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Samuel Beckett's Peristaltic Modernism, 1932-1958 View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by White Rose E-theses Online ‘FIRST DIRTY, THEN MAKE CLEAN’: SAMUEL BECKETT’S PERISTALTIC MODERNISM, 1932-1958 ADAM MICHAEL WINSTANLEY PhD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE MARCH 2013 1 ABSTRACT Drawing together a number of different recent approaches to Samuel Beckett’s studies, this thesis examines the convulsive narrative trajectories of Beckett’s prose works from Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1931-2) to The Unnamable (1958) in relation to the disorganised muscular contractions of peristalsis. Peristalsis is understood here, however, not merely as a digestive process, as the ‘propulsive movement of the gastrointestinal tract and other tubular organs’, but as the ‘coordinated waves of contraction and relaxation of the circular muscle’ (OED). Accordingly, this thesis reconciles a number of recent approaches to Beckett studies by combining textual, phenomenological and cultural concerns with a detailed account of Beckett’s own familiarity with early twentieth-century medical and psychoanalytical discourses. It examines the extent to which these discourses find a parallel in his work’s corporeal conception of the linguistic and narrative process, where the convolutions, disavowals and disjunctions that function at the level of narrative and syntax are persistently equated with medical ailments, autonomous reflexes and bodily emissions. Tracing this interest to his early work, the first chapter focuses upon the masturbatory trope of ‘dehiscence’ in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, while the second examines cardiovascular complaints in Murphy (1935-6). The third chapter considers the role that linguistic constipation plays in Watt (1941-5), while the fourth chapter focuses upon peristalsis and rumination in Molloy (1947). The penultimate chapter examines the significance of epilepsy, dilation and parturition in the ‘throes’ that dominate Malone Dies (1954-5), whereas the final chapter evaluates the significance of contamination and respiration in The Unnamable (1957-8). 2 LIST OF CONTENTS Page Abstract 1 List of Contents 2 Acknowledgements 3 Author’s Declaration 4 INTRODUCTION: Samuel Beckett’s Peristaltic Modernism 5 CHAPTER ONE: ‘The whole fabric comes unstitched’: Dehiscence and Dream of Fair to Middling Women 23 CHAPTER TWO: ‘An irrational heart’: Arrhythmia and Murphy 59 CHAPTER THREE: ‘Want of stomach’: Exhaustion, Linguistic Constipation and Watt 90 CHAPTER FOUR: ‘Relapse again into a wealth of filthy circumstance’: Peristalsis, Rumination and Molloy 126 CHAPTER FIVE: ‘Throes are the only trouble’: Dilation, Parturition and Malone Dies 162 CHAPTER SIX: ‘There go the impurities’: Contamination, Respiration and The Unnamable 182 CONCLUSION 207 Abbreviations 209 LIST OF REFERENCES 210 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Derek Attridge, and my thesis advisory panel member, Dr Emilie Morin, for their unstinting support throughout the whole of my time at the University of York. This work is, in many ways, the product of their intellectual rigour and enthusiasm, and the debt I owe to Derek in particular remains incalculable. Secondly, I would like to thank both the post-graduate community within the Department of English and Related Literature and the wider Beckett community, whose probing enquiries challenged, but ultimately strengthened this project. In particular, I would like to thank the Department for providing financial support through the F.R. Leavis fund and the Graduate Support Fund, which allowed me to undertake some research for this project at the University of Texas in Austin. I would also like to thank my friends and family, including Jason, Neil and Ian Winstanley and those at 26 Meeson Street, who put up with more indigestible conversations about Beckett than even I can care to remember. Finally, I must acknowledge the unfailing emotional support of my fiancée, Kathryn Bromwich, who cared about this project simply because it was mine. 4 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION I declare that this thesis is my own work, apart from those instances in which I quote or draw upon the work of others, where acknowledgement is clearly given through references within the text. Part of Chapter 4 will shortly be published in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Vol. 26, ‘Revisiting the Trilogy’, edited by David Tucker, Mark Nixon and Dirk van Hulle (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014). No other work in this thesis has been published and no portion of the work referred to in this thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification at this or any other institution of learning. 5 INTRODUCTION Samuel Beckett’s Peristaltic Modernism I’ve been writing in French – for the wastepaper basket again. – Samuel Beckett to Mary Hutchinson, 9 April 1958 It is difficult to envisage the development of Samuel Beckett’s artistic practice without considering the extent to which his writing foregrounds the compulsions, drives and obligations of the human body. This is readily apparent in the persistent attention his work devotes to everyday bodily motions, or rather, to the disruption of those motions, for corporeal processes such as alimentation, digestion, ejaculation, pulmonary circulation and respiration seldom function normally in his work. Equally striking is the extent to which his work is littered with textual waste, with abandoned texts, fragments, ‘draff’, ‘disjecta’, ‘foirades’, ‘precipitates’, ‘residua’, ‘sanies’, ‘tête-mortes’ and ‘odds and ends’, in a process that destabilises our notions of the totality inherent within the concept of an oeuvre, while the connotations of redundancy contained within these titles disrupt the value that we typically ascribe to literature. Repeatedly, too, the syncopated narrative and stuttering syntax of Beckett’s prose loops through a series of convulsions, disavowals and disjunctions that have been relentlessly illuminated in post-structuralist readings of his work, yet which we are now discovering bear a marked resemblance to early twentieth-century investigations into medical ailments and psychiatric maladies. Most significant, however, is what Steven Connor has termed, ‘the extraordinary corporeality of the linguistic process’ in Beckett’s mature work, where ‘the drama of utterance is embodied in terms of violent alternations of incorporation and emission’ (Connor 2008, 23), as speech and writing are envisaged through a series of discharges, excretions and expulsions that challenge perceived notions 6 of volition, with artistic expression finally emerging as a compulsive, bodily expulsion where ‘language is spewed, vomited, dribbled, shat and belched’ (Salisbury 2012, 90). In recent years, the representation of the body in Beckett’s work has undergone a substantial reappraisal, yet many questions surrounding its portrayal have only just begun to be addressed. In the first decades of Beckett studies, the existentialist-humanist approach adopted by critics such as Martin Esslin, Hugh Kenner and Samuel I. Mintz tended to equate his work with a rigid Cartesian dualism, reducing the body to an obstacle that thwarted the Beckettian characters’ apparent quest for transcendence in the realm of the mind. Mintz, for example, symptomatically underestimated the vexed depiction of the body in Beckett’s first published novel Murphy (1934-5) to link its protagonist to the Occasionalist doctrine espoused by the seventeenth-century Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669).1 Despite the anxious narrative caveats that frame that novel’s portrayal of Murphy’s attempts to retreat into the ‘third zone’ of his mind, Mintz unhesitatingly reads ‘[t]his mental world’ as the ‘scene of Murphy’s bliss’, where he ‘achieves his most transcendent experience, the apprehension of pure intellect, the mind apprehending itself’ (Mintz 1959, 156-7). The body remains, in this reading, a site of deficiency, a problem to be overcome in order for the protagonist to transcend beyond the difficulties of corporeal, embodied existence. Similarly, Kenner’s essay ‘The Cartesian Centaur’ attributes the Beckettian characters proclivity for, yet difficulties with, bicycles to a stuttering locomotion caused by the ‘intolerably defective machine’ of the human body, which pales in comparison with a mechanised bicycle that reflects the ‘seventeenth-century connoisseurship of the simple machine’ (Kenner 1965, 53-54). Beckett studies may still occasionally defer to these approaches, but it has become remarkably suspicious of them and with good reason. These existentialist-humanist approaches fail, for instance, to acknowledge the extent to which Beckett’s work might be thought to be marked by a stern refusal of mystical or transcendental thought. Nor did they account for the sheer diversity of embodied experience in Beckett’s work, such as the privileging of sensory perception, involuntary movements or autonomous reflexes. 1 Throughout this thesis, parenthetical dates for Beckett’s works refer to the years in which they were written. For these, I have predominantly relied upon John Pilling’s A Samuel Beckett Chronology (2006). 7 If the existential-humanist interpretations that dominated Beckett studies until the 1980s were inclined to reduce the body to an obstacle, the poststructuralist readings of the 1980s and 1990s led to a reappraisal of narrative and subjectivity that frequently coincided with a re-evaluation of the importance of the body in his work. After examining
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