“ALMOST LIFELESS, LIKE THE TELLER”: THE INSTRUCTIVE PERFORMANCES OF SAMUEL BECKETT’S SELF-AWARE NOVELS
A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
by
Garth Jerome Sabo
May, 2011
Thesis written by Garth Jerome Sabo B.A., John Carroll University, 2009 M.A., Kent State University, 2011
Approved by
______Claire Culleton______, Advisor
______Ronald Corthell______, Chair, Department of English
______Timothy Moerland______, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..iv
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 “That which lurks behind, be it something or nothing”
Chapter One………………………………………………………………………...……11 Transparency – Beckett and the Text as Art
Chapter Two……………………………………………………………………………...41 Physicality – Beckett and the Text as Object
Chapter Three…………………………………………………...... ………………..70 Scatology – Beckett and the Text as Fart
Chapter Four……………………………………………………………………..………98 Implications – Beckett and the Reader
Notes………………………………………………………..…………………………..109
References……………………………………………………..….……….……………123
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Claire Culleton for her assistance in the composition and revision of this thesis. Her words of encouragement and attentiveness were invaluable in the process of this project’s completion. I would also like to thank Dr. Tammy Clewell and Dr. Robert Trogdon for serving on my committee and offering their tacit support through the course of my efforts.
Thanks are also due to Dr. Jeanne Colleran, without whom I never would have been introduced to the works of Samuel Beckett. Were it not for the studies of Krapp’s
Last Tape and Waiting for Godot she prompted, this thesis would have been impossible.
On a personal note, I would like to thank Michelle Rigsby for the support and solidarity she offered. Michelle put up with months of Beckett anecdotes far better than I ever could have anticipated, and I am deeply indebted to her for that.
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INTRODUCTION
“THAT WHICH LURKS BEHIND, BE IT SOMETHING OR NOTHING”
In the field of Samuel Beckett scholarship, considerable attention has been paid to the apparent meaninglessness of the Beckettian text. Hannah Copeland has stated that “it is the absence, the nothingness at the center of being, that [Beckett] wishes to reveal in his art.”1 Similarly, in his introduction Beckett’s Dying Words, Christopher Ricks asserts that in the Beckettian text, “there is nothing to compare with the ultimate asylum; there is no substitute for nothing.”2 Dirk van Hulle, writing on the topic of Beckett’s manuscript practices, also suggests that Beckett’s writing practices “implied the know-how to create and carefully refine his composition in order to admit the decomposition to become part of it.”3 Even Beckett was willing, even eager, to position himself as an author seeking to say nothing – or, more appropriately, Nothing. In a letter to Axel Kaun, a well respected
Beckett critic, Beckett wrote on 9 July 1937:
It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write
in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a
veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the
nothingness) lying behind it…It is to be hoped the time will come, thank
God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is
1 2 most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we
do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute.
To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it
something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher
goal for today’s writer.4
Beckett goes on to note that “[on] the road toward [a] very desirable literature of the non- word, some form of nominalistic irony can of course be a necessary phase. However, it does not suffice if the game loses some of its sacred solemnity. Let it cease altogether!”5
Beckett thus established for himself the explicit goal of the non-statement; that is,
Beckett’s “literature of the non-word”6 limits itself to the face value of its terms. No deeper meaning underlies the Beckett text, owing to Beckett’s suspicion that there is simply nothing lurking behind the veil of language to seep through.
It would be a mistake, however, to misinterpret the critical canon and the artist’s own statements as implying an entirely empty experience with the Beckettian text. In the absence of that which lurks behind, Beckett’s writing obsesses with that which cannot be denied – the text itself, the words and performances with which Beckett’s reader interacts moment by moment. The literature of the non-word is still a literature, and as such it continues to embody and follow certain structural constants and conceits. These structural and artistic elements of Beckett’s literature avoid the total deconstruction of the text by asserting that the meaning is wholly contained in the moment of reading; Beckett certainly does not point beyond the text to any deeper meaning, but that is due in part to his satisfaction with the immediate text to convey an artistic experience. In deference to
3 this, Beckett’s works abound in moments that are clearly intended to reify the exact moment of interaction between reader and text. Beckett’s intention at these points seems to be twofold. First, the text supplements itself in meta- or extraliterary ways. That is, in addition to the thematic concerns relevant to the novels’ artistic wholeness, the texts include performative gestures whereby the reader’s response to that which is written is acted out physically or conceptually within the novel. This leads to the second apparent intention of Beckett’s reification of the immediate within the text, which is to instruct the reader in the development of a highly specific, rigid response to novel as intended by
Beckett. Beckett may intend for his reader to arrive at Nothing, but it is nonetheless a distinct Nothing he pursues. The text, thus, exerts exacting control over the reader’s possible interpretation and response to it, such that the outward unintelligibility of the
Beckett text belies its rigorously enforced authorial presence and control.
It is in light of this that I offer the term “instructive performances,” and all reasonable variations thereof, in reference to Samuel Beckett’s early novels. Throughout this thesis, it is my intention to trace and explain the influence of these instructive performances upon the Beckettian text. In so doing, I offer an alternate understanding of
Beckett’s non-word. Rather than an empty experience, Beckett is profoundly motivated by the creation of an impossibly rich interaction with the text; he only differs from traditional literature in that he restricts this richness to the immediate moment of reading, with no intention of making a statement that reaches beyond the instant of the text. This awareness of the immediacy of the moment of reading results in a relationship with the texts that transcends the abstract and deconstructionist understanding traditionally
4 proposed by Beckett scholarship. Beckett’s moments of instructive performance in the novels encourage his readers to become subsumed in their progressive experience with his writing. There are certainly moments where Beckett forcefully alienates his reader from the text, but they are offset by the wealth of examples wherein he actively and overtly pursues an intimate relationship with the audience of his novels.
I focus specifically on Beckett’s novels because while the issue of self-aware performance in Beckett’s drama has already been addressed admirably, it has been at the expense of a serious contemplation of the performative elements of the novels. In Samuel
Beckett’s Self-Referential Drama: The Sensitive Chaos, Shimon Levy’s excellent book on this subject in Beckett’s plays, Levy offers an explanatory example of the typical critics’ dismissal of the novels. Levy asserts, “In Beckett’s prose and poetry a constant quest for the embryonic presence of a self, perhaps as proxy for his own self, can easily be detected; but in his dramatic works the characters need actors as actual ‘proxies’ to provide the necessary vehicle to carry the self.”7 Apparently, Beckett’s prose is ignored due to its self-explanatory clearness in favor of the more attractive complexity of the drama. While it is not my intention to refute this positive impression of Beckett’s dramatic canon, it is a reductive limitation of scholarship to suggest that the novels serve a merely ancillary role in the body of Beckett’s work. “While allowing for methodological modification pertaining to the particular character of the [dramatic] medium dealt with,” Shimon Levy suggests “that self-reference, reflexivity, medium- awareness and notions of an implied author, as well as audience, are all manifestations of a unified artistic course – a course that ensues from Beckett’s expressed artistic self-
5 consciousness.”8 Levy’s examination of these concepts in the drama is inspired and suggests a productive vein for further contemplation in the field of dramatic analysis.
However, Levy himself asserts the need for “methodological modification” when dealing with different artistic media, and it is for that reason that the discussion of Beckett’s self- aware novels can no longer be included as a mere subset of the drama. Indeed, Beckett’s paradoxical inclusion of performative elements in the novel, a traditionally non- performative genre, establishes the analysis of this theme as long overdue and profoundly resonant within the scope of Beckett studies.
In the interest, then, of applying to the novels the same interest in self-aware performance exemplified by Levy’s book on the drama, I deal at length with Beckett’s first five major novels in this thesis. Beckett’s first novel, Murphy, was published in 1938 and focuses on the titular character Murphy’s pursuit of a vagrant, introspective lifestyle.
However, pushed by his prostitute lover Celia into finding employment, Murphy takes a position as caretaker at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat asylum in London, which leads indirectly to his death in a gas explosion. Watt is Beckett’s second novel, completed in
1945 but unpublished until 1953, when Paris’ Olympia Press released a limited edition in its “Collection Merlin” series.9 The plot of Watt is broken into four non-chronological sections that trace Watt’s arrival at the mysterious Mr. Knott’s estate, where he serves as a manservant and struggles with the apparent disintegration of meaning while in Knott’s employ. After leaving the manor, Watt ends up in an institution, proposed by Gottfried
Büttner and others to be an insane asylum, where he meets Sam, the novel’s narrator, and presumably relates to him the events that make up the text of Watt. Beckett wrote both
6 Murphy and Watt in English, which may partially account for the many similarities in artistic style and certain plot points the novels share.
Owing in part to the dissatisfaction Beckett expressed with writing in English as early as 1937, he composed his later novels in French and subsequently translated them himself into English. Raymond Federman, notably, has pointed out the intriguing influence “Beckett’s bilingualism and his unique activity as a self-translator”10 has on his writing. As it is beyond my purview to comment on the French text of his novels, I will be restricting my analysis to the English-language texts of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The
Unnamable. These are traditionally referred to as Beckett’s trilogy novels owing to their closeness of composition and publication, as well as thematic concerns that are shared and expanded upon progressively across the three novels. Molloy, published in French in
1951 and in English in 1955, splits itself into two non-chronological sections much like in Watt. In the first, the ancient, crippled vagrant Molloy struggles to return to his mother’s home before his death; this first section of Molloy is notable for, among other things, being split into only two paragraphs, the second of which lasts uninterrupted for more than eighty pages. A new character Moran narrates the second section of Molloy, which is broken into more traditional paragraphs. Moran’s narrative details his descent into infirmity and madness as he seeks out Molloy for his boss Youdi, though by the end of the novel it is strongly implied that Moran becomes the Molloy persona as he returns from his failed pursuit.
An essential element of the trilogy novels is the extent to which each novel claims some ownership over the creation of those that preceded it. As such, the eponymous
7 narrator of Beckett’s 1956 novel Malone Dies indicates an awareness of the fictionality of Murphy, Molloy, and Moran alike (though not Watt, due most likely to the fact that
Watt was not published until after Malone Dies was published in French in 1951).
Malone, restricted to a hospice room and unable to leave his bed on account of his crippled legs, creates a narrative centered around a thinly veiled personal analogue, initially called Saposcat and later changed to Macmann, in order to distract himself from the process of dying. Malone Dies is notable for its artistic use of the continuous present and the way in which Malone’s diminishing faculties are reflected by the text, culminating in the novel’s abrupt, unpunctuated conclusion as he expires.
The final trilogy novel, The Unnamable, departs radically from traditional expectations of the novel form. Published in French in 1953 and in English in 1958, the novel contains no physical action. The narrator, identified only as the Unnamable, exists in a purely cognitive universe within the confines of his own mind. The Unnamable alternately asserts total control over his universe as well as the narrative that conveys his thoughts and suggests that he is merely a passive observer of the cognitive events that surround him. As in Malone Dies, the narration of The Unnamable indicates itself to be aware of Beckett’s earlier novels; the Unnamable is visited by apparitions of the protagonists of each of the trilogy novels, and suggests that he created them himself.
Owing to the cerebral emphasis that characterizes The Unnamable, it has traditionally been understood, and rightly so, as Beckett’s most exhaustive treatise on the subject of artistic creation in an ultimately meaningless universe.
8 Though they represent a considerable portion of Beckett’s artistic career, these five novels employ a notably consistent system of reference and imagery that invites certain comparisons. Beckett’s artistic intentions, and the strategies through which he realizes those intentions, remain remarkably consistent throughout the novels, though certainly with some stylistic progression from Murphy to The Unnamable. By tracing the particular ways Beckett frames the processes of creating and consuming his texts, it becomes possible to arrive at a more complete understanding of the conceptual function of instructive performances within his novels. As such, in Chapter One I examine the extent to which Beckett asserts the text’s status as the receiver of conscious artistic effort.
While interacting with the text, the reader also interacts directly with the creative presence responsible for it, which results in a resonant theme of artistic transparency within the novels. Beckett’s awareness of the physical aspect of the book, and the impact this physicality has on the reader’s relationship with the text, is covered in Chapter Two.
Beckett makes the physical space occupied by the text inseparable from the cognitive event of reading, which results in a unique readerly suspension between the physical and cerebral planes of the novel. In Chapter Three, I pay careful attention to Beckett’s predilection for couching the artistic process in scatological terms. With the understanding that Beckett’s fecal imagery is intended as more than physical humor, I argue that the combination of literary creation with the expression of scatological physical burdens offers some explanation of the author’s continued artistic expression despite its perceived meaninglessness. Finally, in the closing chapter I examine the influence these instructive performances exert over the field of Beckett criticism as it
9 strives for continued relevance. In pursuit of this, I pay careful attention to the emphasis that the Beckett text places on the reader at the moment of consumption. This focus on the immediate integration of reader into text represents a profound element of Beckett’s overarching artistic intention and motivation.
By focusing on the instructive performances of Samuel Beckett’s novels, I offer a new direction to the field of Beckett scholarship. In “The Writer as Self-Translator,” for example, Raymond Federman identifies a vague uneasiness that has been felt throughout the critical community:
Like all those who get involved with Beckett’s work, initially I wanted to
know what that work means. And so I devoted a lot of time and effort to
the “pursuit of meaning” in the Beckett landscape. Gradually, this pursuit
of meaning became less and less important, less and less interesting to me.
Perhaps because I had no more to say (if I ever had anything to say) to my
own satisfaction, and perhaps also because what was being said was being
said over and over again…In any event, having freed myself of this need
for understanding the meaning of Beckett’s work, I found a new
enjoyment in returning to his books.11
The current critical obsession with the meaning of Beckett ignores what Federman articulates as the reality that everything has already been said on that subject. Federman rediscovers the enjoyable aspect of reading Beckett as a self-contained and instantaneous experience. The only point at which Federman errs in his critique is to assume that this
10 enjoyment is “new” in any way. Indeed, as I will show presently, Beckett has intended this enjoyable subsumption in the experience of the text from the start.
CHAPTER ONE
TRANSPARENCY – BECKETT AND THE TEXT AS ART
There can be little doubt that Samuel Beckett is intensely interested in portraying in his novels the creative process. Beckett’s extreme fondness for creating author- protagonists in his novels deserves considerable attention. In The New Literature, critic
Claude Mauriac has suggested, in fact, that Beckett’s heroes are “interchangeable from book to book, [and] are all projections of the author, who, in turn, is a reflection of ourselves.”1 Similarly, Edith Kern’s pivotal article “Moran-Molloy: The Hero as Author” focuses on possible interpretations of the Beckett trilogy narrators as figures of both an abstract “Author” and Beckett himself.2 Kern notes that “Molloy is an author consciously engaged in literary creation”3 and, similarly, that “Moran…insists on his authorial power to create characters.”4 These projections of the authorly figure onto the text constitute a pivotal characteristic of the Beckettian novel, for it is through these creative incursions that Beckett lays bare the process of his artistry. Hannah Copeland, in her excellent Art and the Artist in the Works of Samuel Beckett, describes this characteristic quite eloquently, stating that “the Beckettian narrator (or actor) underlines in his art the very aspect that traditional novelists…seek most diligently to efface from their work – the process of fabrication.”5 These critics concentrate on the self-reflective influence
11 12 Beckett’s artistic narrators have on the texts; for Copeland, in fact, it “would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of this artistic lucidity, for it determines the entire course of Beckett’s creative efforts.”6 The critics cited point, rightly so, to the preponderance of moments in Beckett’s novels that specifically invoke the process of storytelling. As an illustrative example, consider the opening of Malone Dies, in which the titular narrator proclaims:
While waiting [to die] 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. 7
At this moment, the content of the novel intersects with the process that creates it, as
Malone, and thus Beckett, cannot separate artistic invention from commentary on the same. Here Malone reveals the motivation for the text that is to follow, and also models the interpretative process to be employed in response to his stories. As a result, Malone calls explicit attention to the process of creation that has resulted in the text being actively consumed by the indirectly addressed reader. The text, at this moment and others like it, becomes intriguingly performative, in that it, as the product of the artistic process, nevertheless positions itself as the arbiter of that very process. As such, these moments of artistic self-reflection act out the process of the novel’s creation, and for that reason I deem them the preeminent example of Beckett’s performative prose. These moments of creative transparency indicate Beckett’s characteristic interest in the text as an active object, and construct the relationship that the reader is to develop with the novels.
13 Foregrounding the creative process in the Beckettian novel provides an instructive lens through which the prose is to be viewed. Moreover, this instructive element of self- reference and meta-awareness represents a unique feature of the Beckettian literary canon. Whereas the typical meta-moment suggests a generalizing totality of literature, in which the individual work invokes and connects itself to a larger body of external texts, the Beckettian meta-moment remonstrates the very idea of such literary abstraction.
Instead, Beckett’s self-referential texts divorce themselves from the abstract body of literature in favor of a self-contained experience of the unique immediacy of the individual text. Though Beckett’s novels abound with intertextual references, they result nevertheless in a profound experience of the specific moment in which they occur. That is, the invocation of additional texts strengthens the experience with the novel at hand, rather than diluting it. This partially contradicts Hannah Copeland’s suggestion that
“[s]elf-consciousness grows from one work to the next, and, as it develops, the fictional atmosphere and characters (especially the central figure of the artist creating) reflect its deep penetration in their increasing starkness.”8 Copeland’s comments suggest that the importance of the novels is only to be derived from their function as an increment of the larger series of Beckett’s prose. I will demonstrate instead that the meta-artistry of the novels encourages the perception of the novels as individually distinct and productive.
This realization brings with it an awareness of the importance of the immediacy of the consumptive moment in the Beckettian text. Beckett’s rigorous display of his own creative process encourages the reader, somewhat paradoxically, to be subsumed in the product of that creativity; though he engages himself in demystifying the process of
14 artistry, the audience of the novels nevertheless remains entranced by the constructs he imposes.
The influential relationship between reader and text engendered by Beckett’s metacommentary implies some degree of audience empowerment. The effectiveness of moments of explicit self-awareness relies on a conscious acknowledgment and appreciation of the creative processes intrinsic to them. By this, I do not mean to challenge the considerable body of critical work that has pointed out the alienating effect that Beckett’s writing has upon the reader9; the sheer bulk of this critical interpretation makes such a move eminently undesirable, to say the least. Rather, I offer this reinterpretation of Beckett’s self-reference as a complementary counterpart to this disjunctive understanding of the novels. Beckett’s novels certainly challenge the reader’s traditional attempts to interpret meaning, but in doing so they also make the reader’s consumptive role explicitly important to the completion of the artistic process. As such, my focus rests firmly on the extent to which the portrayal of active creativity in the novels constructs a specific immediate reaction of the reader to the text. With this perspective, the individual novels gain considerable importance, as any meta-reflection on the reader’s part must be mediated by the specific context in which it occurs.
Importantly, if Beckett’s self-reflection does invite any universalizing perspective on literature, it is always centered upon the work that facilitates it, and as such, Beckett’s self-conscious invocations of artistic craft reiterate the importance of the individual moments and texts in which they appear.
15 This awareness of the immediate implications of self-reference greatly complicates the traditional critical preference for Beckett’s trilogy novels (Molloy,
Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) over the earlier works Murphy and Watt, which have often been summarily dismissed as mere “parodies of epistemological issues.” 10 It is true, certainly, that Murphy and Watt rely considerably less on creative reflection than the trilogy does, which may no doubt be attributed to the latter works’ characteristic use of the protagonist-narrator figure. The fact remains that all of Beckett’s central figures
“alternate in the roles of creator and created.”11 Understanding that the explicit invocation of the artistic process conveys the immediate importance of the performative quality of
Beckett’s prose, Murphy and Watt can be seen as equally important indicators of the dramatic meta-moment in the novel. The subtle, or rather oblique, manner in which the narrators of Murphy and Watt implicate the creative process in fact encourages the dramatic meta-moment, rather than stifles it. While Watt’s Sam figure and the omniscient narrator of Murphy are less overtly involved in artistic reflection, their narrative structures are strikingly performative of the artistic process.
As Beckett’s first and most traditional novel, Murphy relies the least on moments of meta awareness and reflection. Nevertheless, there abound throughout the novel instances where the narrative commentary infringes upon the artistic traditions that inform the book. The most overt of these moments stand out for their mention of the
“care” 12 with which the text has been crafted. When Celia tells Murphy that he must find work or accept that she will return to prostitution to support them, he knows “what that meant. No more music,”13 with “music” serving as the novel’s repeated euphemism for
16 sex. The narrator interrupts at this point to note that “[t]his phrase is chosen with care, lest the filthy censors should lack an occasion to commit their filthy synecdoche.”14
Similarly, the narrator reveals that a later passage in the novel describing a passionate kiss “is carefully calculated to deprave the cultivated reader.”15 Both of these moments lay bare the creative processes that spawned them by calling attention to the thought and intention that motivated them. In so doing, the narrative voice, which has otherwise neglected to comment directly on the text elsewhere in the novel, indicates the exhaustive attention with which the text has been imbued and discourages any potential reading that might attribute qualities of the novel to accidents or inattention. More importantly, the artistic identity establishes itself here as consciously pursuant of a specific readerly reaction. In the first example, the process of writing purportedly avoids the potential action of “the filthy censors,” whereas in the second the censors’ assumed criticism of the novel’s effect on “the cultivated reader” is anticipated and imitated for disruptive effect.
Beckett’s explicit reference to the influence of the filthy censors upon his text reveals an aspect of the creative process that might otherwise go unnoticed. The conscious awareness of censorship ties the element of revision in the novel writing process into the reader’s experience of the text. Though he contests their influence over his text here, Beckett’s acknowledgment of the censors’ participation in the creation of his texts results in a dim perception of a hierarchical process of creation, in which a constraining presence tempers the artist’s initial efforts at articulation. Accordingly, the text indicates an additional step in the transmission of content from author to reader, which further complicates the growing awareness of the process of creation in the novel,
17 as the main artistic influence competes with additional voices for creative authority. The weakening of the artist’s absolute control over the text engenders a subsequent empowerment of the reader’s position, as the role of textual consumer constitutes the only active presence in the novel whose authority is not split amongst multiple competing figures.
The main importance of these self-aware sections derives from the artistic transparency that characterizes them. By revealing the creative motivations that resulted in a discernible aspect of the novel, the text acts out the processes that govern its creation and consumption equally. Beckett collapses the illusion of the novel as a product alone, and instead demonstrates how the process and product of creativity are inseparable, though uniquely distinct. Murphy complicates this in due course when the narrator notes shortly after, “All the puppets in this book whinge sooner or later, except Murphy, who is not a puppet.”16 The identification of characters as “puppets” dependent upon an unseen actor for their actions, and the knowledge that “sooner or later” they all will express their discontent, implies a knowledge of events in the novel independent of the imposed chronology of the plot. In this dramatic meta-moment, then, the text acts simultaneously as its own creator and creation. However, this assertion that Murphy “is not a puppet” must be seen as extremely harrowing to a simplistic understanding of this aspect of the novel, which up to now may have been explained as instances of the author’s insertion of himself into the text. For Murphy to evince an agency that the other characters lack would imply a lack of meaningful control over his actions by the creative presence responsible for the novel, and presumably the narration that comprises it. Here, it is
18 demonstrated perfectly that performative moments of meta-awareness are not exempted from the creativity they indicate. The dramatic meta-moment does not necessarily establish a direct connection from the author to reader, though this potential misreading is clearly intended by the text. Rather, these moments are often demonstrative of the intricate leveling of mediating forces in the novel, as the moment in question transfers the reader from sublimation in one creative process to the authority responsible for it: a higher, yet still entirely constructed, creative voice. The realization that dramatic meta- moments are themselves subject to a further level of creative intervention highlights their importance, as it provides a constant reiteration to the processes that weigh upon the creative entity of the novel. It is clear that Murphy –and, by extension, performative literature – hovers between the roles of “creator” and “creation.” Critic Anthony Farrow sums this up eloquently when he suggests that Beckett’s “books seem to belong to some area between, or including, both mental events and objects.”17 Indeed, this suspension between competing sources of authority describes the fundamental experience of reading
Beckett admirably.
This seemingly paradoxical dual role as both event and object manifests several times throughout the text as self-aware descriptions of the novel’s creative and consumptive figures. Neither writer nor reader appears in Murphy as a particularly positive presence. The creative community, of which the narrative voice of the novel must be seen as an example, appears to Celia as “Artists of every kind, writers, underwriters, devils, ghosts, columnists, musicians, lyricists, organists, painters and decorators, sculptors and statuaries, critics and reviewers, major and minor, drunk and
19 sober, laughing and crying, in schools and singly.”18 The abstract artist figure appears in this moment as a member of the dregs of society, whose procession past the prostitute
Celia suggests the insolvency and indecency of art in Beckett’s construction. The reader, conversely, can be seen in the character of Murphy himself, whose constant pedantry satirizes an overly academic response to the novel. Like the potential reader, Murphy is
“one of the elect, who require everything to remind them of something else.”19
Considering that this description occurs when the pattern of a linoleum floor “delighted
Murphy because it called Braque to his mind,”20 it is rather inevitable that this be interpreted as a jab at an excessively allusive and elitist artistic community.
Though they may seem disparate, these images of author and reader fulfill mostly similar performative roles in the novel. In both cases, the text acts out an aspect of its role as an object of the creative process. The negative portrait of the artist in the prostitute’s procession implicates the production of the novel’s content, whereas the satirical image of the elitist reader affects the consumption of the same. Through this, Beckett invokes reflection on both ends of the creative experience. More importantly, these performative moments of self-awareness instruct the reader’s potential relationship to the text. The image of the artist cultivated here discourages any untenably grandiose interpretation of the author’s intentions or presence in the text, whereas the satirical portrayal of the reader figure suggests an emotive response to the novel and its notably humorous aspects. The moments of meta-awareness in Murphy, then, conflate the boundaries of the author’s intended influence over the text; at the same time, they act out the reasonable limitations of the reader’s relationship to the text.
20 Just as the meta-presence of the creative process in Murphy serves as an indication of the discernible boundaries of the creative experience, Beckett’s second novel Watt enhances its potential artistic extension through a greater emphasis on the process of its creation. This can be seen in the very first footnote to the text21, which occurs only six paragraphs into the novel and suggests that “[much] valuable space has been saved, in this work, that would otherwise have been lost, by avoidance of the plethoric reflexive pronoun after say.”22 As in Murphy, Watt’s narrator Sam here identifies himself as the originator of an element of the text, although notably he is only taking credit for an absence in the text. More importantly, the lack of the “plethoric reflexive pronoun,”23 would not typically constitute a conscious omission, since, as
Matthew Winston notes, this “resolve[s] difficulties which need never have arisen in the first place.”24 As such, this moment of awareness of the creative construction of the text is heavily predicated upon an element of the text that cannot be directly encountered.
This does little to alleviate the impact of this moment of self-awareness, however, and in fact establishes the importance of this footnote as a notable example of Beckett’s performative self-reflection. An assertion that draws attention to the negative presence of the novel – that is, a description of the text based on what it lacks – induces metacognition of a level not otherwise attainable. A footnote occupies an instantaneous
“readerly moment” and is characterized by considerable conflict between an awareness of the text as it is and a suspicion of how it might have been. In this way, the Beckettian audience is pushed into considering the text in the context of its creation; it is impossible to be satisfied with the text as a matter of fact when the processes that resulted in it – and
21 may have altered it considerably – are laid bare. As such, the reader at this moment is struck by a profound realization of the demonstrative power of the Beckettian prose, as all dialogue in the text following this point will, so long as it excludes the plethoric reflexive pronoun, act out this absence repeatedly. In doing this, the reader is confronted over and over with the influence of the author over the text.
The performance of absent creativity is far from the only point of interest for the metadramatics of Watt. As in Murphy with the discussion of the censors’ influence,
Beckett establishes in Watt a hierarchy of implied creativity, which results in a profoundly intricate experience of the novel’s craft and chain of artistic ownership. He accomplishes this by sustained references to mediating influences between Watt’s experience in Knott’s house and the publication of Watt, which, if the various creative intermediaries are to be enumerated, results in fully three separate creative realms: Sam as the receiver of the story, Sam as the writer of the story, and the editor and printer of
Sam’s manuscript. The inclusion of these three seemingly conflicting levels of remove from the story proper would seem to alienate the reader from the text by placing it at too great a distance, but instead the interaction of these three roles actually results in a substantial empowerment of the reader through ample instances of dramatic meta- moments for each of these mediators.
The first interlocutor to Watt’s story is Sam, a passive recipient of the tale.
Because Sam as writer is by far the dominant influence on the novel, it can be difficult to distinguish this preliminary step of comprehension, but it nevertheless exists and performs a role easily distinguishable from Sam’s written persona. In the midst of the
22 description of the Lynches, the family Mr. Knott employs for the sole purpose of raising enough dogs to reliably eat the scraps of his dinner, the text notes, “Five generations, twenty-eight souls, nine hundred and eighty years, such was the proud record of the
Lynch family, when Watt entered Mr. Knott’s service.”25 The footnote to this, however, establishes that “[t]he figures given here are incorrect. The consequent calculations are therefore doubly erroneous.”26 The discrepancy between the text and the footnote reveals that Sam’s immediate goal here is the direct transmission of Watt’s story, despite his realization of the flawed calculations.27 At this moment in the text Sam is as much a passive consumer of the content as the reading audience; he is aware that he receives flawed information, but his role as the recipient of a coherent tale forces him to simply accept his lack of agency. The narration here is as much a passive vessel of the novel’s content as the reader is, and the explicit self-awareness of this fact has the effect of a performance of the reader’s own passivity. The passive, minimally intrusive Sam hints at the novel’s status as both object and actor, which is a fundamental aspect of the successful dramatic meta-moment. Insofar as the content of the novel may be transferred directly between distinct entities, in this case Sam and the reader, it appears as a self- contained object; insofar as Sam and the reader are beholden to its whims, including its flaws, it exercises dominion over them and performs an active influence. The simultaneity of these conflicting active and passive roles is encapsulated in the fleeting moment of the footnote, which underscores the moment-based meta-landscape of the novel. Beckett’s performative prose is not a constant presence in the novel, for this would
23 dilute its impact. Rather, it appears at discrete moments and then retreats, resulting in an undulating experience of Watt as a metacognitive text.
Notably, the presence of the narrator as a passive recipient of the content of the novel results in a semi-empowered character structure for Watt comparable to the assertion that Murphy “is not a puppet.” To the extent that he interacts with Sam directly during their time of acquaintance,28 Watt achieves a level of agency that complicates
Sam’s artistic control over the text greatly at multiple points throughout the novel. Sam mentions Watt’s distaste for the sun, and yet when they meet Watt “liked the sun at this time, or at least supported it. Nothing is known about this volte-face. He seemed pleased that all the shadows should move, not only himself.”29 Sam’s inability to account for this abrupt change in Watt’s behavior suggests a limitation in the creator’s authority over the product of his artistic endeavor. Watt, moreover, revels in the observation that he is not the only object that is acted upon in the novel, which suggests a certain awareness that he is being acted upon against his will by external forces, just as the sun dictates the movement of the shadows. Watt’s ability to alter his relationship to the sun hints at autonomy beyond Sam’s scope, but is nevertheless tempered by Watt’s own awareness that he, like the shadows, answers to a constraining influence in the novel.
The principal mediating creative lens of the text, and by far the most prolific dramatic influence on the experience of the novel, is that of Sam as writer. The first footnote, already discussed, introduced this aspect of the narrative voice, but it would be a mistake to limit its discussion to one fleeting example. Indeed, Sam’s creative process is on display throughout the novel, but nowhere is its influence so apparent as in the
24 Addenda section. The note to the section assures the reader, “The following precious and illuminating material should be carefully studied. Only fatigue and disgust prevented its incorporation.”30 The frankness and fragmentary nature of the commentary here suggests that the Addenda section marks a weakening of the perceived distance between Beckett and his creative corollary Sam. The self-referential notes in the Addenda section suggest an artistic awareness not otherwise encountered through Sam’s narration. The temptation to attribute this section to Beckett exclusively certainly presents itself, but such an interpretation discounts the clear continuation of elements of Sam’s voice. The suggestion that this material could have been incorporated into the text indicates that it remains stylistically consistent with Sam’s narration elsewhere. As such, the increased visibility of Beckett’s influence on the creative voice should be understood as an empowering addition to Sam’s creative commentary, rather than a restrictive replacement. The Addenda section, then, provides a substantial example of the novel’s performance of the process of creation. The narrative voice demonstrates a relationship to the text that foregoes the traditional objective remove and illusion of immediacy. The material of the Addenda, described as “precious and illuminating,” is clearly to be held in some regard. This is a radical departure from the disinterested, surgical relationship to the text that has predominated elsewhere in the novel, and invites the reader to apply an elevated sense of value to the byproducts of the creative editing process. The “fatigue and disgust” that prevented the inclusion of these fragments into the body of the novel reiterates the awareness of the process of creation being cultivated here, as the narrator’s tiredness implies an extended and exacting period of composition and revision of the
25 novel’s contents. The narrator’s “disgust” certainly complicates any potential opinion of the “precious and illuminating material” that comprises the section, but this indicates the complexity of the creative impulse being described. The relationship to the text indicated by the narration at this point informs and prefigures the audience’s own, to the extent that this must be seen as a profoundly performative moment. By acting out and calling attention to the process of the novel’s creation, the narrative voice encourages an encompassing view of the craft of the novel, which mirrors the negative presence invoked by the first footnote.
Repeatedly throughout the Addenda the reflective narrative voice addresses itself, which represents a radical departure from its otherwise consistent outward focus elsewhere in the novel. Several Addenda fragments reveal how the process of self- reflection influences the very text in which it appears, as Sam clearly uses moments of increased reflexivity to guide his creative output. Sam notes that the fragment “Watt learned to accept etc.” should be “[used] to explain poverty of Part III. Watt cannot speak of what happened on first floor, because for the greater part of the time nothing happened, without his protesting.”31 Immediately after this, Sam reminds himself to
“[n]ote that Arsene’s declaration gradually came back to Watt.”32 Both of these moments provide a revelation of the artistic motivation and intended interpretation of distinct moments in the text. The narrative voice engages itself directly in the process of generating and defining the content of the text, and Sam’s need to elucidate these practices for himself speaks to the complexity of the process of creation. The clarity of these notes stands in direct contradiction to the sections they describe, particularly
26 “Arsene’s declaration,” which takes the form of a single uninterrupted paragraph that lasts for twenty-five pages.33 This discrepancy retains great significance, as it subtly inculcates an awareness that the denseness and seeming inanity of certain sections of the text represents the conscious preference for obfuscation over clarity of prose. In doing so,
Beckett imbues his frustratingly characteristic “babble moments” with an overt sense of the craft intrinsic to them, and though he offers no explanation for the confusion, it becomes abundantly clear nonetheless that such an explanation does exist.
Elsewhere, however, the self-reference seems to parody the conscientious craft of the text by suggesting superficiality in moments of apparent depth throughout the novel.
The second longest fragment in the Addenda notes “[t]hat however a damp cloth had been rapidly passed at a recent date over more prominent portions of facies (Latin word, meaning face) seemed not improbable. (Latin quote.)”34 Here Beckett invites comparisons to numerous other sections in the text where the English narration is interrupted by phrases in German or Latin. The meaning of such a moment, however, apparently derives only from the fact that it is a “Latin quote,” and not from the content of the quote itself. The artistic intentions of these multilingual moments in the text appear to be nothing more than the forced complication of the narration with the burden of translation. I strongly doubt, however, that Beckett intends to completely invalidate this trait of his writing, especially in consideration of the fact that he employs it in each of his novels and most of his major plays. In his essay “The Writer as Self-Translator,”
Raymond Federman offers a possible understanding of Beckett’s linguistic manipulations. “Sometimes,” Federman suggests, “translation amplifies the original,
27 sometimes it diminishes it, corrects it, explains it even (no, not to us, not to the reader, but) to the writer, who always knows that the language he uses…is an obstacle he must overcome.”35 “The Writer as Self-Translator” focuses on the wholesale translation of texts from one language into another, as when Beckett translated his novel Malone meurt, originally composed in French, into Malone Dies; nevertheless, Federman’s point on the conscious diminishment of the text through translation bears considerable weight here, as
Beckett’s narrative voice devotes itself momentarily to purposely and overtly complicating the transmission of the novel’s content. As a self-aware moment of composition, the inclusion of a “Latin quote” reveals the author’s awareness of the occasional discrepancy between stylistic and content concerns.
Sam totalizes the Addenda metacommentary in the novel’s final line, “no symbols where none intended,”36 a statement examined by Beckett critics because it indicates
Beckett’s artistic philosophy. In the context of the immediate experience of the novel, this completes the explicit performance of active, meaningful artistry that has characterized the entirety of Watt. Through such a statement, Beckett takes explicit ownership, though deferred through multiple creative lenses, for the entirety of the text.
This technique departs considerably from the traditional novel’s subconscious assumption of the integrity of the whole. A reading of the traditional novel is predicated upon the ability to separate the knowledge of the author’s existence from the experience of the novel at any moment in its consumption. Beckett’s final assertion of total creative authority over every element in Watt, however, makes his creative influence and authority over the text inseparable from the experience of reading it. He flouts the
28 assumed boundary between the complete text and an awareness of its origin processes, suspending the reader between the immediate experience of the novel and an abstracted awareness of the composition process. The dramatic meta-moment, in which the novel acts out the processes of its own creation and consumption, instructs readers in their intended relationship with the text, and develops in them an understanding of the craft inherent to the creation of the final text.
Though the importance of Sam’s creative persona clearly dominates the text, the third mediating creative influence of the novel, that of the editor responsible for the publication of the text, remains relevant to a complete understanding of the novel’s performance of the creative process. In neither of his roles as recipient or creator of the text does Sam properly explain the multiple points in the novel where the reader encounters unexplained skips in the text, seen as
“ ? .”37 Similarly, problems with a fictional manuscript periodically accompany shifts in the text, as when “(Hiatus in MS.)”38 and “(MS. illegible)”39 prompt sudden leaps forward in the plot. Sam, the principal narrative voice of the novel, has no reason to call attention to his supposed manuscript whatsoever, and could conceivably fill in any holes in the manuscript himself; as such, this third creative entity manifests limited agency, as the publishing mediator of the text can comment on the text as an object but cannot influence the content otherwise. These are, then, instances where Beckett’s creative process directly contributes to a hole in its product, as Beckett’s authorship implies a deficiency in the creative process. As an explicit inversion of the typical artistic goal of a perfectly integrated whole, this moment can be seen as nothing if not a dramatic
29 performance of the imperfect impact of creative energies. These moments emphasize the production of the novel; “Hiatus in MS.” shatters the illusion of an independently occurring whole, as it implies a creative timeline that contrasts directly with the experiential timeline of the novel. Beckett, in these moments of intentional inconsistency, foists upon the audience a perspective that is equally trained on the illusory scale of the text and the realistic scale of the book.40 In doing so, he engenders a paradoxical response to the multifaceted nature of Watt; its utility as a physical entity only extends to its ability to advance the abstract content of the text, but this same textual content, focusing as it does on the process whereby the book was constructed, continuously returns the reader to the immediate moment of physical interaction with a concrete object. As both object and actor, then, the true impact of Watt lies in its ability to suspend the reader between seemingly mutually exclusive realms of self-aware observation and willful immersion in the text.
Murphy and Watt, then, fluctuate playfully between a timeless experience of the text and a concrete awareness of the context of its consumption. This is accomplished, certainly, by both novels’ periodic implications of the creative processes inherent to them respectively, but Beckett’s early interest in semi-traditional expression and construction greatly limits the ability of the texts to sustain metacommentary indefinitely. It is only in the trilogy novels – Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable – that Beckett achieves a prolonged performance of the processes of literature. This is due in no small part to his eschewal of the illusion of objectivity in his narration. The shift to the trilogy’s intimately
30 contemplative first person narration results in their sustained ability to situate attention firmly upon the process of composition; indeed, Frederick Hoffman has suggested that
While Murphy and Watt are parodies of epistemological issues, the trilogy
is directly involved with the question of being, creation, extension,
corporeality, and with the several languages of assertion and doubt.
Throughout, the ‘I’s’ of the trilogy alternate in the roles of creator and
created. They take on themselves the full responsibilities of birth,
movement, persistence in space, and decline.41
While I disagree with Hoffman’s relative dismissal of Murphy and Watt as indicators of relevant subject matter, his comments merit consideration insofar as they point out the trilogy’s overt thematic concern with the creative elements of the respective novels’ existence. Whereas the dramatic meta-moments of overt artistic process in Murphy and
Watt tended to be highly visible due to their variation from the surrounding text, the creative references of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable are largely inseparable from the context of the novels in which they appear. In this way the performative aspects of these novels are conflated and move from fleeting moments of paradoxical interrelationship between process and product to extended reflections on the discernible effect writing has on the written.
Molloy establishes a timeline of construction that is distinct from the illusory timeline of the content, which then results in a simultaneity of implied contexts for the text: that being described, and that being occupied by the description. Molloy relies
31 heavily on the progressive incursion of composition onto the entity of the completed text, as in this moment from early in the novel:
I should have begun differently. He must be right. I began at the
beginning, like an old ballocks, can you imagine that? Here’s my
beginning. Because they’re keeping it apparently. I took a lot of trouble
with it. Here it is. It gave me a lot of trouble. It was the beginning, do you
understand? Whereas now it’s nearly the end. Is what I do now any better?
I don’t know. That’s beside the point. Here’s my beginning. It must mean
something [emphasis added], or they wouldn’t keep it. Here it is.42
Molloy begins here by expressing regret for how he has written the novel, thereby casting the reader into the uncertain position of negotiating both past and present as the dominant realm for comprehension at this moment. At the moment of beginning, Molloy recalls having begun, and in doing so heavily implicates the progressive development of the writing at hand. Similarly, he notes that he “took a lot of trouble with it,” which further suggests the effort through which the current product was crafted. The effect of this process reflection prolongs the reader’s immediate experience of the text indefinitely, as the text’s only movement at this point is to promise movement to come. This incrementalizes the text to the point that the focus on the beginning of the text is made explicit as such. This recalls Watt, in that the narrative voice draws attention to an aspect of the text that need not be made explicit; in this case, the beginning of the text rarely needs to be identified as such, as its identification as such is almost tautologically simple.
In doing this, the narrative identity of Molloy makes plain his reliance on the reader as
32 the determinant of the text’s existence. It is notable in this case that Molloy can only conceive of a meaning for his writing in its consumption by its essential yet faceless reader, whose acceptance of the pages is the only proof that it “must mean something” that is needed.
The explicit observance of competing timelines in Molloy continues throughout the novel, and weighs heavily on the illusion, or lack thereof, of the text as a generator of definitive knowledge. Molloy narrates, “I speak in the present tense, it is so easy to speak in the present tense, when speaking of the past. It is the mythological present, don’t mind it.”43 Here the text is being directly instructional in the method whereby it is to be encountered and understood. The contrivance of the tense in the novel is assumed here, and no attempt is made to refute a growing awareness that the narrative timescale interrupts the immediacy of reading. The time being occupied by Molloy’s writing of the text is implied as a concrete quantity, which does not enter into an according ratio of meaning with the text. That is, though Molloy draws attention to the fact that he occupies a time other than that directly conveyed by his text, the reader has no way to encounter this second time scale other than through the mediation of the constructed time line he develops in contradistinction to it. An awareness of the time occupied by the immediate creative presence responsible for the text implicates the third chronology active at this moment: that occupied by the act of reading the text. The dramatic meta-moment here is predicated upon the interaction of these three wholly distinct and oppositional chronological commitments. It actively flouts the experience of reading, as the text is positioned in such a way that the effort devoted to an interaction with it is made into a
33 measurable quality. The activity of the reader in consuming the text is made comparable to the activity of the regnant voice in creating it, and as such there develops a clear sense of the reader’s formative role in attaining the maximal literary experience.
To return to Molloy’s suggestion that it “is the mythological present, don’t mind it,” the abrupt directness of this point exerts such surprising force that there is no real opportunity to question the formative role statements like this have in shaping an experience of the novel. This moment may be viewed equally as a segment of the text and as a comment on the same; its role is eminently performative, in that here the text acts out its consumption in the process of being consumed. The instructive quality of the dramatic meta-moment is on full display here; the consideration of the text required by a meta experience with it by its nature encourages a specific, formative response that has some profound implication for the text. Beckett’s performativity is nothing if not precise; the text, by acting out the reader’s response to itself, specifies the terms and results of these moments of self-awareness in a way that would not otherwise be accomplished. As such, Beckett often relies on characters who both create and respond to the text. In her essay “Moran-Molloy: The Hero as Author,” Edith Kern deals extensively with the important role of the protagonist-narrator in Molloy. Kern sees in Beckett’s narration “an author consciously engaged in literary creation,”44 but she focuses on the artistic implications of Moran’s gradual transformation into Molloy. Kern portrays “Moran’s quest for Molloy (who is a secret part of himself)”45 as an example of the interior representation that must classify the creative process. In pursuit of this, she notes that
Moran can only “lay[] hesitant claim to authorship of Molloy,”46 by which she means that
34 Moran, like the narrator of Murphy, cannot claim total authority over his own artistic creation. Thus, though Moran “insists on his authorial power to create characters,”47 he remains unable or unwilling to take full responsibility for their actions within the text.
Kern’s description of the performative aspect of self-awareness in Molloy closely mirrors my own analysis of this phenomenon in Beckett’s other novels. Indeed, Kern’s conception of these moments differs from my own only in that she attributes this self- awareness and performative process to Beckett’s “artistic fulfillment in the creation of a world without causality and will,”48 whereas I would argue instead that these moments imply a pervasive causal presence in the novels. Kern correctly notes the repeated example of the semi-autonomous character and the inefficacious narrator in Beckett’s prose, but she misidentifies these features as self-contained. Rather than interpreting
Moran/Molloy’s hesitancy and self-doubt as symptoms of an inability to properly influence a literary text, the reader’s experience of these moments instructs them in the creation of a positive, empowered relationship with the text, in which the textual observer completes the gaps of meaning left by any flaws in the narrator. These carefully constructed deficiencies in Beckett’s narration dictate the readerly role in a direct and highly causal manner.
The instructive goals of the dramatic meta-moment are not to be understated; indeed, I will argue in the coming chapters that this aspect of Beckett’s self-aware performative prose is the defining characteristic of its inclusion in the texts. This sort of instructive performance is perhaps best encountered in Malone Dies. Malone’s narration is clearly established as a dying ritual, and thus positioned from the start as an example of
35 the way in which reflections on the creative process can serve as instructions in the consumption of the text. The stories with which Malone comforts himself “will not be the same kind of stories as hitherto,”49 which points immediately from the text of Malone
Dies to an abstract body of “other literature.” This initial meta-moment, in which Malone directly addresses the stories that will comprise his death tome, discourages possible comparisons between the text and traditional prose.
Noticeably, Beckett’s work seems directly placed into a continuum with the literary traditions that have preceded it, if only to the extent that its differentiation from those traditions must, in any direct invocation, be suggestive of those very traditions.
However, any such interpretation of this moment in Beckett would be supremely short- sighted, as the defining characteristic of the self-commentary in Malone Dies is its inability to complete any creative moments. Reflecting periodically on the effort to create an artistic whole, Malone declares, “What tedium”50 and “This is awful.”51 Malone performs the ultimate gesture of artistic dissatisfaction with his creation by changing his protagonist’s name from Sapo to Macmann halfway through the novel. In doing this,
Malone’s narration seems to directly challenge the supposition that it could be conflated into anything approaching a comment on the body of literature; the events of Malone
Dies are carefully crafted in such a way that they are in no danger of being mistaken for the absolute. Their only extension is in the immediacy of the moment of their articulation, and as such they perfectly encapsulate the sudden self-reflexiveness of Beckett’s performance prose.
36 The chronological constraints of the text in Malone Dies perform quite differently than those to be found in any previous Beckett novel, as the thought processes intrinsic to artistic production appear to be directly reflected in the text. There is no difference between the artist’s consciousness and the text’s reflection of the same in the novel, for example, which results in the most profoundly performative experience in any Beckett novel thus far. Malone passes in and out of consciousness during the course of the novel’s supposed composition, and the text reflects these moments of interrupted artistic influence as gaps and silences. By far the most stirring such example of performative artistic implementation of silence in the novel is to found in the closing section of the novel. As he nears death, the emotional profundity conveyed by Malone’s increasing silences and frequent textual gaps reaches, by dint of its performative quality, a pitch that could not otherwise be achieved by the text alone:
This tangle of grey bodies is they. Silent, dim, perhaps clinging to one
another, their heads buried in their cloaks, they lie together in a heap, in
the night. They are far out in the bay. Lemuel has shipped his oars, the
oars trail in the water. The night is strewn with absurd
absurd lights, the stars, the beacons, the buoys, the lights of earth and in
the hills the faint fires of the blazing gorse.52
There is no way to explain this textual gap that does not make recourse to Beckett’s profoundly performative intentions at the moment, as the controlled process of writing would be otherwise unaffected by the implied passing from consciousness at this point.
37 The dramatic meta-moment here performs Malone’s gradual disintegration in a way that complements the text but is nonetheless wholly distinct from it. The gap at this moment, and the performative implications attached to it, advance the emotive impact of the scene in a way that would be wholly beyond the grasp of the traditional novel at this point.
It is interesting that Malone’s struggling narration here continues to bear explicit signifiers of his creative manipulation of the scene. Macmann and his companions at this point are “perhaps clinging to one another,” which is as indicative of Malone’s responsibility to create the scene as it occurs to him as it is of his own inability to satisfy himself with these creative machinations. More importantly, his continued attempts to bring Macmann’s story to a satisfying conclusion before his death strongly indicates of his own desire to comfort himself through the text, which, of course, further complicates the role of the self-commentary in the novel. He recalls: “Macmann, my last, my possessions, I remember, he is there too, perhaps he sleeps.”53 The sense of ownership over his character, and the momentary reprieve it earns him, is palpable here, as this is the last sentence Malone successfully completes in the novel. Though he is unable to establish definitively that Macmann sleeps, and thereby remains unaware of the danger he is in, Malone’s inclination to do so suggests that part of the attraction of the creative process for the artist is to exercise control over situations that would otherwise be wholly passive.
As yet the discussion of Beckett’s narration has been exclusively, perhaps problematically, attributed to the characters designated for that purpose in the respective novels. The narration of Malone Dies has been attributed to Malone for the same reason
38 that Watt was attributed to Sam, and not Beckett; that is, the artistic experimentation that designates the narrative consciousness in Beckett’s novels is too heavily mediated to be satisfactorily understood as a direct incursion of the author onto the text. However, both
Malone Dies and The Unnamable complicate this to some extent, as both works evince an awareness of the Beckett novels that have preceded them. Malone, in his death throes, reflects that “it will be all over with the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and
Malones, unless it goes on beyond the grave.”54 Similarly, the Unnamable is orbited by apparitions of his predecessors, in what is widely considered to be the most memorable feature of the novel he narrates. Declaring that he shall have a “few puppets”55 with which to amuse himself, which should remind the conscientious reader of Beckett of the similar description of the characters in Murphy, the Unnamable is visited by Malone, or
“[p]erhaps it is Molloy, wearing Malone’s hat. But it is more reasonable to suppose it is
Malone, wearing his own hat.”56 Like Malone, the Unnamable also encounters “the pseudocouple Mercier-Camier”57 from the peripheral Beckett novel Mercier and Camier.
Malone and the Unnamable’s invocations of other characters, seemingly aware of the novels from which they are drawn, suggests a reflective awareness that is not limited to their respective novels, but instead is capable of commenting on other extant Beckett works at the time of composition.
There may be some basis to the suggestion, inevitable as it is, that Beckett’s self- reflective narrators are mouthpieces for the author himself. It passed without mention earlier that Sam, the narrator of Watt, most assuredly invites comparisons to Samuel
Beckett in a way that, though not necessarily tenable, is nevertheless unavoidable. A
39 consequence of the meta-focus of the Beckettian novels, then, seems to be the author’s inability to divest them of his direct influence, or at least the suggestion of it. This is not, of course, to suggest that the reader interpret these moments as Beckett’s direct thoughts on the subject of self-reflection, or, far worse, autobiographical in any way.58 Rather, it seems that the suggestion of the author’s influence on the text is a playful extension of the performative quality of the meta-comment. Though it is certain that Beckett does not appear directly in the text as often as it is suggested by autobiographical critics like
Sighle Kennedy59, the reader’s anticipation of his presence encourages an atmosphere of meta-reflection in response to the text. As such, the close analogue many of Beckett’s narrators seem to serve as for the author himself appears to be little more than a ploy to establish the grounds through which the process of artistic production can be discussed.
By creating characters who take credit for his other characters, Beckett positions the reader to consider the multiple layers of construction and artistic influence that reign over the creative entity of his work. The product of Beckett’s artistry presupposes his creative efforts, and makes their active influence on the shaping of the novels’ content absolutely explicit.
Thus Beckett’s novels, in many ways, tell the story of writing the novels. While traditionally this has been regarded as a flaw of the texts, and grounds for dismissal from the critical consciousness, this self-reflexive aspect of the novels’ construction represents a uniquely performative condition of Beckett’s prose. They act out the process of their creation and take part in cementing their role as an object, even at the moment of immediate consumption. This has a profound role on the reader, for whom these
40 moments of heightened performance and artistic awareness provide a guide for the consumption and interpretation of the text. Despite appearances, then, Beckett’s novels are supremely concerned with the immediacy of their encounter with the reader, for in bringing attention to their process of their creation they determine the context in which they are to be judged. This alienates Beckett’s novels from the bulk of traditional literature, and in many ways from the traditional reader as well, but also reveals an intensely positivist obsession on the part of the creator. In laying bare the relationship between creation and consumption, Beckett foists an observant agency onto the reader that paradoxically encourages the text to be seen as a completed object and a perpetual experience. In the following chapter, I show how the book, as a physical object aware of its status as such, is inseparable from the experience engendered by an encounter with its content.
CHAPTER TWO
PHYSICALITY – BECKETT AND THE TEXT AS OBJECT
Though Beckett imbues his novels with a considerable emphasis on the toil and strain that accompany the artistic process, his texts often question whether the content they provide is worth the effort. In the early narration of the novel bearing his name,
Molloy directly questions the capability of literature to effect positive change, or even make a statement worth the artist’s struggles:
[For] example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you
would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken
margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole
ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless
misery.1
Molloy advocates the destruction of the very thing that gives meaning to his existence; his semi-awareness of his contrived status as a literary figure makes his suggestion that the reader “obliterate” the text all the more chilling. Interestingly, Molloy’s statements focus on the novel as a profoundly physical object; he decries “blacken[ing] margins,” taken here to mean adding notes on the text and thereby intuiting meaning, and recommends instead “fill[ing] in the holes of words,” thereby eliminating legibility as a
41 42 feature of the text. Both of these statements draw attention explicitly to the appearance of the words on the page. The end result of this, as he notes, makes “the whole ghastly business [look] like what it is [emphasis added],” and in this Beckett initiates a refinement of the self-aware performativity that already classifies his prose writing.
Beckett’s interest in making the text look like what it is suggests a dramatic role of the text beyond acting out the process of its own creation. Just as the text’s awareness of itself as the product of a conscious artistic process plays an important role in determining the meaning of the novels, so too does the book’s role as the product of physical construction become relevant to the discussion of the Beckettian meta-dramatic novel.
I use the term “book” here with the understanding that it conveys a specific understanding of the physical object with which the reader directly interacts through reading. The space occupied by Beckett’s writing clearly fascinates him, as his novels repeatedly mention and experiment with their extension into the physical plane. Molloy is not Beckett’s only narrator with an interest in how his words look; recall the first footnote in Watt, which points out the “valuable space [that] has been saved”2 by the omission of unnecessary pronouns from the text. I have already noted the uniqueness of this passage as an indicator of the conscious artistry of the novel, but in this moment Beckett also draws attention equally to the physical qualities of the text. The value of the creative act is determined by its observable effect on the physical text; positive artistry manifests as the efficient use of the pages that contain it. Beckett focuses on the “space” his writing occupies throughout his novels, though it is only in Watt that he makes it so explicit. This awareness of the book as a physical object provides an additional and pivotal meaning to
43 the reading experience, in that it makes the reader’s interaction with the physical book an outward performance of the internal experience of the content of the text. In this way
Beckett’s physical invocations are profoundly performative, as they externalize fundamentally interior processes of reading.
At the same time, Beckett’s physical meta-comments instruct the reader in the consumption of the text. The book generally serves a passive role as the object of the reading process, but by classifying specific actions taken by the reader in response to it
Beckett imbues the physical object of the text with a degree of agency in the transmission of the textual content. This represents a profound reversal of the traditional role of a novel’s physicality, which is typically ignored at worst and begrudged at best. Beckett’s meta-performative texts embrace the physicality of the novel medium, and make the space occupied by the text inseparable from the meaning presented there. Beckett’s physical references, then, focus extensively on the seemingly paradoxical dual roles of book as passive object and active participant in the meaning-making process. Not surprisingly, the subtlety of Beckett’s physical invocations tends to be inversely proportional to the meaningful resonances of the moments in which they occur; the most direct references to the “book” are also the least intellectually and artistically productive, whereas the subtlest object references of the text fill a profoundly instructive role in the consumption of the text. For this very reason, I consider it beneficial to examine the physicality of the Beckettian text in its entirety, for it is only through the comprehensive awareness afforded by direct invocations of the book as a physical object that the more
44 indirect passages can properly be evaluated for their relevance to the novels’ intrinsic artistic value.
The appearance of the Beckett text dictates the mental event of the novel, and I am not alone in tracing the implications of this phenomenon. Hannah Copeland classifies this aspect of the Beckettian canon well, noting how, in “the last stage of the process of assimilation, the words – themselves the basic elements of literature – come to the fore, replacing the superficial allusive detail of conventional fiction.”3 Copeland thus identifies the goal of Beckett’s obsession with the book-object as a refinement of the literary allusion, whereby the appearances of words allude to extended meanings in the same way that traditional allusions rely on connotative connections to impact the text.
Similarly, Jean-Jacques Mayoux notes that, for Beckett, “[words] and phrases remain apparitions full of meaning.”4 The implication of both critics’ analyses is that the shape of the text is an apparition of meaning independent from and yet complementary to the direct textual meaning. The physicality of the text alters the meaning it is able to convey.
Copeland, in explication of this Beckettian trait, quotes Beckett’s admission: “I love the word, words have been my only loves, not many.”5 This overt fondness for the role of words in the conveyance of meaning has traditionally been examined solely through a semiotic lens, but even this approach relies heavily on a language system of unrepentant physicality. Mayoux notes that, for Beckett, words “are the nuclei, the raw materials of a nebulous structure that forever rises up and partially disintegrates, in the midst of which a voice heroically persists.”6 These “raw materials of a nebulous structure” cannot be a purely abstract concept; Mayoux intends for his physical imagery to be purely
45 metaphorical, but in fact it underscores the unavoidability of Beckett’s book-object obsession. His novels, particularly in the trilogy, call attention to the appearance and construction of the printed page in such a way that it seems imprudent to focus on the semiotic impact of individual words at the expense of their typographical influence.
With this understanding, I approach Beckett’s novels with my attention focused firmly on the simultaneity of semiotic and typographical events. Beckett tends to blend his moments of increased metacommentary with the foregrounding of the text’s outward appearance. In this way, Beckett’s obsession with the physical book can be explained as an indicator of an increased attention in the content of individual thematic moments.
Conversely, though of equal importance, the text often offers an explanation of its own appearance by reflecting overtly upon the interplay between appearance and meaning. In this way, the text’s meaning and appearance build upon one another cooperatively, to the point that the physicality of the text instructs the reader in its meaning while, at the same time, explicit comments by the narrative voice explain the reasoning behind the text’s use of its physical context. Because the physical space of the novel receives the most explicit attention in the trilogy novels, particularly Molloy and Malone Dies, it is helpful to begin by tracing the physicality of those books first, as they provide an ur-example that can be readily applied to the other novels of the Beckett canon.
A comparative correspondence between the Molloy- and Moran-narrated sections of Molloy demonstrates this characteristic admirably. The defining physical aspect of the first half of Molloy, narrated by Molloy himself, is the sheer length of the second paragraph.7 The physical uniformity and indistinguishability of Molloy’s extended
46 diatribe accurately conveys the muddled cognitive processes that define the narrator. As the shape of the pages blend into each other, the reader is profoundly aware of Molloy’s inability to determine the boundaries between disparate thoughts. By breaking more than eighty pages of narration into only two paragraphs, Molloy-as-narrator, and by extension
Beckett-as-writer, manifests the gradual disintegration of tangible meanings and differences that constitute the central thrust of the novel. This affords a close consideration of Beckett’s physical attention at two cognitive depths. First, the foreboding apparition of Beckett’s eighty-page paragraph, in which the majority of
Molloy’s descent into physical and mental insolvency transpires, demands the reader’s attention. The nigh-oppressive length of Molloy’s paragraph assures that the reader’s focus will drift to the lack of clear boundaries between points in the novel. The space occupied by the text remains uniform throughout the first half of the novel, which is unusual enough to draw the reader’s notice. By minimizing the amount of distinguishability between individual words and the meaning they convey, Beckett encourages the reader to see the page as a purely physical image even while divining the thematic meaning it contains. This imagistic foregrounding of the page encourages the second, deeper conception of Beckett’s book-object consideration, in which a physical aspect of the text suggests an element of the content it conveys. In this case, the rigid edifice of the textual appearance implies the infirm dysfunction of the narrator’s mind. As
Molloy’s grasp on reality slips away, so too do the discernible boundaries between distinct images and concepts. The physical page acts out the implied decline of the narrative voice in a way that is not wholly accommodated by the text alone.
47 In the Moran section of the novel, Moran describes Molloy in a way that strongly implicates the appearance of Molloy’s text:8
I knew then about Molloy, without however knowing much about
him. I shall say briefly what little I did know about him. I shall also draw
attention, in my knowledge of Molloy, to the most striking lacunae.
He had very little room. His time too was limited. He hastened
incessantly on, as if in despair, towards extremely close objectives. Now, a
prisoner, he hurled himself at I know not what narrow confines, and now,
hunted, he sought refuge near the centre.
He panted. He had only to rise up within me for me to be filled
with panting.
Even in open country he seemed to be crashing through jungle. He
did not so much walk as charge. In spite of this he advanced but slowly.
He swayed, to and fro, like a bear.
He rolled his head, uttering incomprehensible words.
He was massive and hulking, to the point of misshapenness. And,
without being black, of a dark colour.
He was forever on the move. I had never seen him rest.
Occasionally he stopped and glared furiously about him.
This was how he came to me, at long intervals. Then I was nothing
but uproar, bulk, rage, suffocation, effort unceasing, frenzied and vain.
48 Just the opposite of myself, in fact. It was a change. And when I saw him
disappear, his whole body a vociferation, I was almost sorry.
What it was all about I had not the slightest idea.9
Ostensibly, Moran engages himself here in describing Molloy’s character. To do so, however, Moran only finds success in the description of Molloy’s text, for this extensive consideration of Molloy is insensible if it is understood as an enumeration of Molloy’s personal qualities. The “very little room” Molloy has, as well as his incessant haste and slow advance, better describes the monolithic image of Molloy’s text on the page. By eschewing paragraph breaks, Molloy’s narration certainly gives the impression of a dearth of space. Similarly, the unbounded flow between points in Molloy’s text certainly gives conflicting impressions of the speed of articulation and the plodding pace at which he approaches meaning. More directly, Moran’s description of Molloy as “massive and hulking, to the point of misshapenness” can only reasonably be seen as a reference to
Molloy’s shapeless text, for Molloy himself dwindles in size throughout the novel. By the end of Moran’s statement, it becomes clear that Molloy’s body has been entirely ignored.
His “whole body [as] a vociferation” indicates that Molloy only occupies space as a textual outcry. The “dark colour” of the printed word that conveys Molloy is similarly explicated here, such that the specific invocation of the appearance of the text on the page is completed. By describing Molloy through the appearance of his text, Moran reveals the considerable effect of Beckett’s performative physicality. The “misshapenness” of the textual object implies the narrator’s own misshapen body and mind. The appearance of the text, in light of Moran’s description, performs the portraiture of Molloy himself.
49 Moran arrives at a more effective image of Molloy himself by describing his massive and hulking text than he does by describing Molloy’s crippled body.
Moran’s portrait of Molloy, if it may so be dubbed, also accomplishes an important instructive goal to the novel’s readership, in that Moran’s response to the image of Molloy encourages the reader to adopt similar mental attitudes, thereby shaping the interpretation of the text directly. Moran relates his own response to the book-object by noting the “uproar, bulk, rage, suffocation, effort unceasing, frenzied and vain” to which the text reduces him. In so doing, Moran demonstrates what the acceptable or presumed reaction of the reader to the text will be. He encourages the reader to understand the novel’s objectives as being “extremely close,” thereby underscoring
Beckett’s absolute refusal to let his literature extend beyond the immediate moment of its consumption. Similarly, Moran acknowledges the incomprehensibility of Molloy’s narration at times, which suggests that the text serves some utility independent of its perceived meaning (or lack thereof). In effect, then, Moran’s narration instructs the reader in the consumption and interpretation of the text. He accepts the reader’s potential frustration with the text as a matter of course, and, to the extent that the text even classifies itself as indecipherable, even suggests that the reader’s rage fulfills Beckett’s artistic intentions for the novel. The confusion to which Moran admits indicates that the novel’s shuffling movement ignores any obligation to arrive at any acceptable conclusions. Moran’s narration instructs the reader in the appreciation of Molloy’s, which consequently prefigures an appreciation of Molloy itself.
50 The obsession of the narration with the image of Molloy, and thus by extension with the image of the text, is carried on through the direct address of the reader. Molloy suggests, somewhat sardonically, that his crippled appearance
is indeed a deplorable sight, a deplorable example, for the people, who so
need to be encouraged, in their bitter toil, and to have before their eyes
manifestations of strength only, of courage and of joy, without which they
might collapse, at the end of the day, and roll on the ground.10
Ostensibly, here Molloy describes the reaction of characters within the plot to his pathetic condition, but the unusual wording and lamenting tone of this passage invites an understanding of it as a comment on the reader’s burden on the artist. In the scene that prompts this observation, Molloy rests on his bicycle with his “feet obscenely resting on the earth, [his] arms on the handlebars and on [his] arms [his] head, rocking and abandoned.”11 Even under scrutiny, the posture Molloy criticizes himself for could hardly be deemed “obscene”; indeed, the only difference between Molloy’s stance and the typical cyclist’s is that Molloy slumps over to rest his head against his arms. As such, the suggestion of obscenity becomes highly sarcastic, and intimates an unheard but overzealous criticism. In responding to this assumed criticism, though, Molloy relies heavily on language that emphasizes physical observation and the immediacy of symbols, both of which better apply to readers than passersby in the novel. He refers to “the people, who so need to be encouraged,” which uses an abstraction that seems out of place if confined solely to those who witnessed Molloy’s prone form and complained.
51 Considering Molloy’s explicitly established role as both character and author of the text, it is more plausible that he is lamenting the image of himself he provides as a creative voice, and the subsequent reaction of its observers, than how he comports himself as a figure in the text. With this understanding, Molloy laments the requirements the traditional reader has for a text here. His reference to the “manifestations of strength only, of courage and of joy” being “before their eyes” strongly suggests the close physical intimacy between reader and text. The text’s manifestations of these concepts are accompanied always by a physical act of observation. The process of reading emerges as the “bitter toil” Molloy attributes to his falsely beleaguered observers. Additionally,
Molloy criticizes the reader’s need for symbolic structure through repeated reference to the neediness of the observer. The reader, “who so need[s] to be encouraged,” expects the text to provide positive, formative images, “without which they might collapse, at the end of the day, and roll on the ground.” The hyperbole of this description indicates Molloy’s, and presumably Beckett’s, distaste for the restrictions these readerly expectations place upon the text. Notably, by imagining the observer collapsing and rolling on the ground,
Molloy repeats the protagonist-reader mirroring I identified in Murphy. The idea that the insolvency of Molloy’s crippled image could potentially victimize the reader in a similar way further complicates the book’s dual role as actor and object. The creative voice here is conscious of the fact that the act of reading, which remains a physical process and thus subject to an external agent, produces a profound response. As such, the text at this point acts out the author’s awareness of the responsibility foisted upon him as an active but indirect presence in his readers’ experience.
52 Thematically, Beckett adopts similar goals in Molloy and Malone Dies, but the books manifest these shared themes very differently. Molloy and Malone both view the text as a distraction during the process of their respective descents toward physical infirmity and death, but while Molloy is characterized by its aggressive filling of the physical space of the page, Malone Dies invokes the narrator’s diminishing faculties through the use of empty space. Blankness in Malone Dies fills a profoundly integral role in the development of the novel’s artistic direction. Malone’s narration is constantly interrupted, whether by his own reflective response to his composition or by the impact of external forces on his consciousness. In this way, Malone Dies foregoes the conscious craftsmanship of Molloy in favor of a more intimate, cerebral manner of expression.
However, Malone’s constant commentary on his own writing prefigures the response of his reader, with his periodic gaps indicating, in some cases, his invitation of criticism.
Malone consumes and responds to the text as overtly as he creates it, and in this way he pairs the creative transparency of the novel with a corresponding awareness of the readerly reaction. Malone’s self-evaluative comments adopt a critical lens that anticipates the reader’s likely responses to the same sections that inspire them. As such, Malone is as likely to reflect, “There’s a nice passage,”12 as he is to note, “What tedium.”13 Many of
Malone’s readerly interjections completely interrupt the text, which acts out the forceful nature of the reader’s presumed response. In doing this, Beckett defers to the dominance of the reader’s scrutinizing self-dialogue as a determinant of the text’s flow. His text actually repeats itself for the reader, whose reaction has presumably prompted a
53 temporary alienation from the text. As an example of Malone’s performance of this reader initiative, consider the following narration:
Sapo loved nature, took an interest
This is awful.
Sapo loved nature, took an interest in animals and plants and willingly
raised his eyes to the sky, day and night.14
The admonition “This is awful” completely disrupts the expected completion of the line, as indicated by the abrupt, unpunctuated end of the first quoted line. Beckett’s use of the physical space of the page here weighs considerably on the overall impact of the moment, as the advancement of the text further down the page implies chronological progression at a time when the novel’s timeline has been frozen. Presumably, the reader agrees with
Malone’s condemnation of the text, and the time dedicated to this evaluation instead of the cognitive processes of the novel is reflected by the physical space allocated to this passage. Beckett’s repetition of the beginning of this sentence suggests a wayward reader’s reapplied attention after encountering a difficult or unsatisfactory passage; if a reader’s reaction interrupts the text as much as Malone’s does here, then it will be necessary to retrace his steps, so to speak, once the immediacy of his emotional outburst fades. The text acts out this recursive aspect of reading directly, such that the reader’s interaction with the text is determined and defined by the text itself. It is possible that the reader’s actual response to the text will differ from that anticipated by Beckett’s narration, but the surprisingly resonant quality of this brief textual performance has a profoundly subliminal effect. Paradoxically, Malone’s adoption of the reader’s
54 perspective is very effective at convincing the reader that the text is unsatisfying or worthy of criticism. The performance of the readerly reaction here, then, is also supremely instructive, as Beckett asserts a distinct control over the reader’s positive and negative evaluations of the novel equally.
The blank spaces of Malone Dies perform a more influential role than the mere opportunity for readers to project their voice into the text. Hannah Copeland sees the thematic role of the base whiteness of the page as intensely formative of Beckett’s creative intentions. As she notes of Beckett, “[b]y insisting on the whiteness that surrounds his fiction, he goes further than ever in underscoring the creative act, the attempt to fill blank pages with words.”15 Malone Dies acts out the symmetry of this pursuit by demonstrating the expansion and subsequent reduction of the text into the white space of the page as the narrative faculties wax and wane. The unfilled space of the page in Malone Dies performs a unique role, as it acts out the passage of creative time in the process of Malone’s composition of the text. The space of the page, though unaltered by the ink of the press or the text of the writer, nevertheless furthers the novel’s content.
Malone periodically lapses into unconsciousness during the course of his composition, and indicates those gaps in his awareness with similar gaps in the page, as when he notes:
Ah yes, I have my little pastimes and they
What a misfortune, the pencil must have slipped from my fingers, for I
have only just succeeded in recovering it after forty-eight hours (see
above) of intermittent efforts.16
55 At the basest level, Malone’s narration here implicates the physicality of the page by directing the reader’s gaze “above,” indicating a clear awareness of the object status of the text in the reader’s hands. It is far more compelling, however, to consider how the gap in the text may be interpreted as an artistic representation of the passage of forty-eight hours. Beckett thus explicitly quantifies the extent of the impact this blank space exercises over the text. The absence of the printed word in this section no longer corresponds to the absence of the creative voice, for the narration positions this gap in such a way that it speaks for two days’ of implied activity. As wordless performances of temporal progression, then, these blank spaces come to exercise substantial control over the text. This leap forward in Malone’s life complements the text but is not contained by it, in the same way that the physical object status of the book exists alongside yet independent from the thematic content of the novel.
As Malone slips closer and closer to death, these temporal and artistic gaps in the text increase in frequency and influence. By the end of the novel, Malone’s periods of unconsciousness become harder and harder to accommodate under the guise of coherent artistry. On the brink of death, Malone can no longer contest the white spaces that invade his words and his thoughts. As such, the conclusion to Malone Dies makes more sense as a physical apparition of decline than as a thematically consistent approach to content.
Slowly the text fades into nothingness, mirroring Malone’s own passing into death:
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 hit anyone
56 any more, he will not touch anyone any more, either with it or with it or
with it or with it 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 more17
The physical space of the text here fills the void vacated by Malone’s dissolving narrative capabilities by completing the utterances Malone leaves unfinished. In conjunction with the examples from Molloy, the physical qualities of Malone Dies suggest the number of artistic and readerly implications of the book’s influence over the text.
First, it is readily apparent that the printed space of the text plays a profound role in the creation of meaning. Molloy’s emphasis on the black spaces of the text, combined with the emphasis on the blank whiteness of Malone Dies, indicates that physicality exerts a constant presence on the consumptive process. The concluding assertion of Watt,
“no symbols where none intended,”18 applies easily to Beckett’s other novels as well. As a corollary to this constancy, Molloy and Malone Dies both indicate that the physicality of the text acts in cooperation with the artistry of the novel, but it is not wholly subject to the conceits of the creative processes underlying the novel. The meta-performances of the
57 Beckett text, then, represent an additional presence that weighs upon the text in equal measure to the artist’s direct shaping of the textual content. In addition, Moran’s articulation of his response to Molloy’s image accurately conveys the instructive element of Beckett’s physical invocations of the book; Beckett’s narrators consistently act out the process of reading, whether overtly or by subtle implication, and it is through this that
Beckett best assures himself of a specific reaction of the reader to the text. It should be remembered, in light of this, that the end goal of Beckett’s physical invocations seems to be the careful cultivation of a specific moment of immediacy in the reader’s experience with the text. By mandating how the text is to be consumed, then, Beckett exerts a powerful influence over the logical extension of his work in a way that would not otherwise be accomplished by the transparency of his artistic processes alone.
As I have noted, Beckett employs physical invocation of the book as an object in each of his novels, though with varying degrees of emphasis and subtlety. In the early novels Murphy and Watt, for example, Beckett directly addresses the reader in a way that is specific to the immediate engagement with the text. These moments inspire an awareness of the text’s recursively reifying nature; the book asserts its own object status, but also mandates specific interactions with it as a result of this. Beckett’s moments of direct or implied address of the reader differ from the classical iterations of this admittedly well-worn narrative interruption. Invocations of “Dear Reader” in traditional novels typically transcend the moment of their articulation, inviting consideration of a topic on a grander or more abstract scale. Beckett’s texts, conversely, use these moments to concretize the reader’s immediate interaction with the text, even going so far as to
58 express sympathy for troublesome or convoluted sections of the text. Rather than deemphasizing the current moment in the text, then, Beckett’s reader-awareness reiterates the individual experience of the novel. Though Beckett includes these moments in each of the novels considered to some degree, nowhere do they have greater prominence than in Murphy, which may be due in part to this novel’s comic subversion of the tropes of
Victorian literature. Following a lengthy description of Murphy’s connivances to
“defraud[ ] a vested interest every day for his lunch, to the honourable extent of paying for one cup of tea and consuming 1.83 cups approximately,”19 the narrative voice suggests: “Try it sometime, gentle skimmer.”20 The identification of the novel’s audience as a “skimmer” produces a moment of profound self-awareness. In this instant, the text simultaneously reveals its knowledge that it is being consumed as a passive object, while at the same time acknowledging that the consumptive response to this object is cursory at best. The text assumes its own inability to hold the full attention of its consumer, which introduces an appreciable element of self-deprecation; Beckett here admits that Murphy’s tea-stealing antics may not fully warrant the reader’s interest, but in doing so he makes a context-specific reference to the manner in which the reader experiences the text. The use of the term “skimmer” in such close juxtaposition to references to theft invites consideration of the additional meaning of “skim” to mean “conceal[ing] or divert[ing]…some of one’s earnings or takings.”21 The connection is admittedly slight, but present nonetheless; the reader’s skimming of this section mirrors, to a certain degree,
Murphy’s skimming of tea and biscuits, and in this way the book thrusts the reader into a position of concomitance with the text. In addition, for the reader at this moment the
59 abruptness and pointedness of this address results in a reevaluation of the current readerly activity. Caught in the act of “skimming” by the one presence that can be trusted not to notice, the reader’s attention is duly refocused on the text that follows. By classifying the way his readers absorb the text, Beckett’s novels act out their own object-status, for they instruct their audience in the proper or expected reaction to distinct instances in the plot.
Moments of reader identification in the novels need not be as direct or explicit as the “gentle skimmer” example. Indeed, the bulk of examples in this vein rely on far subtler invocations of the reader’s immediate activity toward the text. To wit, the description of Murphy’s attic apartment in the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat asylum casually describes the reader’s assumed physical surroundings while reading. In the apartment, “[an] immense candle, stuck to the floor by its own tallow, pointed its snuff to heaven at the head of the bed. This, the only means of light, was more than enough for
Murphy, a strict non-reader.”22 Any reference to reading within a text as self-aware as
Murphy invites immediate speculation, and in this case such an engagement pays great dividends. As nothing else in the description of Murphy’s living arrangements necessitates this revelation of his reading habits, or lack thereof, this comes across as an indirect acknowledgment of the difference between Murphy’s quarters and the reader’s own. Beckett’s recognition that darkness only suits the non-reader makes a powerful assumption about the reader’s surroundings, which must be better lit if this distinction is even to be experienced in the first place. Just as the “gentle skimmer” moment offers a profound statement about the reader’s engagement in the text, here Beckett achieves an equally revelatory description of the physical context in which the text is consumed. The
60 ability of the novel to anticipate and describe the situations in which it will be read reveals a deeply entrenched theme of physical self-awareness that is both uniquely
Beckettian and profoundly instructive. Beckett stipulates here certain conditions that a reader must fulfill in order to properly encounter the text. The physical conditions of the reading environment are one such condition. Such a subtle and yet unavoidable indication of the consumptive context of the novel results in a powerful moment of suspension for the reader between the engagement of the text as a mental event and the interaction with its physicality.
Beckett includes these specific reader invocations in each of his novels, not merely Murphy. Just as the creative transparency of Beckett’s prose began with Murphy and grew into Watt, ultimately culminating in the trilogy, direct description and address of the reader diminishes in Watt and the trilogy from its overt beginnings in Murphy.
Rather than mitigating the influence of physical self-awareness in the later novels, I would argue that the increasing subtlety of Beckett’s reader address corresponds to an increase in the depth of its implications. Accordingly, a footnote in Watt suggests
For the guidance of the attentive reader, at a loss to understand how these
repeated investments, and divestments, of the nightdress, did not finally
reveal to Watt Mr. Knott’s veritable aspect, it is perhaps not superfluous
here to note, that Mr. Knott’s attitude to his nightdress was not that
generally in vogue. For Mr. Knott…went to bed with his nightclothes over
his dayclothes, and he rose with his dayclothes under his nightclothes.23
61 At first glance, this passage fulfills a role comparable to the “gentle skimmer” address in
Murphy, in that both describe the reader’s actions in response to a specific moment in the text. Here the narration anticipates the attentive reader’s confusion as to how Watt could assist Mr. Knott in dressing and yet still be in the dark regarding his intimate physical appearance. To the extent the text assumes a certain readerly response, this recalls the
“gentle skimmer” passage. However, whereas the “gentle skimmer” address acted as a gentle remonstrance against the reader’s drifting attention, this “attentive reader” has done nothing to attract the author’s potential ire, as the confusion is clearly due to the uncertainty of the text. The narrative voice admits to its own role in propagating the haziness of the description here, and yet stops short of offering any truly helpful further explication. Though the narration suggests that it has effectively dealt with the issue of
Knott changing before Watt, in actuality it has merely skirted the issue. Mr. Knott’s wears his dayclothes beneath his nightclothes when he goes to bed, and wakes still wearing them in this order, which prolongs the reader’s confusion rather than alleviating it. In the recognition of readerly confusion and subsequent refusal to alleviate the same, the creative voice of the novel enters into minor conflict with the consumptive presence.
Clearly, the process of reading does not necessarily ingratiate the reader to the artistic presence of the text. This should not, however, be misconstrued as a hierarchical ordering of the self-aware commentary in the novels. The mere fact that the artistic voice needs to contest the reader as the main agent of the text indicates that the relationship between the two is anything but rigid or assured.
62 As much as Beckett emphasizes the relationship between artist and reader in determining the extension of the novel as a physical and textual onject, he also makes it very clear that he values the physical element of space in his novels. The first footnote to
Watt refers explicitly to the “valuable space”24 the text fills, and further notes that a misuse of that space would result in a discernible loss for the novel. The “space” of the novel is a uniquely evocative concept, in that it establishes a physical context for what would otherwise be a purely mental experience. The traditional novel derives its value solely from the conjunctive meanings of the words and phrases that make up the text.
Beckett’s introduction of the appearance of these words as an additional source of value is largely unprecedented. Space provides a profoundly extratextual source of meaning, and, insofar as it is unbounded by the text that it accompanies, this element of the novels is inherently performative. The reader can only encounter the space of the book as a physical attribute, and as such the meaning thus derived acts in conjunction with the text to arrive at a deeper, more resonant experience of Beckett’s artistry. Though Beckett makes this space valuation most explicit in Watt, the considerable emphasis on the appearance of the text in his other novels demonstrates the sustained importance he places on the physicality of his books throughout his writing career. To echo Malone’s articulation of this tendency in the literature, all of Beckett’s narrators “have pinned
[their] faith to appearances, believing them to be vain.”25 This faith in appearances accomplishes performative and instructive goals that would otherwise remain unattainable in the novels.
63 Often Beckett’s faith in appearances serves a purely emphatic role in the texts. By playing with the appearance of various words or phrases on the page, and then drawing attention to those playful innovations, Beckett underscores a specific emphasis that would be otherwise underemphasized by the text. The narration in Murphy provides a brilliant example of this manipulation of the book’s physical aspect. After Murphy becomes accustomed to the requirements of his position at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat,
“M.M.M. [stands] suddenly for music, MUSIC, MUSIC, in brilliant, brevier and canon, or some such typographical scream, if the gentle compositor would be so friendly.”26
Beckett’s explicit reference to the typographical setting of the text at this moment is stunningly unexpected, as the industry terms for these aspects of the printing process generally have no place in the literary realm.27 Interestingly, though the size of the
Beckett text certainly does fluctuate, the deviation from standard typesetting is substantially less significant than that proposed. The idea of the “typographical scream” nevertheless retains its potency, for the manipulation of the textual size in accordance with the growing importance of “music” in Murphy’s mind provides a physical manifestation of a conceptual conceit. The text’s identification of the brilliant, brevier, and canon settings also reveals a willing awareness of the physical construction of the printed material in such a way so as to lend credence to the idea that the book-object bears additional meaning in the Beckettian canon. The increasing physical space occupied by the text in this moment mirrors the increasing importance of this concept for
Murphy. Shortly after, Beckett repeats this convention, as Murphy realizes “[in] short there was nothing but he, the unintelligible gulf and they. That was all. All. ALL.”28
64 Here the textual emphasis provided by the physical manipulations resonates deeply. As
Murphy’s repetition of “all” grows on the page, so too does his sense of alienation on account of the increasing “unintelligible gulf.” The physical appearance of the text exercises an intangible influence over the available meaning, for the increased allocation of physical space to these moments better emphasizes Murphy’s emotional states than the artistic repetition and description alone could.
Typographical conventions play a pivotal emphatic role in Watt in much the same way as in Murphy. Beckett, having established the valuable space taken up by the text of this novel, repeatedly calls attention to how he fills that space. Matthew Winston sees this as an ironic inversion of the expectations Beckett encourages in his reader through the first footnote. Winston notes that, for “a book which proclaims at its beginning a concern with saving space, Watt is later very free with the same commodity.”29 However,
Winston predicates this judgment on an assumption that Beckett’s detail-obsession represents a misuse of the space of the novel. Taking the narrator at his word that the physical space is indeed valuable, and has been conserved for a specific, precious reason, it becomes clear that the book’s physicality asserts an influential presence over the text.
The narrative voice reflects frequently on the physical appearance of text as though it bears meaning for the content of the novel. It is clear that Beckett wants to ensure that the shape of the text does not pass the reader’s attention unnoticed. For example, we get another example of this in the description of the convoluted process by which Mr.
Knott’s household servants succeed one another:
65 Dick’s ten years on the first-floor are not because of Harry’s ten years on
the ground-floor, or of the other’s coming then, and Harry’s ten years on
the ground-floor are not because of Dick’s ten years on the first-floor, or
of the other’s coming then, and the other’s coming then is not because of
(tired of underlining this cursed preposition) Dick’s ten years on the first-
floor.30
The italic emphasis on “because of” alone indicates Beckett’s manipulation of the book’s physical space in order to affect meaning, but his explicit comment on this convention makes it impossible to dismiss this element as a coincidental feature of the text. Beckett retains creative authority in this moment by lamenting the extra effort it requires of him, but his artistry here is devoted solely to the shape of the text. In a novel as committed to extended repetition as Watt, the emphatic isolation of one element of that repetition cannot escape the reader’s notice. This is, notably, one of precious few moments anywhere in the Beckett novels where causality is discussed directly, though clearly here the reference to causal connections only serves to refute the idea of their influence over the novel’s “plot,” if such a thing can be identified in Watt. Clearly, Beckett’s willingness to foreground the causal implications of the text through its outward appearance instructs the reader in the intended weight of this passage, without which this would be merely another moment of exasperating repetition in a novel replete with it.
A similar moment occurs later in the novel, when the narrator Sam finds his
“steps impelled, as though by some external agency.”31 As he recalls, “this impulsion was maintained, until I could go no farther, in that direction, without doing myself a serious,
66 if not fatal injury; then it left me and I looked about, a thing I never used to do, on any account, in the ordinary way. How hideous is the semicolon.”32 The “hideous” appearance of the semicolon offers a purely aesthetic evaluation of this element of the text. At first glance, the focus of this comment is so pointedly image-based that it can be difficult to intuit its relevance to the textual meaning of the novel. However, Sam’s clear distaste for the effect the semicolon has on his narration, even if only in aesthetic terms, suggests that its inclusion in the text somehow supersedes Sam’s ability to edit his creative process. How fitting, then, that Beckett juxtaposes this physical repugnance with
Sam’s recollection of a temporary loss of agency. The impulsion Sam remembers at this point is strong enough that it influences his ability to shape the physical aspect of his text.
In remembering how his control over his actions weakened, they weaken again, which results in a reluctant misuse of the space of the novel. Thus it becomes clear that
Beckett’s artistic transparency relates closely to the physicality of the text as well, in that the process of creating the text manifests directly as the printed object to be evaluated.
Sam’s diminished artistic agency establishes the dual creative-consumptive attitude of the narrator. In the absence of a solely authoritative authorial voice, Beckett empowers the reader’s external perspective. He continues, and in fact completes, this practice in The Unnamable. Indeed, I conclude my discussion of Beckett’s physicality with The Unnamable, for the final novel of the trilogy positions itself paradoxically as the
Beckett novel simultaneously most and least aware of its physicality. If the Unnamable can be identified as the consummate artistic narrator in Beckett’s novels, it is equally viable to see him simultaneously as the ultimate consumer of that same artistry. Ruby
67 Cohn has suggested that one “of the major meanings of the stream of meditation of the
Unnamable is to be found in a double absurdity – that of the world and that of its observer.”33 The Unnamable creates the world he inhabits and then, like the reader, observes the revolution of the world’s mental constructs around him. With this understanding, The Unnamable emerges as a powerful representation of the reader’s mental state during the process of reading. When the image of Malone passes before the
Unnamable “at doubtless regular intervals,”34 it recalls the mental occupation with the image of Malone for the reader of Malone Dies. In this light, the narration of The
Unnamable seems to be best explained as the explication of the mental process of reading the Beckett novels that preceded it. As the embodiment of the Beckettian reader, the
Unnamable can “only see what appears immediately in front of [him]”35 in the same way that the reader only experiences those concepts that are presented through the book immediately at hand. The reader of The Unnamable thus becomes inextricably involved in mimicking the observations that the Unnamable acts out first. The novel may not directly address the reader, but that is only because the narrative “I” has embraced the reader’s perspective. This represents the pinnacle of Beckett’s performative instruction of the reading process, for he effectively abandons the barrier between narrator and reader.
The Unnamable is equally writer and reader, and as such he alone determines how his artistry is to be consumed.
Understanding the proliferation of Beckett’s physical invocation of the book- object, the question remains as to what the implications of this awareness are for Beckett studies, or indeed literature in general. The first and most resonant conclusion to be
68 drawn from Beckett’s overt fascination with the text as a physical object is the influence it confers upon the immediate moment of reading. Beckett consistently engages himself in the reification of the reading process, such that the novel’s reliance on the reader and the reader’s reliance on the novel sustain each other. By focusing equally on the creative and physical processes resulting in the text, the reader is suspended in a constant state of engagement with the novel. The physicality of the book prevents its meaning from being abstracted beyond recognition, whereas the metaphysical extension of the text assures that each individual reading cannot be reduced to a non-aesthetic, purely physical activity. Beckett’s physicality, in combination with his artistic transparency, limits the extension of the text to the immediate moment of consumption while asserting the legitimacy of such an immediate focus. Beckett’s envisioning thus departs substantially from the traditional extension of the literary act. In her Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of
Literature, Asja Szafraniec offers Derrida’s theory of the literary event as an example of this traditional, or critically entrenched, understanding of the extension of literature. The
Derridean understanding of literature suggests that in “‘thematizing the event of writing,’ literature addresses itself, revealing that it is both an institution and a counterinstitution…taking place in the space of difference that an institution produces with itself.”36 Certainly it is simple to see how Beckett’s novels, owing to their copious self-address, might be shoehorned into this conception of literature. However, Szafraniec takes umbrage with the Derridean expectation of the writer to force “the singularity of the literary work [to] universalize itself,”37 especially in consideration of the Beckettian oeuvre; I echo that criticism. Universalization is antithetical to Beckettian literature.
69 Instead, I would propose an understanding of Beckett’s emphasis on the moment-by- moment cultivation of instantaneous meanings as the principal intention of his artistry.
The relationship between these instances results in a collaborative extension of available meanings; the repeated address of the reader in Murphy, for example, achieves more when considered as a group than when each is considered in isolation from the others.
Beckett’s interest remains firmly invested in the localized, non-universal meaning of the text. His strong emphasis on the physical contexts that govern the possible extension and implications of that text connects the text inextricably to the reader’s physical interaction with a specific object. The object status of the book asserts its unsuitability for universalizing commentary, and assures that the relevance and poignancy of the individual moment reigns over the illusion of adequately totalizing literature. Beckett establishes the text as a passive object but does not equate this passivity with diminished utility. Rather, by placing considerable narrative import upon the constructed physical edifice of the novel, he asserts the book-object as a reliable vehicle for textual content.
The thematic immediacy demanded by the physical book speaks to Beckett’s steadfast refusal to grant the text a universal voice.
CHAPTER THREE
SCATOLOGY – BECKETT AND THE TEXT AS FART
Samuel Beckett rarely demurred from the use of scatological images for the sake of humor or artistic reflection. His novels often suggest a bawdy preference for bathroom puns. In Watt, for example, Mr. Graves charms the narrator by using the words “Turd and fart…for third and fourth.”1 When he hears this, Watt “liked those venerable Saxon words.”2 For Beckett, however, the attraction to scatology amounts to more than a juvenile fascination with simple puns. In a personal letter to Mary Manning Howe dated
November 14, 1936, Beckett wrote:
My next work shall be on rice paper wound about a spool, with a
perforated line every six inches and on sale in Boots. The length of each
chapter will be carefully calculated to suit with the average free motion.
And with every copy a free sample of some laxative to promote sales. The
Beckett Bowel Books, Jesus in farto. Issued in imperishable tissue.
Thistledown end papers. All edges disinfected. 1000 wipes of clean fun.
Also in Braille for anal pruritics. All Sturm and no Drang.3
It is worthwhile to note, and in fact quite telling, that Beckett’s “next work” was Murphy in 1938. Though the Howe letter is certainly tongue in cheek, it suggests a serious topic
70 71 of consideration in the topic of Beckett’s meta-commentary. Beckett appears eager to compare and correlate writing with defecation and scatology. His letter to Howe presents two possible scatological understandings for Beckett’s perception of his own composition. The first, and most direct, is that he expects the reader’s response to his writing will induce a bowel movement. Under such an understanding of the Howe letter,
Beckett suggests he print his next work on toilet paper to save his readers the trouble of refitting his prose to that purpose themselves. The second possible reading of Beckett here, subtler but more meaningful to the task at hand, is that Beckett equates the process of writing with the act of defecation. With this view, Beckett does not print his words on the page; he wipes them. He views writing, thus, as an artistic excretion, produced by the mind in the same way that excrement is produced by other orifices. In Beckett’s conception of artistry, then, the written product is pure waste, and yet he continues to struggle to write and assumes his audience will continue to read. With the understanding and acceptance of Beckett’s multifarious approach to scatology in his writing, the
Beckettian text emerges as a pseudo-physical necessity for creator and consumer alike. In the absence of a reliable universal language, the shared human experience of excrement makes it the perfect common image on which Beckett bases some of his most searching artistic self-reflection.
Beckett’s fondness for scatological imagery in his writing has been well attested.
In his essay “‘Shat Into Grace’ Or, A Tale of a Turd: Why It Is How It Is in Samuel
Beckett’s How It Is,” William Hutchings focuses on the “central metaphor… that the narrator (and by extension every human being) is a turd in the cosmic digestive process
72 of time”4 in Beckett’s later novel How It Is. In Beckett, Hutchings suggests, “the generating, devouring, and defecating body is fused with nature and cosmic phenomena.”5 Hutchings traces Beckett’s scatology as an indication of humanity’s absolute subsumption in a continuous universal process of digestion. Though he focuses on How It Is exclusively, Hutchings nevertheless establishes Beckett’s unwillingness or inability to articulate humankind’s relationship with its universal surroundings in a non- scatological way. Beckettian scatology, in Hutching’s view, is a necessary lens through which the universe’s role in the gradual devouring and disintegration of human existence is to be understood.
Joshua D. Esty offers an alternate understanding of Beckett’s fecal fascination. In
“Excremental Postcolonialism,” Esty compares the Irish authors Beckett and Joyce with
African postcolonial authors Wole Soyinka and Ayi Kwei Armah. For each of these authors, he suggests, “shit (not to mention its corporeal familiars phlegm, drool, vomit, sweat, piss and blood) emerges as an index of moral and political outrage”6 in contexts of repressed or emergent nationalism. Esty’s argument is that scatological imagery and language offers an avenue through which nationalistically motivated authors, which he classifies Beckett to be, “present political and corporate misdeeds in terms of unhealthy digestion.”7 As with Hutchings, Esty focuses on Beckettian scatological reference primarily as a symbolic stand in for metaphysical issues. However, Esty notes Beckett’s
“conspicuous investment in the language of excrement [emphasis added].”8 Having established thus far that Beckett’s overt engagement in the structures of language need not point beyond the immediate moment of the text itself, I am hesitant to agree with
73 Esty’s suggestion of a political message underlying Beckett’s scatology. Esty, whose stated interest rests in the development of postcolonial national identities, sees in
“Beckett’s excremental writing…a rupture in the mutually reinforcing allegorical link between personal and national identity.”9 Esty focuses on the scatological as a gesture of diffident cultural rejection, predicated upon his interest in the political implications of postcolonial texts. Insofar as Beckett can be said to be politically minded in his novels,
Esty’s analysis of the disruptive impact of the fecal image reverberates profoundly, but
Beckett’s obsession with the immediate experience of the text makes it clear that he is interested in more (or, in an appropriately cynical way, less) than international relations.
A wealth of evidence exists suggesting that Beckett’s scatology focuses most centrally on artistic self-commentary. Esty correctly identifies the motif of rejection in excremental literature, but he fails to account for the ways in which Beckett uses scatology to discuss creative gestures as well. In his portrayal of defecation and related acts, Beckett characterizes the processes of writing and reading the text.
Some precedent exists for approaching Beckettian scatology in this way, but it has been restricted solely to Beckett’s drama. Sidney Shrager, in Scatology in Modern
Drama, identifies Beckett as “an author who thought of art as the excrement of the soul,
[for whom] obscenities are part of the poetry of the state of man.”10 Shrager understands
Beckett’s scatological references and imagery as an admission that “[art], instead of being immortal, is just excrement like everything else.”11 Shrager examines the scatological abundances of the plays Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last
Tape, and concludes that Beckett “uses [scatology] to underscore his belief that modern
74 man lacks any real moral, spiritual, and creative vitality.”12 The artistic expression thus becomes an ultimately empty experience, for the absence of any “creative vitality” in a human species equated with excrement makes any attempt at expression a futile gesture.
Shrager arrives at an understanding of Beckett’s scatological drama that reduces the fecal image to an expression of absolute meaninglessness; Beckett’s plays, thus, and the scatological references contained therein, produce meaning only “if one accepts the nothingness of this ‘muckheap’”13 of existence.
Julie Campbell challenges certain of Shrager’s conclusions directly, deriding his conclusion as “a rather glib and superficial generalization which may have some relevance, but loses any point for [her] because it attempts to be all-inclusive.”14
Campbell’s criticism of the totalizing implications of Shrager’s viewpoint is well taken, for it corroborates my own assertion that Beckett is disinterested in cultivating more than the immediate moment through his writing. Appropriately, Campbell’s essay “The
Semantic Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape” traces the deep implications the word and image of “crap” hold in an isolated play, arriving ultimately at the conclusion that Beckett’s scatology performs a variety of roles, both aesthetic and psychoanalytic, within Krapp’s
Last Tape. Beginning with the multifaceted etymology of “crap,” Campbell demonstrates the fluidity of scatological implications throughout the play. Though she goes to great length to explain non-fecal interpretations of crap in context, Campbell nonetheless admits that it “is the far more common use of the word crap [to mean defecation] that the audience cannot fail to bring to mind…All the associations merge in this overriding definition of crap as excrement and waste.”15 Campbell even goes so far as to suggest that
75 this emphasis on crap in the play provides “Beckett’s own self-deprecation: the play signified as crap.”16 Campbell rigidly restricts the scope of her scatological discourse to
Krapp’s Last Tape; having condemned Shrager for his generalizations, she has no real opportunity, nor any apparent desire, to comment upon scatology as a recurring conceit in the Beckettian canon. Campbell certainly delves deeply into crap in Krapp, but to handicap discourse by refusing intertextual comparisons ignores Beckett’s constant return to scatology for images that are consistent in description and artistic intention alike.
By approaching the novels with the same attention that Campbell applies to
Krapp’s Last Tape – that is, by focusing on the scatological in the immediate context of its appearance and articulation – it becomes possible to address the issue in a way that avoids the Shrager mistake of over-generalization while still expanding the discussion beyond the confines of any single work. More importantly, it is entirely productive, and long overdue, to apply the same scatological scrutiny to Beckett’s early novels as has been applied to his drama. Both Shrager and Campbell forward a principal explanation of the scatological references in the drama, particularly Krapp’s Last Tape, and argue that their importance lies in their humorous effect. Shrager notes that Beckett’s “excremental vision is tragic-comic”17 and suggests that “his scatological laughter helps us all to endure when we feel like is ‘Krapp.’”18 Campbell, similarly, dedicates a considerable portion of her essay to the Freudian theory behind scatological humor, pointing out the
“comic shock effect”19 of such moments in the text. To the psychoanalytic perspective,
“laughing at the scatological is a release; it takes the audience of the comedy back to childhood, bypassing the adult, rational censorship which has taught that such topics are
76 disgusting and unseemly.”20 My intention is not to reject unilaterally the comedic explanation offered by these critics; there can be little argument that Beckett’s novels are highly comic in nature and tone, which is only enhanced by the inclusion of scatology.
However, the “comic shock effect” that Campbell notes and attributes to a Freudian reading of Beckett, if taken as the sole determinant of scatological reference in the text, disregards a more serious attribute of Beckett’s bawdy language and imagery. In addition to providing a comedic release for its reader, the Beckettian text uses scatology to provide a consistent language system through which the creative process and artistic identity can be discussed. When the analysis of Beckett’s scatology is restricted solely to the drama, it is permissible to overemphasize what Shrager refers to as the “scatological laughter”; as the plays are intended to be staged, they rely more overtly on certain strategies of audience engagement, most notable of which is the fecal pun which predominates. In consideration of the novels, however, it becomes clear that scatology performs a far more instructive role in the text. Defecation routinely acts as the sole productive act in the novels and, owing to the self-aware status of Beckett’s narrators, the characters’ production of feces often mirrors the author’s production of the text. The effort of creativity thus takes on a physical component, as scatological images of the artistic endeavor focus strongly on the exhausting toll defecation and artistry take on their respective agents.
Beckett cannot resist portraying this physical strain of artistry with the language of scatology. As Hannah Copeland notes in Art and the Artist in the Works of Samuel
Beckett, “[t]he image par excellence of the creator’s anguish appears in the Addenda to
77 Watt.”21 The section Copeland refers to describes a picture hanging in the room occupied by Erskine, the servant who preceded Watt in Mr. Knott’s employ. The picture depicts a
gentleman seated at piano, full length, receding profile right, naked save
for stave-paper resting on lap. With his right hand he sustains a chord
which Watt has no difficulty in identifying as that of C major in its second
inversion…The bust was bowed over the keyboard and the face, turned
slightly towards the spectator, wore expression of man about to be
delivered, after many days, of particularly hard stool, that is to say the
brow was furrowed, the eyes tight closed, the nostrils dilated, the lips
parted and the jaw fallen, as pretty a synthesis as one could wish of
anguish, concentration, strain, transport and self-abandon, illustrating
extraordinary effect.22
Copeland praises this as a “brutally frank image of artistic creation as a kind of painful physical catharsis,”23 but in doing this she glosses over the fact that Beckett likens this creation to a “particularly hard stool.” Copeland points out, and rightly so, that Erskine’s picture provides the clearest image of an abstract artist in Beckett’s novels; certainly the texts abound with artistic figures, due in no small part to the predilection for artistic transparency and creator-narrators that I discussed in Chapter One, but it is only at this moment in Watt that the artistic act appears perfectly undiluted by narrative inconsistency. The creative movement is indistinguishable from the bowel movement it resembles. More importantly, Beckett’s narration at this point resists efforts to explain the scatological away as shocking humor by earnestly employing the language of traditional
78 beauty. In the image of the straining pianist, one could not wish for a prettier synthesis of
“anguish, concentration, strain, transport and self-abandon.” Beckett’s portrayal of the noble artistic experience may be ridiculous, but it is not overtly so; James Eliopulos asserts that “Beckett’s humor is grotesque and vaudevillian,”24 and though an element of the grotesque may present itself here, the subdued language is far from the vaudevillian tone that otherwise accompanies baseless fecal puns. This would seem to suggest that
Beckett intends more for this image than a dismissible occasion for “scatological laughter.” A certain degree of absurdity naturally develops in the comparison between art and scatology, but it is accompanied equally by a degree of creative contemplativeness.
Defecation is raised to the level of enviable creation, and as such moments of intestinal strain suggest the artistic strain that went into creating them.
Though Copeland avoids direct reference to the scatological elements of Erskine’s picture, she nonetheless describes the portrait of artistry provided by this section effectively. She notes that despite “all his pain this artist produces nothing more than a simple C-major chord.”25 The effort of the process seems wholly incommensurate with its result. As Copeland explains it, the “artistic process is negligible. All that can be said for the gratification of the artist is that he achieves a catharsis, temporary relief from the obligation to create.”26 The ultimately unsatisfactory nature of the created work offers a potential explanation of Beckett’s fondness for portraying it in scatological terms. The excrement produced by the body provides the nearest corollary for the artist’s sense of wasted effort in relation to the text. Again, then, the process of writing assumes a role arguably superior to the product that results from it. By equating his own artistry with the
79 physical necessity of defecation, Beckett balances his pervasively dim outlook on the world with the fact of his continued pursuit of creativity. The impulse to write need not assume a meaningful or worthwhile result, in much the same way that the effort to deliver oneself of a particularly hard stool expects no reward other than the release from a physical burden. The scatological references of Beckett’s fiction, then, serve an explicitly self-deprecating role, as they clearly equate the artist’s work with the artist’s waste.
However, it would be a mistake to dismiss Beckett’s scatology on this basis. Beckett may be denigrating the completed text, but in doing so he raises the artistic process to a necessity of nature. Thus, the activity and impulses of scatological reference invite continued consideration. If attention is restricted solely to the grotesque image of feces in
Beckett’s novels, then the theme naturally merits little further attention. If, however, scatology is understood as a self-important process equal to writing itself, then the continued examination of its influence over Beckett’s texts provides an opportunity to further appreciate Beckett’s efforts to instruct his readers in the proper consumption of his artistry.
The urge to defecate is not the only physical burden to which Beckett compares the act of writing. Raymond Federman has observed that “throughout Beckett’s fiction…images of physical birth are equated with the act of creating fiction.”27 Indeed, another example from Watt illustrates this admirably, as when Tetty Nixon recalls that the primary emotion for the mother who has just delivered is “one of relief, of great relief, as when the guests depart…the feeling was always the same, one of riddance.”28
Tetty’s sense of physical release, and the negative emotion of “riddance” she feels toward
80 her pregnancy, closely mirrors the alleviation of creative tension on display in Erskine’s picture. Tetty remains unconvinced that the product of her labor, her son Larry, deserves the effort put into delivering him, but she is nonetheless satisfied merely by the release from the physical pressure that preceded his birth. Birth in Beckett, however, cannot avoid scatological description. Recalling his own birth, Molloy thinks “of her who brought me into this world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit.”29 The obvious anatomical mistake in Molloy’s memory asserts little influence over the text, for it is the emotional resonance of his supposed birth by arse that truly merits further consideration. Molloy attributes his own existence to the act of defecation, which for him better explains the universal “taste of the shit” in his life.
Creation and scatology are inextricable in his mind, as Molloy is incapable of imagining the non-fecal origins of anything, himself included. The fact that Molloy narrates and ostensibly creates the text of Molloy should not be overlooked. Knowing that creativity and scatology are indistinguishable in Molloy’s mind, it is reasonable to extend his own
“hole in her arse” origin to the text itself. Molloy has no ability to describe his own creative process independent of scatology, for no reasonable boundary between one or the other exists within the text. The fact of creation within Molloy presupposes the image of feces. The internal urgency to narrate cannot be couched in terms other than those of excremental alleviation.
This is not to say, of course, that Beckett’s narrators consistently retain absolute control over the appearance of the scatological in the novels. Just as often, his narrators serve as unwitting, even unwilling, vehicles for the fecal image. The very act of creation,
81 in which all of Beckett’s narrators are actively and self-consciously engaged, places a discernible burden on the artistic presences that transcends their ability to control or resist. The impulse to create controls the narrators’ action as much as any necessary physical impulse. Malone, for example, discusses the pressure of his fecal imperatives in a tone that implicates his role as narrator:
For my arse for example, which can hardly be accused of being the end of
anything, if my arse suddenly started to shit at the present moment, which
God forbid, I firmly believe the lumps would fall out in Australia. And if I
were to stand up again, from which God preserve me, I fancy I would fill a
considerable part of the universe, oh not more than lying down, but more
noticeably.30
Malone evinces a considerable degree of passivity in relation to the whims of his bowels; he cannot control the production of his feces, only their distribution. He is forced to choose between filling the earth with his waste, indicating an inward focus of this imperative, or projecting his excrement into the universe for observation by external agencies. In this light, it becomes clear that Malone’s narrative role is equally on display at this moment in the text, as he is equally unable to resist the impulse to convey his thoughts artistically. Throughout the novel, he questions the intended recipient of his desire to give voice to his decline. It is clear, then, that though Beckett’s scatological references assist his narrators in the development of images of creation, they also act out the inability of the novels’ creative presences, including Beckett himself, to resist the impulse of artistry. The scatological images that abound in Beckett’s novels demonstrate
82 that the artist, following Malone’s example, has only enough authority to determine the direction of his artistic output; he cannot control the appearance of artistry entirely. In this way, Beckett’s scatology suggests that the expressive urge is foisted upon the writer in the same way that excrement can never be totally controlled, only restricted.
Molloy experiments with this image of the narrator’s inability to resist the scatological and artistic burdens upon him. Molloy’s narration is unable to explain creative origins without reference to excrement. Commenting on the rate at which his physical health deteriorates, Molloy notes, “I would have hesitated to exclaim, with my finger up my arse-hole for example, Jesus-Christ, it’s much worse than yesterday, I can hardly believe it is the same hole. I apologize for having to revert to this lewd orifice, ‘tis my muse will have it so.”31 Molloy directly acknowledges the centrality of the anus in his creative process, noting that inspiration keeps forcing him to return to his “lewd orifice.”
He appears to be wholly unable to create without relying on the image of the anus to understand his own activity, and in fact returns to the anus time after time in order to determine the boundaries of his sense of self. Molloy’s continued narration offers a glimpse into the motivation behind his creative reliance on his arse-hole, which he views as the principal source of his meaningful transmissions. Reflecting on his return to the anus as a creative image, he suggests:
Perhaps it is less to be thought of as the eyesore he called by its name than
as the symbol of those passed over in silence, a distinction due perhaps to
its centrality and its air of being a link between me and the other
excrement. We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the
83 arse-hole and affect to despise it. But is it not rather the true portal of our
being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen door.32
This comparison implicates Molloy’s negative impression of existence, which makes no connection between him and “the other excrement.” Nevertheless, the “centrality” of the scatological source and its utility as “the true portal of our being” subverts the traditional image of the navel as the physical and spiritual center of the human body. The anus produces in a way that the navel cannot; as such, the former enjoys a practical utility as the embodiment of the reflective impulse. Beckett’s narrator is unable to comprehend his own created identity without comparing it to defecation, his most consistent act of production. Molloy suggests that there is an element of natural and discernible truth to the scatological image that is otherwise lacking from his creative reflection. The perversity typically attributed to the scatological image is, by his own admission, an affectation. The arse-hole, as an artistic image, conveys a sense of self that resonates, for the Beckettian narrator, with greater honesty than any other human or metaphysical orifice. As such, there exists a certain expectation that the artist’s gaze, if properly focused on the articulation of human experiences, will arrive eventually at the scatological in some way.
The inevitability of the scatological as a dominant image in self-aware literature is addressed admirably in Malone Dies. The attempt to avoid images of filth and excrement cannot be sustained indefinitely. Macmann, Malone’s thinly veiled artistic representation of himself, attempts to find employment as a street cleaner, and yet feels “compelled to admit that the place swept by him looked dirtier at his departure than on his arrival, as if a
84 demon had driven him to collect…all the dirt and filth which chance had withdrawn from the sight of the tax-payer.”33 Despite his best efforts to emphasize cleanliness and exclude the scatological from discourse, Beckett’s artistic figure finds that filth invades his actions naturally. By the end of the day, Macmann finds that “dogs’ and horses’ excrement and other muck [has been] carefully concentrated all along the sidewalk or distributed on the crown of the street, as though in order to inspire the greatest possible disgust in the passers-by.”34 The Beckettian narrator, similarly, finds himself unable to exclude scatology from his text, no matter how much he may exert himself otherwise.
The fecal image exerts a powerful compulsion over all agents in the Beckettian text, such that no figure in Beckett’s novels can accumulate meaning without also gathering the scatological images that express it.
In Molloy, this manifests as Molloy’s inability to avoid mentioning his struggles with flatulence. Molloy, in his narrative capacity, regrets that he “can’t help it, gas escapes from [his] fundament on the least pretext, it’s hard not to mention it now and then, however great [his] distaste.”35 It is as difficult for Molloy to stop himself from mentioning his flatulence as it is to stop himself from passing gas. The artistic process is strongly suggested to mimic, then, the pressures of scatological actions. The Beckettian narrator can no sooner exclude the fecal image from his text than he can exclude defecation from his natural activities. Molloy and Malone are far from the only narrative voices in his novels unable to avoid the influence of scatology on their texts. Moran, narrating the second half of Molloy, finds himself “succumbing to other affections, that is not the word, intestinal for the most part. [He] would have described them once…it
85 would have been worth reading.”36 Despite this direct acknowledgment that it does not bear mentioning, Moran cannot exclude an image of himself crawling “on all fours shitting out [his] entrails and chanting maledictions”37 from his narrative. The Unnamable expects the scatological to interrupt his narrative. Hearing “a little cry, stifled outright”38 in the silent void of his empty universe, he wonders whether it “is not perhaps a simple little fart, they can be rending.”39 Other Beckettian narrators are not lucky or lucid enough to anticipate the insistent appearance of scatology in their texts. The narrator of
Murphy refers to “the whole extent of the little afflatulence”40 between Murphy and Mr.
Endon without indicating that the scatological pun was intentional or even noticed. In each of these moments, the scatological images and language stymies the narrators’ efforts to subdue and exclude it. Clearly, then, something in the creative process naturally invites comparison to scatology.
Joshua Esty offers a reasonable explanation for the persistent influence of the scatological on the Beckettian novel. In Esty’s estimation, the excremental image bridges the gap between the internal and external through the ambiguous sense of ownership with which feces are imbued. Beckett’s self-aware narrators in the novels involve themselves fundamentally with the navigation of this gulf between interiority and the external, and as such Beckett “exploits shit’s symbolic vocation as an ambiguous marker of the self/not- self divide.”41 The image of feces is inherently ambiguous in attributive terms, as feces’ origins from within are immediately contradicted by their alien appearance and status as waste following their emission from the body. Molloy, then, views his arse-hole as the
“true portal of our being” in deference to its unique ability to separate the internal integral
86 experience for external waste, quite literally. The scatological lens adopted by Beckett’s narrators acts as a mediating influence through which external experiences are evaluated for their relevance to an internal stasis. In the same way that intestinal processes separate materials for digestion and excretion, Beckett’s narrators engage themselves in the discernment process between relevance and meaninglessness. Molloy esteems the arse- hole for the ease with which it completes this fundamental task: determining the boundary between his internal self and external appearance. Molloy, moreover, is far from the sole Beckettian narrator to rely on the scatological for the determination of identity. In fact, the protagonists of the novels most typically look to the same orifice at moments of heightened personal scrutiny, to the point that self-knowledge in Beckett’s novels is virtually unattainable without reference to scatological processes and anatomy.
In Murphy, it is no accident that Murphy’s charred body can only be identified after scrutinizing his posterior. The group of Murphy’s closest friends, tasked with establishing the identity of the corpse in the morgue, are first shown the face and chest of the body, becoming “annoyed that no trace remained of what [they] had known, chagrined that [they] could not exclaim…‘This is Murphy, whose very dear friend I was.’”42 It is only when the body is turned over that Celia, Murphy’s lover, “addresse[s] herself with a suddenly confident air to the further of the charred buttocks and [finds] at once what she sought.”43 The distinguishing mark of Murphy’s identity appears, of course, on his buttocks, for it is here that Beckett establishes the center of his characters’ identity. The source of Murphy’s identity is the same lewd orifice to which Molloy attributes his creative self. Even in death, the arse-hole’s role in establishing internal
87 uniqueness proceeds unabated. More importantly, this example from Murphy suggests that the identifying element of scatology and related references in Beckett may not simply be dismissed as comedic excess. There is a certain degree of absurdity inherent to
Murphy’s birthmark, but it is played straight within the confines of the text. The role it plays in self-identification asserts an undeniably positive influence over the text, and as such the potential implications of anatomical humor must be seen as tempered, at the very least, by the meaningful role Beckett affords to the anus in his novels.
Beckett does not restrict the image of the arse-hole’s role in individuation to
Murphy. Identification through the buttocks is carried out to a very similar degree in
Watt. Following Watt’s collapse in the rail station in Part Four, the crowd of onlookers that gathers around him cannot tell for sure if he is the same man the night watchman Mr.
Case encountered the night before. Mr. Case bemoans the fact that he only saw Watt’s face the night before, mentioning that he has a particular memory “for arses.”44 He assures his companions, “Let me once catch a fair glimpse of an arse, and I’ll pick it out for you among a million.”45 As in Murphy and Molloy, the anus reigns here as the source of an individual’s definable characteristics. To view the arse in Beckett is to view the self, to the point that facial appearance and other traditional indices of self fade into insignificance. It is apparent, moreover, that Mr. Case’s proposed identification of Watt by his buttocks is not solely attributed to the unfamiliarity with one another; that is, the identification through centers of excrement need not suggest a lack of other, more intimate knowledge in Watt. Watt defines himself through his excremental routines. Watt characterizes himself as
88 He who hourly passed an urgent water, a delicious water, in the ordinary
way. This last regular link with the screen, for he did not count as such his
weekly stool, nor biannual equinoctial nocturnal emission in vacuo, he
now envisaged its relaxation, and eventual rupture, with sadness, and
gladness, distinctly perceptible in an alternation of great rapidity.46
Watt clearly derives no small amount of his sense of self from the regularity of his excretions, despite the fact that the infrequency of his bowel movements borders on the inhuman. The expectation of his body to expel urine hourly, and stool weekly, comforts him, for it is in his recognition of this routine that he assures himself of his continued personal unity. The “relaxation, and eventual rupture” of this routine occasions a moment of considerable personal scrutiny, for it requires him to reimagine the definition of “self” to which he subscribes. Watt, then, recognizes himself through his arse to the same degree that Mr. Case does. The scientific classification of his occasional wet dreams as
“biannual equinoctial nocturnal emission[s] in vacuo” suggests that, for Watt at least, this system of self-identification has been rigidly formalized. Identification through excrement, and the orifices that produce it, is reliable insofar as it is exhaustive; as the principal creative orifice, the anus provides the greatest amount of differentiation between individuals. Beckett thus proposes an excremental identity as the most unique aspect of the characters within his novels.
This excremental identity, and the importance of scatology in the determination of character within the novels, is emphasized by the pervasive influence of scatological references in the description of his characters’ relation to life and the world around them.
89 In addition to establishing and maintaining the internal identities of Beckett’s protagonists, the language of scatology provides the context against which external experience is to be judged in the novels. Beckett relies heavily on the image of excrement as a statement about mankind’s position in an unkind universe. William Hutchings notes that “Beckett’s narrator is conscious of the ‘vast tracts of time’ in which he, like all things, is continually being digested and devoured.”47 An awareness of self in Beckett, and the consequent reliance on fecal imagery to categorize that sense of self, mandate an awareness of the slow process of digestion and reabsorption by the universe.
Malone Dies expands upon this image of an indigestible outer world passing over the individual and reducing the individual self to excrement. As his life wanes, Malone reflects on the insubstantiality of his existence, noting that “[w]hat matters is to eat and excrete.”48 Confined to the room in which he later dies, the only actions Malone can take are to consume soup from one pot and defecate into an identical pot, such that soup and shit, cause and effect, become indistinguishable from each other. Malone’s entire existence is reduced to “[d]ish and pot, dish and pot, those are the poles.”49 The passing of soup wholesale through his body, returning unchanged after digestion, suggests that
Malone is wholly unable to integrate external features into his internal self, and as such his cycle of consumption and defecation acts out a profound sense of isolation from his surroundings. As his faculties decline, ingestion and expulsion cease to convey any meaningful differences. Scatology may mediate knowledge at times in Beckett, but it is equally capable of indicating an unmediatable conflict with an external hostility. Like
Watt, Malone pays careful attention to changes in his intestinal patterns, noting that when
90 he has “stopped eating [he] produce[s] less and so eliminate[s] less.”50 Defecation, thus, provides a reasonable gauge of his own immersion in the world; Malone is clearly aware that the reduction of excrement in his life, and indicates that he expects his death to coincide with a total cessation of defecation. His waste provides for him, then, a measurement of the process of his alienation from the world.
For Beckett, death completes this gradual process of alienation, and even dying is couched squarely in terms of scatological discharge. Nowhere is this more evident than in
Murphy, in which Murphy’s will stipulates that his “body, mind and soul…be burnt and placed in a paper bag and brought to the Abbey theatre, Lr. Abbey Street, Dublin, and without pause into what the great and good Lord Chesterfield calls the necessary house, where their happiest hours have been spent.”51 Murphy, in including his “mind and soul” in the list of remnants to be discarded in this way, compares the entirety of his being and sense of self to excrement, worthy only of being flushed down the Abbey Theatre toilets.
The further stipulation that this entire ritual “be executed without ceremony or show of grief”52 indicates that the return of his mortal remains to a state of excrement reflects the natural order, deserving of neither solemnity nor sorrow. The intention of Murphy’s will appears to be an instructive performance of his conception of his relationship to the universe after death; divested of life, his identity is pushed further into the metaphysical digestive tract Hutchings identifies in his essay. The purging of Murphy’s physical and metaphysical remnants suggests the destructive influence of the external world on his inner integrity. After death, Murphy returns to mere excrement. His passing through the world and out of the mortal plane merits as little attention as the slightest bowel
91 movement. The external world’s indifference to interior conditions confines the soul’s
“happiest hours” to isolated moments of strained excretion in the necessary house.
Though Beckett’s infirm narrators routinely imagine the dissolution of the physical requirements of existence through death, they are unable to imagine dying to be a sufficient release from the burden of scatological discharge. Malone, imagining his own death, does not equate the end of life with the end of his fecal burdens. Fantasizing about a sexual partner to ease his transition into death, Malone imagines he “would die delighted, she would close [his] eyes and put a plug in [his] arse-hole, as per instructions.”53 These instructions are not specified further, but it is interesting to note that Malone perceives some urgent need to block the continuation of his excremental processes after his death. Scatology, then, plays some undefined role in the determination of the end of life, as the fecal image is uniquely suited to definitive description in
Beckett’s texts. Beckett expands upon this notion of the role of the anus at the end of life in The Unnamable. The eponymous narrator of that novel recalls, “I once knew a doctor who held that scientifically speaking the latest breath could only issue from the fundament and this therefore, rather than the mouth, the orifice to which the family should present the mirror, before opening the will.”54 Just as Malone was forced to in
Malone Dies, the Unnamable’s reflection on death cannot avoid relying on scatology to make sense of the otherwise senseless. Beckett’s narrators turn naturally to vulgar anatomy and scatological references when presented with concepts beyond their ken, for they rely on the internal/external mediation provided by the anus to determine their response to issues larger than themselves. The constant reliance on scatology to order
92 Beckett’s worlds bespeaks a need for a linguistic image that is simultaneously intimate and yet outwardly expressive. Previous critics on this subject have interpreted Beckett’s scatology as a limitation of the text; James Eliopulos, for example, suggests that
“[b]ecause Beckett’s humor is reductive and sadistic, it tends to focus upon scatological rather than erotic functions.”55 I view it, however, as an expansion of the text; the scatological imagery and language that abounds in Beckett’s novels allow his narrator- protagonists to give voice to concepts otherwise beyond the limits of their perception. In the absence of scatology, Beckett’s narrators would struggle to properly describe the process and result of creativity, and would be wholly incapable of articulating the motivating impulse to create. Scatology, simply put, provides the context in which
Beckett’s self-aware prose can flourish.
The performative and instructive implications of this scatological context, which enables creative commentary in a wholly unique way, are staggering. Because the fecal image is tied so explicitly to the experience of artistic production, moments of active defecation in the novels reliably act out the creative energies inherent in the novels. The
Unnamable provides an excellent example of this performative aspect of Beckett’s scatology. Periodically, the Unnamable refers to his contemplative actions as “shitting” on various topics. He notes, for example, that “[w]ith the yesses and noes it is different, they will come back to [him] as [he goes] along and how, like a bird, to shit on them all without exception.”56 Similarly, he exhorts himself to “let me complete my views, before
I shit on them.”57 His contemplation, which bears the full weight of his creative identity, can only be articulated as an excremental function. As such, when the Unnamable
93 occupies himself with deep contemplation or reflection, the fecal actions that accompany his thoughts act out his internal processes for his external audience. The Unnamable is aware that the apparitions of characters with which he surrounds himself are merely extensions of his own identity; as such, he switches his attention between these characters with images of defecation. The Unnamable admits, “For if I am Mahood, I am Worm too, plop. Or if I am not yet Worm, I shall be when I cease to be Mahood, plop [all italics mine].”58 The “plop” of dropping feces, while grotesque and highly visceral, nonetheless conveys the artistic command of the moment; the Unnamable punctuates his points by controlling the emergence and effectiveness of the scatological image. The interjection of
“plop” into the narrative structure provides an active illustration of the meaningful conclusions the Unnamable reaches mentally. The production of creative reflection is supplemented by the production of stool, which demonstrates the resonance of his thoughts with this slight disruption of the text.
Scatological performances of the text need not be so explicit, however. Beckett often invokes images of fecal activity subtly so as to emphasize the effort with which his protagonists approach cognitive events. The description of Murphy’s outward posture during his moments of meditative contemplation strongly suggests the act of defecation, closely mirroring the image of the artist in Erskine’s picture in Watt. Celia, witnessing the physical exertion that accompanies Murphy’s mental activity, notes that
Clearly the effort was considerable…she found, as she had fully expected,
the eyes of Murphy still open and upon her. But almost at once they
closed, as for a supreme exertion, the jaws clenched, the chin jutted, the
94 knees sagged, the hypogastrium came forward, the mouth opened, the
head tilted slowly back. Murphy was returning to the brightness of the
firmament.59
The description of Murphy’s cognitive exertion, owing to the progressive tense of description employed by Beckett at this moment, exerts a tangible performative quality over the text. Murphy’s external behavior acts as a physical approximation of his internal scrutiny; it is no coincidence, of course, that his external posture is indistinguishable from that of a man in the throes of a powerful bowel movement. Murphy’s posture, which relaxes after he flexes his hypogastrium,60 indicates the satisfying excretion of a difficult internal object. His mental digestion of his thoughts is acted out externally with the same posture of physical digestion and excretion of fecal material. The scatological imagery at this moment, then, serves to demonstrate the considerable expended mental effort.
Artistry, by dint of its close reliance on the scatological image, demands a physical toll to complement its cognitive effort. This is not to say, of course, that the performative aspects of scatology are to be restricted solely to instances of cognitive effort. Scatology acts on the Beckettian text just as often as the manifestation of the undeniable impulse to create.
I have already pointed out multiple instances where Beckett’s narrative characters are unable to prevent themselves from giving utterance to concepts they would rather omit from the text; these moments are quite reliably framed in the language of excrement, as the physical burden and the satisfaction of the process, not the product, of defecation closely mirrors the writer’s own relation to the created text. As such, scatology is
95 intensely performative of the undeniability and inevitability of artistic utterance. For this reason, the moments of greatest creative energy in the Beckett text rely on the suggestion of physical pressure and discomfort to convey the motivating energies behind the narrative effort. The preponderance of farting and shitting in Beckett’s novels speaks to the creative pressure welling up inside his narrative conduits. The figure of the artist in
Beckett finds itself thrust into a performative gesture quite similar to Malone’s in Malone
Dies. Unable to resist the urge to utterance entirely, Beckett’s narrators can only determine the extent and direction of their artistry. Malone’s choice, whether to fill the earth or the heavens with his cognitive dung, acts out the creative conundrum experienced throughout Beckett’s novels. Malone imagines his physical self performing the conflict his inner artist experiences. As such, his physical adjustments, directing his anus first toward the earth and then toward the sky, are performative of intangible artistic choices. His fluctuation between equal alternatives speaks to the satisfaction of any release from creative pressure without concern for the result. This obsession with the alleviation of an internal burden forms a crucial element of Beckett’s artistic concept.
The instructive implications of Beckett’s scatological references are just as significant as the performative. Whereas the instructive relationship cultivated by artistic transparency and object physicality focused primarily on the establishment of the text’s discernible boundaries, scatology requires the reader to see the text as an undefined quantity. Through scatology, the text asserts an agency of its own, independent from the artist’s self-aware craft. The articulation of the fecal image resists the creator’s attempts to rein it in; through this, the creative impulse emerges as a powerful force in opposition
96 to the artist’s conscious intentions. The text burdens the author in a way similar to the requirements it exacts from its readers. There remains, then, an element of the reading experience that cannot be governed solely by writerly manipulation or artistic conceits.
The reader’s relationship with the text is greatly expanded by the scatological emphasis
Beckett employs, for the diminishment it engenders in the author’s totality of control over the text results in a corresponding increase in the reader’s ability to determine meaning personally.
Thus it is that the scatological language and imagery with which Beckett infuses the text of his novels redefines the relationship of the writer and the reader to the processes of creation. The narrative reliance on scatology reveals a yet insurmountable need of the creative presence to give voice to concepts that continue to elude efforts to define them. Moreover, the continued insistence on such profoundly physical language to describe the cognitive activity of literary creation underscores the effort through which
Beckett and his narrators struggle to create. Scatological images certainly grant the text an absurd humor and evince a dim conception of humanity’s relationship to an unfeeling universe; however, the humor of the fecal image is tempered by the serious contemplation that accompanies it. Beckett’s negative perception of the universe is continually challenged by his efforts to define it, however successful or unsuccessful they may be. Scatology acts out the challenge of creative expression within the confines of the text, all while instructing the reader in a limited conception of the artist’s mastery. As such, the emphasis of scatology in Beckett’s novels results in an unexpected acknowledgment of the integrity of certain natural impulses and conceits. Scatology
97 continues to be an intensely personal experience of the limits of an individual’s interior self. By building a creative relationship upon such imagery, Beckett asserts his novels’ principal interest in the establishment of an immediate, intimate relationship with a specific, well defined reader. As I will conclude shortly, this conception of the reader-text relationship stands as one of the defining innovations of Beckettian literature.
CHAPTER FOUR
IMPLICATIONS – BECKETT AND THE READER
Throughout this thesis, I have articulated the myriad ways in which Beckett instructs his reader in the proper response to his texts, and I have pointed out the performative qualities of the novels, which act out a specific intended relationship between author, text, and reader. The question yet remains, however: how do these observations weigh on the field of Beckett criticism? Though I have suggested that
Beckett emphasizes the reader’s immediate experience of consumption – the instant in which the physical interaction with the book translates into the specific cognitive event of the text – I have not discussed how the text stands to benefit from this steadfast insistence on specificity and immediacy, or what Beckett critics may derive from this perspective.
Having traced the artistic, physical, and scatological presences in the novels, I now stand poised to reflect on the implications of Beckett’s multifarious approach to the concept of
“text” as it weighs on his artistic process. Beckett may portray the universe as a decidedly bleak and empty place, but he fills the texts that express that emptiness with a profound linguistic and cognitive complexity. The richness of Beckett’s conception of the text resists simplistic attempts to explain away his novels, as Frederick Hoffman suggests, as literary “extension[s] to an infinity of noncontent.”1 Hoffman is hardly alone in this
98 99 critical dismissal of the novels; Beckett’s prose has long suffered from their perceived status as periphery works to the drama. However, by acknowledging the importance of the self-aware instruction uniquely present in Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, and
The Unnamable, the novels assume a critical importance equal to the plays. The novels serve as essential indicators of Beckett’s reverence for the text as a complex and irreducible structure, and by analyzing his instructive comments therein we can arrive at an understanding of the relationship he envisions between artist, art, and audience.
As I have mentioned, critical attention has traditionally focused quite extensively on Beckett’s “literature of the non-word.” However, to date, the majority of criticism has focused on the non-word, the un-statement, at the expense of the literature in Beckett’s formulation. Beckett may strive for meaninglessness, but he does not attempt to do so at the expense of or in the absence of structure. In fact, I argue that to see in Beckett only emptiness favors the product of his artistry at the expense of its process. An empty universe does not mandate an empty text, as Beckett articulates in Watt:
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. The most meager, the least plausible, would
have satisfied Watt, who had not seen a symbol, nor executed an
interpretation, since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, and who had lived,
miserably it is true, among face values all his adult life, face values at least
for him. Some see the flesh before the bones, and some never see the flesh
at all, never never see the flesh at all. But whatever it was Watt saw, with
100 the first look, that was enough for Watt, that had always been enough
for Watt, more than enough for Watt.2
Watt’s singular perception of face values would seem to mirror Beckett’s own, were it not for the narrative inclusion of the “flesh” and “bones” lying beneath the thin exterior appearance of the world. Though Beckett admits that some never see the flesh at all, the text here refuses to ignore the structure that supports the outward appearance and face value obsession that has classically defined Beckett’s literature. The repeated insistence that the first look is “enough for Watt” suggests that Beckett remains unconvinced that the structural skeleton of the text is inconsequential. The responsible reader of his writing, therefore, must share Beckett’s resolution that the structure of the text, insofar as it provides a foundation for the artistic utterance, bears some self-contained meaning otherwise absent from the Beckettian universe.
Naturally, this does not suggest that Beckett, in Watt or any other novel, contradicts his long-standing refusal to imagine universal meaning hidden just beneath the appearance of things. As James Phillips notes in the essay “Beckett’s Boredom,”
“Beckett’s work does not yield an idea. It has no message.”3 The importance of the metacommentary provided by Beckett’s instructive performances derives from its ability to assert through structure what cannot be expressed in content; in this case, the value with which Beckett imbues the form of the text exists simultaneously with and yet independent from the empty content that fills his novels. Phillips’ assertion of an idea- less text bereft of underlying messages is as valid as it is well attested in the canon of
Beckett criticism. However, acknowledging Phillips on this matter does little to mitigate
101 the perception of the textual structure as a meaningful construct. Indeed, the lengths
Beckett goes to in order to portray the text as an active artistic process and passive physical object suggest that the text, unlike every other concept and image in the novel, is an idea from which Beckett cannot be dissuaded. He dissolves everything in his novels, and yet the text remains, stripped to its barest form but yet still a deserving, if reluctant, object and originator of cognitive effort. The artist’s physical need to create the text, and the reader’s corresponding impulse to consume it, indicate that the interaction between artist and text and between text and reader alleviates the crushing inconsequence imposed upon existence by the incoherent nothingness that lurks beneath meaningless surfaces.
The impossibility of totalizing perspectives or abstract notions in Beckett’s texts necessitates the immediacy upon which Beckett insists throughout his novels. As an object of an ultimately empty existence, the text can only purport to have significance when its temporal extension approaches zero; that is, in order to provide a resonant experience in a universe that disallows them, the text must reduce the duration of its interactive moments to absolute instantaneity, such that the cognitive event of the novels does not contradict the existential prohibition of meaningful utterance. It is for this same reason that, as James Phillips articulates, Beckett “privatizes [his novels], not by withdrawing the subject from the world but by individuating the exposure of an existence to its world.”4 In other words, the Beckett text strives to make the interactive relationship between reader and text as personal as possible, so as to establish an intimate connection between novel and reader that cannot be attained between universe and human. A literary reference unilaterally applicable to its audience would contradict Beckett’s fundamental
102 disbelief that totalized abstractions can bear any meaning. Accordingly, Beckett’s novels cultivate a profound sense of intimate response in their readers so as to circumvent, to the greatest degree possible, the strictures against undue extension of cognitive concepts. Insofar as Beckett intends for his reader to feel invested in the experience of the text, he must appeal to the individuality of that reader. Just as Beckett cannot conceive of a concept that is not grounded in an immediate, concrete context, he is equally unable to invoke the faceless, abstract “Reader” that so often defines more traditional literature.
To explain the impetus behind Beckett’s decision to rely on the reader’s engagement with the text, it is helpful to recall the ambiguity with which he approaches the topic of authority in his texts. The Beckettian narrator never achieves autonomy, but must rely on a collaborative effort between creator and consumer in order to properly determine the extension and efficacy of the text. Texts in the Beckett canon resist the efforts of any single agent to wholly contain or control them, and as such the reader of
Beckett’s novels fulfills a vital role in the completion of Beckett’s artistic intentions. In her book Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliché, Elizabeth Barry investigates the extent to which the Beckettian text anticipates and relies upon the reader’s consumptive efforts to complement the creativity of the author. Barry traces the use of cliché as both language and image in the Beckettian text in much the same way that I examined the scatological in Chapter Three; with this in mind, she arrives at the conclusion that “cliché is an effect of reading, a property of an audience as much as of a text.”5 Beckett’s narrative language, in this light, foists considerable authority upon the reader in the
103 determination of his structural images. Though ostensibly the language of the text originates from the creator alone, Barry suggests that only through the audience’s evaluation of the text does Beckett’s artistry achieve its greatest utility. The implications of Barry’s findings on this point are staggering, for they reveal the comprehensive responsibility afforded to the reader of Beckett to act upon the text with a level of agency comparable to that of the author. The ways Beckett frames the text in the novels, then, speak to the degrees of complicity the audience shares with the author in determining the success of the creative effort. Beckett’s scatological conception of the text invites the reader to share in the physical compulsion of utterance that plagues his narrators, with the understanding that the reading of creative expression relieves this burden in the same way that writing does. Similarly, Beckett’s physical classification of the text establishes it as a universally passive object equally influenced by all who interact with it. Even when
Beckett emphasizes the conscious craft manifested by the artistic text, he implicates the reader’s influence. The continuous application of artistry in Beckett’s transparent moments closely mirrors the progressive act of reading he acts out in the text. Beckett’s artistic self-awareness, moreover, asserts a degree of competition between artist and audience over the control of the text. The writer’s concern over the reader’s interpretation of the text mitigates the pride he feels in its creation. This feud would be wholly irrelevant if the reader occupied a peripheral role in the Beckett novels. By relying explicitly upon an outside presence to qualify his artistry, Beckett forces himself to accommodate a multi-tonal voice of authority within the text. In doing so, Beckett transforms the act of reading from a passive reception of information into an active
104 determination of content. In Beckett, the creative presence can no longer merely act upon the novel, but must also react to the influence wielded by the consumptive counterpart.
Beckett’s constant instruction of the reader’s response to the text, then, emerges as a necessary measure to prevent the corruption of the textual object by a duly capable consumptive presence. In the absence of the novels’ instructive narration, the text would be subject to the whims of an under-informed and over-empowered reader, in the hands of whom the careful artistry Beckett employs would be subverted. The fact that these instructive aspects of the novels have escaped critical comment for so long suggests a misappropriation of scholarly attention, for the texts themselves explicitly emphasize the necessity of these bulwarks against readerly excess. If Beckett truly resigned himself to a perfectly valueless text, he would have no reason to guide the reader’s response to his writing. Any interpretation the reader applied would be equally valid because each would enjoy an equal share of the available content. The self-aware instruction of the Beckett text, then, complicates the traditional understanding of the non-word by asserting a textual value independent from textual meaning. This value, in turn, is intimately bound up in the reader’s interaction with the created work, for Beckett only asserts his instructive approach at moments when the consumptive presence could contradict the creative intention. By insisting upon creator-consumer collaboration, Beckett suggests that the text works towards or contains a subtly resonant element that will not develop adequately without conscious cultivation.
105 My recognition of the collaborative reader role is only unprecedented insofar as I have applied it to the novels. Critics of the drama have applied this perspective to
Beckett’s plays for years, to the point that the formative position of the audience in staging performances has been well attested. Herbert Blau has suggested, for example, that “[no] modern drama is more sensitively aware of the presence of the audience [than
Waiting for Godot].”6 Similarly, in Samuel Beckett’s Self-Referential Drama, Shimon
Levy asserts that the “dialogue on stage…reflects a desired dialogue between playwright and audience, and hence expresses concern for humanity.”7 Accepting, then, that the plays anticipate and rely upon a productive interaction between creative and consumptive presences, it becomes wholly untenable to neglect the ability of the novels to do the same. The relationship cultivated between reader and writer in the novels indicates, in
Levy’s words, a shared concern for humanity, as both parties engage in exercises designed to establish a cognitive context against which to assert relevance to a hostile universe. Restricting this critical perspective to the drama prevents the canon of Beckett literature from reaching its greatest logical extension; it is foolish, after all, to suppose that Beckett as playwright imagines a universe more receptive to human utterance than
Beckett as novelist. Accepting the concept of the novels’ instructive performances affords the field of Beckett studies a new perspective on the ability of Beckett’s prose to share in the cognitive exchange between clearly defined artist and audience figures. Moreover, by refusing to withhold from the novels’ reader the cognitive autonomy granted to the dramatic audience, I introduce genre parity to Beckett analysis, which discourages thematic pigeonholing to solely literary or dramatic contexts.
106 This analytic shift engenders a newly productive and positivistic direction for
Beckett studies, particularly in relation to the oft-maligned novels. The instructive performance concept relies fundamentally on the notion that the reader of the novel exercises some control over the effectiveness of the language and imagery contained therein, and simply acknowledges Beckett’s vested interest in shaping the application of that authority to better suit his artistic purposes. Simply by admitting the intimate relationship between artist and audience that motivates this theory, Beckett criticism opens itself to a range of new perspectives on the utility of the novels. In the hands of a semi-autonomous cognitive agent, the Beckett novel ceases to be an intellectually arid, emotionally empty affair; instead, it assumes a conceptual vitality that explains the creative impulse without abandoning the metaphysical cynicism that defines Beckett and his writing. The exclusion of the reader from the completion of the artistic image ascribes to the Beckettian narrator a total authority that runs quite contrary to the themes that have been identified as Beckett’s central self-commentary. By opening discourse to include the reader’s essential interaction with the text, and including Beckett’s conscious efforts to train his audience to properly wield their authority, the critical community stands poised to be reinvigorated, as the stagnant emptiness that has so dominated scholarly discussion contracts to admit a far more compellingly complex theory of interaction with both art and existence.
There is nothing to the concept of instructive performance in the novels that breaks radically from the extant scholarship; rather, by investigating the author’s invocations of immediacy with the text, I extend the reigning understanding of Beckett’s
107 literature of the non-word closer to its logical limits. The non-word does not require inaction to complement its incoherence; rather, the Beckettian text demands its reader exercise a specifically defined control over its consumption. The instructive element of
Beckett’s novels serves as a paradoxical manifestation of the text’s dual roles as master and subject of the reader. The performative moments I have traced through Beckett’s novels result in a profound sense of the physical burden experienced by author and audience alike in response to the created work. Rather than abandoning the negativism and deconstructionism that defined Beckett studies throughout the 20th century, I argue that these approaches to the literature have been adequately investigated and documented in critical scholarship, and I propose that critical energies may now be spent exploring alternate understandings of Beckett’s artistry. My point is not intended to reject the traditionally deconstructionist reading that has so long predominated discussions of
Beckett’s novels. I do not propose to disregard these readings, nor do I consider the perspective I have argued here to be inherently superior to the existing criticism. The field of Beckett studies is rapidly approaching a point where it will no longer be able to maintain the rigidly negativist principles that have so long attracted critics to his literature. It is true that Beckett’s writing reveals the nothing that underlies everything.
However, it is equally true, and considerably less precedented, to argue that Beckett’s careful sculpting of the immediate experience with the text manifests a vaguely positivist notion that some value can still be derived from the pursuit of artistic expression and consumption. Simply put, the time has come for Beckett to be about more than nothing.
108 The Beckett novel may be “almost lifeless, like the teller,” but in this new perspective, the life that yet remains, in the teller and in the told, cannot and will not be ignored.
NOTES
Notes to Introduction:
1 Copeland, Hannah. Art and the Artist in the Works of Samuel Beckett. The
Hague: Mouton and Co., 1975. p 26.
2 Ricks, Christopher. Beckett’s Dying Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993. p 12.
3 Van Hulle, Dirk. Manuscript Genetics, Joyce’s Know-How, Beckett’s Nohow.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. p 120.
4 The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume One: 1929-1940. Ed. Martha Dow
Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. p
518.
5 Ibid, p 520.
6 In the original German of the Kaun letter, “Literatur des Unworts.” The German phrasing of this concept especially has been embraced in the critical community as an expression of Beckett’s unique artistic goals. Here I rely instead on the English translation for the sake of clarity, as well as to symbolically distance myself from the reductive critical lens I find to be engendered by the German term.
7 Levy, Shimon. Samuel Beckett’s Self-Referential Drama: The Sensitive Chaos.
Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2002. p 62.
109 110
8 Ibid, p 13.
9 For this information regarding the publication of Watt, I am directly indebted to
Gottfried Büttner’s Samuel Beckett’s Novel Watt (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1984; p 5-7.
10 Federman, Raymond. “The Writer as Self-Translator.” Beckett
Translating/Translating Beckett. Ed. Alan Warren Friedman et al. University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987. p 7.
11 Ibid, p 7.
Notes to Chapter One:
1 Mauriac, Claude. The New Literature. New York: Braziller, 1959.
2 Perspective, 11 (Autumn 1959), 183-193. Note especially that Kern draws an important distinction between these characters’ symbolization of a generic author character and their role as a direct Beckett corollary. This is a distinction that should be maintained throughout this thesis as well, though both readings will be considered.
3 Ibid, p 183.
4 Ibid, p 184.
5 Copeland, Hannah. Art and the Artist in the Works of Samuel Beckett. The
Hague: Mouton and Co., 1975. p 18.
6 Ibid, p 18.
7 Beckett, Samuel. Three Novels. New York: Grove Press, 2009, p 174.
111
8 Copeland, p 18.
9 The considerable preponderance of essays on this topic in Beckett makes any exhaustive listing undesirable and practically infeasible. Particularly representative examples of the discourse on this subject, however, can be found in Lidan Lin’s “Labor,
Alienation, and the Status of Being: The Rhetoric of Indolence in Beckett’s Murphy”
[Philological Quarterly 79.2 (Spring 2000): p 249-71], John Erickson’s “Alienation in
Samuel Beckett: The Protagonist as Eiron” [Perspectives in Contemporary Literature 1.2
(1975): p 62-73], and Martin Esslin’s “Alienation in Brecht, Beckett, and Pinter”
[Perspectives in Contemporary Literature 1.1 (1975): p 3-21].
10 Hoffman, Frederick. Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. p. 120.
11 Ibid, p 120.
12 Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1957. p 76.
13 Ibid, p 76.
14 Ibid, p 76.
15 Ibid, p 118.
16 Ibid, p 122.
17 Farrow, Anthony. Early Beckett: Art and Allusion in More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy. Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing Co., 1991
18 Murphy, p 14-15.
19 Ibid, p 63.
112
20 Ibid, p 63.
21 For the current consideration of the novels’ artistic self-awareness, attention is better spent on the content of this footnote in Watt rather than on the startling fact that the novel uses footnotes at all. Beckett’s use of footnotes in the novel, a genre typically devoid of such conventions, will be considered in Chapter Two.
22 Beckett, Samuel. Watt. London: Calder Jupiter, 1963. p 6.
23 The plethoric reflexive pronoun would simply assert, in this case, that Mr.
Hackett said this himself.
24 Winston, Matthew. “Watt’s First Footnote.” Journal of Modern Literature 6
(1977), p 71.
25 Watt p 101.
26 Ibid, p 101.
27 Though it is noted nowhere in the text, the flaw is that the twenty-eight Lynches have only 978 years amongst them. There may be something to be said for the relative slightness of Watt’s mistake, but it is not relevant to the topic at hand.
28 Gottfried Büttner has suggested that Sam and Watt meet each other during their concurrent treatment at an insane asylum. While this is certainly a compelling potential interpretation of the action in Watt’s third book, which has been adopted by several critics of note, I find that this concretizes their relationship in a way that almost certainly oversteps Beckett’s intentions. As such, this potential meaning will be noted but not exclusively applied throughout this thesis.
113
29 Ibid, p 151.
30 Ibid, p 247.
31 Ibid, p 248.
32 Ibid, p 248.
33 Ibid, p 37-62. Note, especially, that the Addenda suggests that this diatribe contains some resonant meaning for Watt in that it remains somehow encapsulated within him; this stands in direct contradistinction to the typical reader’s inability to separate the meaningful aspects of Arsene’s declaration from the meaningless.
34 Ibid, p 252.
35 Federman, Raymond. “The Writer as Self-Translator.” Beckett
Translating/Translating Beckett. Ed. Alan Warren Friedman et al. University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987
36 Watt, p 255.
37 Considerable care was taken to imitate the spacing employed by Beckett here for the purpose of illuminating example. These holes in the text appear a total of nine times and can be found on pages 27, 30 (twice), 82, 99, 167, 227, 233, and 236 of the
1963 Calder Jupiter edition of Watt.
38 Both instances of this phrase are to be found on page 238 of the cited edition.
39 Ibid, p 240.
114
40 This proposed distinction between “text” and “book” will be dealt with substantially in Chapter Two, but for now let it suffice to say that “book” here refers explicitly to the physical object that contains and conveys the “text.”
41 Hoffman, Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self. p 120.
42 Three Novels, p 4.
43 Ibid, p 22.
44 Kern, p 183.
45 Ibid, p 186.
46 Ibid, p 184.
47 Ibid, p 184.
48 Ibid, p 192.
49 Three Novels, p 174.
50 Ibid, p 181.
51 Ibid, p 185.
52 Ibid, p 280.
53 Ibid, p 280.
54 Ibid, p 229.
55 Ibid, p 286.
56 Ibid, p 287.
57 Ibid, p 291.
115
58 As an example of this theory in practice in the criticism, Sighle Kennedy’s book Murphy’s Bed attempts to trace the real sources of inspiration behind Murphy, many of which derive from Beckett’s own biography. While certainly a fascinating approach to the subject, any argument of Beckett’s autobiographical focus should be regarded with extreme suspicion.
59 Kennedy, Sighle. Murphy’s Bed: A Study of Real Sources and Sur-real
Associations in Samuel Beckett’s First Novel. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University
Presses, 1971. Kennedy identifies multiple elements of the plot of Murphy as inspired by
Beckett’s personal life, and traces the importance such a realization has on a reading of the text.
Notes to Chapter Two:
1 Three Novels, p 9.
2 Watt, p 6.
3 Copeland, p 73.
4 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques. “Samuel Beckett and Universal Parody.” Trans. by
Barbara Bray. Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Martin Esslin.
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965. p 90.
5 Copeland, p 73.
6 Mayoux, p 90.
116
7 In the edition of Molloy cited here, the novel’s second paragraph begins on the fifth page and ends on the eighty-fifth.
8 I quote this passage in its entirety for the sake of demonstrating the dramatic reversal in Beckett’s use of space at this point. As Moran’s narrative overuses paragraph distinctions, it subtly reemphasizes the unchanging nature of Molloy’s thoughts and the text that harbors them. Just as Molloy’s lack of physical distinction leads the reader, in part, to ignore individual elements of the text, so too does Moran’s clear boundaries of text make it difficult to excise meaningful elements of his narration.
9 Three Novels, p 108.
10 Ibid, p 20.
11 Ibid, p 20.
12 Ibid, p 186.
13 Ibid, p 183.
14 Ibid, p 185. A considerable portion of the efficacy of this passage is derived from the physical spacing of this section on the page, and as such I have reproduced it here as diligently as possible.
15 Copeland, p 73.
16 Three Novels, pg. 215-216. Note here especially that the spaces of the original text are included here, as it is my contention that Beckett’s artful use of the physical space of the text makes it possible to quote the wordless sections of the novel as a clear example of his original artistry.
117
17 Ibid, p 281. Note please the absence of a full stop at the end of this quote;
Malone Dies ends quite fittingly with Malone’s last unpunctuated and uncompleted thought.
18 Watt, p 255,
19 Murphy p 84.
20 Ibid, p 84.
21 “Skim, v.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford
University Press. 21 February 2011.
22 Murphy, p 162.
23 Watt, p 211.
24 Ibid, p 6. See also Chapter One, note 21. Whereas previously I have focused on the artistic utterance contained within this footnote, my interest now lies in the physical and genre implications of the footnote’s inclusion.
25 Three Novels, p 204.
26 Murphy, p 236.
27 Brilliant, brevier, and canon are all print setting terms for font size, roughly equivalent to 3 ½ point, 8 point, and 44 point font respectively. My knowledge of these conventions is indebted to Theodore Low De Vinne’s The Practice of Typography (New
York: Century, 1910).
28 Murphy, p 240.
29 Winston, p 71.
118
30 Watt, p 132.
31 Ibid, p 155.
32 Ibid, p 156.
33 Cohn, Ruby. Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut. New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 1962. p 150
34Three Novels, p 286.
35 Ibid, p 291.
36 Szafraniec, Asja. Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature. Stanford,
California: Stanford UP, 2007. p 12.
37 Ibid, p 15.
Notes to Chapter Three:
1 Watt, p 142.
2 Ibid, p 142.
3 The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume One: 1929-1940. Ed. Martha Dow
Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. p
383.
4 Hutchings, William. “‘Shat Into Grace’ Or, A Tale of a Turd: Why It Is How It
Is in Samuel Beckett’s How It Is.” Papers on Language and Literature 21 (1985). p 65.
5 Ibid, p 65.
119
6 Esty, Joshua D. “Excremental Postcolonialism.” Contemporary Literature XL 1
(1999). p 22.
7 Ibid, p 22.
8 Ibid, p 25.
9 Ibid, p 50.
10 Shrager, Sidney. Scatology in Modern Drama. New York: Irvington Publishers,
1982. p 63.
11 Ibid, p 63.
12 Ibid, p 67.
13 Ibid, p 65.
14 Campbell, Julie. “The Semantic Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape.” Samuel Beckett
Today/Aujourd’hui 6 (1997): p 65.
15 Ibid, p 64.
16 Ibid, p 64.
17 Shrager, p 65.
18 Ibid, p 67.
19 Campbell, p 65.
20 Ibid, p 65.
21 Copeland, p 108-9.
120
22 Watt, p 251.
23 Copeland, p 109.
24 Eliopulos, James. Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Language. Paris: Moulton, 1975. p 97-98.
25 Copeland, p 109.
26 Ibid, p 109.
27 Federman, Raymond. Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965. p 200.
28 Watt, p 12-13.
29 Three Novels, p 12.
30 Ibid, p 228.
31 Ibid, p 74.
32 Ibid, p 74.
33 Ibid, p 237.
34 Ibid, p 237.
35 Ibid, p 26.
36 Ibid, p 160.
37 Ibid, p 160.
38 Ibid, p 290.
39 Ibid, p 290.
40 Murphy, p 250.
121
41 Esty, p 50.
42 Murphy, p 265.
43 Ibid, p 266.
44 Watt, p 242.
45 Ibid, p 242.
46 Ibid, p 232.
47 Hutchings, p 65.
48 Three Novels, p 179.
49 Ibid, p 179.
50 Ibid, p 245.
51 Murphy, p 269.
52 Ibid, p 269.
53 Ibid, p 266.
54 Ibid, p 336.
55 Eliopulos, p 98.
56 Ibid, p 285.
57 Ibid, p 331.
58 Ibid, p 331-332.
59 Murphy, p 14.
60 According to Thomas R. Gest and Jaye Schlesinger’s MedCharts Anatomy
(New York: ILOC, Inc., 1995), the hypogastrium is the area of the human abdomen
122 located below the navel and directly above the crotch. It is responsible for elements of control over the rectum, intestines, and urinary bladder.
Notes to Chapter Four:
1 Hoffman, Frederick. Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self. p 132.
2 Watt, p 70.
3 Phillips, James. “Beckett’s Boredom.” Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Ed.
Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani. New York: Rodopi, 2009. p 121.
4 Ibid, p 115.
5 Barry, Elizabeth. Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliché. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006. p 11.
6 Blau, Herbert. Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2000. p 33.
7 Levy, p 15; italics Levy’s.
123
REFERENCES
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