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Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love

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Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love Keller_00_Prelims 1 23/9/02, 10:42 am Keller_00_Prelims 2 23/9/02, 10:42 am Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love JOHN ROBERT KELLER Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Keller_00_Prelims 3 23/9/02, 10:42 am Copyright © John Robert Keller 2002 The right of John Robert Keller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for Cu ISBN 0 7190 6312 4 hardback ISBN 0 7190 6313 2 paperback First published 2002 100908070605040302 10987654321 Typeset in Dante with Tiffany display by Koinonia Ltd, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow Keller_00_Prelims 4 23/9/02, 10:42 am For Liwah, beautiful flower Keller_00_Prelims 5 23/9/02, 10:43 am Keller_00_Prelims 6 23/9/02, 10:43 am Contents Acknowledgements—page viii Foreword by Lance St John Butler—ix Introduction—1 1 Preliminaries and Proust 9 2 No Endon sight: Murphy’s misrecognition of love 49 3 This emptied heart: Watt’s unwelcome home 90 4 A strange situation: self-entrapment in Waiting for Godot 133 5 The dispeopled kingdom: the hidden self in Beckett’s short fiction 172 Epilogue—217 References—219 Index—225 Keller_00_Prelims 7 23/9/02, 10:43 am Acknowledgements I am grateful to many individuals for their support and guidance. My primary reader (and listener) was Ian Alexander, who until recently taught Beckett at the University of Aberdeen. Shane Murphy, who currently teaches Beckett at Aberdeen, also read the manuscript and provided sage commentary. Lance St John Butler advised me in many ways and wrote a most generous foreword. In Toronto, both Don Carveth and Otto Wein- inger discussed my work with me on many occasions. Ron Ruskin kindly invited me to present my work on Waiting for Godot at the Day in Applied Psychoanalysis. Norman Holland, at the University of Florida, published sections of this study in the online journal Psyart and made helpful com- ments on the Introduction. The team at Manchester University Press – in particular Matthew Frost and Kate Fox – and freelance editor Susan Williams, are consummate professionals, and managed to do the impossible in making the publication process an enjoyable one. I must also thank my patients, from whom I learn continually. On a personal note, I am grateful to Victor Likwornik, Charles Hanly, Joshua Levy and to Doug Frayn, all of whom have been central to my development as a psychoanalyst, writer and person. My friends and colleagues Fadi Abou-Rihan, Keith Haartman, Mimi Ismi and Jane Baldock have always been patient, helpful listeners for me. For obvious reasons, writers always acknowledge their partners, whose patience and support is crucial to their work. My wife Betty’s encouragement allowed the original conception of this study, and her unfailing sacrifice made its completion possible. Our three daughters, Liwah, and the twins, Annika and Katrina, were born during the course of this project. They have inspired it more than they can ever know. Keller_00_Prelims 8 23/9/02, 10:43 am Foreword Beckett once remarked that he was interested in ‘fundamental sounds’ and the challenge for Beckett critics has been to find a metalanguage in which they can adequately comment on the profound noises of his drama and prose. A number of studies have considered Beckett’s work alongside analogies from philosophy and, more recently, there has been an interest in Beckett as a sort of ‘dud mystic’ and espouser of what in theology is called the Via Negativa. Aesthetically he has been seen as a minimalist minimalist. But what is ‘fundamental’ can also include the psychological, and there have been several attempts at trying out the mind (rather than the nature of things, or the soul) as the locus of the Beckettian anguish. John Keller, a practising psychoanalyst, has plunged into these bottomless waters with great energy and insight and has written a book that throws more light onto the Beckettian murk, at least for this long-term reader of his work, than has been available before. I came away from reading the manuscript of this book with a sense of clarity and simplicity: whatever else Beckett is about, it now seems to me certain that his work is also a response to childhood trauma and an extended explora- tion of the effects on human beings of the primal loss. Keller has the vigour and fearlessness of a scholar with a solid basis in one discipline applying his skills freely in another. What he sees, from the perspective of his own special knowledge, is a series of texts crying out, perhaps almost literally, for a reading that acknowledges one source of the pain to be the separation from goodness (the Mother) that is the lifelong curse of the sensitive mind. The readings he gives of the Beckett works dealt with are highly convincing and in places quite stunning. Beckett Studies, for me at least, will never be quite the same again. My own interests are leading me towards a Beckett more tormented by God (an absent God, bien entendu) than once people thought he was, but perhaps that is no contradiction of the immense explanatory power Keller_00_Prelims 9 23/9/02, 10:43 am Foreword x of Keller’s thesis; after all where else would Beckett’s sort of God make himself, or, more accurately and fashionably, herself felt than in the endless departures and disappearances of the primal object? There are many Becketts, but this may be the most fundamental of them. Lance St John Butler Pau, France Keller_00_Prelims 10 23/9/02, 10:43 am Introduction For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds, Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Wallace Stevens Till feeling the need for company again he tells himself to call the hearer M at least. (Samuel Beckett) It is often said that the opening words of the psychoanalytical session contain the totality of what is to come. Thinking this true of the scholarly text, I find myself writing that this study is primarily about love. This might seem somewhat odd for a reading of Beckett, but I hope that in what follows the reader will gain an appreciation of what I believe to be the fundamental emotional force that organizes his work – a need for contact with a primary, loving other. I will suggest that deeply embedded in his fiction and dramatic work is an enduring psycho- logical struggle to engage the primal mother, in order to maintain a complete, enduring sense of selfhood. Within his work, this struggle and its consequences reflect universal experiences at the edge of the earliest moments of human life, experiences that have at their core the integrative qualities of maternal love. The central argument of this study suggests that a fundamental contribution of Beckett’s work is its presentation of very early experi- ences in the formation of the human mind and, in particular, the struggles of an emerging-self to maintain contact with a primary sense of internal goodness. This struggle is highly complex, manifesting throughout his oeuvre in variable, sophisticated ways, appearing in character relations, imagery and the associative flow of the plot, and as internal struggles within the narratives and monologues of various first- person pieces, both dramatic and prose. I suggest a reading of the work that assumes it is a production of a ‘narrative-self’, a virtual person who Keller_01_Intro 1 23/9/02, 10:45 am 2 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love produces it as a whole, and that we can approach an understanding of the feeling-states and central psychological organization of this narrative- self through a close study of the texts. Finally, I suggest the texts reveal the convergence of the experience of psychological birth, made possible through the loving mind of the mother, and the birth of fiction, of creativity, that is the heart of life. Fundamental aspects of early, powerful states of mind manifest throughout the texts: a withdrawn, uninterested passivity that defends against powerful feelings of sadness and rage, feelings of envy directed at sources of goodness that could provide love and attachment, states of confusion between self and other that function to blur loss by forging a sort of primary contact, feelings of severe persecutory or annihilation- anxiety, and a constant, powerful struggle to remain authentic when faced with an overwhelming, consuming otherness. The core feeling- state, however, is one of profound loneliness and disconnection, predi- cated on the central feeling of being unwitnessed, or felt, in a loving way that would contain the earliest anxieties confronting an emerging-self. In this, Beckett’s work is about the possibility of its own genesis since, as primal reader/auditors, we must maintain contact with the elusiveness that lies at its heart. Beckett touched upon the centrality of emotional contact in his work when he said (allegedly): ‘I’m no intellectual. All I am is feeling’ (Graver and Federman, 1979: 217), a statement that fundamentally informs this study.
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