history 23 persistence 14–15 reduced 71–3 boredom 11, 30, 120, 154 breakdowns, Watt 99 Breath 3 Caruth, Cathy 55–6, 68, 69, 74 Chambers, Iain 123 characters 17, 88–9, 134–6 chess 41 Christianity 35 classic realism 109–10 Clov 41, 47–8 Coetzee, J.M. 4 Company 23 memory 138–9 narrative 139 posthumanism 142 solitude 138–41 spectral subjects 141–2 compassion 15, 109 consistency, thematic 52 constructedness 9 content, Murphy 84–5, 89 context 2, 27 control 128, 140 crisis 10–11 crisis of detection 114–18 critique of reason 109–11 Culture After Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity 123 curiosity 10–11

early novels, shape 81–2 Eliot, T.S. 30 embodiment 61, 64, 109 emotions 138 Endgame 2 audience responsibility 48–9 autonomy 50 body 41 context 27, 41–2 ethical responsibility 48 free will 49–51 history 50–1 interpretive key 41 nostalgia 44–5 nothing 42–3 postholocaust 42–4 repetition 48–9 time 45 entrapment, Happy Days 61 epiphany 56, 100 Eros 89, 92, 93 Estragon belief and faith 39–40 relationships 31–4 religious associations 34–6 self-awareness 39 time 37–8

dark 86–8 death 13, 94–6, 118–19, 122–3 180

INDEX

marriage 60–2 nothing 63 quotations 62 self-awareness 61 time 63 Hegel, Georg 33 Heidegger, Martin 30, 70, 126 Hell, Play 65 hermeneutics 16 historical context 2 history 22–3, 24, 50–1, 52 Homo Ludens (Huizinga) 120–1 How It Is 138 How to Read Lacan 130 Huizinga, Johan 120–1 humanism 12–13, 155 humor 4–5

ethics 28, 48 expectation 7–9, 30 face 146 failing words, Worstward Ho 149–51 failure 131–2, 136, 156 faith 39–40 fantasies of non-being, Texts for Nothing 132–4 fictionality, Murphy 84 form, Murphy 84–5, 89 free will 49–51, 84–5 Freud, Sigmund 13, 21, 23, 24, 45, 55–6, 67–9, 74, 82, 87, 92–4, 151 fundamentals 10 future trauma 55–8

identity 73, 111–14, 115, 116, 123 ideology, Happy Days 60–1 Ill Seen Ill Said allegory 146 image 142–4 manipulative narrator 143–4 seeing eye 145–7 shattered prose 143 witnessing 144–5 image as essence 70–1 Happy Days 58–9 Ill Seen Ill Said 142–4 transcending language 76–7 visual 60 Imaginary register 73 impossibility 134 Inferno (Dante) 65 interpretation 38–9 crisis of 11 posthumanism 81–4 problematization 82 problems of 16–18 resistance to 9–10 Watt 101 irony 5

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 3, 16, 103–4, 121, 126 generic decomposition 7–8 genre 7–9 German Letter 19–20, 59–60, 147 ghosts 13–14, 83 Gift of Death (Derrida) 35 God, absent 34–6, 40 Godot, Beckett’s regret of name 34–5 habit 32, 154 Hamm autonomy 50 body 41 narrative 46–7 nostalgia and melancholy 45 postholocaust 43 self-pity 47–8 happiness, Krapp’s Last Tape 57–8 Happy Days 3 audience 60–1 being ‘after’ 63–4 body as archive 63–4 entrapment 61 ideology 60–1 image 58–9 181

INDEX

loneliness 138, 145 loss 21–2, 23, 155 Lucky 33–4, 37

Jameson, Fredric 49, 74 Joyce, James 1, 4, 5 Kafka, Franz 27 Kane, Sarah 4 Kaun, Axel 19 Kenner, Hugh 30, 31, 60, 65, 132 Knott, as Other 104–6 Knowlson, James 5 Krapp 56–7 Krapp’s Last Tape context 53–4 future trauma 55–8 happiness 57–8 melancholy archive 55 specters 18 technology 53–4

madness of order, Watt 97–9 Malone Dies 3 boredom 120 death 118–19 fundamental question 10 irony 5 the limit 118–19 posthumanism 13 use of language 5–6 writing 118–23 marginalization 4 marriage Happy Days 60–2 Play 66–7 Marx, Karl 13 meanings absence of 17 collapse 11 creation of 40 desire for 102–3 loss of 44 multiple 6 possibility of 43–4 melancholia 21–2, 44–8 melancholy archive 55 memory 21–2, 53–4, 56–7, 138–9, 140 Mercier, Vivian 29 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 102 metanarrative 96 metaphors, visual 58–9, 68–9 Metastases of Enjoyment (Zizek) 74 Molloy 3 crisis of detection 114–18 detective narrative 109–11 identity crisis 111–14 Moran 114–18 as parody 109–10 self-understanding 111–12 use of language 6

Lacan, Jacques 18, 73–6, 140, 154 language Beckett’s view of 19–20 as character 6–7 and control 128–9 elimination of 152, 156 ending 59–60 and experience 3 failure 136 fragmented 148 inadequacy 134 in relation with the Stranger 103–4 representational 9 Symbolic register 73 transcending 76–7 The Unnamable 126 use of 5 Learning to Live Finally (Derrida) 108 Levinas, Emmanuel 18, 102–4, 105, 106 liminal space 125 the limit 118–19, 122–3 literature of the unword 20–1, 138, 147, 155–6 182

INDEX

Moran 114–18 mourning 45, 137 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (Freud) 21, 45 Mouth as image 70–1 narrative 72 Real register 75–6 Symbolic register 74 Murphy 86–8, 94–6 Murphy agency 90–2 astrology 91–2 desire 89 determined character 88–9 fictionality 84 form/content 84–5, 89 free will and determinism 84–5 nostalgia 93 prophecy 90–2 self-awareness 82, 85–6, 90

reduced body 71–3 shattered narrative 71–2 trauma 72 nothing 5–6, 7 Beckett’s exploration 11–12 drama of 29–31 Endgame 42–3 Happy Days 63 Not I 76 Watt 106–7 Worstward Ho 152 nothingness 8, 10, 30–1, 76, 92–3, 140 novel 109–11

Nachtraglichkeit 55–6 Nagg 41, 45 narrative Company 139 deconstruction 14, 81 Endgame 46–7 as expression of human 9 shattered 71–2 without subject 149 narrator, manipulative 143–4 ‘neither’ 159–61 Nell 41, 45 Nietzsche, Friedrich 13, 54, 102 nostalgia 27, 41, 44–5, 93 Not I 3, 14, 18 anxiety 72–6 audience response 72 drama of the real 76–7 image as essence 70–1 Lacanian interpretation 72–6 Mouth as archive 75 nothing 76

pain 155 paralysis 39 parody, Worstward Ho 148 past, denial of 139 The Perfect Crime (Baudrillard) 154 permanence, Play 67–70 perplexity, of characters and readers 16–17 persistence 61, 130 phantoms 135–7 Philosophical Hermeneutics (Gadamer) 16 piano tuners, Watt 101 Pinter, Harold 3–4 Play 3 allegorical real 65–7 allegory 64–5 characters as narrative 14 desire 66 marriage 66–7 permanence 67–70

object 102, 111 ontology 6, 132, 134, 149, 160 oppositions 111–14 order 97–9, 120–1 the Other 144 see also otherness Otherness 103–6 see also the Other

183

INDEX

Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Derrida) 82 resistant text 82, 156–8 rhetoric, self-cancelling 6, 112–13 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 30

Play (Cont’d ) posthumanism 13 repetition compulsion 67–70 as vision of Hell 65 play, as order 120–1 postholocaust 42–4 posthuman space 122 posthumanism 12–15, 109, 155 Company 142 and desire 151–3 interpretation of 81–4 and language 128–9 self 138 Texts for Nothing 134 The Unnamable 123–4 use of term 15–16 postnarrative 124 power 103 Pozzo belief and faith 39–40 relationships 33–4 self-awareness 39 time 37 prophecy, Murphy 90–2 prose, shattered 143 Proust 16, 21, 50 Proust, Marcel 154 pseudo-couples 31, 34

Saint Paul 35 salvation 35–6, 37–8 Schneider, Alan 9–10 seeing eye, Ill Seen Ill Said 145–7 self-awareness 2, 156 Happy Days 61 Murphy 85–6, 90 in Murphy and Watt 82 Texts for Nothing 135 Waiting for Godot 38–9 self-cancelling rhetoric 6, 112–13 self-consciousness see self-awareness self-contradiction 6 self, reduction of 12, 14 self-understanding 111–12 shape, of early novels 81–2 silence 136, 137 singularity 4 situations, unfamiliar and unreadable 7 solitude, Company 138–41 sounds, fundamental 10–11 speaking, The Unnamable 125–7 specters 13–14, 83, 137 stories, dead 134–6 the Stranger 103–4 subject as character 127–9 shattered 139 spectral 132, 137, 141–2 subject-object binary 114, 116–17 subjectivity as embodiment 15 nothingness 10 perplexing 132 without subject 129, 131, 159

quotations, Happy Days 62 the Real 154 real, allegorical 65–7 Real register 74, 76–7 realigning, drama of 76–7 reason, critique of 109–11 redemption 35–6 reduced body 71–3 reduction, plot and character 10 regret 18 regret, Krapp’s Last Tape 53 relationships, inescapable 31–4 repetition 36, 46, 48–9 repetition compulsion, Play 67–70 184

INDEX

Krapp’s Last Tape 55–8 Not I 72 Texts for Nothing 133 understanding 68, 69 Watt 106–7 truth 54 ‘Truth and Falsity in Their Extra-Moral Sense’ (Nietzsche) 54 Truth and Method (Gadamer) 3, 121 ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ 43–4

suffering 154–5 aesthetics of 156 Symbolic register 73, 140 technology, Krapp’s Last Tape 53–4 text, resistant 82, 156–8 Texts for Nothing 83, 130 dead characters/dead stories 134–6 failure 131–2 fantasies of non-being 132–4 inadequacy of language 134 mourning 137 phantoms 135–7 posthumanism 134 relationship with The Unnamable 131–2 self-awareness 135 time 133 trauma 133 Thanatos see death drive things 62 Three Dialogues 11, 16–17, 128 ties that bind 31–4 time deconstruction in Waiting for Godot 36–8 deconstruction of understanding of 27–8 Endgame 45, 48 Happy Days 63 Texts for Nothing 133 Totality and Infinity 103 trajectories embodied to disembodied characters 12, 52–3, 143 Murphy’s death 92 narrative and novelistic forms 81 reduction 20–1 trauma and death drive 92 as descriptive of Real 74 encounter with Other 106

uncanny 82, 83 Unclaimed Experience (Caruth) 55–6 undead partial object 130, 131 unhappiness 41 The Unnamable 3 agency 125–6 allegory 127 language 126, 128 the limit 123 posthumanism 123–4 questioning 17 relationship with Texts for Nothing 131–2 speaking/being spoken 125–7 subject as character 127–9 unword 122–3 unwording, German Letter 59–60 veil, as metaphor for language 19–20 visual image 60 visual metaphors 58–9, 68–9 Vladimir belief and faith 39–40 relationships 31–4 religious associations 34–6 self-awareness 39 time 37–8 voice 137 185

INDEX

Waiting for Godot 2–3 absent God 34–6, 40 audience awareness 39 belief 36–8 belief and faith 39–40 boredom 11, 30 context 27, 28 humor 4–5 interpretation 38–9 nothing 29–31 relationships 31–4 religious references 34–5 repetition 36 response, critical and audience 28–9 self-awareness 38–9 time 36–8 waste, characters as 64 Watt 9 character’s need to interpret 101–2 context 96–7 interpreting Knott 104–6 madness of order 97–9 meaning 17 nothing 106–7 Otherness 103–4, 105 role of servant 99–100 self-awareness 82 trauma 106–7 witnessing 99–102 witnessing Knott 104–5 witnessing the unwitnessable 102–4

why read Beckett? 157–8 Winnie denial 62–3 image 60 as metaphor 58–9 persistence 61 quotations 62 witnessing Ill Seen Ill Said 144–5 of the unwitnessable 102–4 Watt 99–102 Woodthorpe, Peter 34–5 worst 151 Worstward Ho desire and the posthuman 151–3 elimination of language 152 failing words 149–51 fragmented language 148 literature of the unword 147 nothing 152 parody 148 reduction of plot and character 10 use of language 6–7 writing 118–23 limit 122 as play 119–21 unto death 122–3 The Writing of the Disaster 118 Zizek, Slavoj 14, 74, 130, 131, 149

186