Beckett's Everyday Psychopathology: Reading Male Nervous Hysteria In

Beckett’s Everyday Psychopathology: Reading Male Nervous Hysteria in Murphy Emily Christina Murphy Queen’s University Psychotherapy is an artistic profession. Samuel Beckett “Psychology Notebooks” n 23 january 1934, samuel beckett, then twenty-eight years old, Omoved from Dublin to London to undertake a course of psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic (Fehsenfeld 175). He complained of a series of “severe anxiety symptoms, which he described in his opening session: a bursting, apparently arrhythmic heart, night sweats, shudders, panic, breathlessness, and, when his condition was at its most severe, total paralysis” (Knowlson 169). His subsequent two-year course of therapy with Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, soon to make a career for himself as a leading psychoanalyst of shell shock during World War ii, allowed Beckett to work through anxieties that sprang from his relationship with his mother, his unwillingness to pursue an academic career, and his “arrogant superiority and isolation” (Ackerley and Gontarski 467). This therapy, perhaps surprisingly, was immensely successful: it turned the “arrogant, disturbed, narcissistic young man of the early 1930s” into the man “noted later for his extraordinary ESC 40.1 (March 2014): 71–94 kindness, courtesy, concern, generosity, and almost saintly ‘good works’ ” (Knowlson 173). Conversely, from 1927 to 1930, the years preceding his therapy, Beckett Emily Murphy is a came to be known as one of the foremost translators of surrealist poetry doctoral candidate at and prose. Some of his translations included André Breton and Louis Ara- Queen’s University. gon’s celebration of hysteria as a “supreme means of expression” (quoted She studies celebrity in Albright 10) in “La Cinquantenaire de l’hystérie” (1928) and portions and mental illness of Breton and Paul Eluard’s L’Immaculée conception (1930), a text which (particularly attempts to “simulate various mental illnesses, debilities and paralyses” schizophrenia) in the (Albright 10). Beckett’s involvement with surrealism, then, is closely linked modernist period to the characteristic avant-garde and surrealist impulse to reclaim mental through traditional illness, particularly hysteria, and critique the bourgeois medical profes- and digital humanities sional project to cure the mentally ill and suppress their non-rational methodologies. In the modes of expression. summer of 2014, she These two early moments of Beckett’s career—the later treatment was a co-instructor at of his own nervous health, the earlier access to an aesthetic of critique the Digital Humanities against those very therapeutic methods—seem at odds, perhaps irrecon- Field School at the Bader cilable. But during his psychotherapy, Beckett began to compose his first International Study published full-length work, Murphy (1936), a novel that centres upon its Centre in Herstmonceux title character’s search for a “kindred” which he finds in a “hospital for Castle. the better class mentally deranged” (87), whose subject matter mirrors his direct experiences with therapeutic systems and whose criticism of those systems and its aesthetic of absurdity recall the surrealist aesthetic that Beckett encountered in Paris. This paper argues that Murphy places surrealism’s aesthetic and formal critique of the psychoanalytic project in tension with the desire in psychoanalysis to understand the structure and content of the psychopathological mind. It is a question of surrealist treatment of form and psychoanalytic interest in structure and content. Hysteria is the diagnostic category effecting this tension, Beckett’s simul- taneous appropriation of both surrealist and psychoanalytic approaches to what Freud famously entitled “the psychopathology of everyday life.” Murphy constitutes a key moment in the representation of male nervous illness in the 1930s and in the afterlife of hysteria. At this time, the legiti- macy of male nervous illness was to some extent in question: Freud had relegated hysteria to the feminine, and Bion and the Tavistock Clinic would not reach prominence in their treatment of shell shock until the war. However, the tension in Murphy between the therapeutic and the aesthetic elements of hysteria suggests a continuous discourse of hysteria in a late-modernist moment. And this late-modernist moment is one expressed through a masculine hysterical aesthetic: Beckett deliberately 72 | Murphy departs from his experience of female nervous illness (his proximity to Lucia Joyce’s breakdown) and his awareness of the feminization of hysteria in surrealist conceptions. In Murphy can be found a temporally displaced manifestation, an afterlife of hysteria whose structure, aesthetics, and content are specifically masculine. Surrealist translations and psychopathological aesthetics Beckett encountered surrealism over five years before he undertook his course of psychotherapy. His exposure to surrealism, in fact, underpinned the network of influences that he encountered in Paris from 1927 to 1930 and that framed the earliest moments of his artistic production. Thomas McGreevey, a fellow lecteur at the École normale supérieure formed a linchpin in the development of Beckett’s artistic and intellectual circle, introducing Beckett to numerous contacts within the “proliferation of private presses and little magazines” in Paris (Knowlson 107). Although MacGreevy is most famous for introducing Beckett to James Joyce, Mac- Greevy also introduced Beckett to Eugene Jolas, “friend of Joyce and edi- tor of the journal, transition, which had begun publishing Joyce’s Work in Progress and soon published some of Beckett’s early work” (91)—a contact that provided a key mode by which Beckett participated in the same circles as many surrealist artists. Between 1927 and 1937, Eugene Jolas’s magazine, transition, “would publish, thanks notably to Eluard’s support, more than sixty Surrealist pieces”1 (Hunkeler 37–38). Jolas not only offered a point of contact between Beckett and the surrealists, he also provided the platform for Beckett to undertake multiple translations of surrealist prose and poetry. Among them were Eluard’s “L’amoureuse,” “A perte de vue dans le sens de mon corps,” “A peine défigurée,” and “Second nature” as well as the surrealist favourites Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre,” and Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Zone” (Beckett, Collected Poems). Beckett’s involvement in another “little magazine” based in Paris, Edward Titus’s This Quarter, and in the translated collection of surrealist poetry Thorns of Thunder (1936) established his status as a leading translator of surrealist literature. Titus identified Beckett as a translator of superb quality: “We shall not speak of the difficulties experienced in putting the material placed at our disposal into English, but we cannot refrain from singling out Mr Samuel Beckett’s work for special acknowledgement. His rendering of the Eluard and Breton poems in particular is characterizable 1 The original text reads, “publiera notamment grâce au soutien d’Eluard, plus de soixante écrits surréalistes.” All translations are the author’s unless otherwise indicated. Beckett’s Everyday Psychopathology | 73 only in superlatives” (Titus quoted in Hunkeler 41). Breton himself pre- pared the edition and Beckett translated a large part of the surrealist works that were to appear in the publication: a dozen poems by Eluard; four texts from Breton’s Champs magnétiques, Poisson soluble, and Revolver à cheveux blancs; and an excerpt from René Crevel’s Clavecin de Diderot (Hunkeler 41). The 1932 special surrealist edition of This Quarter proved a landmark publication for surrealism in an English-language context. When Reavy wrote to Anglo-Irish poet Brian Coffey for advice on potential translators for Thorns of Thunder (1936), a compilation and translation of poems by Eluard, Coffey wrote that Reavy should “Ask Beckett whether it would not be well to make the translations into a sequence of Eluard’s work from the start [to] Facile. And to give his selection from the whole work, saying what poems he would like to translate” (Coffey quoted in Hunkeler 42). Thus, by the mid-1930s, Beckett’s reputation as a translator made him a particular favourite among the surrealists and among the English-language authors and editors who commissioned his work. Two of Beckett’s translated texts in particular—L’Immaculée conception (1930) and “La Cinquantenaire de l’hystérie” (1928)—engage directly with questions of mental illness. It is in these texts that we may look to find a surrealist aesthetic that Beckett carried over into Murphy. L’Immaculée conception, specifically the section “Les Possessions,” makes a series of “ ‘attempts’ ” (Rosemount 49) or “ ‘essays of simulation’ of the maladies virtual in each one of us” (“Introduction to the Possessions” 51); in other words, it looks to render mental illness stylistically, to show that the aesthetics of mental illness may constitute a “state of poetic tension” (50) where the “mind [may] harbour the main ideas of delirium without being permanently affected thereby or in any way jeopardized in its faculty of equilibrium” (51). Mental illness for the surrealists is thus a viable means of expression, of style.2 Beckett translated the introduction to “Les Posses- sions,” along with three of the five sections. “Simulation of Mental Debility” mimics an obsessional approach to self-aggrandizement. “Simulation of General Paralysis” portrays a devotional idealization of a beloved woman. And “Simulation of Delirium of Interpretation” represents

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