THE ABSTRACT GROTESQUE IN BECKETT’S TRILOGY

David Musgrave

Through an examination of Beckett’s usage of the rhetorical device of the ‘enthymeme’ I try to show how the grotesque in Beckett’s Trilogy differs from previous literary examples of the mode. The article takes as its starting point Bakhtin’s periodization of the grotesque in terms of carnival culture (Rabelais) and the ‘subjective grotesque’ (Sterne) and puts forward the argument that the abstractness of Beckett’s gro- tesque is its defining feature. By positioning Beckett’s work in a gen- eral history of the grotesque, I hopefully provide a context for under- standing Beckett’s ‘modernist’ grotesque and show how it is primarily concerned with the discovery of the new.

Much of the work carried out in recent years assessing Beckett’s achievements in the light of the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin has tended to focus on questions of dialogue and genre: the bedrock, in other words, of Bakhtin’s ideas that are often referred to under the rubric of ‘dialogism’. Henning’s work on Beckett and carnival, for example, works under the assumption that “Beckett shares Mikhail Bakhtin’s criticism of the repressive monologism that is so character- istic of Western thought with its penchant for abstract integrality” (Henning, 1) and proceeds to discuss some shorter works of Beckett in terms of “carnivalized dialogization” (29-31). While the Bakhtin of menippean satire is to some degree evoked, the historian of laughter and the grotesque is scarcely dealt with in this and other recent stud- ies.1 Similarly, work which focuses on the grotesque aspects of Beck- ett’s work has tended to dwell on established theories of the grotesque and has not attempted to determine how the grotesque in Beckett’s works differs from other representatives of the mode.2 My primary goal in this article is to describe how Beckett’s grotesque represents a significant development in the history of that mode. Most of Beckett’s oeuvre belongs squarely in the tradition of the grotesque. While the grotesque nature of The Trilogy, the other prose works and even the plays is beyond question, the exact nature of the grotesque which characterises these works is harder to define. Like any tradition or mode the grotesque does not remain unchanged over time. Following Bakhtin’s work on the grotesque, I want to develop a periodization of the grotesque and then assess Beckett’s Trilogy in relation to what I believe to be its current phase, which I term the ab- stract grotesque. Even a cursory familiarity with Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais is enough to make clear the almost nostalgic place Rabelais holds for Bakhtin. He is the paradigmatic example of the height of so-called carnival culture and the grotesque forms associated with it. In Rabe- lais and His World, Bakhtin identifies this phase of the grotesque as grotesque realism: in general terms this grotesque is characterised by its objective quality. Images of the bodily lower stratum give birth to a “new, concrete, and realistic historic awareness” which is “not ab- stract thought about the future but the living sense that each man be- longs to the immortal people who create history”, (1984b, 367). For Bakhtin, Rabelais is the prime example of the direct influence of folk- carnivalistic culture on literary forms. I say nostalgic, because the history of the medieval grotesque after Rabelais is, for Bakhtin, one of attenuation and involution. After Pope’s and Swift’s neo-classical, but nonetheless rum- bustious grotesques, Laurence Sterne’s menippean satire is the first important example of the next phase of the grotesque which suffuses the pre-romantic, romantic and early modern periods. The grotesque in this phase becomes the expression of a “subjective, individualistic world outlook very different from the carnival folk concept of previ- ous ages, although still containing some carnival elements”, (1984b, 36). The subjective grotesque can be characterised in terms of two symbols: the mask and the marionette. At the height of carnival cul- ture, in the phase of grotesque realism, the theme of the mask is con- nected with a “merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself” (Bakhtin 1984b, 39-40) and establishes a cheerful similarity with the other. In the Romantic period, the mask is torn out of its original, carnival context and invested with an often dark interiority. The open-endedness of the grotesque body known to carnival culture makes possible the development, in the Romantic 372