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2005 Beckett's Victors: Quests without Qualities Paul Shields
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
BECKETT’S VICTORS: QUESTS WITHOUT QUALITIES
By
PAUL SHIELDS
A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Awarded: Spring 2005
The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Paul Shields defended on January 4, 2005.
______S. E. Gontarski Professor Directing Dissertation
______Mary Karen Dahl Outside Committee Member
______Karen Laughlin Committee Member
______Fred L. Standley Committee Member
Approved:
______Bruce Boehrer, Director of Graduate Studies
The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.
ii
For my mother and father— and for my grandmother, Lucille
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Stan Gontarski for his guidance and encouragement during the development of this study and over the course of my graduate career. His insights are evident on every page. I would also like to thank the members of my committee: Karen Laughlin for her support (and for buying coffee in Sydney); Fred L. Standley for his generosity; and Mary Karen Dahl for her willingness to be a part of this project. I must also thank Yu-Mi Yang for introducing me to Deleuze’s work and Chris Ackerley for reading parts of the manuscript. I am greatly indebted to Lori and Ben York, who have always cared about my pursuits and, more importantly, my well-being. Thanks also to Steven, Alan, Karen, and Zachary for their conversation and friendship. I would like to acknowledge Michael Rodriguez for asking good, tough questions; Dustin Anderson for his company; and Curt and Judith Willits, who made sure I didn’t spend Thanksgiving alone. A special thank you to Marsha Gontarski, who provided me with confidence and sustenance. Debra Brock’s door was always open, and I thank her for her words of encouragement along the way. I also wish to thank Trish Lyons and Diane Thompson for their friendship and useful information about ginger, Linda Mashburn for caring about my project, and Olga Connolly, whose own experiences helped get me through mine. Roxane Fletcher was an endless source of amusement and information and always took an interest in my work. John Bailey was an invaluable listener in trying times, and I thank him for his story about long and short letters. Finally, I am blessed to know Geoff and Kim, good people who didn’t want me sleeping in the Banner office. I owe them my life.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT…………………….………………………………………………………..vii
PREFACE ……………………………………………………………………………….viii
INTRODUCTION: LIFE WITHOUT QUALITIES ……………………………………...1
1. PROCEEDING GINGERLY: BECKETT, MELVILLE, DELEUZE, AND THE
MAKING OF AMMMERICANS ………………………………...………...………..23
2. BECKETT’S VICTORS …..………………………………………………………….53
3. WOLFMAN ON THE LAM: DE-OEDIPALIZING BECKETT …………………….70
4. HAMM STAMMERED: BECKETT’S ATMOSPHERIC STUTTERING …………86
5. BECKETT’S EXAGGERATED OEDIPUS ………………………………………..101
CONCLUSION: BECKETT: THE INVENTION OF THE INHUMAN ………………118
NOTES ………………………………………………………………………………….121
REFERENCES …………………………………………………………………………133
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH …………………………………………………………...141
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ABSTRACT
This study explores the work of Samuel Beckett through the lens of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s materialist philosophy. More specifically, it chases after what the French theorists refer to as the “new man” or the “man without qualities”—a stuttering, staggering creature whose language, movements, gestures, and thought confuse the organizations and institutions of the “molar world.” Such a figure seeks refuge from the confines of capitalism, the oedipalized family, and other cultural systems that attempt to forge respectable citizens out of immanent bodies, molar men out of tramps. The “new man” appears in Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy, and proceeds to traverse the terrain of his plays, short prose, and late texts. Significantly, Beckett often situates his stuttering figures in equally stuttering environments, revealing his ability to “carve a foreign language out of language” (as Deleuze and Guattari, following Proust, are fond of saying) and cause entire texts to shake the foundations of molarity. Like Kafka, Beckett thus demonstrates his capacity as a “minor” writer—that is, one who subjects not only his characters but his entire oeuvre to a “minor” treatment to oppose the onslaught of majoritarian ideals.
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PREFACE
This project grew out of an essay I wrote several years ago (and delivered at the 2004 Twentieth Century Literature Conference in Louisville, Kentucky) that reads Samuel Beckett’s Endgame in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze’s theories of atmospheric stuttering in his essay “He Stuttered.” As I proceeded with my research, I encountered a number of critics and scholars whose work proved enlightening, influential, and inspirational. I am indebted to the helpful analyses of various Deleuze scholars, including, among others, Claire Colebrook, Philip Goodchild, Brian Massumi, Mark Seem, and Daniel W. Smith, who was kind enough to meet with me and offer words of encouragement during the early phases. I am also indebted to the work of countless Beckett scholars, particularly those who have preceded me in the investigation of Beckett and Deleuze: Kateryna Arthur, Ronald Bogue, Mary Bryden, Thomas Cousineau, Garin Dowd, Jennifer Jeffers, Timothy S. Murphy, and Anthony Uhlmann, whose Beckett and Poststructuralism offers fascinating insights into Beckett’s texts. H. Porter Abbott’s Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in The Autograph became an increasingly valuable resource, especially in my studies of filiation in Eleuthéria and Company. All of these critics have played a significant role in the (in)formation of this study. P.S.
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INTRODUCTION
LIFE WITHOUT QUALITIES
It would seem, then, that during the dreaming process he identified with his castrated mother and is now struggling to resist this outcome. —Sigmund Freud, “History of an Infantile Neurosis [‘The Wolfman’]”
Psychoanalysis contains but a single error: it reduces all the adventures of psychosis to a single refrain, the eternal daddy-mommy. . . —Gilles Deleuze, “Louis Wolfson; or, the Procedure”
Do you see me, in my dreams. . . —Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier
In The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Harold Bloom unmasks Freud as an imposter, a quack doctor who is finally his own patient. In the chapter entitled “Freud: A Shakespearean Reading,” Bloom maintains that Freudian psychoanalysis develops out of a poetic anxiety, an agon with Shakespeare’s great plays: I don’t think it is accurate to say that Freud loved Shakespeare as he loved Goethe and Milton. Whether he could even be called ambivalent about Shakespeare seems to me doubtful. Freud did not love the Bible or show any ambivalence toward it, and Shakespeare, much more than the Bible, became Freud’s hidden authority, the father he would not acknowledge. (345-46) For Bloom, Shakespeare understands Freud as Freud never could, and Freud’s writings are merely a dark shadow of the psychoanalysis—the true psychoanalysis, as Bloom argues—that runs through the major plays, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello. A pseudo-diagnostician, Freud suffers from an illness, an anxiety that causes him to misread
1 and revise Shakespeare’s sublime art: “Hamlet did not have an Oedipus complex, but Freud certainly had a Hamlet complex, and perhaps psychoanalysis is a Shakespeare complex!” (350). Bloom thus takes all authority away from Freud in building his literary canon, sending the Austrian doctor—along with his book of imitations—to the margins as a belated poet. Shakespeare remains the original psychoanalyst, a writer who understands the western psyche because, as Bloom argues unabashedly in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he invented it: “He extensively informs the language we speak, his principal characters have become our mythology, and he, rather than his involuntary follower Freud, is our psychologist” (17). In developing their own literary canon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari form a momentary alliance with Bloom in their suspicion of Freud—momentary because their philosophies otherwise have little in common.1 Bloom is elitist, staunchly hierarchical, and obsessed with centers; Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, are pluralist, anti- hierarchical, obsessed with rhizomes and multiplicities. Bloom identifies points of origin; Deleuze and Guattari sense intensities, follow lines of flight. Without hesitation, Bloom would enroll Deleuze and Guattari and their wholly political views of literature in the “School of Resentment,” an institution of feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, and semioticians whose sole practice is, according to Bloom, the destruction of all earnest literary study. Bloom, in fact, has a particular distaste for Parisian thinkers, and French theory in general.2 Still, their contempt for Freud affords the theorists a common enemy. Like Bloom, Deleuze and Guattari see Freud as a hack psychologist who pretends to possess an understanding of the human psyche but under whose control the “unconscious ceases to be what it is—a factory, a workshop—to become a theater, a scene and its staging” (Anti-Oedipus 55). Yet Deleuze and Guattari do not dismiss Freudian theory as a misreading of Shakespearean psychoanalysis. In their estimation, Freud is not, as Bloom understands him, merely a writer whose texts evidence a secret wish to dethrone Shakespeare and dominate the center of the western canon. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari’s view of literature is as clinical as it is critical, and they set out to find a cure for the cultural disease of Freudianism, a quiet but certain killer: “Psychoanalysis is like the Russian Revolution, we don’t know when it started going bad” (Anti-Oedipus 55).
2 In quest of an antidote, Deleuze and Guattari turn to great poets, authors whose keen understanding of the human mind and body far exceeds Freudian theory. Unlike Bloom, the French theorists rarely exalt Shakespeare and instead focus their attention on artists who, to echo Salman Rushdie, write back to the center, send missives from the islands of exile—Melville, Jarry, Artaud, and Kafka, among others. While Deleuze and Guattari, contra Bloom, would disavow any attempt to locate a central figure in their canon of great authors, Samuel Beckett would be a strong candidate. For the French theorists, Beckett represents a sublime frustration of Freudian thought and is, as Daniel W. Smith3 explains, the better “symptomatologist.” Like all great writers, Beckett “can go further in symptomatology than doctors and clinicians” (Smith xvii). To adapt Bloom’s comments about Shakespeare, Beckett, rather than Freud, is our psychologist. His novels, plays, works for television, and cinematic achievement (Deleuze calls Film the “greatest Irish film”4) upset Freud’s vision of humanity and culture, debunking “underlying truths” and oedipal psychodramas: “[N]o great novelist contemporaneous with psychoanalysis has taken much interest in it” (Deleuze “Bartleby” 81). As the Deleuzo-Guattarian project demonstrates time and again, Beckett defies psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic interpretation. Life-affirming, Beckett’s work is a prophecy, a schizophrenic vision of a late evening in the future, in the den of our universe. No Man is an I-land: How Freud Misses What Any Child Would Notice5 An understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s specific complaints against Freud illuminates why they esteem writers such as Beckett. As numerous critics discuss, Deleuze and Guattari see Freud as a thinker who perpetuates the notion of a suffering subject, an individual who ails from a psychological disease and who may undergo treatment from one greater man and find a cure for his affliction. The affliction stems specifically from familial relations and involves the child’s oedipal yearning for his mother and fear of his father. Deleuze and Guattari refer to Freud’s family romance as the mommy-daddy-me triangle, a structure they see as not only contrived but oppressive. Throughout both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the theorists expose the lies of Freudianism, arguing for a vision of humanity and nature that has nothing to do with genealogies and filiation. As Smith asserts, Anti-Oedipus “offers a now-famous critique
3 of psychoanalysis that is primarily symptomatological: psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari contend, fundamentally misunderstands signs and symptoms” (xx). From the opening pages of the book, which Michel Foucault believes “can best be read as an ‘art’” (xii), the French theorists seek to discount Freud’s preoccupation with interiors and disturbed psyches for breeding guilt and shame—in short, for defining healthy and sick ways of being. One of Freud’s great sins involves his reduction of the unconscious—indeed the human condition—to Sophoclean myth. Deleuze and Guattari explain: “The neurotic is trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society, and reduces all of them (les rabat toutes) to Oedipus as the ultimate territoriality—as reconstructed in the analyst’s office and projected upon the full body of the psychoanalyst (yes, my boss is my father, and so is the Chief of State, and so are you, Doctor)” (35). But “Why return to myth?” ask Deleuze and Guattari, “Why take it as the model?” (57). The mind is far too elaborate to fit in the amphitheater: “We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing of castration or Oedipus, just as it knows nothing of parents, gods, the law, lack” (61). As Claire Colebrook observes, the problem with Freud’s oedipalization of the individual is that it takes too much for granted: [T]he drama [Oedipus] has so much power, according to Freud, because it represents a universal human desire. […] But Oedipus is not a drama about ‘the’ human family; it is about a specific king and political power. […] Before there is a personal and private image of ‘man’ or the ‘father’, social machines (through events such as Greek tragedy) invest in images of the king, the despot, the banker, the cop or the fascist. ‘Man’ is produced from social roles. (144-45) Thus, Mark Seem eloquently explains, “[I]t is into these back rooms, behind the closed doors of the analyst’s office, in the wings of the Oedipal theater, that Deleuze and Guattari weave their way, exclaiming as does Nietzsche that it smells bad there” (xvii). “Schizoanalysis,” which Seem describes as a “healing process” whose “major task is to destroy the oedipalized, neuroticized individual dependencies through the forging of a collective subjectivity, a non-fascist subject” (xxiii), serves as Deleuze and Guattari’s alternative approach to thinking about the unconscious, the human, and culture at large:
4 [S]chizoanalysis must devote itself with all its strength to the necessary destructions. Destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes. And when engaged in this task no activity will be too malevolent. Causing Oedipus and castration to explode, brutally intervening each time the subject strikes up the song of myth or intones tragic lines, carrying him back to the factory. (Anti-Oedipus 314) Reincarnated Futurists, Deleuze and Guattari cause more explosions, indeed wage a shock-and-awe campaign on Freud’s Oedipus in A Thousand Plateaus, the second, more extensive indictment of “General Freud.” In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari waste no time in dismissing the primacy of the cogito, turning themselves into two, three: “To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I” (3). For Deleuze and Guattari, no man is an I-land, everyone and everything is always-already part of the ma(ch)in(e). They soon return their attention to Freud and the havoc he wreaks in the lives of his “patients.” Psychoanalysis, they reiterate, is never a cure for “mental illness.” Rather, it is the infection: Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child psychoanalysis at its purist: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and guilt in him, PHOBIA (they barred him from the rhizome of the building, then from the rhizome of the street, they rooted him in his parents’ bed, they radicled him to his own body, they fixated him on Professor Freud). (14) Professor Freud is thus a stumbling block to the health of humanity, a philosopher Deleuze and Guattari identify negatively as “arborescent”—another branch on the tree of “State philosophy.” As Brian Massumi explains, arborescent thinkers are “employees of the State” who help instill the notion of “truth” and justice” in culture and, in turn, every citizen (xii). “The end product,” Massumi continues, “would be ‘a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society’—each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State” (xii). As a State employee, Freud builds
5 “tree-like” hierarchies and instills notions of transcendence into philosophy, and Deleuze and Guattari would have done with such a vision: “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. […] Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not rooted or ramified matter. […] Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree” (15). One of the most scathing attacks on Freud occurs in the second chapter of A Thousand Plateaus entitled “1914: One or Several Wolves?” The chapter is a re- examination and re-diagnosis of Freud’s infamous Wolf-Man case and reads like a nursery rhyme: “That day, the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by, then filling the void with associations” (26). But this is no children’s tale. And the real wolf of the story turns out to be smoking the cigars of an Austrian doctor—the better to treat us with, cheat us with. Deleuze and Guattari rush in to rip the mask from his face, revealing his true nature, his desire to plant trees in the place of grass. Indeed, “No sooner does Freud discover the greatest art of the unconscious, this art of molecular multiplicities, than we find him tirelessly at work bringing back molar unities. […] On the verge of discovering a rhizome, Freud always returns us to mere roots” (27). Deleuze and Guattari venture to undo the damage done to the Wolf-Man, pointing out how the doctor misses what any child would notice—that wolves travel in packs not only in the content of dreams but by nature (28; my italics). Yet Freud’s desire to oedipalize the world, turn the molecularity of culture into Greek drama, leads him to make false assertions about “patients” like the Wolf-Man: “[I]t was already decided from the beginning that animals could serve only to represent coitus between parents” (28). Deleuze and Guattari would have Freud relive his own childhood, learn things about wolves he should have picked up in his developmental years, for as a psychoanalyst he “sees nothing and understands nothing” (27). Like Belshazzar falling, Freud is again found wanting, only a shell, a husk of meaning. In his Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze (sans Guattari) further explores the dangers and shortcomings of Freud’s tree of thought and, significantly, champions an anti-Freudian literary criticism that nowhere examines great authors or their characters as patients in need of the talking cure. The inaugural essay, “Literature and Life,” expresses
6 Deleuze’s belief that great poets, not psychoanalysts, understand the plagues and oppression of the human condition. Such authors have no interest in traumatic events from their personal childhoods: “To write is not to recount one’s memories and travels, one’s loves and griefs, one’s dreams and one’s fantasies. […] We do not write with our neuroses. Neuroses or psychoses are not passages of life, but states into which we fall when the process is interrupted, blocked, or plugged up” (2-3). Psychoanalysis, therefore, is of little help in understanding the schizophrenic imagination of great poets. According to Deleuze, Freudian theory simply fails to make sense of the “delirium” of great literature, for it has nothing to do with “a father-mother affair” (4). As Smith explains in his introduction to Deleuze’s essays, This point of view is very different from many psychoanalytic interpretations of writers and artists, which tend to see authors, through their work, as possible or real patients, even if they are accorded the benefit of “sublimation.” Artists are treated as clinical cases, as if they were ill, however sublimely, and the critic seeks a sign of neurosis like a secret in their work, its hidden code. (xvii-iii) Throughout his essays, Deleuze lauds characters who fight back against the systems and hierarchies of molar culture, who challenge parental, pseudo-parental, and societal authorities that would contain and tame subjects. In his essay “Louis Wolfson; or, The Procedure,” for example, Deleuze argues that Wolfson sees through the symbols of the mother and father and detects oppressive powers in their language and behaviors: “Wolfson seems to follow in the footsteps of Artaud, who had gone beyond the question of father-mother, and then that of the bomb and the tumor, and wanted to have done with the universe of ‘judgment,’ to discover a new continent” (19). Of all the authors Deleuze (with and without Guattari) discusses, Beckett emerges as one of the most important to his philosophical vision: “More than an art,” Deleuze writes of Beckett’s work, “this is a science that demands long study” (“The Exhausted” 155). Beckett’s Mole-cular Quest In their efforts to escape the pitfalls of psychoanalytic interpretation, Deleuze and Guattari play Vladimir to Freud’s Estragon: ESTRAGON: I had a dream.
7 VLADIMIR: Don’t tell me! ESTRAGON: I dreamt that— VLADIMIR: DON’T TELL ME! (11) Following Spinoza, the French theorists are interested as much in the bodies as in the minds of Beckett’s characters, understanding them as part of the “rhizomatic” or “machinic” interaction of all things on a “plane of immanence.” Deleuze and Guattari open Anti-Oedipus with a series of images from Beckett’s Three Novels, describing characters not as subjects but machines that plug into other machines. More important than Molloy’s oedipal relationship to his mother, for example, is his relationship with his bicycle or his set of six stones (Anti-Oedipus 2-3). In Malone Dies, the theorists focus on the machinic compilation of human beings, as “Lady Pedal takes the schizophrenics out for a ride in a van and a rowboat, and on a picnic in the midst of nature: an infernal machine is being assembled” (3). The Unnamable, moreover, dismisses the idea of the subject in favor of the machine: “The subject is not at the center, which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered, defined by the states through which it passes” (20). For Deleuze and Guattari, then, Beckett’s world illuminates their philosophical vision of how “the self and non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever” (2). His oeuvre is replete with characters who swear off the self and “live as a flow, a set of flows in relation with other flows, outside of oneself and within oneself” (Deleuze “Nietzsche and Saint Paul” 51). What Bloom says of Freudian readings of Shakespeare is, therefore, also true of Freudian readings of Beckett, at least for Deleuze and Guattari: “[Y]ou will not interpret Shakespeare any more usefully by applying Freud’s map of the mind or his analytical system” (Western Canon 345). In its entirety, Beckett’s work is an exercise in what Deleuze and Guattari frequently refer to as “deterritorialization.” It constantly flees from the organized territories of the molar world and into the blind tunnels of the plane of immanence. Like the stubborn moles that ravage his garden in Ussy, Beckett goes underground and uproots the arborescent thought of western civilization, digging, shoveling, burrowing (all vintage Deleuzo-Guattarian tropes) his way deep beneath the gardens of Freud and flouting the psychoanalyst’s noxious cylinders of molebane (“Keg arrived at Le Havre. The moles
8 have decided to flout it.”6). As H. Porter Abbott reveals, Beckett himself sees writing as a mole-like excursion: Beckett (the puckish ephebe?) describes his own textual being as a kind of vermin. He is a “skymole” tunneling in “its firmament in genesis”; he is an “insistent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral coherence of the art surface.” The metaphor was to stay with him. In the late sixties, he told Alec Reid, “It would be impossible for me to talk about my writing because I am constantly working in the dark, . . . it would be like an insect leaving his cocoon.” At the same time, he told Charles Juliet that as an author he was like “a mole in a molehill.” The composite figure is powerfully suggestive. A small, burrowing creature, Beckett within his work is at once elusive, busy, threatening, purposive, blind, trapped, buried alive. (xi) Beckett’s is a mole-cular quest for a land of deforestation, a desert, a “Third World zone” where art verges on starvation—and, for Deleuze and Guattari, desirably so. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, the theorists maintain that Kafka’s genius rests in his formidable ability to “find points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones” (27).7 From such zones, Kafka resists Oedipus and drains Freud of his authority (12-13). The Czech author “becomes-animal”—one of Deleuze and Guattari’s key philosophical ideas—and “find[s] a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs” (13). In turn, “There is no longer anything but movements, vibrations, thresholds in a deserted matter: animals, mice, dogs, apes, cockroaches are distinguished only by this or that threshold, this or that vibration, by the particular underground tunnel in the rhizome or the burrow” (13). Beckett finds similar realms of nonculture, rendering an art of “underdevelopment” in which inhuman inhabitants dream uninterpretable dreams. The idea of the “inhuman” is central to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical enterprise. As Seem explains, The [Deleuzo-Guattarian] experience […] is no longer that of man, but of what is nonhuman in man, his desires, and his forces: a politics of desire
9 directed against all that is egoic—and heroic—in man. […] They urge mankind to strip itself of all anthropomorphic and anthropological armoring, all myth and tragedy, and all existentialism, in order to perceive what is nonhuman in man, his will and his forces, his transformations and mutations. (xix-xx) By “inhuman,” then, Deleuze and Guattari mean anti-subject, anti-man, anti-state, anti- western myth. For the French theorists, all great writers depict characters in states of becoming-inhuman, becoming-other. One of their most famous examples is Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, a young man who “becomes-insect” and thus something other than the image of western man. The figure who manages to “become-animal” or “become-insect” is, as Colebrook explains, in pursuit of anti-subjectivity: “We do not begin as subjects who then have to know a world; there is experience and from this experience we form an image of ourselves as distinct subjects. Before ‘the’ subject of the mind, then, there are what Deleuze refers to as ‘larval subjects’: a multiplicity of perceptions and contemplations not yet organized into a self” (74). The man without an organized self is what Deleuze interchangeably terms a “new man,” an “original man,” a “man without particularities,” a “man without qualities,” a creature who lacks the traits that qualify human beings to participate in molar culture as respectable, oedipalized citizens.8 New man, original man, larval man wanders without papers, without identification, without a family history, without memories, without roots in the soil. He leads an existence that interrupts the organizations and institutions of capitalism. He understands his body in non-molar ways, experiencing, to adapt Philip Goodchild’s commentary, the “disorganization of the human body as a ‘socially liberative practice’” (156). The new man is the creator of a new language that the molar world fails to translate. Doctors, policemen, and businessmen alike fail to show him his place in a family and society at large. He lives not by the logic of Freud but by the lyrics of Frank Loesser: “Never never will I marry, / Never never will I wed. / Born to wander solitary, / Wide my world, narrow my bed / Never never will I marry / Born to wander till I’m dead. / No burdens to bear / No conscience nor care, / No memories to mourn.” Bartleby stands, according to Deleuze, as a quintessential man without qualities. He materializes out of nothingness, reveals no secrets as to his past, and sends the
10 capitalist attorney spiraling into madness. He appears to bear no burdens, no conscience, no memories. He sleeps in a narrow bed without wife or lover, abstaining from procreation. Bartleby’s life is a foreign language for which Wall Street lacks an interpreter. Similarly, many of Beckett’s characters speak in the cryptic tongue of the new man, uttering a foreign language that has no translation (Deleuze and Guattari are fond of echoing Proust’s dictum that “masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language”9) and sleeping in narrow beds. They possess an inhuman, mole-like energy to claw into a subterranean world of vagrants whose failing eyesight, stuttering tongues, crippled limbs, and frozen and distorted visages indicate their shuffling off the western coil (Anthony Uhlmann’s reading of Molloy cited below is exemplary). Beckett’s hollow men and women are, to invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s phraseology at the outset of Anti-Oedipus, “out for a walk” and a “breath of fresh air” (2) and nowhere repressing oedipal desires, wishes, or fears, nowhere, to contradict John Robert Keller’s thesis in his recent psychoanalytic study of Beckett, involved in the “search for a primary maternal home” (18), which is why the French theorists never seek to analyze words or gestures as symbols, never aim to interpret dreams. As they emphasize (hyperbolically) in their study of Kafka’s art, “[W]e aren’t looking for any so-called free associations. […] We aren’t even trying to interpret, to say that this means that. And we are looking least of all for a structure with formal oppositions and a fully constructed Signifier” (7). What they are looking for is an art form that offers refuge to those who suffer at the hands of fascist regimes. Beckett’s work as a whole constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari term a “minor” literature, a “minor” stuttering art form that collides with and frustrates the myths of colonizing majorities—Freud or otherwise (Smith xli-li).10 Significantly, at least one critic, Timothy S. Murphy, explores the idea of “minor” literature in relation to Beckett, commenting in his study of Nohow On that “Beckett [unlike Joyce] foregoes linguistic lushness with its attendant dangers to embrace a style of ‘willed poverty’, what Deleuze later calls ‘exhaustion’” (233).11 Deleuze and Guattari stress that Beckett’s “minor” language has nothing to do with writing in French as an Irish native, but with writing in a stuttered form of whatever major language he chooses: “That is the strength of authors
11 termed ‘minor,’ who are in fact the greatest, the only greats: having to conquer one’s own language” (Thousand 105). As the theorists make clear, Beckett conquers language by causing entire works of art to stutter: characters, milieus, images, gestures, dialogue: “It’s easy to stammer, but making language itself stammer is a different affair; it involves placing all linguistic, and even non-linguistic, elements in variation, both variables of expression and variables of content” (Thousand 98). Like a “boum” emanating from the Marabar Caves, Beckett’s work communicates by way of vibrations that reveal the fragility of major discourses, the transmutability of the name of majorities into an uninterpretable chant: “Esmiss Esmoor, Esmiss Esmoor.” Beckett is thus the diagnostician of cultural imperialism and founder of a way out. Unlike Freud and State philosophy at large, Beckett travels through fields of immanence looking for “a maximum number of connections” (Deleuze “Nietzsche and Saint Paul” 52). His is an art, a voice, a language that proceeds claw-like (“Two claws?”) into the groundwork of western thought, revealing Freud and Co. not as the interpreters of dreams, but the real nightmare. The Critical Response The critical response to Deleuze and Guattari’s admiration of Beckett is now a world-wide phenomenon, as scholars in the United States, Europe, Australia, and other countries carry on where the French theorists leave off. Critics devote numerous books, journal articles, and conference lectures to experimenting with Deleuzo-Guattarian theory as it coincides with Beckett’s work. The most notable study thus far is Anthony Uhlmann’s Beckett and Poststructuralism, in which the Australian scholar and translator moves through the here-flat, there-dense territory (or, rather, “deterritory”) of Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Uhlmann’s book examines the intersecting philosophies of Beckett and Deleuze and Guattari, among other French intellectuals. In his introduction, Uhlmann emphasizes that his discussion is not necessarily the “right” way to interpret the Beckett canon and readily admits the validity of other Becketts. Yet he preoccupies himself specifically with “that Beckett who is loosely described as a ‘philosophical’ writer” (3). Uhlmann suggests that Beckett, like all other poststructuralists, is an anti-platonic thinker whose art reflects a denial of
12 essentialism. Indeed, Beckett rejects fundamentally the binary opposition of appearance and Reality, shadows and Forms. Uhlmann writes, In overturning Plato’s opposition between essence and appearance, or the ideal and the real (as Beckett puts it), Beckett develops an essence of the impure. We find, especially in later plays, such as Play and What Where, for example, impotence and torture in essence; elsewhere there are so many sad passions in essence; failure and ignorance in essence; the essence, if you like, of the dirt under the fingernails; corruption and decay in pure form. (19) Uhlmann proceeds to discuss Beckett’s anti-platonism as it relates to Deleuze and Guattari, arguing that many of Beckett’s works correspond to their materialist philosophies. Uhlmann’s overall agenda concerns how Beckett, like Deleuze and Guattari, chooses to avoid running from the cave and towards a transcendent truth. He opts, rather, to “think differently” about the problems of existence, judgment, and justice, which, according to Uhlmann, “remain key problems for us all everywhere here and now” (39). Uhlmann devotes a large part of his study to Deleuzo-Guattarian analyses of Beckett’s Molloy and Malone Dies. In chapter two, “Perception and Apprehension: Bergson, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and Beckett,” the Australian scholar argues that the first of the Three Novels exemplifies the agon between the plane of organization (the systematized, structured world) and the plane of consistency or immanence (the chaotic, univocal world of becoming). Molloy, Uhlmann posits, inhabits the latter plane, while Moran dwells, at least initially, in the world of organization, the molar world. Uhlmann believes that the novel hinges on Moran’s movement away from structured living: “In Molloy, the molecular assault on the disciplined molar individual Moran is of central concern” (67). Significantly, Uhlmann contends that Moran’s shift corresponds to his “corporeal degeneration,” the breakdown of his body and its organization (an issue I take up in later chapters) (68). By the end of the novel, Uhlmann argues, Moran’s mind and body finally merge, corroding and transmogrifying into molecular chaos. Moran eventually gives up trying to live the life of a detective who searches for facts and clues in order to solve mysteries, come to conclusions. He now permits himself to leave the
13 world of habit, of “perception,” and enter the world of apprehension, which is vital in moving from the molar to the molecular plane. Finally, “Moran stops perceiving and begins to apprehend” (83). One might say he no longer writes a report but has the world write or inscribe itself on him. Uhlmann reads Malone Dies in a similar philosophical context, though he argues that the second of the Three Novels concerns the distinctions between morality and ethics. He prefaces his analysis with Deleuze’s (a la Spinoza’s) revisionist interpretation of the Garden of Eden scene in which God forbids Adam from eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. According to Deleuze, Adam mistakenly thinks that God’s command implements a moral code: that eating from the Tree of Knowledge is categorically Evil. Yet, as Deleuze goes on to point out, God tells Adam to avoid the fruit not because it is Evil but because it will be bad for his nature, a bad composition (108). Uhlmann proceeds to examine Malone Dies with the Garden of Eden scene in mind, arguing that the novel “poses problems for the notion of judgement, and in formulating those problems indicates elements of an alternative response which strike a chord with the work of Deleuze and Guattari” (109). That alternative response, as Uhlmann’s reading illustrates, involves a Moran-like exodus from molar institutions and a discovery of the plane of immanence. Salvation for Malone rests in the form of a materialist understanding of the self, a materialist refusal of any universal system of judgment that ultimately fails to “encompass or even shed light on the nature” (113) of his life. Indeed, Malone is an anti-platonic figure who rejects any notion of the “immortal soul” and, therefore, immortal judgment: “In Malone Dies, the characters of Malone, Sapo and Macmann have finished with judgement in part because they have no faith in the order of time, the order of progress through accumulation. Opposed to the fixed self with its immortal soul, these characters appear as haecceities” (125). Like Moran, then, Malone leaves the world of perception and moral judgment (the plane of organization) and begins to apprehend his surroundings on the plane of immanence. His punishment will end at the level of the body—the level of good and bad compositions— and not carry into infinity (115). Partial evidence for Malone’s transformation rests perhaps in his failure “to understand or hear the angry words shouted at him by the stranger who infiltrates his room and strikes him towards the end of his narrative” (133).
14 Notably, Uhlmann’s reading of Malone Dies and Molloy exemplifies his attempt to reveal possible ways in which Beckett’s work is not merely about what Spinoza calls the “sad passions.” Instead, it portrays characters who—decaying, corroding, going deaf— experience a life of pure immanence, life beyond habit, life in all of its molecular intensity. Like Uhlmann, Garin Dowd finds that Beckett’s fiction has much in common with Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy. His essay “Mud as Plane of Immanence in How It Is” reveals how the mud in Beckett’s 1964 novel is a rhizomatic space of multiplicities that resists the alluring call of transcendental Tribunes of Reason. Dowd begins by contrasting How It Is with Krapp’s Last Tape, arguing that the main character in the latter work “can be seen as a version of Leibniz’s binary God, programming and surveilling a past and present to which he appears to have immediate access” (2). Conversely, “How It Is yields a version of the anti-, or at least post-archival ‘subject’ whose thoughts and practice are of a decidedly more rhizomatic disposition” (2). A la Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari, Dowd reads the novel as a portrayal of two colliding planes—organization and immanence: “Life in the mud therefore is that of the stupor of monads nues, the life of shocks, beatings and vibrations. Life above, in the light, is that of synthesis and apperception” (4). Dowd proceeds to discuss the history of the two planes in western philosophy, locating the source of transcendence, as Deleuze does in his essay “Plato, the Greeks,” in the poisonous dialogues of Plato. The Greeks, Dowd explains, contaminate the plane of immanence with their invocation of immortal Forms, immortal justice, immortal judgment. Plato et al. impose their notions of transcendence on the original plane of immanence, which philosophers such as Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and Beckett aim to re-discover: The plane of immanence is the ground of philosophy, and yet it does not consist of a “programme, design, goal or means.” It is the abstract plane where philosophy “happens,” and in this sense it is “pre-philosophical.” […] The “enemy” of the correct use of the plane of immanence is, for Deleuze and Guattari, transcendence. And it is precisely the innumerable attempts to salvage the latter that have dogged philosophy ever since the
15 Greeks, and which, as it transpires, have left it incapable of assimilating Deleuze and Guattari’s book. (10) How It Is, for Dowd, represents Beckett’s efforts to find and “restore” the pre-Greek, pre- transcendent, “pre-philosophical” terrain of immanence. Ultimately, Dowd asserts, the muddy plane of immanence resists, subsumes, and consumes the plane of organization, or what Deleuze and Guattari would call the molar world of systems, judgment, and transcendence. While the lure of the molar world is strong, it nevertheless “dwindles as the novel proceeds” (18). By the end of the narrative, the Tribune of Reason gives way: “Thus the plane of immanence is restored, and the mud is nothing other than the abstract plane where pre-individual singularities emerge, where points of intensity can be discerned, where incompossible times and places enter into dissonant arrangements, in a ‘procession without head or tail’” (Dowd 22). For Dowd, then, Beckett’s novel stands as the author’s repudiation of a philosophy—indeed a literature—of transcendence, and “in place of the tribunal […] there is nothing but a threshold vigilance” (23). Dowd’s essay “The Abstract Literary Machine: Guattari, Deleuze and Beckett’s The Lost Ones” also reveals a correspondence between Beckett’s fiction and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, specifically their ideas concerning “abstract machines.” As Dowd explains, in an “abstract literary machine” all elements flow endlessly in and out of one another. Like the plane of immanence, it is a schizophrenic world of multiplicities rather than subjects, a world full of intensities which “entails an opening to molecularity” (209). Dowd asserts (a la Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves) that seemingly distinct literary characters are finally absent in an amorphous “phylum”— i. e. “a larval, fluid and machinic matter” (209)—of the abstract machine: “They [characters] are at once, Deleuze and Guattari explain, this multiplicity and its edge, that is the edge which marks the tipping over of one into the other, the point of crossing or of passage into other multiplicities” (209). Significantly, Dowd argues that “in the work of Beckett one finds more than a merely convenient literary space in which to explore a contiguity between Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the machinic phylum or the abstract machine and an accommodating literature” (205). For Dowd, Beckett’s work is not, as he will go on to demonstrate, a representation or allegorical exposé of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy; rather, it is the concept, is the abstract machine (210).
16 Dowd argues that Beckett’s oeuvre (especially the later works) is full of such machines: “The late work of Beckett entails a progressive, but by no means teleological, inscription of the machinic. It is always there as a concern in his work, for what, after all, are the combinatories of Murphy’s biscuits or the Knott household in Watt but proto- machines (that is, they comprise a system of interfaces)?” (210). For Dowd, The Lost Ones is the most “systematic” and “machinic” of Beckett’s works, a novel in which “we encounter an entirely machined world” (210). Within the cylinder is an inhuman “arrangement of beings, lights and temperatures”—all of which perform machinically (211). And all intimations of possible stoppage are, Dowd believes, illusory, as the novel repeatedly and ultimately re-intensifies itself: “[E]schatology and entropy are merely present as an illusion in Beckett’s text. […] Such freeze-framings are halts and cuts within the larger machinic phylum” (212). Dowd thus describes the novel as a “many- demoned space—a ‘pandemonium’” that “keeps the abstract machine at work, destabilising the reifying assemblage of narrating consciousness and critical exegesis” (214). Dowd concludes his reading of the book by recapitulating his earlier comment that Beckett’s works are literal rather than allegorical expressions of the abstract machine, arguing that in The Lost Ones the “abstract literary machine is rendered actual, on the plane of literary composition itself” (214). Notably, Dowd’s reading of the mud in How It Is is similar to his reading of the “phylum” in The Lost Ones, for in both worlds transcendent systems of judgment and reason give way to amorphous “zones” and “thresholds” in which, to adapt Dowd’s comment about life in the cylinder, “[a]ll categories are provisional, transitory” (211). Jennifer M. Jeffers traverses similar territory in her work on Beckett and Deleuze and Guattari, though she moves the discussion into the context of Beckett’s drama. Her essay on Krapp’s Last Tape reveals how the stage serves as a theatrical plane of immanence. Intriguingly, as opposed to Dowd’s assertion in his essay on How It Is, Jeffers interprets Krapp not as a “version of Leibniz’s binary God” but, on the contrary, a rhizome: “Aligning the rhizome with Krapp’s Last Tape helps us to open up the multiple and complex ways in which the play through the central character moves, functions and performs” (63). Like Uhlmann and Dowd, Jeffers contextualizes her discussion of the play in Deleuzo-Guattarian thought and terminology, arguing that Krapp’s Last Tape is a
17 literary manifestation of the plane of immanence on which all elements—language and objects—converge in a univocal becoming (64-65). Significantly, Jeffers’s reading exemplifies further Beckett’s anti-platonic philosophy: “Krapp’s taping is a postmodern parody of the philosophical life. This challenge to the Platonic order is one that cuts deeply into the heart of the philosopher; for Krapp’s [Last Tape] confronts and deconstructs the cherished Socratic maxim from the Oracle at Delphi: ‘Know thyself’” (66). Jeffers’s theory corresponds to Uhlmann’s and Dowd’s claims that Beckett’s work frustrates Greek thought and seeks to reverse the implementation of transcendence into philosophy. Jeffers ultimately views Krapp’s Last Tape as a gargantuan machine and exposes the play as “a Postmodern heterogeneous, disfunctionally [sic] schizophrenic world of the Krapp-machine, with the mouth-machine that eats the banana-machine, the same mouth- machine drinks the liquor-machine and records into the recorder-machine which then produces sounds which lie on the surface of meaning” (71). According to Jeffers’s reading, Krapp, like those in the mud in How It Is or the cylinder of The Lost Ones, lives in the threshold of existence where no autonomous subject can survive, where the “univocity of Being”—to use Spinoza’s terminology—fuses man with nature, nature with man, machine with machine. Notably, Jeffers herself admits that her reading of the play is less than original, remarking in her introduction to the casebook in which her essay appears that “the basic idea of the reading is an old and familiar one—one voiced by Beckett in Proust” (8). Jeffers’s recent book on Beckett and Georgia O’Keefe, Uncharted Space: The End of Narrative, also deals extensively with Deleuze and Guattari. While much of her discussion concerns the absence of color or “achromaticism” in the writings and paintings of the two artists, Jeffers uses Deleuze as a frequent point of reference. In her introduction, for example, she discusses Deleuze’s essay “The Exhausted” to explore the notion of artistic exhaustion. She surveys the three kinds of language (I, II, and III) Deleuze describes in his essay—the last of which is most exhaustive—and asserts that both Beckett and O’Keefe seek to reach an end, a finishing point in their art. Jeffers’s final chapter concentrates solely on Beckett’s theater and his attempt to create “an unsullied image” that foregoes representation: “With Beckett’s late drama almost all that
18 we have is the visual; words are sparse or non-existent because Beckett closes down the last available links to narrative” (181). Jeffers subsequently turns her attention to three plays in particular, Rockaby, Quad II, and Catastrophe, arguing that “Beckett challenges our very ability to make sense of his plays and productions, and, in this way, he opens up an uncharted theatrical space” (188). Quad II, according to Jeffers, is indicative of Deleuze’s influence on Beckett. Jeffers claims that the play is overwhelming because it is [sic] gives us so little. We cannot even be sure that the slow moving white robed figures are indeed human. Beckett has taken Deleuze’s advice to ‘eliminate everything that exceeds the moment, but put in everything that it includes—and the moment is not the instantaneous, it is the haecceity into which one slips and that slips into other haecceities by transparency’ (Thousand 280). (193) Whether one agrees with Jeffers’s questionable assertion that Beckett takes advice from Deleuze in forging his late theatrical works, her reading nevertheless stands as another example of how critics use Deleuze to analyze and re-analyze Beckett’s art. Jeffers, Dowd, Uhlmann, and others12 represent divers attempts to extend the Beckett-Deleuze project into the twenty-first century, yet, following Deleuze and Guattari’s example at the outset of their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, readers of Beckett—like rats, like Ussy moles—must continue to look for new openings through which to enter and experiment (3). The following study proposes to pick up where other critics leave off, to pursue insane asylums, vacuous apartments, country roads, covered bins, and dark closed spaces in search of fresh understandings of Beckett’s art, re- envisioning hierarchies as rhizomes, patients as physicians, and inarticulate mumblers as the true unacknowledged legislators of the world. Following Uhlmann, this study aims to further the project of moving beyond a view of Beckett’s work as merely negative, despondent, nihilistic. That is, these essays continue the reconciliation of Beckett’s traditional association with the void and negativity with Deleuze’s philosophy of joy: [I]f we are to believe the publicity which follows Beckett and Deleuze, then, strictly speaking, their projects should be considered irreconcilable. After all, Beckett is, in caricature, associated with negation, the expression of nothing, failure, the misery of being; all of these are (no doubt
19 justifiably) critical commonplaces in the field of Beckett studies. On the other hand Deleuze is, like Spinoza, seen as a philosopher of affirmation, of joy, of positive Being which requires no negation. (Uhlmann 9) Each of the following chapters extends and augments Uhlmann’s readings by discussing how Beckett’s individual characters find molecular realms of existence that allow them to overcome what Deleuze and Guattari call the “great molar powers of family, career, and conjugality” (A Thousand Plateaus 233). All of the chapters trace the footsteps of inhuman creatures—animal men, new men, original men—as they endure quests without qualities, leading lives in isolation from majoritarian regimes, sensing the dangers of oedipal culture, preferring not to participate in family triangles, and, like Little Hans before his molar transformation, searching for exits from the family home and all of the “diabolical powers” that inform filiation. Many of Beckett’s characters experience the “becoming-animal” of the human and come to realize their bodies, their minds, and their speech in non-molar ways. Chapter one, “Proceeding Gingerly: Melville, Beckett, Deleuze, and the Making of AMMMericans,” focuses on a comment Deleuze makes in passing in his essay “The Exhausted” linking Murphy to Melville’s Bartleby. Anachronistically, Deleuze believes that “I would prefer not to” is a “Beckettian formula” (154). The chapter explores more fully the implications of Deleuze’s comment, examining how the character of Murphy is and, as importantly, is not representative of Bartleby. Throughout much of the novel, Murphy attempts to lead the life of the man without particularities, preferring not to work, not to marry, not to reproduce, not to read. Yet, after his encounter with Mr. Endon, he decides to leave his life at the M.M.M. and go back to the molar world—to Brewery Road and Celia (but stumbles into extinction before making his return). Chapter two, “Beckett’s Victors,” traces the movements of the man without qualities in Eleuthéria. Victor Krap wants to be left alone, but his family pursues him throughout the play. Over the course of the three-act play, Beckett reveals how the Krap family is in collusion with representatives from the molar world who attempt to lure the young man back from his Parisian bedsit and into the respectable home of a man with a family, a wife, and the chance to people the world with little Victors. Victor, however, resists the call of molarity for much of the drama, and, more importantly, infects those
20 around him, particularly the male characters, with his quality-less disposition. He breeds other victors not by filiative procreation but, as Deleuze and Guattari prefer, by epidemic. Chapter three, “Wolfman on the Lam: De-Oedipalizing Beckett,” undoes the psychoanalytic work of other critics (Michel Bernard, J. D. O’Hara, Phil Baker, John Robert Keller), revealing how the nameless narrator of Beckett’s short prose piece “From an Abandoned Work” is not a neurotic obsessed with his mother and father but, rather, an example of Deleuze and Guattari’s “new man.” Like Victor, the nameless narrator seeks a life without molar qualities, escaping to the fringes of culture and into an immanent realm of sensation and intensity. He undertakes a quest whose only goal is to avoid the objectives of organized culture. Chapter four, “Hamm Stammered: Beckett’s Atmospheric Stuttering,” enters into a dialogue with Nels C. Pearson’s postcolonial reading of Endgame, in which he argues that Clov’s stutter indicates the futility of a subaltern finding a voice of his own. Yet, as Deleuze’s essay “He Stuttered” helps to demonstrate, the stuttering voices of all the characters, as well as the stammering bodies and quivering gestures, serve as a language of liberation. Indeed, Beckett’s characters invent a “minor” language—and participate in an atmospheric stuttering—that works against the discourse and myths of majoritarian regimes. They move, speak, and communicate against the conventions of the molar world. Chapter five, “An Exaggerated Oedipus,” employs Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the “exaggerated Oedipus” as it emerges in Kafka’s work to investigate how the family triangle in Beckett’s late novel Company colludes with the exterior “diabolical powers” of molar culture, ensuring the child’s inclusion in the habits and customs of capitalism. The figure on his back in the dark sees through the oedipal ruse and transforms into a creature without qualities who avoids molarizing into a unified subject. Collectively, these essays demonstrate how Beckett’s art in general constitutes a “minor” achievement, further investigating Beckett as a “minor” author and witnessing how his characters and texts “minorize” majoritarian ideals and presumptions about humanity. Beckett’s art proves a refuge, a shelter for minorities who possess no language, no myths of their own (Smith’s introduction to Essays Critical and Clinical offers an in-depth discussion of minorities’ lack of language and myths). To adapt Dana
21 Polan’s comments about Kafka’s “minor” effect, Beckett’s oeuvre is “one of the many ways to enter into the field of history, to find oneself (or one’s many selves, to refer to the way that Deleuze and Guattari describe their collaboration at the beginning of Milles Plateaux) carried away on one of history’s many, many lines of escape” (xxiii). I trust the following essays reveal that what Deleuze believes about Spinoza is also true of Beckett, namely, that “he is the quintessential object of an immediate, unprepared encounter, such that a nonphilosopher, or even someone without any formal education, can receive a sudden illumination from him, a ‘flash’” (Spinoza 129).
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CHAPTER ONE
PROCEEDING GINGERLY: BECKETT, MELVILLE, DELEUZE, AND THE MAKING OF AMMMERICANS
Who in the rainbow can show the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but when exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. —Herman Melville, Billy Budd
“I would prefer not to.” According to Gilles Deleuze, Bartleby’s five-word refrain decimates western culture. In “Bartleby; or, the Formula,” Deleuze writes: “Without a doubt, the formula is ravaging, devastating, and leaves nothing standing in its wake” (70). Herman Melville’s aloof scrivener maintains a permanent place in Deleuze’s biography of great machines, confusing and collapsing the organizations of the molar world. To the great dismay of his Wall Street employer, Bartleby, according to Deleuze, manages “to carve out a kind of foreign language within language, to make the whole confront silence, make it topple into silence” (72). As much as he praises Melville’s creation, however, Deleuze elsewhere in his writings attributes the fantastic formula not to the nineteenth-century author but, anachronistically, to Samuel Beckett. In “The Exhausted,” an essay devoted entirely to Beckett, Deleuze remarks in passing that “I would prefer not to” is “Bartleby’s Beckettian formula” (154) and that Murphy invokes the formula in an episode involving a series of biscuits: “In Murphy, the hero devotes himself to the combinatorial of five small biscuits, but on the condition of having vanquished all order of preference, and of having thereby conquered the hundred and twenty modes of total permutability” (153). Unfortunately, Deleuze’s comparison of Murphy and Bartleby ends abruptly, as the theorist turns his attention to Beckett’s entire oeuvre and, ultimately, the brilliantly “exhaustive” measures of the television plays.1 Yet
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Deleuze’s ephemeral likening of the two characters is too enticing to forego. Reading Murphy in light of Deleuze’s essay on “Bartleby” helps to flesh out the comparison and demonstrates what an extended Deleuzian analysis (or “schizoanalysis”) of Beckett’s 1938 novel might look like. Significantly, Murphy emerges as a figure in search of pure disinterestedness, yet, unlike Bartleby, he ultimately relents from an “I would prefer not to” demeanor. Deleuze’s comparison proves to be limited, as Murphy removes himself only partially from what he refers to as the “big world.” The would-be recluse seeks to adopt Bartleby’s temperament and relinquish his human qualities (“’E don’t look rightly human to me,’ said the chandler’s eldest waste product” [77]), but he is finally too pretentious and too deliberate to achieve the immaculate indifference of Melville’s scrivener. Murphy nevertheless comes face to face with one greater man, the indomitable Mr. Endon, who holds fast to (even exceeds) Bartleby’s philosophy and inserts a cataclysmic stutter into the perfectly formed sentence of molarity. Like the incomprehensible copyist, Mr. Endon resists translation, interpretation, and the colonization methods of oedipalized culture. 1. Murphy and its Critics Murphy enjoys a wealth of critical attention as the subject of numerous essays, book chapters, and entire books. Any attempt to re-evaluate the novel owes an immediate and permanent debt to the inspiring and foundational work of Ruby Cohn, John Fletcher, Eugene Webb, Robert Harrison, Rubin Rabinovitz, David Hesla, H. Porter Abbott, and Linda Ben-Zvi.2 Among the most important recent developments in Murphy criticism, and one that S. E. Gontarski believes “will form the starting point of all Murphy and much Beckett scholarship well into the twenty-first century” (viii), is C. J. Ackerley’s unfathomably comprehensive Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy, in which Ackerley reveals the novel’s vast intertextual relationship with the great works of western civilization. According to Ackerley’s introduction, Murphy is, despite all efforts, an inexhaustible text: “Samuel Beckett’s Murphy is a vast, rollicking jeu d’esprit in the tradition that runs from Cervantes to Rabelais through Burton and Fielding to Ulysses; and it can maintain itself proudly in that company” (ix). Ackerley’s book is, in the strictest sense, primarily a work of scholarship, as it refrains from adopting any one critical approach and offers instead an epic catalogue of references and allusions, a line-
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by-line, often word-by-word, explication of Beckett’s source material. Significantly, Ackerley claims to hold no interpretive key, no right answer, preferring the career of a cosmic encylopedist to that of a (with finality) Crritic! Other recent studies, however, insist upon more definitive examinations of Beckett’s novel. John Robert Keller’s 2002 book Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love, for example, claims to understand precisely the afflictions of not only Murphy but all of Beckett’s characters. Keller’s psychoanalytic investigation suggests that the driving force behind the Irish author’s texts is the search for the lost maternal figure. In his chapter on Murphy, wittily entitled “No Endon sight: Murphy’s misrecognition of love,” Keller argues that Murphy’s suffering and “hopelessness” stem from the absence of a loving mother: “At its heart, Murphy suggests an early experience of disconnection from the good mother, her containing love and her joy with her infant” (50). Keller goes on to assert that Murphy’s quest for a mother figure (or motherly affection) leads him ultimately to the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat: “He abandons engagement with life, unknowingly clinging to the hope of rebirth within the love of a new mother, who will manifest as Mr. Endon” (69). Keller’s vision is precisely the kind of criticism that Deleuzian theory seeks to subvert. Indeed, as anyone familiar with Anti-Oedipus or A Thousand Plateaus knows, psychoanalytic interpretation represents what Deleuze refers to as an “arborescent” system of thought, a philosophical paradigm that secures individuals to Freud and, by extension, the myth of Oedipus. As he posits Murphy’s need for a mother figure, Keller binds Murphy to the family drama, turning him into a suffering subject, a “sick” creature in need of fulfillment and a psychological cure—in a word, therapy. In the first of his Essays Critical and Clinical, “Literature and Life,” Deleuze offers a response to arguments such as Keller’s: “We do not write with our neuroses. Neuroses or psychoses are not passages of life, but states into which we fall when the process is interrupted, blocked, or plugged up” (3). While a Deleuzian understanding of Murphy contrasts with Keller’s approach, it forms a partial alliance with analyses such as Lidan Lin’s Marxist reading of Beckett’s novel, in which Lin views the title character not as sick but rebellious, an actively “indolent” individual who aims to overthrow the capitalist machine in favor of a “de-
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alienated” society. Lin writes, “For Beckett, Murphy’s indolent behavior embodies two positive meanings, both related as ways in which Murphy becomes a heroic defender of human dignity against a dehumanizing materialist culture” (250). Lin continues, “If alienation occurs when the relationship between men is perverted by the mediation of such extra-human categories as money and property, then by freeing himself from the desire to produce, own, and spend, Murphy helps to remove these extra-human obstacles and, accordingly, to restore human bond to its unmediated form” (251). Unlike Keller, Lin thus finds in Beckett’s novel a passage of life rather than a passage of sickness. The following reading of Murphy moves initially in the same direction as Lin’s essay, as it compares and contrasts the “indolent” rebellion of Murphy and Bartleby. Yet it separates ultimately from Lin’s argument to focus on Mr. Endon, whose rhizomatic existence more closely approximates that of Melville’s scrivener. Like Bartleby, Mr. Endon is a supreme example of the Deleuzian hero, a creature who, more than Murphy, renders powerless the myth of Oedipus and abides by the laws of his own constitution, his own America. Melville’s Minoritarians In Deleuze’s canon of great writers, Melville ranks with Walt Whitman as one of the saviors of America—a writer who exemplifies the French theorist’s anti-Freudian, anti-arborescent vision of culture and literature. In his solo essays and his co-writings with Félix Guattari, Deleuze praises Melville for forging a literature of “becoming,” a body of work in which characters set sail for the plane of immanence. According to Deleuze, Melville’s writing never fits into the plan of “State philosophers,”3 never works through individual neuroses, and never reveals an obsession with what the theorist often calls Freud’s “mommy-daddy-me” complex. On the contrary, Deleuze believes that Melville’s art is impervious to such systems of thought and, in fact, helps to uncover or “invent/invoke”4 minorities lurking beneath the political ideologies of cultural majorities. Deleuze writes, “Health as literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people who are missing. It is the task of the fabulating function to invent a people. We do not write with our memories, unless it is to make them the origin and collective destination of a people to come still ensconced in its betrayals and repudiations” (“Literature and Life” 4). As Daniel W. Smith5 explains, Deleuze’s idea of literature eschews psychoanalytic
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interpretation in particular because, in his eyes, great writing contains only “collective utterances”: In the midst of an intolerable and unlivable situation, a becoming passes between the “people” who are missing and the “I” of the author who is now absent, releasing a “pure speech act” that is neither an impersonal myth nor a personal fiction, but a collective utterance […]. In literature, Deleuze frequently appeals to the texts of Kafka (in central Europe) and Melville (in America) that present literature as the collective utterance of a minor people who find their expression in and through the singularity of the writer, who in his very solitude is all the more in a position to express potential forces, and to be a true collective agent […]. (xliv-xlv) Readers, then, should never approach and attempt to deliver the talking cure to Melville’s characters, according to Deleuze. Conversely, they come to us, whisper in our ear, inform us of their existence, of the irreducible chaos of their lives. Deleuze writes, “The founding act of the America novel, like that of the Russian novel, was to take the novel far from the order of reasons, and to give birth to characters who exist in nothingness, survive only in the void, defy logic and psychology and keep their mystery till the end” (“Bartleby” 81). Melville and his characters are not patients but, in fact, physicians in Deleuze’s eyes—the diagnosticians of cultural illness.6 Deleuze argues that Melville’s heroes of “becoming” assume various shapes and guises. Captain Ahab, for example, stands at one end of the Melvillian spectrum. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze (and Guattari) argue that “Moby-Dick in its entirety is one of the greatest masterpieces of becoming; Captain Ahab has an irresistible becoming-whale, but one that bypasses the pack or the school, operating directly through a monstrous alliance with the Unique, the Leviathan, Moby-Dick” (243). Unlike Harold Bloom, who believes that “Ahab seeks only Moby-Dick’s destruction; renown is nothing to the Quaker captain, and revenge is everything” (128), Deleuze and Guattari contend that Ahab is ultimately after something more profound than vengeance. To help illustrate their view of Ahab’s intentions, the theorists offer a paraphrase of the captain’s vision of the hunt: “I have no personal history with Moby-Dick, no revenge to take, any more than I have a myth to play out” (245). As Smith explains, Deleuze and Guattari envision Ahab
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as ego-less, a man who loses his subjectivity in his encounter with Moby Dick: “Ahab becomes Moby-Dick, he enters a zone of indiscernibility where he can no longer distinguish himself from Moby-Dick, to the point where he strikes himself in striking the whale” (xxx).7 Ahab’s becoming-whale signals the end of distinct categories such as man and nature or, better, man and beast: “There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together” (Anti-Oedipus 2). For Deleuze and Guattari, then, Ahab searches not for the self but—contra Freud, contra Descartes, contra Plato—the non-self, his heat-oppressed brain opening infinitely into the world. From a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective, the captain ultimately achieves not a violent vengeance but a combative comitatus with the White Whale, a subject-less alliance. To view the novel as subject-less is not to pretend, Deleuze stresses in his essay “Literature and Life,” that Melville’s work is devoid of individual characters, but rather to realize that literature “exists only when it discovers beneath apparent persons the power of the impersonal—which is not a generality but a singularity at the highest point” (3). Deleuze continues: “Of course, literary characters are perfectly individuated, and are neither vague nor general; but all their individual traits elevate them to a vision that carries them off in an indefinite [sic], like a becoming that is too powerful for them: Ahab and the vision of Moby-Dick” (3). Deleuze’s accentuation of the “impersonal” in Melville’s novel reiterates his anti-Freudian vision. The French theorist concentrates not on the supposed prison of Ahab’s traumatic past but, rather, on the captain’s new fraternal connections on the plane of immanence, which, as Deleuze maintains, “strips us of the power to say ‘I’” (“Literature and Life” 3). As Jennifer M. Jeffers explains, Deleuze and Guattari’s provocative analysis of Moby Dick is seemingly flawed as it leaves out the salient plot line of the novel. Jeffers writes, “What A Thousand Plateaus fails to note, of course, is that Ahab’s becoming- whale is fueled by a beastly hate and obsession because the whale, as we recall, took off Ahab’s leg in a rather grizzly encounter” (96). Yet as Jeffers also attempts to show, Deleuze and Guattari are not blind to the traditional interpretation of the novel but, rather, petitioning for a new understanding of the relationship between Ahab and the White Whale. They aim to turn attention away from the idea of the whale as a terrible creature
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that must die and toward the idea of the whale as an entryway to the plane of immanence (96). Jeffers writes, “The whiteness is a threshold or a door that Ahab in his becoming- whale must pass through. Interpreting Ahab as becoming-white whale deterritorializes our traditional narrative assumptions of the relationship between the whale and Ahab” (96). Meek Bartleby stands in direct contrast to psychotic Ahab. Deleuze writes, “Melvillian psychiatry constantly invokes two poles: monomaniacs and hypochondriacs, demons and angels, torturers and victims, the Swift and the Slow, the Thundering and the Petrified, the Unpunishable (beyond all punishment) and the Irresponsible (beyond all responsibility)” (“Bartleby” 78-79).8 Bartleby, of course, is in each case the latter figure, though Deleuze is careful to point out that both characters finally haunt one and the same world, forming alternations within it […]. This is because both poles, both types of characters, Ahab and Bartleby, belong to this Primary Nature, they inhabit, they constitute it. Everything sets them in opposition, and yet they are perhaps the same creature—primary, original, seized from both sides, marked merely with a “plus” or a “minus” sign: Ahab and Bartleby. (80) For Deleuze, Bartleby is one of Melville’s “creatures of innocence and purity” (80) who “can only survive by becoming stone, by denying the will […]” (80). The Wall Street copyist speaks in a “minor” key and what he has to say (“I would prefer not to”) serves as the collective utterance of all who suffer at the hands of colonizing regimes, all who prefer an anti-hierarchical community of brothers and sisters to the power structures of cultural imperialism, and all who despise the characteristics of the well-wrought, well- spoken Human Being: “I PREFER NOT TO […] contaminates everything, escaping linguistic form and stripping the father of his exemplary speech […]” (77). The copyist emerges from the Wall Street wreckage de-oedipalized, fatherless, motherless, sonless— an “Original” (83). From the outset of his essay, Deleuze argues for a literal reading of “Bartleby.” Indeed, an attempt to comprehend Bartleby on a metaphorical level, the level of signification, the level of assumptions, immediately reiterates the kind of interpretation the formula renders impotent, cold. Deleuze begins, “‘Bartleby’ is neither a metaphor for
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the writer nor the symbol of anything whatsoever. It is a violently comical text, and the comic is always literal. It is like the novellas of Kleist, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, or Beckett, with which it forms a subterranean and prestigious lineage. It means only what it says, literally. And what it says and repeats is I would prefer not to” (68). In Cavellian fashion, Deleuze thus implores that we listen to the scrivener’s words with the ears of a literal-minded child, unlike his supervisor who tries to hear and make sense of him as a full-fledged, full-grown citizen of the molar world and its logic. Only then can we sense Bartleby’s message and come to know him not as mentally ill or, as Ralph James Savarese’s recent essay surmises, suggestive of a railway accident victim (32), but as Deleuze refers to him: “the doctor of a sick America, the Medicine-man, the new Christ or the brother to us all” (90). Bartleby’s formula assaults the language and logic of the molar world both by what it says and how it says. Early on, Deleuze argues that the very sound and shape of the phrase confuses and disturbs those who encounter it: Certainly it is grammatically correct, syntactically correct, but its abrupt termination, NOT TO, which leaves what it rejects undetermined, confers upon it the character of a kind of radical, a kind of limit-function. Its repetition and its insistence render it all the more unusual, entirely so. Murmured in a soft, flat, and patient voice, it attains to the irremissible, by forming an inarticulate block, a single breath. In all these respects, it has the same force, the same role as an agrammatical formula. (68) Deleuze goes on to posit that, while Bartleby does not stutter or stammer, his words have the same effect on language. The way he arranges and juxtaposes them gives his boss and co-workers pause: “At each occurrence, there is a stupor surrounding Bartleby, as if one had heard the Unspeakable or the Unstoppable” (70). The scrivener thus uses a perfectly grammatical and seemingly mundane concoction of words to throw his boss off kilter, disrupt his routine. His tone, his manner of speaking, and his repetition mystify those around him. Behind the green screen, the entranced copyist performs a small-scale Theater of Cruelty, chanting his way into the fault lines of the molar landscape. To his boss and his co-workers, Bartleby’s literally broken English (his cleft infinitive) makes him sound like an incoherent foreigner stuttering his way through capitalist New York.
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Bartleby’s selection of words is equally baffling, leading the lawyer to infer his meaning, decode his language—but to no avail. As Deleuze points out, the scrivener’s strange phrase makes no sense in the context of the law office (molar institution). The formula, paradoxically, is a response devoid of an answer: “The attorney would be relieved if Bartleby did not want to, but Bartleby does not refuse, he simply rejects a nonpreferred (the proofreading, the errands…). And he does not accept either, he does not affirm a preference that would consist in continuing to copy, he simply posits its impossibility” (71). Bartleby thus circumvents entering into the conversation in any specific, any particular sense. The lawyer wants an answer from his copyist, a reply that will allow room for judgment. Deleuze writes: “He is urged to say yes or no. But if he said no (to collating, running errands…), or if he said yes (to copying), he would quickly be defeated and judged useless, and would not survive. He can survive only by whirling in a suspense that keeps everyone at a distance” (71). Deleuze’s reading here intersects with Giorgio Agamben’s brilliant essay “Bartleby, or On Contingency.”9 Agamben explains that the lawyer and Bartleby are always-already on different planes; the former moves and operates in the world of reason and will, whereas the latter swims in what the Italian philosopher calls “pure potentiality”: Our ethical tradition has often sought to avoid the problem of potentiality by reducing it to the terms of will and necessity. Not what you can do, but what you want to do or must do is its dominant theme. This is what the man of the law repeats to Bartleby. When he asks him to go to the post office […] and Bartleby opposes him with his usual “I would prefer not to,” the man of the law hastily translates Bartleby’s answer into “You will not?” (254) Like Agamben, Deleuze believes that Bartleby’s formula finds itself between language or, as Deleuze is fond of saying, on “the outside of language.” The lawyer may translate the formula to mean that the scrivener does not want to copy, but, as both Deleuze and Agamben stress, Bartleby has no will, and his words literally reveal nothing about his preferences: “I would prefer nothing rather than something: not a will to nothingness, but the growth of a nothingness of the will” (Deleuze “Bartleby” 71). Bartleby and the attorney are, in effect, talking to themselves, as the latter infuses the former’s words with
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unintended meaning. The odd formula, therefore, disrupts not merely the flow of the official language of the law office but its traditional myths. Bartleby thus stands as one of Deleuze’s quintessential “minoritarians.” As he carves a “minor” or “foreign” language out of his own, the scrivener manages to carve out a new logic as well, what Deleuze terms the “logic of preference” (73), alienating himself from his molar surroundings. Bartleby lives the life of his formula, existing as a kind of infinite infinitive, a sentence without end. The scrivener is nearly finished, nearly formed, a human becoming rather than a human being. Sans history, the copyist resists the logic and reason of the molar world and prevents the attorney (or allows the attorney to prevent himself) from interpreting him. Invoking Robert Musil, Deleuze depicts Bartleby as a “man without references, without possessions, without properties, without qualities, without particularities: he is too smooth for anyone to be able to hang any particularity on him. Without past or future, he is instantaneous” (74). Deleuze’s reading of Melville’s short story ultimately pivots on this notion of the man without a history, as it allows him to further his anti-Freudian agenda and envision Bartleby as a parentless figure, a dreamless creature who has no past through which to work, no point of reference. Deleuze, accordingly, moves in for the kill. As he esteems Bartleby as the man without qualities, he assaults and dismantles western notions of reason, knowledge, and psychology. Devoid of human attributes, of preferences, of bad dreams, Bartleby is able to “escape knowledge, defy psychology” (83). He stands as an “Original.” Deleuze writes, “The original, says Melville, is not subject to the influence of his milieu; on the contrary, he throws a livid white light on his surroundings, much like the light that ‘accompanies the beginning of things in Genesis’” (83). As an “Original,” Bartleby defeats the Sophoclean narrative of fathers and sons and institutes a new myth. Indeed, psychoanalysis depends entirely on the subject’s past. As Freud writes in his notorious “Wolfman” case, “To dream is, after all, to remember” (250). But Melville’s anti- Oedipus offers no past for evaluation, which is why no one who encounters him knows what to do with him, what to make of him. The son of nothingness, Bartleby sounds the collective cry of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses—a people without a past. The copyist reintroduces the original, if ideal, idea of America, implementing what Deleuze
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describes as a culture of orphaned siblings (“Bartleby” 84). Bartleby avoids becoming a copy, a replica of anyone or anything. Unlike the attorney, Turkey, Ginger Nut, or Nippers, the scrivener renounces his citizenship in the land of reproduction. Rather than descending, Bartleby diffuses like the ooze of oil crushed, on his way to nowhere in particular, just on his way. In his book-length study of Melville, poet and scholar David Kirby offers a reading of Bartleby’s death in the Tombs that bolsters Deleuze’s vision of the scrivener’s life-energy. Kirby writes, “When the Mastery of Chancery touches Bartleby’s body, he reports, ‘a tingling shiver ran up my arm and down my spine to my feet.’ Even in death, Bartleby emanates a force that gives the lie to any suggestion that he might be weak or cowardly” (141). For Kirby, as for Deleuze, Bartleby is finally the great rejuvenator, the doctor for a sick, anti-American America. Murphy’s Molecular Movements Beckett’s personal letters reveal not merely an awareness but an appreciation of Melville’s work. In his biography on Beckett, James Knowlson mentions that the Irish author “found Melville’s Moby Dick […] exciting fare” (157), citing as evidence Beckett’s 1932 letter to Thomas MacGreevy: “That’s more like the real stuff. White whales and natural piety” (qtd. in Knowlson 157). As a prelude to a discussion of Murphy and “Bartleby,” the novel’s allusions to Moby Dick are worth noting. Ackerley catalogs one vague reference in his Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy, suggesting that the passage in which a golf ball “spouted a foot into the air, fell plumb into the hole, bubbled and was still” calls up an image of the White Whale (205). Other allusions, however, surface throughout the book. For example, Neary invokes Melville’s novel in chapter 10 when he cries out: “There He blows, or I am greatly mistaken” (223). Celia’s “Hark to the wind” (20) is also evocative of Moby Dick, specifically the 43rd chapter entitled “Hark!” in which Archy beseeches Cabaco: “Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I expect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the wind” (197-98; my italics). Mr. Kelly’s warning to Celia a few pages later—“‘Sever your connexion with this Murphy,’ he said, ‘before it is too late’” (24)—recalls Elijah’s intimations of doom to Ishmael and Queequeg
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concerning their connection with Captain Ahab (103-106). One might envision the entire novel as a kind of subtle homage to Moby Dick, as the main premise involves a rag-tag group of characters in desperate quest of the elusive Murphy (another great “M”), who swims relentlessly away from them in the ocean of London. That he plays White in the chess game with Mr. Endon and inhabits a garret in which the “ceiling and the outer wall were one, a superb surge of white” (162) is all the more provocative, especially given Ahab’s famous association of the White Whale with a wall, “shoved near to me” (167). Notably, Murphy’s intertextual relationship with “Bartleby” hinges not on piecemeal references or subtle allusions but, rather, on the philosophical outlook of the title characters. While Murphy has no distinct verbal mantra, he seeks to lead a life of “I would prefer not to” and, like Bartleby, yearns to withdraw, as many critics remark, from the logic, reason, language, and psychology of the outer world. Throughout the story, he gradually drifts away from what he calls the “big world” and those who would make of him a practical man—Celia et al. Murphy prefers not to mimic the human, and above all else he wishes to curtain himself off, become imperceptible, unintelligible: the man without qualities, the man without—to adapt the phraseology of Bartleby’s boss—“a satisfactory biography” (103). As aforementioned, Deleuze links Murphy to Bartleby briefly in “The Exhausted.” Early on in the essay, the theorist alludes to Murphy’s permutation game with his biscuits to describe the first of three kinds of exhaustive language in Beckett.10 The biscuit passage, Deleuze explains, illustrates Murphy’s effort to relieve himself of all preferences, his endeavor not to prefer (to prefer not) any particular biscuit to another. Once free of “his infatuation with the ginger” (Murphy 96), Murphy manages to discover the “total permutability” of the five biscuits: “a hundred and twenty ways!” (Murphy 97). Beckett continues, “Overcome by these perspectives Murphy fell forward on his face on the grass, beside those biscuits of which it could be said as truly as of the stars, that one differed from another, but of which he could not partake in their fullness until he had learnt not to prefer any one to any other” (97). In one fell swoop, Deleuze then quickly suggests Murphy’s actions are evocative of Melville’s scrivener: “I would prefer not to, following Bartleby’s Beckettian formula” (154).
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Deleuze explains that Murphy’s ability to dismiss his preference for ginger (as Bartleby dismisses his preferences) is necessary if he is to detach (language) from the world of signification and meaning—the molar world. Deleuze writes, The combinatorial is the art or science of exhausting the possible through inclusive disjunctions. But only an exhausted person can exhaust the possible, because he has renounced all need, preference, goal, or signification. Only the exhausted person is sufficiently disinterested, sufficiently scrupulous. Indeed, he is obliged to replace his plans with tables and programs that are devoid of meaning. (154) Various critics help to shed light on Deleuze’s ideas concerning the relationship between preferences, combinations, and exhaustion. Ronald Bogue, for instance, asserts that Murphy’s scene with the biscuits is an example (one among many, to be sure) of how Beckett’s characters estrange language from its traditional purposes. Bogue writes, “The purpose of exhausting the possible is finally that of undoing language, of dissolving the glue of calculations, significations, intentions, personal memories, and old habits that cement words together” (43). Mary Bryden offers a similar perspective: “In other words, all available combinations are attempted, but in a context which is uncoupled from any numerical, motivational or symbolic significance […]. It is a language of enumeration, in which combinatory relations replace syntactical ones” (82, 85).11 Some twenty-four years prior to Deleuze’s essay, Robert Harrison offers perhaps the best explanation of Deleuze’s idea of exhaustion. Harrison suggests that games of permutation obliterate language and, in effect, usher in (at least symbolically) the Apocalypse: As the infinite computer grinds out its calculations, human intelligence is reduced to a pulp; the final wedge is driven between existence and understanding […]. By closing the circle of permutation around a thing or an act and still arriving at no significant assertion about its meaning, Beckett opens up an abyss of incommunicability between narrator and reader and gives the nod to the end of language itself. And in a still broader sense, the closing of a finite circle of permutations signals symbolically the end of the universe. (26-27)12
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Bogue, Bryden, and Harrison all help to show how games of permutation allow Murphy, in Deleuze’s echo of Proust, “to carve out a foreign [minor] language within language,” a formula that confuses the Wall Street attorneys of his own place and time. At least during the biscuit scene, Murphy liberates language from its conventional functions and discovers what Deleuze refers to as a “metalanguage, a very special language in which the relations between objects are identical to the relations between words” (“The Exhausted” 156). Deleuze’s analysis of the biscuit scene and Murphy’s permutation game opens the door for a more extensive comparison of Murphy and “Bartleby,” an experiment through which to understand more fully the French theorist’s complex ideas about exhaustion, the logic of preference, and the original man. Indeed, as soon as Deleuze correlates Murphy’s quest for an “I would prefer not to” attitude to Bartleby’s outlook on life, other analogies between the two characters begin to emerge. To begin with, Murphy’s “infatuation with the ginger [biscuits],” which, as Deleuze argues, he must abandon to exhaust the possible, is reminiscent of the scrivener’s infamous consumption of ginger nuts. The attorney documents Bartleby’s bizarre dietary habits: He lives, then, on gingernuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian, then; but no, he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but gingernuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on gingernuts. Gingernuts are so called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now, what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect on Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none. (115) The characters’ penchant for ginger is, on one level, ironic, since neither Murphy nor Bartleby is “hot and spicy” but, for the most part, mellow and reserved. On another level, their ginger fetish might simply be suggestive of how they move quietly, calmly, “gingerly” through life. Also like Bartleby, Murphy comes across on various occasions as an inhuman interloper, a creature who, aside from a few bits and pieces of vague information, seems
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to possess no personal history. When Mr. Kelly tries to learn of Murphy’s past from his granddaughter, Celia can provide few answers: “Who is this Murphy,” he cried, “for whom you have been neglecting your work, as I presume. What is he? Where does he come from? What is his family? What does he do? Has he any money? Has he any prospects? Has he any retrospects? Is he, has he, anything at all?” Taking the first point, Celia replied that Murphy was Murphy. Continuing then in an orderly manner she revealed that he belonged to no profession or trade; came from Dublin—“My God!” said Mr. Kelly— knew of one uncle, a Mr. Quigley, a well-to-do ne’er-do-well, resident in Holland, with whom he strove to correspond; did nothing that she could discern […]. (17-18) Celia’s inability to learn of Murphy’s background parallels the attorney’s failure to discover significant details about Bartleby. The lawyer begins his narration by relaying to the reader his lack of factual information: “While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. […] Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable except from the original sources, and, in his case, those are very small” (103-04). Likewise, Murphy aims to relinquish all particularities and become a man “of whom nothing is ascertainable.” Celia’s knowledge of his Dublin connection and his one uncle from Holland sounds more like the stuff of rumors than biographical data, analogous to the attorney’s discovery of ambiguous information concerning Bartleby’s alleged former job in a Washington D. C. dead letter office. Even the reader’s understanding that Murphy is from Cork and was a one-time theology student only hints at his full history. Murphy’s mysterious materialization to Celia one summer evening reiterates his apparent lack of personal history. To her, he seems an alien born of thin air rather than of a mother and father. Not only does the young prostitute have little knowledge of Murphy’s background, but, according to the narrator, her initial meeting with him is shrouded in ambiguity: It was on the street, the previous midsummer’s night, the sun being then in the Crab, that she met Murphy. She had turned out of Edith Grove into
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Cremorne Road, intending to refresh herself with a smell of the Reach and then return by Lot’s Road, when chancing to glance to her right she saw, motionless in the mouth of Stadium Street, considering alternately the sky and a sheet of paper, a man. Murphy. (12-13) Bartleby comes into view just as enigmatically and, intriguingly, also in summer—the middle months of the year. Compare the attorney’s words with those of Celia: “In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby” (110). The lawyer’s description of his first encounter with Bartleby, who appears “motionless” and out of the blue, is noticeably similar to Celia’s sighting of the “motionless” Murphy, whose appearance on Stadium Street is evocative of other infamous Beckettian entrances (e.g. Watt’s “motionless” arrival at the beginning of his tale13). Celia sees him as a creature from nowhere, a statue-like figure against whom she will bang her head in search of a respectable man with respectable qualities, preferences, content—“. . .to make a man of Murphy!” (65). But like the sheet of paper in his hand, Murphy presents himself as smooth, flat, depthless. Unhinged from time and place, Murphy resembles, to borrow two of the attorney’s eloquent analogies in his discussion of Bartleby, a “bit of wreck in the mid-Atlantic” (125), the “last column of some ruined temple” (126). Murphy not only appears to hail from thin air but, similar to Bartleby, seeks to alienate himself in every possible way. As Fletcher asserts, “For Murphy, like Belacqua but with more determination and therefore more success, is for ever striving to cut himself off from the importunities of the world of sense and to retire into the calm of his mind” (49). From the outset of the novel, the narrator describes how Murphy—like the scrivener behind his green screen—cordons himself off from molar society, preferring not to adhere to its methods and enjoying the privacy of his tripartite mind: The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. […] He
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sat naked in his rocking-chair of undressed teak, guaranteed not to crack, warp, shrink, corrode, or creak at night. It was his own, it never left him. The corner in which he sat was curtained off from the sun […]. (1) Like Melville, Beckett places a barrier between his main character and the rest of the world. Murphy seeks refuge within his apartment and, as Leslie Hill argues, “struggles to withdraw from the public world of desires and rewards” (12). He recedes, recoils from the busy streets outside his mew, exempting himself from the ruckus of city life, just as Bartleby “sat in his hermitage, oblivious to everything but his own peculiar business there” (114). Though Murphy remains in earshot of the molar plane and can make out the distant noise of street vendors below, the narrator asserts, “These were sights and sounds that he did not like. They detained him in the world to which they belonged, but not he, as he fondly hoped” (2). Like Bartleby, Beckett’s recluse longs for an existence on the outskirts of culture, burrowing rat-like, mole-like into a darkened corner and attending his own peculiar business there. Murphy’s bizarre way of speaking serves as yet another protective palisade. While he may hold fast to no specific “I would prefer not to” refrain, his language, like Bartleby’s, has a similar effect on those around him. Like the scrivener, Murphy sometimes causes other characters, Celia in particular, to hesitate at the sound of his voice, as if he, to adapt Deleuze’s earlier comments, manages the “Unspeakable or the Unstoppable.” For example, as Murphy finishes explaining to Celia the consequences of entering the workforce or what he dubs the “mercantile gehenna” (40), the narrator describes, in a tone similar to the bewildered attorney upon hearing Bartleby’s infamous declaration, the woman’s astonishment: She looked at him helplessly. He seemed serious. But he had seemed serious when he spoke of putting on his gems and lemon, etc. She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time. (40)
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Earlier, Celia expresses similar confusion when she tries to describe Murphy’s communication skills to Mr. Kelly, who has to act as a kind of translator. The narrator explains, “Murphy would begin to make a point, sometimes he may have even finished making one, it was hard to say. For example, early one morning he said: ‘The hireling fleeth because he is an hireling.’ Was that a point? And again: ‘What shall a man give in exchange for Celia?’ Was that a point” (22). Like Bartleby, Murphy finds a way to alienate language from itself. He relieves words of what Deleuze calls their “major” function and introduces a “wind of madness” or “psychotic breath”14 into the English language. Rather than reach the other side of the conversation, his words refuse to take root or invest themselves with molar meaning and simply, as the narrator describes, go dead. At times, Murphy’s face also goes dead. Indeed, his often-vacant stare conjures an image of the cataleptic Bartleby and reveals further his detachment from the habits of molar existence. Beckett describes him on various occasions as a kind of zombie, absent from the activity beyond his West Brompton mew: “The eyes, cold and unwavering as a gull’s, stared up at an iridescence splashed over the cornice moulding, shrinking, fading” (2). In chapter four Beckett uses the exact same words to illustrate Murphy’s gaze (39). Near the time when he stops copying for good, Bartleby wears a similarly frozen face, his eyes staring into another realm, another dimension. The mystified attorney comments: “I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall reverie […]. I looked steadfastly at him, and perceived that his eyes looked dull and glazed” (124). Both Murphy and Bartleby are thus not merely retired to their chambers and sequestered by walls and curtains, but entranced by visions of another place and time (“Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?” [176]). Deleuze might applaud the suggestion that their cold, glazed, and unwavering countenances attest to their erasure of human facial expressions from their flesh, their discarding what Deleuze and Guattari refer to in A Thousand Plateaus as the “monstrous hood” (190). For the French theorists, the face is a canvas on which molarity paints its masterpiece: “[I]f human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine […]. Yes, the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled” (171). Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis holds up at least in the
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context of Melville’s short story, as Bartleby’s strange stare takes its toll on capitalist society, giving the attorney and, by extension, all of Wall Street pause. Murphy and Bartleby thus subject not merely their language but their visages to a “minor” treatment, delivering the face from its “major” function. “Dismantling the face,” Deleuze and Guattari assert, “is the same thing as breaking through the wall of the signifier” (Thousand 188).15 With his eyes on another world, Murphy, like Bartleby, shows little concern for the literature, stories, and current events of molar society. At one point in a discussion with Ticklepenny, for example, Murphy makes known that he needs little light in his garret room because he is “a strict non-reader” (162). The narrator also relates that, over time, Murphy gradually discards his “books, his pictures, his postcards, his musical scores and instruments” (189). Similarly, Bartleby emerges over the course of Melville’s short story as a strict non-reader. At one point in his narration, the attorney informs that, among the scrivener’s many unorthodox behaviors, Bartleby oddly never reads anything: “I now recalled all the quiet mysteries which I had noted in the man. I remembered that he never spoke but to answer; that, though at intervals he had considerable time to himself, yet I had never seen him reading—no, not even a newspaper” (121). Murphy’s preference not to read reiterates, to adapt Knowlson’s phraseology, “[Murphy’s] impulse toward self-immersion, solitude, and inner peace” (203). Murphy’s aversion to the language, customs, and books of the molar world naturally means that he has little interest in pursuing a job, and the novel notoriously makes much of his avoidance of work. As Lin argues at the outset of her reading, “Constituting a central plot line, the friction born out of Celia’s work imperative and Murphy’s willful subversion of it becomes a key narrative dynamic by which Beckett shapes and evaluates his characters, and by which he arranges the narrative episodes in sequence” (249). An early conversation between Murphy and Celia reveals the tension: “I’ll tell you what more you can do,” she said. “You can get up out of that bed, make yourself decent and walk the streets for work.” The gentle passion. Murphy lost all his yellow again. “The streets!” he murmured. “Father forgive her.” (38-39)
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Later, the narrator sheds light on Murphy’s hesitations concerning labor, “For what was all working for a living but a procuring and a pimping for the money-bags, one’s lecherous tyrants the money-bags, so that they might breed” (76). In yet another conversation with Celia, Murphy becomes emphatic: “‘Ever since June,’ he said, ‘it has been job, job, job, nothing but job. Nothing happens in the world but is specially designed to exalt me into a job. I say a job is the end of us both, or at least of me’” (137). Murphy’s preference not to work aligns him with Melville’s idle copyist, one of literature’s most infamous non-workers. As with Bartleby, Murphy prefers stillness to movement, silence to the din of the workplace. He prefers not to make himself “decent,” as Celia demands, and not to be a respectable man of the world. An occupation would, as he sees things, root him firmly into the molar landscape and ruin the rhizomatic existence he wants desperately to lead. Notably, Murphy’s past jobs, like Bartleby’s alleged position in an end-of-the-line dead letter office, have kept in the corners of society and allowed him not to settle in: “[H]e had been content to expose himself vaguely in aloof able-bodied postures on the fringes of the better-attended slave-markets, or to drag from pillar to post among the agencies, a dog’s life without a dog’s prerogatives” (76-77). As he refuses to establish himself and make himself decent, Murphy adheres to one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most thunderous dictums: “Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots!” (Thousand 24). Rather than find his place in the great capitalist organism and help the money-bags to “breed,” Murphy prefers, as Lin argues throughout her Marxist reading of the novel, to cause the organism to stutter, skip a beat. Even his position at the M.M.M. allows him solace and takes him “a little way out of town” (156) to a threshold locale on the “boundary of two counties” (156). Murphy thus proves to have more in common with Bartleby than Deleuze’s interpretation of the biscuit scene alone reveals. Like his nineteenth-century predecessor, Murphy evidences an obsession with ginger; appears to materialize out of the blue in the summer months; shelters himself behind various tangible and figurative screens; often wears a dull, expressionless, faceless visage; is a strict non-reader; speaks in what sounds like a foreign tongue that confuses those around him; prefers not to work and, when he does, finds odd jobs that allow him to cultivate his rootless existence. Yet a productive intertextual analysis must deal as much with distinctions and differences as with
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similarities, and Beckett’s protagonist appears finally to be less-than-Deleuzian in his attitude toward life. He may, as Deleuze argues, give up his preferences in the biscuit scene and, at times, demonstrate an “I would prefer not to” philosophy, but on the whole he manifests needs, desires—a will. Unlike Wall Street’s most infamous scrivener, Murphy is finally too deliberate in his progression toward will-lessness. He talks too much, complains too much, whines too much, philosophizes too much. As opposed to Bartleby’s absolute transformation into the quintessential quietist, Murphy explains himself too often, such as when he tells Celia why he wants to remain unemployed. The would-be hermit finds times of seclusion when he can experience the pleasures of his third state of mind, but such moments come and go, as Murphy tries to balance his public and private personas. Despite his efforts, Murphy can never lose enough of his molar mind to achieve the pure indifference of Bartleby. As Ackerley insists, “HE IS ESSENTIALLY SANE” (199-200). Murphy vacillates, waivers, makes too many choices, and, unlike Bartleby, struggles in his pursuit of molecularity. Throughout the story, we watch him try and escape the world, but, as some scholars are quick to point out, he ultimately cares too much for Celia, what she thinks of him, what she wants from him. Fletcher writes, “[T]he trouble with Murphy is that he still is subject to certain passions which he cannot subdue, notably his need for Celia” (52). Hesla, moreover, points out that Murphy’s interest in astrology indicates his desire to “seek some transcendent principle” (40), which, according to Deleuze, is the great downfall of western culture. Conversely, Bartleby is without such inclinations; by all who encounter him, he is judged to be insane, hopelessly lost, a perfect candidate for a rubber room. Bartleby allows no one from the molar world to find him, connect with him, disturb his immanence. Once he discovers and begins to utter his phrase, he shows no interest in a practical existence. At every turn, he repels the keepers of Wall Street. In the final analysis, Murphy seems like one who seeks to copy Bartleby’s temperament (as if following a handbook), who toys with the idea of schizophrenic deterritorialization, who plays with the idea of insanity, but who never finds that narrow road to madness, that Deleuzian byway to molecularity. He may, at times, manage to partake in its pleasures, but Murphy never walks far enough along to lose sight of the big
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world for good, residing as a would-be-minor majoritarian. Significantly, Deleuze praises the “absolute freedom” of Murphy’s third state of mind toward the end of “The Exhausted” (170), but Murphy’s journey into that darkness is often difficult, taxing, interrupted by the call of molarity: “A foot from his ear the telephone burst into its rail” (7). Deleuze’s fleeting comparison of Murphy and Bartleby is therefore limited, useful for the analysis of selected scenes, but not Beckett’s entire novel. Murphy’s “I would prefer not to” is restricted, inchoate. Where Bartleby is, to recall Deleuze’s phraseology, “smooth,” Murphy is sculpted into a human being of the big world. What Deleuze says of Bartleby only applies to Murphy in part, on occasion. Even in death Murphy evidences molar inclinations, as his will, albeit ridiculous, goes into effect and addresses the public on his behalf. Mr. Endon’s America Murphy may lack the scrivener’s sublime coolness, but he comes face to face with an entire community of preference-less quietists, a community without qualities, a community of “microcosmopolitans” (Ackerley 199) whose non-spokesman goes by the name of Endon. Indeed, the M.M.M. houses a veritable race of Bartlebys thriving on the outskirts of town, on the boundary of two counties, neither here nor there—a no-man’s land indicative of the mentality of its motley crew of guests. Murphy sometimes sits “out of it,” but the characters within the halls of the Mercyseat are always-already “out of it,” and, to echo Deleuze’s description of Bartleby, they are “too smooth for anybody to hang any particularity on”—demented or otherwise. “Far from having lost who knows what contact with life,” Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti Oedipus, “the schizophrenic is closest to the beating heart of reality, to an intense point identical with the production of the real […]” (87). Murphy struggles throughout the story to discover a kind of Nothing, a realm where the molar world cannot reach him, but his quest is, alas, fruitless. The preference-less M.M.M. patients, however, find little else, oblivious to the rules of those who would colonize them in the name of Oedipus. For its shut-ins, the M.M.M. is a kind of schizophrenic America (Deleuze’s kind of America, a stuttering AMMMerica) nestled just outside of London. The hospital harbors a small nation, a brotherhood of merry expatriates (“[Murphy] would not have admitted he needed a brotherhood. He did.” [176]) who have eluded the ideologies of
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metropolitan London. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari posit their vision of America as a region that, while “not immune from domination by trees or the search for roots” (19), diverges from the “arborescent” thought of Europe and the East: “America is a special case […] everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside” (19). Deleuze elaborates on the idea of America in his essay on Bartleby: “It was above all to constitute a universe, a society of brothers, a federation of men and goods, a community of anarchist individuals, inspired by Jefferson, Thoreau, Melville […]. America is the potential of the man without particularities, the Original Man” (85). Similarly, the M.M.M. is a realm in which the principles and habits of the parent country are inapplicable. Immigrants without particularities roam free, despite attempts to bring them back from the dead, infuse them with reason, convince them of the laws of State philosophy: On this basis the patients were described as “cut-off” from reality, from the rudimentary blessings of the layman’s reality, if not altogether, as in the severer cases, then in certain fundamental respects. The function of treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable balanced manner, and comfort himself in the society of others in the same predicament. (177) The passage epitomizes, in Deleuzian terms, the clash between the molar and molecular realms. In their unreasonable, unbalanced manner, the “cut-off” patients enjoy a purely molecular lifestyle, secluded in a “pernicious little private dungheap” compared to the “glorious world” into which their doctors would “translate” them (the way colonizing regimes set out to “translate” incomprehensible “heathens” and introduce them to the language of the civilized world). As the sanatorium’s newest employee, Murphy quickly forms an opinion of the politics of his environment, despising, in Deleuzian fashion, the distinction between “healthy” society and the “mentally unfit.” The narrator explains, “All this was duly revolting to Murphy, whose experience as a physical and rational
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being obliged him to call sanctuary what the psychiatrists called exile and to think of the patients not as banished from a system of benefits but as escaped from a colossal fiasco” (177-78). Deleuze could hardly agree more, as most all of his writings champion an escape from the “colossal fiasco” of capitalism, psychoanalysis, cultural Imperialism, and philosophies of Transcendence. The M.M.M. serves as Murphy’s collective minor cry, its foreign language, its agrammaticality, its “tenor of Life.”16 Unfortunately, Murphy can only sit by and covet the sort of reality, the sort of brotherhood that the M.M.M. patients—Mr. Endon in particular—experience. Supremely disinterested, Mr. Endon is, to invoke Deleuze’s description of Bartleby, a “creature of innocence and purity.” His days are exemplary of molecular existence. Unlike Murphy, he never worries about shuffling off or denying his mortal coil, allowing the mind and body to operate in perfect conjunction or, perhaps, disjunction. Murphy, as Hesla refers to him, is a “Cartesian catastrophe” (36), but Mr. Endon is oblivious to such arborescent philosophy. Notably, he is a combination of the “immobile, curled up, seated, somber” (169) figure of exhaustion (Murphy in his chair) that Deleuze depicts in “The Exhausted” and those Beckett characters Deleuze and Guattari describe at the outset of Anti-Oedipus as a “finely-tuned machine.”17 Mr. Endon is sometimes still—“his eyes on some object immeasurably remote” (248)—and sometimes stirring, as when the little schizophrenic “drifts” across the plains of his rhizome-nation, his body entering into machinic relationships with his surroundings, relationships without molar purpose or meaning: “For quite some little time Mr. Endon had been drifting about the corridors, pressing here a light-switch and there an indicator, in a way that seemed haphazard but was in fact determined by an amental pattern as precise as any of those that governed his chess” (247). In his essay on Bartleby, Deleuze, echoing Kafka, asserts that Melville’s scrivener needs a place to take walks (85). The M.M.M. offers Mr. Endon (and its other Bartlebys) just such a locale, a realm to stretch his legs and avoid rooting himself, avoid committing himself to any specific plot of land. The purple-robed creature spreads across the expanse of his little America—a Bartleby On the Road, settling nowhere and everywhere: “One or two minutes was as long as Mr. Endon cared to pause in his drifting” (187). Mr. Endon’s ability to cast a blinding light on the world around him is also evocative of Deleuze’s vision of Bartleby. One will recall Deleuze’s above assertion that
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the “Original,” according to Melville, “throws a vivid white light on his surroundings, much like the light that ‘accompanies the beginning of things in Genesis’” (“Bartleby” 83). Deleuze continues, “Originals are sometimes the immobile source of light—like the foretopman high up on the mast, Billy Budd the bound, hanged man who ‘ascends’ with the glimmering of the dawn or Bartleby standing in the attorney’s office—and sometimes its dazzling passage, a movement too rapid for the ordinary eye to follow” (83). At one point in Murphy, Mr. Endon puts on a dazzling display as he squats “on the head of his bed, holding his left foot in his right hand and in his left hand his right foot […]. The light spurted off Mr. Endon north, south, east, west and in fifty-six other directions” (241). It is perhaps only an uncanny coincidence that Mr. Endon’s squatting position is one “characteristically assumed by […] prisoners sewing mail bags” (Ackerley 189) and that Bartleby once worked in a dead-letter office. Intriguingly, Mr. Endon (rather than Murphy) is responsible for Murphy’s most immanent, most molecular moment, an experience that at least one other scholar, Thomas Cousineau, contemplates in a Deleuzo-Guattarian context. In the novel’s climactic scene, Murphy stares into the blankness of his chess partner’s superbly de-facialized face (those black holes that were his eyes), but he fails to make any profound impact on the hirsute little man, just as the attorney fails to make a connection with Bartleby. Murphy begins to feel “incandescent” (250) and walks outside the M.M.M. to contemplate the pre-dawn, starless sky: He took off his clothes one by one as he went, quite forgetting they did not belong to him, and threw them away. When he was naked he lay down in a tuft of soaking tuffets and tried to get a picture of Celia. In vain. Of his mother. In vain. Of his father (for he was not illegitimate). In vain. It was usual for him to fail with his mother; and usual for him to fail with a woman. But never before had he failed with his father. (251) Earlier, Celia tells her grandfather that she has only a vague understanding of where Murphy comes from and no knowledge of his parents. Now, following the intense encounter with Mr. Endon, Murphy himself fails to conjure his origins, his family tree. While the narrator suggests he has experienced similar moments before (252), this is, significantly, the first time Murphy fails to envision his father, and, in short, he is afraid.
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Under the starless sky, Murphy endures an apocalyptic transformation from his role as an oedipalized subject to a Bartleby-like, Endon-like vagabond who brushes up against a realm where the paternal function is inoperative. Hill describes the moment as one that “returns Murphy to the blankness of birth, without knowledge of who he is” (16). Unable to “get a picture” of his parents, Murphy instead witnesses something akin to a painting by Picasso or Dalí or a theater following a production by Artaud: “Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as though reeled upward off a spool level with his throat” (252). In his psychoanalytic study, Keller believes Murphy’s vision results from an inability to “make himself visible to the mother that Endon represents” (85). Keller continues, “[Murphy] regresses into a primal position, where there are no whole objects, but only meaningless fragments. He is terribly alone, rage having destroyed his inner world […]” (85). From a Deleuzian perspective, however, the fragments are not meaningless but a sign of encroaching molecularity. Indeed, Murphy’s vision is strikingly similar to Deleuze’s account of rhizomatic life on the plane of immanence. Rather than organized subjects, Murphy sees only disorganized bodies, bodies without organs, “lines and colours.” In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari use similar language to describe the rhizome, “Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions […] the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions […]. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory” (21). Murphy’s experience outside the M.M.M. functions effectively as a kind of memory loss, as he can no longer view the past in his mind’s eye. The encounter with Mr. Endon triggers a form of amnesia, a form of schizophrenia more powerful than those controlled excursions into his mind. Without the help of his rocker, without quieting his body, without thinking, Murphy loses focus of his genealogy and the organization of the molar world. He forfeits his long-term memory and extends in all directions.18 Throughout his writings, Deleuze lobbies for just such a transformation, a metamorphosis in which the world might give up its images of the mother and father, its fascination with the mommy-daddy-me complex. Beneath the starless sky, Murphy derails from the big world and its hierarchical systems and experiences himself as the “man without references”—son to none.
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Murphy’s dramatic crossing-over is short-lived. According to Cousineau’s Deleuzo-Guattarian gloss, Murphy’s subsequent retreat from this encounter with the fragmented body […] shows that his self-proclaimed pursuit of chaos has its limits. He is in flight from such external representatives as Miss Counihan, Celia and the doctors, but remains committed to the prerogatives of the unified self against those of the bodily fragments over which it has asserted its dominance. (73) Immediately following the experience, Murphy turns tail and decides that he does, after all, prefer, PREFER, PREFER the big world. He has not reached the echelons of the content schizo who, as Deleuze and Guattari describe in Anti-Oedipus, “has simply ceased being afraid of becoming mad” (131), who “experiences and lives himself as the sublime sickness that will no longer affect him” (131). As Ackerley asserts, “[T]he loss of apperception is a price, Murphy now understands, that he is not prepared to pay” (200). Mr. Endon and the M.M.M. brotherhood prove too much (or perhaps too little, too minor) for Murphy, and he is unwilling to be what Deleuze calls Bartleby: “an Original.” He races back to his garret like the nameless narrator fleeing the falling House of Usher: He rose and hastened to the garret, running till he was out of breath, then walking, then running again, and so on. He drew up the ladder, lit the dip sconced in its own grease on the floor and tied himself up in the chair, dimly intending to have a short rock and then, if he felt any better, to dress and go, before the day staff were about, leaving Ticklepenny to face the music, MUSIC, MUSIC, back to brewery road, to Celia […]. (252) Murphy’s desire to leave the M.M.M. further reveals him as the pseudo-Bartleby and bolsters Mr. Endon as the man without qualities, without preferences. That is to say, Murphy chooses Brewery Road and Celia, who insists on his becoming a practical man, who perceives him. In Deleuzian terms, he chooses molar society, chooses to don his “monstrous hood” once again, chooses to speak the language of the majority, chooses a chess partner who will play by traditional rules. Murphy sees Plymouth Rock, but he never achieves a complete migration, never pushes through the wall shoved near to him. As Ben-Zvi argues, “Having looked into the face of total indifference and self-absorption,
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Murphy realizes his own inability to obliterate the outer world, short of death” (49).19 Mr. Endon, on the other hand, moves on in his flight across America, paying no mind, so to speak, to the call of the practical world, no mind to the culture that would make of him a practical man, a practical chess player. Mr. Endon simply prefers not to engage his opponent, keeping everyone, as Deleuze says of Bartleby, at a distance. More than Murphy, Mr. Endon proves to be evocative of Deleuze’s vision of Bartleby: “a pure outsider [exclu] to whom no social position can be attributed” (73). Following Deleuze’s logic, Beckett is thus akin not only to Melville but to all great American novelists. Recall Deleuze’s comment from his essay on Bartleby: “The founding act of the American novel, like that of the Russian novel, was to take the novel far from the order of reasons, and to give birth to characters who exist in nothingness, survive only in the void, defy logic and psychology and keep their mystery until the end” (“Bartleby” 81). Deleuze might as well be talking about Mr. Endon. One would be remiss not to mention Mr. Endon’s own affinity for games of permutations. In chapter 11, for example, the narrator describes how the schizophrenic occupies himself by bankrupting the different combinations in which the lights can be turned on and off: Murphy found him [Mr. Endon] in the south transept, gracefully stationed before the hypomanic’s pad, ringing the changes on the various ways in which the indicator could be pressed and the light turned on and off. Beginning with the light turned off to begin with he had: lit, indicated, extinguished; lit, extinguished, indicated; indicated, lit, extinguished. Continuing then with the light turned on to begin with he had: extinguished, lit, indicated; extinguished, indicated, lit; indicated, extinguished and was seriously thinking of lighting when Murphy stayed his hand. (247) Unlike Murphy, who has to fight off his preference for ginger to exhaust his game with the biscuits, Mr. Endon is always-already without preference. He shows no care for any particular combination or permutation and is content merely to explore the possible. Mr. Endon, to borrow yet another of Deleuze and Guattari’s descriptions of the happy schizo, “produces himself as a free man, irresponsible, solitary, and joyous, finally able to say
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and do something simply in his own name, without asking permission […]” (Anti- Oedipus 131). Mr. Endon is a picture of “I would prefer not to.” Yet, as Beckett famously warns and many critics continue to repeat, “the danger is in the neatness of identifications.” For even as Mr. Endon appears to be the better example of Deleuze’s preference-less hero (the better Bartleby), the ever-unreliable narrator20 of Beckett’s novel pulls the proverbial rug out from under our feet, forcing a reconsideration of the arguments at hand. Ackerley’s flawless eye for detail reveals that Mr. Endon’s light-switch game is only seemingly exhaustive, noting in his annotations of Murphy that “the options do not form a complete set of permutations, unlike the biscuits in the park, since missing from the off position is the option of indicated, extinguished, lit” (197). One might argue that Mr. Endon’s game is still one of non-preference and that Murphy is the one who keeps it from finishing (“Murphy stayed his hand.”). Still, the series remains, at least in the text, incomplete. Possibilities linger. To recall Harrison’s phraseology, the infinite computer has calculations yet to grind out, the finite circle is not closed. Mr. Endon is a man without preferences, but, unlike Bartleby’s, his actions leave alternatives on the table. He now fails where Murphy, in the park with the biscuits, succeeds. The novel stays our hand. The thesis slips. Gliss—iss—iss—. . . Ackerley’s discovery, however, hardly frustrates a schizoanalytic reading of “Bartleby” and Murphy. In the face of a problematized thesis, thought goes on, new doorways begin to open. Deleuze abhors definitive readings, blocked-off corridors, firmly rooted philosophies. The French theorist looks not for conclusions, and when the text appears to close off a particular pathway of understanding and prefers not to yield to its readers’ expectations, he begs that we search for others. As Deleuze and Guattari assert at the outset of Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, “We will be trying only to discover what other points our entrance connects to, what crossroads and galleries one passes through to link two points, what the map of the rhizome is and how the map is modified if one enter by another point” (3). Admittedly, the present study may reveal that Bartleby, Murphy, and Mr. Endon have as many differences as similarities, but, more importantly, it forms a rhizomatic relationship with Deleuze’s passing remark in “The Exhausted” and opens up new lines of thought, new experiments, and new perspectives. Deleuze connects Bartleby to Murphy, but the analysis refuses to stop there—indeed it
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only begins there, growing not like a tree but like . . . ginger. In a Frostian echo, way quickly and happily leads on to way. “Only the principle of multiple entrances,” Deleuze and Guattari maintain in Kafka, “prevents the introduction of the enemy, the Signifier and those attempts to interpret a work that is actually only open to experimentation” (3).
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CHAPTER TWO
BECKETT’S VICTORS
For the problem is not to go beyond the bounds of reason, it is to cross the bounds of unreason as a victor […]. —Gilles Deleuze, “Louis Wolfson; or, The Procedure”
In his 1996 study Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph, H. Porter Abbott contends that Samuel Beckett’s first full-length play, Eleuthéria, is an early, if rudimentary, experiment in “autography”—a form of writing in which Beckett struggles to rid his texts of lineal narrative and “the closely allied issue of paternity” (11).1 Abbott argues that traditional narration rests upon the model of filiation (procreation and imitation) and that Beckett’s work reveals a persistent effort to move beyond the bounds of the father-son narrative and the father-son model of narrative fiction. According to Abbott, Beckett explores the relationship between filiation and narration through the life and proclivities of the central protagonist of Eleuthéria, Victor Krap. Abbott writes, “Correspondingly, Victor’s dramatically unsatisfying nonpattern of anarratological movement, his oozing, is of a piece with his nonrelation to the paternal home. Both belong to the narratricidal matrix” (72). For Abbott, Eleuthéria thus represents Beckett’s thematic use of anti-filiation to complement his attempted departure from conventional narrative drama. Victor’s detachment from his family signals, in Abbott’s eyes, a drive to step outside of time and exist only in the present—a drive Beckett himself shares as a writer (16 and passim). Abbott’s reading of father-son relationships in Eleuthéria is learned and provocative. I would like to continue the discussion of filiation and, more significantly, explore how Victor yearns not only to abandon lineal descent but implements an alternate form of procreation, what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as propagation by epidemic or
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contagion. For the French theorists, characters like Victor Krap strive to break free of their family ties to escape the “diabolical powers”2 that inform and pervade filial and pseudo-filial relationships. Victor anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the “new man” or the “man without particularities” who seeks to exist as an orphan and produces other men and women without qualities by means of contamination. “We oppose epidemic to filiation,” Deleuze and Guattari proclaim, “contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction” (Thousand 241). In Eleuthéria, Victor disrupts the order of filiation to introduce in its place a community of brothers and sisters. Characters who come into contact with Victor undergo immanent alterations of both mind and body. Throughout their writings, Deleuze and Guattari applaud solitary wanderers, men without family trees, men who repel attempts by the molar world to turn them into sons. Herman Melville’s oeuvre offers striking examples. In his discussion of Melville’s novels and stories, Deleuze argues that characters such as Redburn, Pierre, Bartleby, and others are surrounded by images, paintings, and statues of the father: “But in each case, something strange happens, something that blurs the image, marks it with an essential uncertainty, keeps the form from ‘taking,’ but also undoes the subject, sets it adrift and abolishes any paternal function” (“Bartleby” 77).3 Deleuze goes on to praise Melville for his vision of a “universal fraternity that no longer passes through the father, but is built on the ruins of the paternal function” (78). Deleuze fantasizes about Melville’s society of brothers and sisters, his society of “originals”: To liberate man from the father function, to give birth to the new man or the man without particularities, to reunite the original and humanity by constituting a society of brothers as a new universality. In the society of brothers, alliance replaces filiation and the blood pact replaces consanguinity. Man is indeed the blood brother of his fellow man, and woman, his blood sister: according to Melville, this is the community of celibates, drawing its members into an unlimited becoming. (84) Deleuze and Guattari’s hero, then, is the man who endeavors not to endeavor and who infects others with his becoming. Bartleby, for instance, not only baffles capitalist New York, but he also “contaminates the others, sending the attorney fleeing” (76). Bartleby
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prefers not to accept his boss’s paternal guidance, prefers not to be a son. Melville’s originals thus escape subjectivity, inhabiting a world in which “All referents are lost, and the formation [formation] of man gives way to a new, unknown element, to the mystery of a formless, nonhuman life” (77). The “nonhuman life”—the man without qualities—is only possible when it no longer shares in the bonds of filiation. As Deleuze explains, Melville’s celibates must wage war “against the Universal or the Whole, the fusion of souls in the name of great love or charity” (“Bartleby” 87). In Eleuthéria, Victor Krap likewise resists the “great love or charity” of authority figures and shuns filiation. The few critics who address Beckett’s play note Victor’s agon with his family and, more generally, his spite for bourgeois culture. Ruby Cohn, for instance, sees Victor as “a sensitive young man misunderstood in the bourgeois world” (163) and asserts that “he belongs to the lineage of the sensitive idealistic rebel” (172). Martin Esslin observes that the play is about “a young man’s efforts to cut himself loose from his family and social obligations” (35). Deirdre Bair echoes Esslin in her biography on Beckett, asserting, “[T]he action concerns the efforts of young Victor Krap to free himself from the constrictions and restraints of his bourgeois family” (361). Gerry Dukes likewise describes Victor as “a young man in retreat from the nullity of his bourgeois family” (75). Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld view Victor from a similar perspective, claiming that he searches for freedom “not to assume a pre-existing social or theatrical role” (31). Yet Victor, more specifically, helps to erect a society of brothers and sisters in place of bourgeois society. James Knowlson rightly observes that Victor’s “lack of definition” is contagious (330), but it is an extraordinary kind of contagion that functions as a method of unnatural propagation. Victor disturbs the maternal and paternal functions to people a universe of men and women without qualities. The play’s title, then, pertains not merely to Victor’s personal freedom, but to the freedom that various characters sense (or at least begin to sense) because of him. He introduces immanence into their world of transcendence, altering not merely how they view their places in the universe but how they move, feel, and carry themselves. Victor likes to walk. During the opening moments of the play, he undertakes an aimless voyage: Victor in bed. Motionless. There is no need to see him at once. He
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moves this way and that, sits up in bed, gets up, goes back and forth, in his stocking feet, in every direction, from the window to the footlights, from the door to the invisible barrier on the main action side, slowly and vaguely, often stops, looks out the window, toward the audience, goes back to sit on the bed, gets back in bed, becomes motionless, gets up again, resumes his walk, etc. (4-5) Victor’s is a journey of intensities and vibrations. He traverses the vacuous territory of his bachelor pad of immanence, experiencing movement for its own sake. His Parisian bedsit is devoid of molar amenities, containing “only a folding bedstead and nothing more” (5). In the emptiness, Victor discovers a molecular domain, what Deleuze and Guattari call a plane of consistency: “On the plane of consistency, a body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness […]. Nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds” (Thousand 260). Victor’s to and fro movements are without molar purpose, an exercise in speed and slowness, motion and rest. Beckett’s stage directions explain that Victor’s movements “do follow just the same a most decided rhythm and pattern” (5), but the pattern is asignifying, or rather self-signifying. Victor’s stirrings are like those of Kafka’s animal-characters who inhabit zones where, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “There is no longer anything but movements, vibrations, thresholds in a deserted matter” (Kafka 13).4 Victor’s walking is in direct contrast to the activities transpiring simultaneously in the Kraps’ morning room on the other side of the stage, which is also the other side of Paris.5 The salon (Knowlson calls it “Ibsen-style” [329]) contains all the amenities of bourgeois society: “a highly elegant round table, four period chairs, an armchair, a floor lamp and a sconce” (3). In the room the servants come and go, announcing guests and serving tea. The opening lines of the play reveal the Krap morning room as a realm of rigid hierarchies and customs: MME. KRAP. (With a start) Come in. (Enter Jacques. He holds out to Mme. Krap a tray bearing a calling card. She takes up the card, looks at it, puts it back on the tray) Well? (Jacques uncomprehending) Well? (Jacques uncomprehending) What
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brutishness! (Jacques lowers his head) I thought I told you I was not in for anybody, except for Madame Meck. The Krap home is the molar counterplane to Victor’s molecular desert. The Kraps and their friends champion traditional manners and habits, and they move and operate under the laws of molarity. Their home is a place of power and oppression—a place in which men and women judge and are judged: “So, Marguerite, at last you’re a respectable woman” (18). Significantly, the realm of judgment is not completely detached from Victor’s molecular apartment. As in Molloy, the two planes intersect.6 According to Anthony Uhlmann, Molloy and Moran inhabit respectively the molecular and molar planes, yet they affect each other: “[T]he world Beckett expresses presupposes two ‘planes’ or possibilities of existence, two planes which interpenetrate and are confused with one another but which nevertheless remain distinct” (58). Uhlmann contends that Moran undergoes the more powerful transformation, but he also argues that Molloy is not immune to the pull of the molar plane: “While in the case of Molloy, the molar phenomena are subordinated to the molecular phenomena, he is still subject to the return of those molar phenomena, their incursions on to the plane of consistency” (80). Garin Dowd describes a similar interpenetration of planes in his reading of How It Is. Dowd argues that the “amorphous plane” of mud is at odds with the organized structures of the “life above”: “Justice in the mud consists in resisting transcendence under all its guises” (22). In Eleuthéria, Beckett illustrates the “interpenetration” of the two planes by not placing a partition between the Krap morning room (molar plane; “life above”) and Victor’s cross-town bedsit (molecular plane; “amorphous mud”). As Beckett’s stage directions describe, “There is no partition. Victor’s room moves imperceptibly on into the Kraps’ morning room, as the sullied into the clean, the sordid into the decent, breadth into clutter” (3). The molar world thus penetrates Victor’s immanent space and vice versa. And even though Victor’s room finally sweeps the molar world off the stage—the Kraps’ morning room scenery “having fallen into the pit” (4) by the end of the play—his molecular realm is never completely free, as the final lines of Act III reveal, from the encroachment of molar forces.
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Victor’s effect on the molar plane is gradual. In the first act, his own father, Henri Krap, is the first to evidence a loss of interest in molar society and in the significance of familial bonds. While the women speak of Victor’s ridiculous and irresponsible living arrangements, Henri sticks up for his son: MME. PIOUK. But something must be done! He can’t be left like that. M. KRAP. Like what? MME. PIOUK. In that—that sordid inertia. M. KRAP. And if it’s what he wants. MME. PIOUK. But it’s a disgrace to the family! MME. MECK. It’s not right at his age. (22) Later, Henri declares unequivocally that “My son’s way is the truth” (26) and, moreover, that he too yearns to abandon the molar plane: “I’m cutting loose” (26). Specifically, Henri is cutting loose from his participation as a man with a past and a future. When Dr. Andre Piouk (a doctor interested in mankind, but only generally) asks whether Henri might be tempted to write a “small book of memoirs” (35), a kind of anamnesis or re- visitation of his childhood, Henri replies, “That would spoil the death throes” (35). As their conversation continues, Henri soon recants his paternal authority: “I have no family” (36). The Krap patriarch is slowly becoming, like his son, a man without a biography, without a history, without a memory. Henri gives up his paternal function permanently at midnight on the first day of the play. As Mme. Meck reports to Victor in Act II, “Your father is dead. […] He died last night, in his armchair” (76-77). Yet Victor is not free of a father for long. Indeed, following Henri’s death, tribunals begin to form and invade Victor’s celibate realm. Father surrogates surround him, seeking to force him to submit to a paternal figure and, in turn, to the hierarchies of molar life. Like Bartleby, however, Victor will contaminate his would-be fathers, men who live by the logic of Oedipus. Victor infects most notably the Glazier, the man who steps in and tries to convince Victor that he needs to return to his family and fiancée. After doing battle with the man without qualities, the Glazier finally realizes that he himself is nothing more than a lost son. The Glazier first appears at the beginning of Act II.7 Victor is again taking his walks. He is “Sordidly dressed, in his stocking feet, he moves back and forth” (65).
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Victor’s first words are likewise sordid and ill conceived: “I must say . . . I am not . . .” (65). The stuttering Victor leaves off and continues walking. He quickly echoes his broken language with a broken window, picking up his shoe and tossing it through the glass pane. The Glazier enters immediately to repair it, “with all his gear and Victor’s shoe in his hand” (65). The entrance of the repairman signals not merely that the window is broken but that Victor’s language, Victor’s logic is damaged, corrupt, in pieces. The Glazier arrives on the scene as much to remove the ellipses from Victor’s molecular logic as to put the glass back in place. Significantly, the Glazier is not alone. Michel, his ten- year-old son, accompanies him as his assistant. The filial pair come to re-establish filiation in Victor’s orphanage. The relationship between the Glazier and Michel is a harbinger of pairings in other Beckett plays.8 Pozzo and Lucky, for example, are a master-assistant couple. Like Lucky, who makes his entrance carrying a “heavy bag, a folding stool, a picnic basket and a greatcoat” (15), Michel enters carrying the Glazier’s supplies: “Enter a young boy, with a box in his hand” (65). The way in which the Glazier sometimes demands objects from his son simply by naming the object (“The tape measure” [89]; “The hammer” [97]) is particularly portentous of the way Pozzo requests supplies from Lucky (“Coat!”; “Whip!”; “Stool!” [16]). The Glazier’s young assistant also foreshadows Clov in Endgame, a creature who adheres to the requests of his frightful father-figure Hamm and, like Michel, takes care of the tools—steps, axe, and gaff. Significantly, Michel “is the one who carries the putty” (65), as the Glazier tells Victor, intimating that Michel is a son fit for molding, a young child whose body and mind carry the putty the Glazier will fashion in his image. Over the course of Act II, the Glazier will indeed attempt to fashion Michel into a respectable young man and, in turn, spread filiation across Victor’s bedsit. The father-son team aims to taint Victor’s bachelor pad and restore the myth of fatherhood in the place of celibacy. Victor’s father may be dead, but the paternal function persists. Molar troops have arrived. Victor’s molecular domain is in jeopardy. The Glazier has come to play the surrogate, to endow Victor with qualities, to use all of his tools (the hammer, the chisel, the tape measure, the putty, the diamond, etc.) to reconstruct an arborescent structure in Victor’s Parisian apartment. Victor senses danger
59 shortly after meeting the repairman: “They sent you to spy on me?” (66). The Glazier replies innocently: “You wouldn’t have broken the window then I wouldn’t be here. (A silence. The Glazier is working) Do you not see, Monsieur, what must be admired about me is that I am useless” (66). Yet the Glazier soon goes to work on Victor’s logic, though he is the one who ends up, like Moran, abandoning his stations on the molar plane. The Glazier often lashes out at Victor, demanding he break his silence and show some emotion, some concern for his family, some grief over his father’s death: “Answer, will you please!” (76), the Glazier yells, trying to extract molar qualities from Victor, just as the attorney tries to get Bartleby to respond to his questions at the law office: “‘Bartleby!’ No answer” (117). Not long into their conversation, the Glazier’s hostility toward Victor grows, and he intensifies his attempt to mold Victor into a molar subject. They entertain a heated dialogue after the Glazier says to Victor, “You know, it is time that you explained yourself” (81): VICTOR. Explain myself? GLAZIER. Well, yes. It cannot go on like this. VICTOR. But I am at a loss to understand. Besides I have nothing to say to you. Who are you? I do not know you. Get lost. (Pause) And out. GLAZIER. Now, now, it would do you good to explain yourself a bit. VICTOR. (With a howl) I tell you I am at a loss to understand. GLAZIER. Explain yourself, no, I am not saying that, I did not put it right. Define yourself, there. It is time that you defined yourself a little. You are around like a sort of—what is the way to say it?— like a sort of ooze. Like a sanies, there. Take on a little contour for the love of God. (81) The Glazier’s words represent the collective voice of Victor’s family and friends. They would all have Victor “define” himself, “take on a little contour.” The Glazier speaks to Victor as if he, like the young Michel, “carries the putty,” as if he is made of clay that an authority figure can mold and shape into a respectable being. The Glazier would fashion Victor into a molar subject who dresses properly, who walks in straight lines rather than
60 in every direction, and who reacts to the death of his father. “Feeling is what is needed” (87), the Glazier tells Victor. The Glazier soon realizes he is making little progress with Victor, and upon hearing Victor state his one desire (“To do nothing” [89]), the repairman’s frustration intensifies (Controlling himself with difficulty [89]). He quickly demands Michel give him the tape measure, a self-assuring sign that he still possesses authority despite his failure to sway Victor. Intriguingly, the Glazier and Michel then break into song: Beautiful is France, Her destinies are blessed, As one we advance, As hers we live best, Over the mountains, o— (89-90) The song is, significantly, one of nationalist pride, what Abbot refers to as a “rousing hymn to the progress of the nation” (71). The song indicates that the Glazier is more than a father figure who wants to give Victor “a little contour.” Indeed, the song scene marks a critical moment in the play, revealing how the father (or in this case a father surrogate) is a “conduit” for the motives and ambitions of the state. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari explain, “The judges, commissioners, bureaucrats, and so on, are not substitutes for the father; rather, it is the father who is a condensation of all these forces that he submits to and that he tries to get his son to submit to. The family opens onto doors, on which from the beginning there knock ‘“diabolical powers” that rejoice from the fact that they will arrive soon’” (12). “Diabolical powers” knock on Victor’s door through the words of the Glazier’s song, arriving to convince Victor that “Beautiful is France […] As one we advance.” The Glazier (like all paternal figures) is thus a tool for the molar forces that would convert Victor into an upstanding and productive citizen. Eerily, Mme. Skunk, Victor’s fiancée, materializes during the Glazier’s song, as if summoned by it—a creature who speaks on behalf of the state to disturb Victor’s celibacy. Mme. Skunk’s presence represents another institution that would devour Victor, make him part of the state’s apparatus, allow him to produce biological Victors of his own who might, in turn, produce more Victors. A harbinger of future filiation, Mme.
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Skunk goes to work quickly and begins to remind Victor of his father and his previous life in the bourgeois world. “You loved me,” she says, “You worked. You joked around with your father. You travelled. You—” (92). Victor, however, only responds to the woman’s interrogations with proclamations of ignorance and confusion: “I do not know” (95); “I do not understand” (95). The young man’s refusal to play into Mme. Skunk’s hand conjures more diabolical powers, more tribunals of judgment that literally come knocking on Victor’s door. At first, the Glazier tries to keep the crowd of people from entering the apartment, as if he, like Victor, is beginning to repel the molar world. His Victorization is still in its early phases, however, and upon hearing that a doctor is one of the visitors, the Glazier quickly moves aside to let in the man who might get to the root of Victor’s lack of interest in his former life. Reinforcements at last! Dr. Piouk relieves the Glazier temporarily as the paternal surrogate, a man who will, like the attorney in “Bartleby,” offer a little philanthropy, a little charity to the wayward Victor (though the doctor is, in Act I, contradictory in his view of fatherhood, professing distaste for procreation and then immediately declaring his desire to have a child [43-44]). He and the members of his tribunal gather around the young man’s bed to have a closer look: DR PIOUK. That is Victor there? (A silence. Mme. Meck, Mlle. Skunk, Dr. and Mme. Piouk around the bed. Dr. Piouk takes out his watch, bends over, takes Victor’s wrist. A silence. Victor jumps up, elbows his way through the group, looks for his shoe, finds one, sticks his foot in, looks for the other) VICTOR. (Piteously) My shoe! Dr. Piouk believes Victor’s behavior must be some type of illness, some somatic disease that causes the young man to have no desire for marriage, his family, his work. At the sight of Dr. Piouk, Victor again reveals his desire to take to the road—to walk the motiveless walk of the man without qualities. While the doctor attempts to take his pulse, Victor only cares to find his shoes. Like Büchner’s Lenz, he pursues freedom in travel—not travel to somewhere but to nowhere in particular. Deleuze and Guattari open Anti-Oedipus with a tribute to the travelling Lenz: “While taking a stroll outdoors […] he
62 is in the mountains, amid falling snowflakes, with other gods or without any gods at all, without a family, without a father or a mother, with nature” (2). Dr. Piouk’s assessment of the Victor dilemma involves “finding a suitable means to—how should I put it?—to restore him to himself and therefore to others” (108). Yet only minutes into his hour upon the stage, the doctor begins to act strangely, as if Victor’s immanence seizes hold of Dr. Piouk’s transcendence. According to Beckett’s stage directions, “All of a sudden Dr. Piouk has slightly disjointed gestures, starts a dance step, makes odd movements with his arms, like signals, in other words, such as suit the actor’s fancy, then comes to a stop. Mild embarrassment” (111). Dr. Piouk’s “disjointed” bodily movements indicate that his molar body is beginning to experience its molecularity. To recall Deleuze’s description of Melville’s originals, the doctor “gives way to a new, unknown element, to the mystery of a formless, nonhuman life.” If only momentarily, he succumbs to the tugs of what Deleuze and Guattari often refer to as the “body without organs,” the body without organization. It is an instance of theatrical cruelty, in the Artaudian sense—a brief display of the doctor’s immanent regions. Dr. Piouk’s dance is, to adapt Artaud, a “frenetic dance of rigidities and angles, in which one suddenly feels the mind begin to plummet downwards” (65).9 Like Victor’s walking, Dr. Piouk’s movements are self-signifying, disturbing the structures, customs, and expectations of the molar community, which explains his embarrassment when the dance ceases and he is able to recalibrate, reorganize, re-molarize. Nevertheless, he is temporarily reborn by contagion, undergoing what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a “becoming-intense” or a “becoming-animal.” Like Victor at the outset of the play, Dr. Piouk feels his body (at least during the dancing scene) only in terms of longitude and latitude, differential speeds. Shortly following his dance step, Dr. Piouk resolves to help Victor by giving him the chance to commit suicide and makes his exit just before the end of Act II. The act does not end, however, until the Glazier and Michel abandon their filial relationship to enter into a brotherhood. Michel relieves his father of the paternal function during a discussion of happiness and hunger. The Glazier begins the conversation by explaining to his son the difference between a sandwich and a tartine (another symbol of his
63 penchant for order and strict definitions), but the dialogue ends with a declaration of paternal ignorance and impotence: GLAZIER. Are you happy with me? MICHEL. What is it, happy, papa? […] GLAZIER. You know when there is something that pleases you. It’s a good feeling, isn’t it? MICHEL. Yes, papa. GLAZIER. Well then, happy is pretty much that. (A silence) So, are you happy? MICHEL. No, papa. GLAZIER. And why is that? MICHEL. I don’t know, papa […] GLAZIER. What do you like to do? MICHEL. I don’t know. GLAZIER. What do you mean, you don’t know? Something has to be the matter. MICHEL. (Upon reflection) I like when I am in bed, before I go to sleep. GLAZIER. And why is that? MICHEL. I don’t know, papa. (A silence) As the conversation continues, Michel sticks to his claim of ignorance: GLAZIER. Then say why you like when you are in bed. MICHEL. (Upon reflection) I don’t know, papa. (A silence) GLAZIER. You are still hungry. MICHEL. Yes, papa. GLAZIER. (Giving him the sandwich) Here, eat that. MICHEL. (Hesitating) But it’s yours, papa. GLAZIER. (Forcefully) Eat! (A silence) MICHEL. You aren’t hungry any more, papa?
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GLAZIER. No. MICHEL. And why is that? (A silence) GLAZIER. I don’t know, Michel. (A silence) (121-23) The conversation reads like a platonic dialogue, yet the conclusion is a confirmation of unknowingness rather than philosophical understanding. In his analysis of the scene, Abbott emphasizes the “gravitational pull” of Victor on the young Michel, who “declares to the Glazier’s surprise that what he likes best is lying in bed like Victor” (Abbott 83). Yet the final line of the conversation is the most significant, as it transmogrifies the father into a son. Indeed, the Glazier responds to Michel with a claim of ignorance, echoing Victor’s infamous “I don’t know” formula. Like Bartleby, Michel “strip[s] the father of his exemplary speech” (Deleuze “Bartleby” 77). When he first appears on the scene, the Glazier is confident in his fatherly abilities. He offers charity to both his son and his pseudo-son, Victor. He demands that they both take on a little contour, but at the close of Act II, he is the one who begins to ooze, who begins to lose shape, who experiences a becoming-child, a becoming-Michel. He and his son, in turn, enter into the society of brothers, of men without qualities, allied in their freedom from fully understanding the molar world and its logic. Throughout much of the second act, the Glazier is the master of his craft, the molder of his son, a nationalist. The final line, however, reveals that he is nothing more than a lost orphan and that the paternal function is, as Deleuze echoing James Joyce asserts, “an emptiness, a nothingness—or rather, a zone of uncertainty haunted by brothers, by the brother and sister” (“Bartleby” 84). Moran experiences a transformation similar to the Glazier while searching for the wayward Molloy. Moran begins with absolute fatherly control of his young son, Jacques: “Stop messing about with your mouth! I cried. Go to the window and tell me if it’s still raining. He went to the window and told me it was still raining. Is the sky completely overcast? I said. Yes, he said. Not the least rift? I said. No, he said. Draw the curtains, I said” (Molloy 104). As Uhlmann reveals, however, Moran finally breaks free of the molar order and, like the Glazier at the end of his conversation with Michel, ends up in a state of confusion and unknowingness. Near the end of the novel, Moran relates, “And
65 yet I had not shaved since the day my son brought back the bicycle from Hole nor combed my hair, nor washed, not to mention all the privations I had suffered and the great inward metamorphoses” (163). The mise-en-scène for Act III further symbolizes Victor’s impact on the order and tyranny of paternal authority. The Krap family salon is now “swallowed up by the pit” and, in Victor’s room, the “Door is ajar, windowpane broken, Glazier’s tools in disorder on the floor” (125). The “tools in disorder” represent the chaos and confusion that infect the Glazier at the end of Act II. He is much less of an authority figure than when he first steps onto the stage, Michel and toolbox neatly in tow. Yet the repairman has not let go completely of his attachment to the paternal function. He continues to speak on behalf of the diabolical powers even amid the disorder, ignorance, and impotence. He still asks Victor to “take shape. The faintest glimmer of sense” (125), and he banters with Victor about his indigent aspirations. Before he makes his final exit from the stage, however, the Glazier hands over his tools to Victor and leaves his work unfinished: VICTOR. You’re leaving the window like that? GLAZIER. Yes. VICTOR. And the door? GLAZIER. I’m leaving it like that. VICTOR. You’re coming back tomorrow? GLAZIER. No. VICTOR. Then take your belongings. GLAZIER. I’m giving them to you. (171) According to McMillan and Fehsenfeld, the Glazier’s tools represent his role as stage manager and authorial presence: “His tools are the mastic which holds things together, the measure for assessing character and situation, the hammer and scissors with which he forcibly does away with unnecessary elements like the wrestler” (41). McMillan and Fehsenfeld also contend that all the Glazier’s attempts to produce an admirable play end in failure (42) and that giving the tools to Victor “relinquishes to him the role of authorial presence” (42). Yet, in addition to its metatheatrical value, the hand-over is also a relinquishing of the paternal function. The Glazier comes to take Victor under his wing, to organize his disorganized existence. When he gives his tools to Victor, he admits
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defeat, admits that Victor is the better craftsman, admits that he is unable to construct a molar institution where Victor takes his walks. In fact, toward the end of the play, the Glazier himself begins to take walks, similar to the aimless voyage Victor endures as the play commences: “The Glazier’s hysterical laughter. He goes back and forth with wayward gestures” (153). The Glazier’s abandonment of his tools foreshadows Hamm’s tossing away his property at the close of Endgame. Hamm, Clov’s paternal figure, thinks he has lost his adopted son. Indeed, Clov stands at the door, “dressed for the road” (82). Hamm begins to relieve himself of his belongings, including his gaff and whistle, as if to suggest the loss of fatherly control. One of the Glazier’s final lines, “Our time here is ended” (184), strengthens his connection to Hamm, who says toward the close of Endgame, “Our revels now are ended” (56). One can also find an analogy for the Glazier’s loss of his tools in Pozzo’s inability to make authoritative use of his supplies near the end of Godot. While in the first act Pozzo exudes authority over his servant Lucky, in the second act he is at the mercy of Lucky and needs help employing his whip and shortened rope (57). Pozzo still possesses his tools; however, he is blind and, consequently, as much a follower as a leader. Like the Glazier, Dr. Piouk shows further signs of his becoming-Victor in Act III. For instance, Mme. Piouk enters to inform that her husband has suffered from physical ailments during the night, another attack of immanence: “Of the liver no doubt…? At any rate, it matters little. An attack of one sort or another” (151). Thus Dr. Piouk not only experiences an immanent becoming during the disjointed dance scene in the second act but continues to deteriorate, continues to lose some of his molar qualities as the play moves on. The doctor finally enters to administer the morphine to Victor, but he has obviously changed over the three-day period. Victor is indeed multiplying but by epidemic rather than filiation. The great irony in Eleuthéria is that eleuthéria, the freedom that comes from the society of brothers and sisters, is not free. The tools Victor receives from the Glazier soon reveal the vermin’s entrapment in molar society. They enable him to fulfill his financial obligations to his landlady, Mme. Karl, a name McMillan and Fehsenfeld see as an allusion to Karl Marx: “She is preoccupied with material circumstances. […] Mrs.
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Karl is the keeper of the door. She wants to know whether Victor is staying or going. If he is staying, she wants her bill paid” (McMillan and Fehsenfeld 43-44). After all other characters leave Victor in peace, germs of molarity remain. Indeed, Victor is in debt to Mme. Karl, the owner of his plane of immanence, the proprietor of the place where he takes his walks. She enters not into the society of brothers and sisters, adhering to the requirements and schemes of capitalism to the final curtain. The end of Beckett’s play thus demonstrates what Uhlmann argues in his aforementioned analysis of Molloy: the molar and molecular planes are ultimately inextricable, always-already invading each other. Victor is a man without qualities, but he is also a man with a rent payment. In her analysis of Eleuthéria, Bair comments that the play is a failure because Victor cannot find a way to articulate his rebellion. She argues that Victor does not possess “the proper dialogue to state his reasons for rebellion against his family and the society in which they live. In a play in which everything else is carefully stated, fully delineated, and logically explained, the failure of the central character to stand for something—anything—is a major failure” (363). Yet Victor’s inarticulateness is, in fact, what saves him from being a full-fledged member of the molar world. His stuttering logic designates him as a minoritarian—in the Deleuzian sense. He speaks a minor language that the molar representatives who interrogate him simply cannot interpret, cannot fathom, cannot accept. The tribunals penetrate Victor’s plane of immanence, make their demands, offer the young man charity. As in the works of Melville and Kafka, the diabolical powers and institutions speak through paternal conduits who encourage Victor to pursue a job, a wife, a sense of national pride. Beckett’s protagonist, however, achieves victories—sometimes ephemeral, sometimes perpetual—over his fathers. He rejects the Glazier’s advancements, leaves Dr. Piouk with no choice but to declare him a schizophrenic, and finally gets in bed with “his scrawny back turned on mankind” (191). The scene evokes the end of “Bartleby,” in which the scrawny scrivener, having refused to eat while in prison, lies dead in the Tombs. Victor, then, is largely, but not entirely, a victor. The molar world experiences his immanence, but he never fully escapes its institutions and organizations. Victor recoils from his family, his would-be paternal surrogates, the doctor who would cure him of his malaise. Indeed, he infects the Glazier, Michel, Dr. Piouk, and others, allowing them to
68 sense the effects of molecular existence within his plane of consistency. His universe ultimately pushes the Krap salon out of view. Yet he is finally unable to abandon completely the forces of molarity, having to pay rent and having nightmares about terrifying events with his father. Eleuthéria, like Molloy, subjects individuals to a double becoming in which fathers and father figures discover fraternal alliances with their sons, but also in which the man without qualities still dreams of the father: “No—no—too high—rocks—my body—papa—be brave—good little boy—I am brave—a good little boy—good little boy” (125).10
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CHAPTER THREE
WOLFMAN ON THE LAM: DE-OEDIPALIZING BECKETT
enough of my mother for the moment. —“From an Abandoned Work”
Sigmund Freud stands as the leading interpreter of Samuel Beckett’s short prose piece “From an Abandoned Work”—at least by proxy. Indeed, the critical response to Beckett’s enigmatic text generally focuses on its Freudian themes and motifs. Michel Bernard, Phil Baker, J. D. O’Hara, and, most recently, John Robert Keller all focus on the nameless narrator’s neurotic tendencies. These scholars suggest that the central character shows unmistakable signs of oedipal trauma and that the imagery (horses, rabbits, stoats, etc.) symbolizes his secret wishes, desires, and fears: Little Hans revisited, Wolfman redux. Yet, as anti-Freudian theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would argue, psychoanalytic critics ignore the wider political and cultural implications of Beckett’s text by limiting themselves to an analysis of the family romance. Now pinned firmly to the couch by the critics, “From an Abandoned Work” is primed for an approach that considers the narrator not as a neurotic patient but as a figure who approximates Deleuze and Guattari’s de-oedipalized “new man,” a creature who flees and confuses hierarchical or “arborescent” systems of thought. Deleuze and Guattari help to reveal how Beckett’s prose fragment might serve as a literary “act of resistance”1 against Freud, as well as other majoritarian institutions, exemplifying the salient features of what the French theorists refer to as “minor” literature. A brief survey of the various psychoanalytic interpretations of “From an Abandoned Work” provides points of comparison and contrast for an anti-Freudian investigation. Michel Bernard, to begin with, offers an engaging psychoanalytic reading
70 that treats the narrator as a patient in desperate need of therapy. In his 1994 essay “The Hysterico-Obsessional Structure of ‘From an Abandoned Work,’” Bernard claims that the narrator endures a “quest for the lost object” (100) and displays all the signs of oedipal trauma: “The questions that assail him reveal a murderous wish directed toward his father; at the same time, they disclose his fear of being punished by his father and, thus, his secret love for his mother” (95). Bernard continues his diagnosis with an examination of the narrator’s movements, asserting that the “motive for his walking is obviously the anguish of his ego in its confrontation with his superego, represented by the figure of the roadman” (96). Bernard goes on to comment, “The narrator’s symptoms (his fidgets, sudden rages, and violence) arise so as to avoid the dangerous situation that his anxiety warns him about” (96). Bernard thus privileges the familial drama within the text and views the protagonist as a man who fits Freud’s mold, a man whose mental neuroses and obsessive behaviors express repressed feelings toward his parents. Phil Baker examines Beckett’s prose fragment from a similar angle. In his 1997 book Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis, Baker claims that the text’s “associative monologue about psychic distress still shows an unmistakable relationship to the talking cure” (10) and that the “spontaneous and essentially oral style suggests the analytic couch” (15). Like Bernard, Baker believes the narrator has an “obsessional mind” (10) and that the “model of the mind is dynamic and predicated on repression” (11). Intriguingly, Baker finds allusions in “From an Abandoned Work” to Freud’s specific case studies, namely that of the Wolfman (Sergei Pankejeff). The narrator’s preoccupation with the color white fuels Baker’s intertextual reading: “The association of the mother with whiteness, and the fascination with white dream animals and stillness versus movement, strongly recalls Freud’s famous case history, the Wolf-Man” (13). Significantly, Baker ultimately asserts that while Beckett’s text is ripe with Freudian themes and allusions, it never reveals all of its secrets and, in fact, hinders a definitive psychoanalytic reading (16-17). Like Baker, J. D. O’Hara, whose 1997 book Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology claims that Freud is the most significant structuring principle in Beckett’s texts, believes “From an Abandoned Work” contains allusions to the Wolfman, but also to the Rat-Man and Little Hans (94 and passim). Yet O’Hara
71 argues that the central intertext is Freud’s 1926 work Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (90). “Like Freud,” O’Hara writes, “Beckett develops the relations among these three psychological problems” (90). For O’Hara, the very title of Beckett’s prose piece is suggestive of the “work” of psychoanalysis: “[T]he title is a pun; the work abandoned is the protagonist’s imagined therapy, for which the story functions as a kind of anamnesis” (90). Similar to Baker and Bernard, O’Hara diagnoses the narrator with “Oedipal trauma” (92), as well as with “diphasic behavior, isolation, repetition, displacement of affect, compulsive actions” (92). The family of stoats that attacks the narrator is a point of interest for O’Hara, functioning as a symbol of the narrator’s turbulent relationship with his parents. According to O’Hara, the “brown form of a species that is sometimes white suggests that these stoats are […] a negative image of his white and good parents” (93).2 The most recent psychoanalytic commentary on Beckett’s text belongs to John Robert Keller, a practicing psychoanalyst whose 2003 study Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love argues that Beckett’s characters are all in search of motherly love. Keller is less thorough than his predecessors in his discussion of the story, but he echoes Bernard, Baker, and O’Hara in his insistence on the text’s Freudian themes. Keller writes, “There is an overtly Freudian, associative movement in Beckett’s text” (12), and he describes the central protagonist as a man in need of “protection” from an “abandoning, unheeding world” (12). Keller argues that what the sick and miserable creature needs most is someone to love him: “It is a plea for connection, by a self that is unifying, then fragmenting under the weight of non-recognition” (13). Notably, Keller references O’Hara’s analysis of the title as a pun on psychoanalytic “work” and extends it to Beckett’s canon at large: “This is how I read the entire oeuvre, as a lengthy, complex psychoanalytical dialogue, between the emerging-self and an imagined other. […] The oeuvre is also from an ‘abandoned work’, that is, from the unrecognized, emerging self” (7 n 2). Collectively, Bernard, Baker, O’Hara, and Keller demonstrate a popular critical trend in the study of “From an Abandoned Work” and help unveil the Freudian allusions and intertexts that pervade Beckett’s short text.3 These critical approaches mimic Freud’s methodology by examining colors, animal imagery, and bodily movements as indicative
72 of the narrator’s unresolved childhood trauma. As they preoccupy themselves with Freud and tether Beckett’s story to the family drama, however, such critics begin to block what Deleuze and Guattari would call the text’s “tenors of life.”4 Where Bernard et al. treat the protagonist as a neurotic individual (or at least pursue such avenues of thought and focus on Freudian themes, motifs, and structures), a Deleuzo-Guattarian reading looks instead for potential energies, forces, flows of desire, moments of liberation. For the French theorists, Freudian interpretations finally misread literature and characters, just as Freud misreads the stories and dreams of his patients. Deleuze and Guattari attempt throughout their philosophical writings to detect the fallacies of Freudian analysis. They envision the work of writers such as Beckett as “an enterprise of health” (Deleuze “Literature and Life” [3]) that roots out and combats cultural imperialism, including Freud’s oppressive vision of the human mind. Deleuze and Guattari extol writers as cultural physicians or diagnosticians, rather than treat them and their work as patients.5 In his brief essay “Re-presentation of Masoch,” Deleuze comments: More a physician than a patient, the writer makes a diagnosis, but what he diagnoses is the world; he follows the illness step by step, but it is the generic illness of man; he assesses the chances of health, but it is the possible birth of a new man: “the legacy of Cain,” “the Sign of Cain” as the total work. (53) Deleuze and Guattari eschew any literary evaluation that leads back to the father or the “daddy-mommy-me” triangle. Like Masoch’s, theirs is a quest for the “birth of a new man” who does battle with philosophies that would neuroticize and enchain him/her/it in what the theorists famously call the “iron collar of Oedipus” (Anti-Oedipus 53). “From an Abandoned Work” constitutes Beckett’s diagnosis of the world, his assessment of the chances of health. The narrator of his story emerges as a kind of “new man” who makes his own map of the world, discovers his body without organs, impairs his maternal language, and experiences a “becoming-animal.” The protagonist repels the ideals of majoritarian institutions, which, according to critic and translator Daniel W. Smith, include, for Deleuze and Guattari, being “white, Western, male, adult, reasonable, heterosexual” or “residing in cities, speaking a standard language” (xlii). Significantly, a Deleuzo-Guattarian analysis of the text does not vie for the final word or claim to stand
73 as the definitive reading of the text. As Brian Massumi asserts of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory in general, “The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel?” (xv). Deleuze and Guattari are a way, not the only way, forward. In fact, the language and imagery of “From an Abandoned Work” at times diametrically oppose that of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical discourse. (“Great love in my heart for all things still and rooted” [155; my italics], for example, seems to conflict with Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-“arborescent,” rhizomatic paradigm.) Still, Deleuze and Guattari help to locate new entrances6 into Beckett’s prose fragment, exposing how the family triangle is, to adapt the phraseology of Anti-Oedipus, “at grips with, and directly coupled to, the elements of the political and historical situation […] filled with gaps and transected by breaks that are not familial” (97). To de-oedipalize “From an Abandoned Work” is not to deny the significance of the family in Beckett’s text. Indeed, Freudian interpreters are not blind but, rather, near- sighted. Such critics fail to look beyond the family unit for other sources of the narrator’s oppression. As close reading reveals, even when the narrator’s parents seem to be at the heart of his dilemma, Beckett’s text intimates that the family triangle is indeed “filled with gaps and transected by breaks that are not familial.” The narrator’s account of his final conversation with his mother is revealing: Perhaps I should mention here that I never talked to anyone, I think my father was the last one I talked to. My mother was the same, never talked, never answered, since my father died. I asked her for the money, I can’t go back on that now, those must have been my last words to her. (159; my italics) Significantly, the narrator’s final conversation with his mother concerns monetary gain. Indeed, their entire relationship culminates with a financial dispute, indicating that the narrator understands his mother not merely as a fountain of sexual desire but a source of capital. Oedipus becomes entangled with the financial and the political. The point is one Deleuze and Guattari emphasize in Anti-Oedipus: “One often has the impression that families have understood the lesson of psychoanalysis only too well, even from far off or by osmosis, in the air of the times: they play at Oedipus, a sublime alibi. But behind all
74 this, there is an economic situation” (356). Where Bernard, Baker, O’Hara, and Keller see a neurotic subject at odds with his parents, Deleuze and Guattari encourage readers to see a figure who struggles with socio-political regimes that extend beyond and even help inform and construct the “daddy-mommy-me” triangle.7 “What makes the student sick is the world,” Deleuze writes, “not his father-mother” (“Wolfson” 18). The narrator’s behavior is, therefore, a reaction not solely to familial or sexual anxieties and frustrations but to his social, economical, financial, and ideological milieu. The narrator is at odds with the entire molar enterprise, like the Moran of Anthony Uhlmann’s Deleuzo-Guattarian reading of Molloy. According to Uhlmann, Moran’s search for the elusive Molloy takes him from the molar plane of organization to the molecular plane of feeling, sensation, rhizomatic flux. The detective starts out as a man “enslaved” to molar life (69), but he ends up “casting off the trappings of the properly subjectified self and approaching, perhaps, the essence of self which it would be assumed lies underneath” (69). Similarly, the narrator of “From an Abandoned Work” is engaged in a political, rather than purely familial, battle against majoritarian institutions, and he too rejects the “trappings of the properly subjectified self.” The narrator’s existence illustrates his movement toward becoming (as we saw with Murphy and Victor Krap) a “man without qualities.” The narrator denies himself the characteristics of the molarized human and aspires instead to be, like Bartleby, a “man without references, without possessions, without properties, without qualities, without particularities” (Deleuze “Bartleby” 74). While the narrator is not, as Deleuze describes Bartleby, a “pure outsider [exclu] to whom no social role can be attributed” (73), as he ages, as his story progresses, he moves increasingly closer to that outside. The narrator’s lack of a name is one indication of his flight to the margins. Throughout the short fragment, Beckett’s protagonist refrains from identifying himself by name. He speaks in the first-person but withholds specific appellations, thus erasing one of the first humanizing imprints (qualities, references, particularities) one receives out of the womb, an imprint that would contain, limit, and prepare him for molar society. His namelessness is, to adapt Uhlmann’s comments about Moran, a means of “casting off the trappings of the properly subjectified self” or frustrating what Smith calls the “ideal constant or standard measure” (xlii) of how the human should look, feel, think, talk. For
75 the narrator, the absence of a name—of a family name, a heritage, a house of origin—is a move toward minorization, de-humanization, de-oedipalization. As he refuses the molar gift of a name, he begins to detach from his background: man without genealogy. Significantly, the narrator withholds his name not only from the page but also from posterity. He will take no part in the continuation of a family tree, leading the life of a spouseless, childless loner: In a way perhaps it’s a pity, a good woman might have been the making of me, I might be sprawling in the sun now sucking my pipe and patting the bottoms of third and fourth generations, looked up to and respected, wondering what there was for dinner, instead of stravaging the same old roads in all weathers, I was never much of a one for new ground. No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found. (158) In his essay on anti-oedipal “tendencies” in Three Novels, Thomas Cousineau argues that the narrators of Beckett’s first “trilogy” aspire to undo their family ties and “refuse to identify with the fictive sense of self imposed by the tyranny of familial relationships” (72). Similarly, in “From an Abandoned Work,” the narrator’s choice not to have a wife and children is a form of cultural rebellion, a rejection of the traditions and expectations of molar society. He will not be “made” (by a good woman or anyone else), and he lacks the drive to be “looked up to and respected”—not that such an option is without its appeal (“In a way perhaps it’s a pity”). As the narrator refuses to marry and raise a family, he also refuses to play into the hands of a state that would have him believe in the need to have a family and pass his name on to future generations. A Kafka-esque, Melvillian bachelor,8 he will wander alone, sow no seeds, plant no roots. He will carry the curses of civilization to a solitary grave and not allow Oedipus to “proliferate and be passed on to the children” (Anti-Oedipus 79). Without a family, without a name, the narrator “stravages” his way to the edges of civilization where he endures a quest that has no name, a quest that Ruby Cohn describes as “endless, pointless” (217). His voyage across the face of the earth is non-teleological, absent of molar characteristics, molar qualities. In one of Beckett’s most famous lines, the narrator describes the goal-lessness of his travels: “I have never in my life been on my
76 way anywhere, but simply on my way” (156). In his psychoanalytic study, Bernard aims to oedipalize the narrator’s wandering, claiming that the “motive for his walking is obviously the anguish of his ego in its confrontation with his superego” (96). Bernard thus imposes meaning on the narrator’s journey and tries to understand it as indicative of neurosis. Conversely, Deleuze and Guattari challenge readers to envision the absence of motivation as its own kind of meaning. In Anti-Oedipus, the theorists praise the “schizo” who will not resign him/herself to the search for meaning: “The schizo knows how to leave: he has made departure into something as simple as being born or dying. But at the same time his journey is strangely stationary, in place” (131). Claire Colebrook explains that Deleuze and Guattari admire Kafka’s characters for their stationary journeys, their ability to make their own maps and travel the globe without a final destination in mind: [T]he wanderings in Kafka’s texts are positive. There is an intensity or enjoyment of movement itself, of opening doorway after doorway, of crossing space, or burrowing or playing the insect […]. Kafka’s texts produce doorways, passages, animal movements and images, all with no law or fulfillment lying behind them. (138) Like Kafka’s characters, Beckett’s narrator crosses space with no fulfillment, following not in the footsteps of the father and adhering not to the call of molarity. He is much like the narrators of Beckett’s “trilogy,” who, as Cousineau describes, “are deprived of any specifically human meaning” (75) and like Belacqua in More Pricks Than Kicks, of whom Beckett writes, “[T]h best thing he had to do was move constantly from place to place. […] The mere act of rising and going, irrespective of whence and whither, did him good” (36). As Susan D. Brienza explains in her discussion of “From an Abandoned Work,” “Our nameless first-person hero is even more of an aimless quester than was Molloy; he is always on his way, destination unknown. […] Throughout the story there is no goal, no objective to his journey, and his rages and feelings have no objects” (49, 66). Ironically, the aimless narrator at one point voices his contempt for nomadic wanderers, individuals who lack goals and purposes. Indeed, his comments about his mother’s having no “tenacity of purpose”—“That was another thing I didn’t like in her” (156)—seem to distance him from, put him at odds with, the Deleuzo-Guattarian paradigm. The remark suggests either the narrator’s sense of humor (why would a figure
77 such as the narrator sincerely care about somebody else’s tenacity of purpose?) or that, despite his own predicament, he still clings to some of the ideas and assumptions of the molar world. The comment nevertheless creates a tension between Beckett’s text and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, demonstrating how “From an Abandoned Work” only ever approximates, and never conforms to, their vision of the universe. The narrator’s wandering is hard on his fragile body. The protagonist resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s hobbling schizo who endures “incredible sufferings, vertigos, and sicknesses” (131), and whose body ceases to function organically. As numerous critics9 discuss, the theorists abhor molarized, “organized” bodies—bodies that are conducive to hierarchical systems of subjects and rulers. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari crawl inside the molar mindset and express its dark, oppressive vision: “You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body—otherwise you’re just depraved. […] You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement—otherwise you’re just a tramp” (159). Deleuze and Guattari set out to reverse this voice of molarity, encouraging us all to experience life as depraved tramps who are not “nailed down,” not “well articulated.” Jon Erickson’s essay on “faciality” helps to illuminate the theorists’ philosophy of the body. Erickson describes the philosophers’ understanding of the human face, in particular, as a “State production” and thus something that one must “discard” to avoid subjectification. “You don’t so much have a face,” Deleuze and Guattari theorize in A Thousand Plateaus, “as slide into one” (177). The face is but one of the body’s insidious organs. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that we slide out of the entire molar body. They propose (a la Antonin Artaud) the “body without organs” or body without organization. As Smith teaches, the BwO lies beneath the “organized” body of the molarized human subject: [T]he body without organs is the model of Life itself, a powerful nonorganic and intensive vitality that traverses the organism; by contrast, the organism, with its form and functions, is not life, but rather that which imprisons life. […] In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari make use of the concept of the body without organs to describe the experience of schizophrenics for whom the body without organs is something that is primarily felt under the integrated organization of the organism, as if the
78 organs were experienced as pure intensities capable of being linked together in an infinite number of ways. (xxxvii) Hence Deleuze and Guattari’s fascination with the lame, the maimed, the stumbling, the bumbling. Indeed, in their discussions of literature, the philosophers privilege authors who create characters who are in touch with their immanence, whose bodies fail to move in proper molar fashion. For example, in his essay “To Have Done With Judgment,” Deleuze refers to D. H. Lawrence’s characters as exemplars of bodies without organs: “Lawrence ceaselessly describes bodies that are organically defective or unattractive— like the fat retired toreador or the skinny, oily Mexican general—but that are nonetheless traversed by this intensive vitality that defies organs and undoes their organization” (131). Uhlmann’s aforementioned reading of Molloy hinges on just such an understanding of the body without organs. According to Uhlmann, Moran’s stiff leg forces him out of his routines, gradually allowing him to “feel more” (68) and “prising Moran from his comfortable existence within the molar institutions” (68). The narrator of “From an Abandoned Work” has a similar corporeal experience, only, unlike Moran, he is from the womb sensitive to his immanence, always highly aware that his body fails to function “properly.” As opposed to Moran, who is at first “religious, a disciplinarian father, a good worker understanding both his station and his duty, with a well-kept house in a respectable community” (Uhlmann 68), the narrator of “From an Abandoned Work” never enters fully into the molar world, never puts on his body with organs. He is, to echo John Donne’s “An Anatomy of the World,” “born ruinous” and “come not right” (94-95). His locomotive ability is questionable even from his early days when he finds himself “suddenly stamping and stumbling in the midst of ducks” (155). Later, he reports his failure to find a casual “human” pace for walking the globe. He informs that he is at times a “very slow walker. I didn’t dally or loiter in any way, just walked very slowly, little short steps and the feet very slow through the air” (157), and at other times “one of the fastest runners the world has ever seen, over a short distance, five or ten yards, in a second I was there” (158). The narrator also complains of “those awful fidgets I have always had” (162), and he tells of a number of ear, nose, and throat ailments. “I have never known what it is to be without a sore throat” (157), the narrator writes. A few
79 pages later, he elaborates on his ENT maladies: “Throat very bad, to swallow was torment, and something wrong with an ear, I kept poking at it without relief, old wax perhaps pressing on the drum” (163). Where psychoanalytic studies find a link between the narrator’s bodily quirks and his oedipal anxiety (e.g. Bernard 96), Deleuze and Guattari open the door to other possibilities. His fidgety hands, stumbling legs, sore throat, and clogged ear are indicative not of a dysfunctional relationship with his parents but of a dysfunctional relationship with the world-at-large, a world that would mandate how he should move, walk, talk, eat, swallow, hear. It is as if the narrator rolled off the assembly line ill equipped for capitalist society—physically inarticulate, just a tramp. His body fails to accept what Deleuze and Guattari call “forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences” (Thousand 159), all of which allow the molar world to “extract useful labor” (159) from a subject. The narrator’s disorganized, dilapidated body is significantly different from that of a character like the unnamable, who, according to Cousineau’s Deleuzo-Guattarian reading of Beckett’s “trilogy,” imagines, “in a quite positive way” (74), the loss and fragmentation of bodily organs. Cousineau writes, “[The unnamable’s] reduction of his body to bits and pieces that do not confer on him a coherent identity exemplifies that fragmentation of the unified self which Murphy resisted but which Deleuze advocates as a necessary prelude to the lifting of Oedipal repression” (74). For the narrator of “From an Abandoned Work,” such freedom from oedipal repression comes with the price of a lifetime of pain and suffering. His organs are diseased and infected, and he never glorifies his illness. Deleuze offers cold, but eloquent, comfort, “[T]he greatest pain offers a strange knowledge to those who experience it, and what is knowledge if not the adventure of the painful life in the brains of great men” (“Wolfson” 19). Like his body, the narrator’s language is also out-of-order, out-of-sync. His tongue stumbles and bumbles through the English language just as his legs stumble and bumble upon the earth.10 His treatment of language is highly significant from a Deleuzo- Guattarian perspective, as it further reveals his subversion of the molar world. As earlier chapters discuss, Deleuze applauds characters who “carve a foreign language out of language,” characters like Bartleby and Gregor Samsa, whose “‘persistent horrible twittering squeak’ […] muddles the resonance of words, while the sister is getting the
80 violin ready to respond to Gregor” (72). The “stuttering” of such figures forces language to release what Deleuze calls “a pure sound and unknown chords in language itself” (“Bartleby” 89). The narrator of “From an Abandoned Work” finds unknown chords of his own. Indeed, to appropriate Artaud’s phraseology, he “turn[s] against language and its basely utilitarian, one could say alimentary, sources, against its trapped-beast origins” (46). One of his tactics involves tearing words apart and re-arranging them: “Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, I love the word, words have been my only love, not many. Often all day long as I went along I have said it, and sometimes I would be saying vero, oh vero” (162). Like Bartleby, the narrator invokes a “formula” for toying with his maternal language. He uses the letters of a word to form a word that is foreign to itself, that has no maternal function, no utility. The letters of his words are misplaced, deranged, literally out-of-order: “vero, oh vero.” Like many of the “stuttering” authors and characters Deleuze discusses, Beckett’s narrator fidgets with his maternal language and invents a kind of foreign tongue, using a procedure or formula that causes the molar language to stutter. To adapt Deleuze’s description of stuttering language in his essay “He Stuttered,” “Every word is divided, but into itself […]. It is as if the entire language started to roll from right to left, and to pitch backward and forward” (110). Another of the narrator’s strategies is to defamiliarize or foreignize or minorize a word or phrase by constantly repeating it to himself, like the insomniac child who lies in bed saying his name over and over and over until he no longer understands it, no longer identifies with it: “No, with me all was slow, and then these flashes, or gushes, vent the pent, that was one of those things I used to say, over and over, as I went along, vent the pent, vent the pent” (158). As O’Hara claims, “vent the pent” is an allusion to Freudian methodology (“Freud is concerned with symptomatic venting of the libidinal energy pent up by […] repression” [91]), yet the narrator’s obsessive repetition is a means of chanting meaning out of the phrase. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari explain how a young Kafka engages in a similar treatment of language: Children are well skilled in the exercise of repeating a word, the sense of which is only vaguely felt, in order to make it vibrate around itself (at the beginning of The Castle, the schoolchildren are speaking so fast that one
81 cannot understand what they are saying). Kafka tells how, as a child, he repeated one of his father’s expressions in order to make it take flight on a line of non-sense: “end of the month, end of the month.” (21)11 Like Kafka, the narrator makes “vent the pent” take flight on a line of non-sense, carving a foreign language out of the language of General Freud, which, like English, is a kind of major language or major discourse. The narrator thus manages a double minorization, foreignizing both his maternal English and the discourse of psychoanalysis within his maternal English. Like Gregor Samsa, he discovers his own “persistent horrible twittering squeak”: vent the pent vent the pent vent the pent vent the pent vent the pent vent the pent. . . . Notably, the protagonist’s methods for disrupting the flow of his maternal language only approximate the formulas and procedures Deleuze and Guattari describe in their literary analyses. The narrator’s “stutter” is his own. He does not fit neatly into but, rather, extends the borders of Deleuze and Guattari’s canon of mutterers. Nevertheless, the narrator shows signs of contempt for the strongholds of language, as well as a desire to play with and deform his words. His intentions are similar to those of a young Beckett, who, in an often-quoted 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, proclaims his desire to treat language “like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or Nothingness) behind it” (Disjecta 171). As the narrative nears its end, the stuttering, stumbling narrator literally becomes, in his old age, a “man without possessions”: “Well once out on the road and free of the property what then, I really do not know, the next thing I was up in the bracken lashing about with my stick making the drops fly and cursing, filthy language, the same words over and over, I hope nobody heard me” (163). The narrator’s abandonment of his property indicates a dramatic flight from the molar world. He is free of the objects that tie him to, and demonstrate his participation in, capitalist culture. He flees into the woods, the ferns, the anti-city—resembling a figure akin to the “sorcerers” Deleuze and Guattari describe in A Thousand Plateaus who “have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the field or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages” (246). Haunting the fringes, Beckett’s narrator is again in a situation similar to that of the waning Moran, who, as Uhlmann
82 explains, finally “allow[s] his house and property to run down, largely outside the community, on the verge of vagabondage” (68). Among the ferns, the narrator experiences what Deleuze and Guattari might refer to as his “becoming-animal.” Throughout their writings, the theorists focus on artists who demonstrate a fascination with animals and animal imagery. Unlike Freud and psychoanalytic critics, they contend that a preoccupation with wild creatures, especially pack animals, indicates a desire to move away from the human world and toward the molecular domain of the inhuman. In his essay on Masoch, Deleuze explains, “The relationship between man and animal is without doubt something that has been constantly misunderstood by psychoanalysis, because psychoanalysis is unable to see in it anything but all-too-human Oedipal figures” (54). As a counter to Freud’s reading of animals and animal images, Deleuze and Guattari propose the idea of “becoming-animal,” which aims to correct the injustices of Freud. The Wolfman’s dreams, for instance, have nothing to do with his father or mother, according to Deleuze and Guattari: “Freud obviously knows nothing about the fascination exerted by wolves and the meaning of their silent call, the call to become-wolf” (Thousand 28). Colebrook sheds light on Deleuze and Guattari’s re-evaluation of the Wolfman’s “neurosis”: “The child’s fascination for the wolf is not for what the wolf represents but for the wolf’s entirely different mode of becoming: wolves travel in packs, at night, wandering. […] In perceiving the wolf we perceive differently, no longer separated from the world in the human point of view” (135).12 To exemplify their theory of becoming-animal in art, Deleuze and Guattari allude to the 1972 film Willard, in which the title character experiences a “becoming-rat.” Willard befriends a vermin named Ben and subsequently withdraws, albeit not entirely willingly, from his life at the office, indeed the entire human paradigm. Deleuze and Guattari see the “proliferation of rats” in the film not as a sign of some oedipal trauma but as a force that finally “undermines the great molar powers of family, career, and conjugality” (233). Kafka’s Gregor Samsa experiences a more literal becoming-animal, according to Deleuze and Guattari, turning into a cockroach and horrifying the molar world. The theorists read Gregor’s “becoming-insect” as a shift from the molar to the molecular: “Gregor becomes a cockroach not to flee his father but rather to find an
83 escape where his father didn’t know to find one, in order to flee the director, the business, and the bureaucrats” (Kafka 13). The narrator of “From an Abandoned Work” experiences a becoming-animal that approximates that of Gregor or Willard or the Wolfman. He is fascinated not by insects, rats, or wolves but by a family or tribe of stoats that pursues him on the second day of his story: “a most extraordinary thing” (161). Critics such as O’Hara try to oedipalize the narrator’s preoccupation with the weasel-like creatures, theorizing in Freudian fashion that they symbolize his relationship with his parents: “[T]he attacking stoats may, like little Hans’s horse, represent the narrator’s rage at his parents—or his guilt about his feelings toward them—displaced onto the stoats and turned against himself” (O’Hara 95). One might say that O’Hara blocks the narrator’s escape route from molarity by chasing the pack of stoats back to the family home. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the becoming-animal, however, opens the stoat imagery to a new reading, revealing how the creatures relate not to anxiety or fear but to the narrator’s yearning to abandon the human world, to find a locale from which to “perceive differently,” in Colebrook’s phraseology. Indeed, by the end of his tale, the narrator becomes-stoat, fleeing into their secret places, into the ferns of molecularity. Notably, the narrator’s becoming-stoat is less literal than Gregor’s becoming-insect and more like the becoming-rat of Willard or the becoming- wolf of the Wolfman. In the ferns, the stoat-narrator finds a world free of majoritarian ideals, free of the assumptions, logic, demands, and judgment of molar life. The ferns are a plane of immanence on which the narrator experiences sensations and intensities: “Harsh things these great ferns, like starched, very woody, terrible stalks, take the skin off your legs through your trousers, and then the holes they hide, break your leg if you’re not careful” (164). The narrator’s fascination with the stoats thus indicates not Oedipus but a flight from Oedipus, from the oedipalizers, from institutions that would trap him, fit him for a molar collar. The weasel-like creatures are images of escape and freedom, not signs of the mother-father. “To become animal,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “is to participate in movement, to stake out a path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone” (Kafka 13).
84 “From an Abandoned Work” is, then, more a diagnosis of culture than a case history of neurosis, the narrator more a physician than a patient. The text reveals that the seemingly oedipal story is “transected by breaks” and invested with political, financial, and social forces. As Deleuze writes in his essay on Bartleby, “It is not an individual or particular affair, but a collective one, the affair of the people, or rather, of all peoples. It is not an Oedipal phantasm but a political program” (85). What some critics find to be the ultimate source of the narrator’s pain is, from a Deleuzo-Guattarian standpoint, a ruse, a means of short-changing the narrative and perpetuating Freud’s myth. An anti- Freudian reading of “From an Abandoned Work” undercuts not only Freud but many “arborescent” ideologies—capitalism and the institution of marriage among others. As he stumbles into the bracken, the narrator displays contempt for all such institutions, all such myths. Indeed, he is the abandoned work whom molar society cannot finish, cannot shape into a respectable, productive, organized individual. He will remain a stuttering, staggering, stravaging, childless bachelor—signs not of an illness but of health. Aimless and nameless, he fails to live up to majoritarian ideals, existing as a minoritarian “new man” among the ferns of immanence.
85
CHAPTER FOUR
HAMM STAMMERED: BECKETT’S ATMOSPHERIC STUTTERING
Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. —Proverbs 18:21
There’s English for you. —Hamm, Endgame
There are many ways […] to stutter. —Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered”
In his provocative essay “‘Outside of Here It’s Death’: Co-Dependency and the Ghosts of Decolonization in Beckett’s Endgame,” Nels C. Pearson examines the postcolonial undertones of Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play. Pearson envisions the main character, Hamm, as a “metonym” (224) for a defunct British imperialism, and Clov, Hamm’s forlorn attendant, as a remnant of the voiceless colonized. Throughout the play, Clov struggles for a language that will speak without reference to the assumptions or logic of colonialism, yet, according to Pearson, the slave’s attempts to find such a way of speaking paradoxically re-imprison him in the fetters of the colonizer. Even when Clov tries to convey “autonomous perception and experience” (226), Pearson argues that he ends up stammering and, within his silences, only signifying, never actualizing, the “muted voice or voices beneath [his] words—a voice that cannot speak or communicate its desires in the language available to it” (226). Another way to read Clov’s hesitating speech, however, is to understand it as one faltering voice among many. Indeed, Beckett’s entire play is in a constant state of stuttering, quaking violently from the fragmented speech of all the characters, as well as from their stammering movements and shuddering milieu. Gilles Deleuze’s essay “He Stuttered” helps to reveal an alternative postcolonial reading of the play, demonstrating how the atmospheric stuttering of
86 Endgame emancipates, rather than impedes, the vanquished. Ultimately, Endgame proves to be a world of equal-opportunity stuttering, a world in which faltering is, to contradict Pearson, the language of liberation. Pearson begins his fascinating reading of Endgame with a caveat, asserting that the notorious ambiguity of Beckett’s play, its adamant refusal to give up its secrets, complicates any political approach. Yet, Pearson remarks, “this is exactly the reason not to give up the project of trying to come to terms with the play’s ‘Irishness,’ or, more specifically, with the relevance of the play’s use of imperialist/colonial themes to both global and local (Irish) histories” (216). The author subsequently turns his attention to how Endgame speaks to the complex process of decolonization, and how Beckett’s art perpetually sidesteps any neat or resolute commentaries concerning the master/slave dialectic. While he places Hamm on the throne as the has-been colonizer and leaves Clov to wander in the expanses of the has-been colonized, Pearson emphasizes that theirs is a distinctly, if paradoxically, co-dependent relationship: What Endgame ostensibly dramatizes is not simply a master/slave relationship, but the lingering co-dependency between two leftover participants from an imperial/colonial (or at the very least ruler/subject) historical situation that no longer exists. The important thing is that Hamm and Clov maintain the respective roles of ruler and ruled, as well as the assumption that there is no alternative to these roles, long after the external causes or specific historical circumstances of those roles have deteriorated. (216-17) Ghosts of the past, Hamm and Clov cannot give up their places in a defunct paradigm, according to Pearson. In the words of Stanley Cavell, the characters of Endgame are unable “not to mean what [they] are given to mean” (117). The blind Hamm, who sits in (or near) the center of his shelter-universe, gives orders to Clov, who remorsefully obeys. It is all they know on earth, and, to quote Hamm, there’s no cure for that. As his “Irish reading” of the play progresses, Pearson attempts to show (mostly through admitted speculation based on intimation) that Hamm is or once was British and that Clov is or once was Irish, as well as the son of a political prisoner at the former British military post of Cobh (223). In the context of an Irish reading, Pearson argues, the crux of
87 Endgame concerns Clov’s struggle to find himself, or redefine himself in the phantasmagoric face of the exanimate British Empire. Hamm’s stint as dictator and even as enlightened ex- Imperialist, however, ultimately prohibits the slave from personal discovery, as all of Clov’s moves on the chessboard, to pick up on Pearson’s and the play’s central metaphor, are always already subject to the established rules of the games. Thus, even as Clov, at a pivotal point in the play, looks through his telescope and strives to assert his own vision of the world—“I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy” (Endgame 29)1—, he can only manage to use and misuse the language Hamm gives him. According to Pearson, Clov falters at every turn, fighting to find the right words but only re-instituting those of his ruler (226-27). Long after the fall of Empire, indeed the apocalyptic fall of the world, Clov and Hamm therefore remain in a political stalemate, as every move to get out of the trap only re- establishes the hierarchies and hegemonies that ensnared them in the first place: While the play is about the inability of Clov to find a voice of his own, it is also […] a play about why expecting him to develop this alternative voice is in part what prevents him from doing so. It is a play in which the initial, unquestioned assumption that we must constantly raise our ladder of perception to the same high windows in search of alternatives becomes the very thing that negates all alternatives. (236) Pearson’s ultimate claim is that, as various postcolonial critics submit, the colonized cannot be free of the strictures of colonialism until the language and logic of the “discoverers” dismantles and falls away. As long as memory serves in Hamm’s shelter-colony, so too will the linguistic binaries and hierarchies of colonialism, despite all attempts to circumvent them (229). The only solution is, according to Pearson’s conclusion, not “to ask the question in the first place” (237) or to accept the fact “that freedom (whether it be artistic, psychological, or social and political) cannot be achieved as long as a specific colonizer/colonized paradigm is the foregrounded assumption” (237). Pearson’s reading aligns itself with a number of essays that attempt to situate Beckett’s play within the context of postcolonial criticism, viewing Hamm and Clov as oppositional forces in a colonial or postcolonial world.2 Yet all of the characters, particularly Hamm, evidence problems with speech and articulation, as ellipses and dashes pervade the characters’ dialogue and monologues. Deleuze’s acute vision of minorities and oppression,
88 as well as his theories about language and speech help to pave the way for a new political reading of the stuttering in Beckett’s play. Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical deal largely with the oppression and salvation of minorities. Throughout, the staunch materialist aims to expose the means by which art can serve as a liberating experience for the voiceless. Many of the essays argue that literature, a term Deleuze never uses lightly, is a panacea for the “missing” people of colonized cultures. As Deleuze explains in his essay “Literature and Life,” the writer—and “there are very few who can call themselves writers” (6)— is not a patient but rather a physician, a physician of himself and of the world. The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of health: not that the writer would necessarily be in good health […] but he possesses an irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him, while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible. (3) For Deleuze, the achievement of “delicately healthy” writers is their ability to provide not merely a refuge but a voice for victimized peoples, who, because they lack an identity, are in a purgatorial state of not-yet-arriving, not-yet-living: “The ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, this creation of a health or this invention of a people, that is, a possibility of life. To write for this people who are missing . . . (‘for’ means less ‘in the place of’ than ‘for the benefit of’)” (4). Deleuze goes on to explain that the location or invention of a missing people, a silenced and therefore invisible colonized culture, requires a careful manipulation of words, grammar, and syntax—a stuttering of language. In “He Stuttered,” Deleuze makes clear the difference between immature writers who merely tell readers that their characters stutter, who use “he stuttered” to indicate a speech impediment, and extraordinary writers whose artistic language itself stutters: “It is no longer the character who stutters in speech; it is the writer who becomes a stutterer in language. He makes the language as such stutter: an affective and intensive language, and no longer an affectation of the one who speaks” (107). The result of such an affectation is the forging of a foreign or “minor use” of a language that, in the mouths of ruling regimes, silences the voice
89 of a missing colony. As Deleuze stresses throughout his essay, writers must find a way to estrange the majority from itself: “What they do […] is invent a minor use of this major language within which they express themselves entirely; they minorize the language, much as in music, where the minor mode refers to dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium” (109). A number of writers manage to give voice to an otherwise unheard, otherwise unseen minority. Deleuze cites Kafka, Melville, Masoch, Artaud, e. e. cummings, and Beckett, among others, in his study of stuttering authors, revealing how their art serves as an oasis for the culturally oppressed. Such writers resort not to using a foreign tongue to escape the dominant voice of imperialists, but to taking the language of the majority and dividing it against itself. As Deleuze reveals over the course of his essay, “[t]here are many ways to grow from the middle, or to stutter” (111). The stuttering of Melville’s or Kafka’s fiction differs from that of cummings’s poetry—“Every man his speciality,” as Hamm says. Beckett is of great interest to Deleuze, not because of his abandonment of the language of Empire when writing in French, but because of his systematic corruption of it when writing in English.3 Deleuze references the 1953 novel Watt and, in passing, the 1980s short prose text Ill Seen Ill Said to offer specific instances of Beckett’s stuttering. Yet Endgame also exemplifies Deleuze’s argument, demonstrating how both the speech and, more importantly, the language of Beckett’s art “tremors from head to toe” (109). Clov, to begin with, stumbles his way through many of his lines, flubbing parts of his monologues and dialogues. His opening speech, for example, is a kind of stutter, an initial, albeit subtle, sign that he is clumsy with words. Bungling the precision of Christ’s declaration from the cross, Clov repeats himself, trying to find the right expression: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished […]” (1). As Katharine Worth comments, “‘It is finished’ loses its finality as Clov moves it toward the doubtful ‘must be nearly finished’” (123). In conversation with Hamm, Clov demonstrates a hesitation to finish his sentences. His words come slowly, divided by the ever-present ellipses: HAMM: But you can walk. CLOV: I come . . . and go. (36) Clov’s stutters are particularly pervasive, as Pearson points out, in the scenes with the telescope, as he and Hamm discuss the activity that transpires outside the shelter. Near the
90 end of the play, for example, Clov attempts to give a report of what he sees only to stutter, his words broken up by ellipses: “Nothing . . . nothing . . . good . . . good . . . nothing . . . goo—” (78). At first glance, Clov’s stuttering seems to bolster Pearson’s argument that the servant is slow of speech, further evidence that he is stifled by the only language he knows. After every word, a silence. Within every silence, a muted voice. Yet Hamm, the master of the game in Pearson’s reading, trumps his longstanding crony with stammering of his own, revealing no more command of speech patterns and language than the hesitating Clov. Hamm’s opening lines are replete with interruptions of silence, yawns, pauses, and ellipses.4 The blind invalid begins, vacillates, stammers, bifurcates words and phrases at their centers: HAMM: Me— (he yawns) —to play. (He holds the handkerchief spread out before him.) Old stancher! (He takes off his glasses, wipes his eyes, his face, the glasses, puts them on again, folds the handkerchief and puts it back neatly in the breast-pocket of his dressing-gown. He clears his throat, joins the tips of his fingers.) Can there be misery— (he yawns) loftier than mine? No doubt. Formerly. But now? (Pause.) My father? (Pause.) My mother? (Pause.) My . . . dog? (Pause.) Oh I am willing to believe they suffer as much as such creatures can suffer. But does that mean their sufferings equal mine? No doubt.
91 (Pause.) No, all is a— (he yawns) —bsolute […] (2)5 The opening passage sets the tone for the entire play, in which a bumbling Hamm has difficulty formulating and finishing many of his sentences. His ensuing lines, for example, further reveal his trouble with articulation: “Enough, it’s time it ended, in the shelter too. (Pause.) And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to . . . to end. Yes, there it is, it’s time it ended and yet I hesitate to—(he yawns)—to end” (3).6 Hamm here becomes one with the patterns of his speech. As the invalid hesitates to end, so too do his words, fighting vigorously against the coming period. Elin Diamond observes that Hamm’s yawn is a means of “stalling” or staving off the end of his life (112), but the yawn also stalls language, prevents it from forming smoothly, with molar authority and accuracy. Hamm’s stammering worsens as he begins his dialogue with Clov. When he inquires whether his companion is tired of their life in the shelter, he fails to find the right words to describe their strange existence. “Have you not had enough? […] Of this . . . this . . . thing” (5), Hamm says with difficulty, revealing that he struggles in vain to give a specific account of his predicament. As the play progresses, Hamm continues to have trouble speaking and begins to give up on finishing many of his sentences. He resorts to mere repetition, beginning, trailing off, picking up again, and finally abandoning the effort. Shortly following what Pearson believes to be Clov’s failed attempt to express an autonomous perception of the world, Hamm colludes with Clov to ruin language: HAMM. Nothing stirs. All is— CLOV. Zer— HAMM. (violently): Wait till you’re spoken to! (Normal voice.) All is . . . all is . . . all is what? (Violently.) All is what? CLOV. What all is? In a word? Is that what you want to know? (29)
92 Pearson reads the exchange as evidence of Clov’s subservience to Hamm’s narrative of the world (228). According to Pearson, Hamm knows what “all is” but “dares Clov to come up with an alternative description of the outside world” (228), demonstrating that Hamm has the upper hand (the upper word) on Clov. Another way to read the passage, however, is to witness how both characters cause language to fragment, to hesitate, to stutter, to wait. Indeed, the passage reveals that both Hamm and Clov tear language apart, forcing each other’s words to break prematurely. Clov cuts Hamm off in mid sentence, and Hamm cuts Clov off in mid word. Clov may defer to Hamm’s demand to “Wait till you’re spoken to!” but Hamm, too, impedes the smooth flow of speech. Moments later, Hamm stumbles over one of the most famous lines in the play, as he questions the changing value of his and Clov’s life together: “We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?” (32). Again, Hamm fails to speak without stuttering, faltering temporarily before deciding where his sentence is leading him. He continues to falter through his ensuing speech, in poor control of his language: “And without going so far as that, we ourselves . . . (with emotion) . . . we ourselves . . . at certain moments . . . (Vehemently.) To think perhaps it won’t all have been for nothing!” (33). Like Clov when trying to describe the “multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy,” Hamm struggles to find words and finally gives up. Some of Hamm’s most stilted speech comes late in the drama. In a moment of poignant reflection, for example, Hamm muses about the future: HAMM: There I’ll be, in the old shelter, alone against the silence and . . . (he hesitates) . . . the stillness. If I can hold my peace, and sit quiet, it will be all over with sound, and motion, all over and done with. (Pause.) I’ll have called my father and I’ll have called my . . . (he hesitates) . . . my son. And even twice, or three times, in case they shouldn’t have heard me, the first time, or the second. (Pause.) I’ll say to myself, He’ll come back.
93 (Pause.) And then? (Pause.) And then? (Pause.) He couldn’t, he has gone too far. (Pause.) And then? (Pause. Very agitated.) All kinds of fantasies! That I’m being watched! A rat! Steps! Breath held and then . . . (He breathes out.) Then babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark. (Pause.) Moment upon moment, pattering down, like the millet grains of . . . (he hesitates) . . . that old Greek, and all life long you wait for that to mount up to a life. (69-70) Hamm’s soliloquy is filled with pauses, hesitations, and echoes. When he can’t go on, he resorts to repetition, restating a phrase until the next one presents itself. Hamm thus becomes a babbler—stuttering, stumbling, stammering—even as he contemplates the day when he will babble to himself in the dark. Hamm’s constant stuttering is enough at least to frustrate Pearson’s reading of the hierarchical structure of the characters’ relationship. Indeed, Pearson bases much of his argument on Clov’s inability to speak autonomously without hesitation, yet, as Hamm’s dialogue reveals time and again, the eyeless man in the center of the room makes more of a mess of speech than Clov. Hamm’s sentences, phrases, and words tend to atrophy over the course of the drama. While one of the famous lines in the play may reveal that Hamm introduces Clov to language—“I use the words you taught me” (44)—Hamm shows no
94 singular ability to control it any better than his cohort. Thus when Hamm, like a mad director, exclaims “Articulate!” (80), he is talking as much to himself as to Clov. Nagg and Nell, whom Pearson largely ignores in his postcolonial reading, contribute to the play’s cracked dialogue. The decrepit husband and wife take turns cutting each other off, slicing sentences literally to pieces: NAGG: Do you remember— NELL: No. NAGG: When we crashed on our tandem and lost our shanks. (16) Later: NELL: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But— NAGG: (shocked): Oh! (18) Hamm adds to the fissuring of the old couple’s speech, as Nagg haggles for two biscuits from his unyielding son: NAGG: Two. HAMM: One. NAGG: One for me and one for— HAMM: One! Silence! (50) During the prayer scene, Hamm again truncates Nagg: NAGG: Our Father which art— HAMM: Silence! In silence! Where are your manners? (55) Much like Hamm and Clov, Nagg and Nell evidence an inability to speak in smooth, glib patterns. Their language, to adapt Deleuze’s vision of Walt Whitman’s poetry, “sprouts dashes in order to create spatiotemporal intervals […]. It is an almost mad sentence, with its changes in direction, its bifurcations, its ruptures and leaps, its prolongations, its sproutings, its parentheses” (“Whitman” 58). The broken dialogue of Nagg and Nell complements that of their fellow shelter-dwellers, reiterating the problems with vocalization that mark Beckett’s entire drama. Significantly, the egregious stuttering of the characters is not, by itself, enough to invent a revolutionary and liberating literature. The injured words and phrases of Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell are speech acts (paroles) that take place in a greater system of language (langue)—that of the play as a whole.7 The characters contribute to the materialization of a
95 missing people, but they cannot bring about a full manifestation. According to Deleuze, a revolutionary writer employs “an atmospheric quality, a milieu that acts as the conductor of words—that brings together within itself the quiver, the murmur, the stutter, the tremolo, or the vibrato, and makes the indicated affect [sic] reverberate through the words” (108). Deleuze, in other words, calls for a merging of the form of expression with the form of content, of the words of the characters with the characters themselves, as well as with their surroundings. Various authors have the power to achieve such a feat: This, at least, is what happens in great writers like Melville, in whom the hum of the forests and caves, the silence of the house, and the presence of the guitar are evidence of Isabelle’s murmurings, and her soft, “foreign intonations”; or Kafka, who confirms Gregor’s squeaking through the trembling of his feet and the oscillations of his body; or even Masoch, who doubles the stammering of his characters with the heavy suspense of the Boudoir, the hum of the village, or the vibrations of the steppe. The affects [sic] of language here become the object of an indirect effectuation, and yet they remain close to those that are made directly, when there are no characters other than the words themselves. (108) Deleuze’s Watt example is helpful in explaining how the merging occurs in Beckett. Deleuze points out that the author places the mumbling, bumbling protagonist of his 1953 novel in a world where all things mumble and bumble. Watt’s bizarre locomotion, for instance, serves as an analogy to his equally bizarre way of speaking. Deleuze writes: “[T]his is how the transfer from the form of expression to a form of content is brought about. But we could equally well bring about the reverse transition by supposing that the characters speak like they walk or stumble, for speaking is no less a movement than walking […]” (111). Watt, then, is an exercise in both verbal and physical stuttering, or to employ a term Beckett uses to describe stuttering, an exercise in verbal and physical “battology.”8 Texts other than Watt reveal Beckett’s career-long battological experiment. The short stories of More Pricks Than Kicks, for example, demonstrate the author’s early experiments with artistic stuttering. While Beckett uses the expression “he stuttered” to describe some of Belacqua Shuah’s speech, he also employs the protagonist’s to and fro movements and surrounding environment to make the entire work of art stutter: “‘Pardon me’ stuttered
96 Belacqua ‘just a moment, will you be so kind.’ He waddled out of the bar and into the street […]” (51). Belacqua’s verbal stutter collides with his physical waddling, demonstrating Beckett’s effort to make the language, not simply the speech, of his fiction begin to “scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur” (110). The characters of Endgame persevere in a similar vibratory atmosphere, as Beckett, like Kafka or Masoch or Melville, doubles the stammering of his characters, causes the language of his play as a whole to “take flight[,] send[ing] it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms, following an incessant modulation” (109). Like their speech patterns, the zone in which the characters move is everywhere unstable, everywhere trembling. As we put our ear to the hollow walls of Hamm’s shelter, we hear constant banging, knocking, tapping, ringing, whistling—the rattle and hum of the missing.9 We discern the staccato chuckling of Nagg, who “breaks into a forced laugh, cuts it short, pokes his head toward Nell, launches his laugh again” (23). We perceive murmurs—“Unintelligble words” (48)—and cries—“He’s crying” (62)—that emanate from deep within the abyss of the bins. We detect the “great groaning sigh” (14) and “humming” (72) of the not-to-be-punished anymore. As we peer inside the windows, the stuttering scene arranges itself. We observe the “Stiff, staggering walk” (1) of Clov, the stammering bodies of the legless ashbin couple, the shuddering physique of Hamm, which begins to mimic the quivering of his voice: “[Y]ou give me the shivers!” (65), he tells Clov. We see the inarticulate picture, “its face to wall” (1), the unfinished three-legged Pomeranian, perfectly analogous to the half-complete sentences and words that reverberate throughout the play. The final tableau is perhaps most revealing, as Clov’s physical hesitation, his stuttering to leave, puts no period at the end of the ungrammatical sentence that is Beckett’s play. The concluding line, a stammer (“You . . . remain,” says Hamm), trails off into darkness, as Clov’s visual pause tacks on a perpetual ellipsis10 to the constantly pausing, constantly hesitating speech of the characters. A ninety- minute stutter, Endgame exemplifies Deleuze’s (and Félix Guattari’s) phraseology in A Thousand Plateaus: “Gestures and things, voices and sounds, are caught up in the same ‘opera,’ swept away by the same shifting effects of stammering, vibrato, tremolo, overspilling […]. The moment this conjunction occurs there is a common matter” (109).
97 (Beckett asserts famously that Endgame is a series of repetitions and echoes, and he suggests that the play has a musical quality. Significantly, however, Beckett also disclaims the simultaneous fusion of language and action. As Gontarski notes in his introduction to the Theatrical Notebooks, Beckett told his Berlin cast, “Never let your changes of position and voice come together. First comes (a) the altered body stance; after it, following a slight pause, comes (b) the corresponding utterance” [xix].11) The “common matter” levels the playing space, demonstrating an alliance of the characters rather than their division. They may argue and threaten one another, but they do so as part of a common opera of stutters in which Hamm is not the begetter of language but an extension of it, stammering along with the rest of the cast in an equally stammering milieu. Jeffers observes a similar conjunction of matter and words in Krapp’s Last Tape, invoking Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome to describe how “Krapp enacts this very process on stage with spools, bananas, keys and words—all combine, disperse and rhizomatically connect and align heedless of a semiotic theory of coding” (65). A pseudo- quartet, Hamm-Clov-Nagg-Nell merges with its buzzing, ringing, whistling habitat, “carving a foreign language out of a major language,” to invoke Deleuze’s echo of Proust. Such a reading is distantly similar to Amanda Cagle’s postcolonial study of Endgame, which claims that Hamm and Clov are co-victims of imperialism, though Cagle views the play as an intimated struggle between British rule and impotent Irishmen. Endgame in its entirety thus emerges as the subaltern—exotic, anomalous, Other. Beckett’s screaming, stuttering work of art is the ultimate opponent of colonialism, the worthy combatant of the majority, the evidence, to adapt Deleuze, of a “mute and unknown minority that belongs only to [Beckett]” (“He Stuttered” 109-10). To play on Deleuze’s Bartleby example, Hamm-Clov-Nagg-Nell prefers not to—not to give itself over to the majority’s treatment of language, not to honor the syntax, grammar, and smooth flow of a language that keeps minorities from living, from becoming. In Deleuze’s universe, Hamm and Clov are no longer stuck in the ditch, the “leftover” players in what Pearson sees as a terminated but lingering chess match of imperialism but, rather, co-combatants on a stage- plane of consistency where transcendental differentiations have no place, where slippage is constant, where all language is in an unceasing state of becoming-minor, as Beckett’s
98 stuttering dramatic idiom “makes language grow from the middle, like grass; […] makes language a rhizome instead of a tree” (Deleuze “He Stuttered” 111). Daniel W. Smith asserts that as a majoritarian language becomes minor, so too do the myths of the colonizer. According to Smith, the value of a stuttering language in Deleuze’s sense rests in its instantaneous deconstruction of the majority’s cosmology. The language of Endgame functions, to adapt Smith, as “a creative storytelling that is, as it were, the obverse side of the dominant myths and fictions, an act of resistance whose political impact is immediate and inescapable, and that creates a line of flight on which a minority discourse and a people can be constituted” (xlv).12 To say that Endgame is replete with fragmented speech, repetition, and stuttering is to shine on the nothing new. To examine such language in light of Deleuze, however, reveals a novel perspective of the play’s potential as a postcolonial text, a work that performs, in Smith’s phraseology, as an “act of resistance.” Like many of Beckett’s works, the Endgame machine “drills a hole”13 in language, through which the oppressed may pass, come from the dead, come back to tell us all. The liberating power of Endgame rests in its formidable capacity as a “minor” drama, an “anti- authoritarian” work of art—to borrow Seán Golden’s appraisal of Finnegans Wake (441)— that, in its entirety, takes a stand against an oppressive syntax. Garin Dowd’s astute observation about Beckett’s The Lost Ones pertains extendedly to Endgame, as the play does not “illustrate” a philosophical or political principle but “enacts” one, is that thing itself (210). A kind of foreign language, Beckett’s drama is pro-active and forks the tongue of oppression, turning words inside out, voyaging not outside of but, as Deleuze stresses, to “the outside of language” (112). The domain of language is, after all, where colonialism takes hold of its victim and, therefore, where a minor literature must “nibble away at [the] hegemony and create the possibility of new mythic functions, new cultural references, new vernacular languages with their own uses” (Smith xlvii). Pearson’s essay asserts that Endgame finally offers few solutions to the problem of decolonization, as the characters are unable to get outside of “the black and white rules and oppositional strategies of the game” (237). Deleuze, however, believes that literature goes a long way in giving voice to minorities. For the French theorist, the writer’s job is not to get outside of the game but to expose the vulnerabilities of majoritarian myths. Beckett’s art represents a fissure in the
99 foundation, revealing a writer who has the strength to force syntax to its crisis, who “gives rise to the musical and celestial Beyond of language as a whole” (Deleuze “Bartleby” 72).
100
CHAPTER FIVE
BECKETT’S EXAGGERATED OEDIPUS
May we not speak of the old days? —Samuel Beckett, “Come and Go”
Becoming is an antimemory. —Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
In their joint study Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari contend that, rather than evidence of private neurosis, Kafka’s “Letter to the Father” is a political manifesto. Beneath the seemingly oedipal content, the theorists see an insidious politics of oppression. They explain Kafka’s procedure: “The goal is to obtain a blowup of the ‘photo,’ an exaggeration of it to the point of absurdity. The photo of the father, expanded beyond all bounds, will be projected onto the geographic, historical, and political map of the world in order to reach the vast regions of it” (10). According to Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka demonstrates that father and son suffer the same persecution and that the child is in constant retreat from the presence of extra- familial “diabolical powers”: “The question of the father isn’t how to become free in relation to him (an Oedipal question) but how to find a path there where he didn’t find any” (10). The son’s effort to remove himself from the familial triangle (and, in turn, “the infinitely more active triangles from which the family borrows its own power” [11]) represents what Deleuze and Guattari call the “becoming-animal” of the child—the second effect of the “exaggerated Oedipus”: “To the inhumaness of the ‘diabolical powers,’ there is the answer of a becoming-animal: to become a beetle, to become a dog, to become an ape, ‘head over heels and away,’ rather than lowering one’s head and remaining a bureaucrat, inspector, judge, or judged” (12). Deleuze and Guattari thus
101 unread the misreadings of psychoanalysis, illustrating the political and historical investments behind the father and the family triangle, as well as the child’s recognition of danger and need for escape. Samuel Beckett’s late novel Company offers a variation on the “exaggerated Oedipus.”1 Throughout the text, Beckett amplifies the image of the father and the oedipal triangle—not to reveal the centrality of the family but to illustrate the many triangles that hide beneath and inform the mother-father-child trio. Like Kafka, Beckett perverts the family portrait with bureaucratic and financial forces, sometimes replacing one or more members of the familial unit with exterior “diabolical powers.” As he expands and perverts Oedipus to absurd proportions, Beckett demonstrates that fathers and mothers are surrogates for outside forces that would consume the child, ensure his future participation in the molar world. Yet the figure on his back in the dark, to whom the haunting images appear, senses danger and rejects his place in a family triangle, managing to become-creature and scurry away from the oedipalizing voices. The protagonist prefers existence as an orphan, a creature without qualities who detaches from familial and, more importantly, financial and bureaucratic triangles that threaten to encompass him. He discovers a means of escape—a way to lift his sunken head—where the mothers and fathers in his visions find none. Notably, a discussion of Company as an exaggerated Oedipus forges an alliance with and elaborates on a myriad of critical approaches, particularly two Deleuzian readings by Kateryna Arthur and, more recently, Timothy S. Murphy. I. Critical Company A mere 43 pages of fragmented text, Company elicits numerous interpretations, many of which hinge on the impossibility of reliving or even laying claim to one’s past. The list of scholars who delve into the darkness of the “closed-space” tale includes H. Porter Abbott, Richard Begam, Enoch Brater, Susan D. Brienza, S. E. Gontarski, Raymond Federman, Carla Locatelli, and John Pilling, among others.2 The earliest criticism focuses on Company’s intertextual relationships with Beckett’s literary heritage. Both Brater and Pilling, for example, expose Beckett’s many references to other writers, as well as to his own texts. According to Brater, Company is a kind of field test for avid allusion hunters: “Every work by Samuel Beckett is likely to strike its reader as the
102 discovery of some rich archaeological find. […] And so it is with Company: here Beckett again locates his work within the familiar network he has made so authentically his own” (157). In their respective readings, Brater and Pilling reveal the text’s strong and faint echoes of the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, and James Joyce. They also discuss how the novel is, to use Pilling’s term, a “palimpsest” (130)—a half- erased work beneath which one can still make out many of Beckett’s earlier works. Begam and Locatelli are two of the most important critics to deal with Company from a theoretical/philosophical perspective. Begam explores “postfoundationalist” tendencies in Beckett’s text. Unlike Plato, Rousseau, and Husserl, Beckett, in Begam’s estimation, views language as an empty vessel that cannot lead to a transcendent encounter with Truth, the Self, or Nature (16 and passim): Company […] consistently treats speech not as a foundational reality, but as a mere ejaculation of air. […] Beckett’s story deliberately and scrupulously constructs all the old paradigms—an originary voice, a conscious present, a remembered past—but then proceeds to disassemble and disable those paradigms, to empty out both the Cartesian and Proustian self. (17) In one of his best lines, Begam asserts that selfhood is finally non-existent in the late novel: “Indeed, in Company the first-person singular or plural becomes the last person one is likely to meet” (21). Locatelli approaches Beckett’s novel from a similar poststructuralist perspective, arguing, like Begam, that the first-person is nowhere in sight: “So in Company the ‘I’ tenaciously remains plural, against the traps of conceptual unifications” (159). Abbott’s reading of Company is notable for its innovative attempt to alter the way in which readers understand Beckett’s aesthetics. In his study of Beckett’s text, Abbott offers what he believes is a “fundamental categorical shift in our reading of Beckett, one that moves him out of fiction altogether” (17-18). Abbott suggests that, rather than a novel, Company is Beckett’s attempt at “autography,” in the tradition of St. Augustine and Wordsworth. In his own anti-oedipal reading (which, as will emerge, is both similar to and different from a Deleuzian interpretation), Abbott argues
103 that in Beckett’s subspecies of autography the whole structure of oedipal conflict undergoes erasure. The signs of originary force which so absorbed Beckett’s attention throughout his life achieve a configuration, not within a dialectic of parent and self, but outside of it. A major step in this process is disassembling narrative itself, disassembling, that is, the formal equivalent of generative fatherhood. (19) According to Abbott’s fascinating study, Company is the work of an orphaned writer who erases his history through the anti-lineal, “narratricidal” form of his imaginative texts. Raymond Federman moves the discussion into a political and social domain, arguing that Company provokes a questioning of language that might lead to less oppressive conditions for posterity. “Unless we examine, reexamine the words of our language,” Federman writes, “we will never solve our social, political, cultural problems. The primary role of the writer today is to listen to The Voice of Language. That is what Beckett has been telling us for more than sixty years” (17). A discussion of the exaggerated Oedipus coincides with and at times diverges from the above approaches, but it has most in common with Kateryna Arthur’s 1987 Deleuzo-Guattarian reading, “Texts for Company,” and Timothy S. Murphy’s 2000 essay “Only Intensities Subsist: Samuel Beckett’s Nohow On.” Like Begam and Locatelli, Arthur focuses on the “I”-lessness of the novel: “The suppression of the subjective ‘I’ which is everywhere implied in Company, its dispersal into the second- and third-person narratives, is the most immediately visible structural evidence of the deeply and variously divided nature of this work” (136). Unlike Begam, Arthur finds more than a “mere ejaculation of air,” demonstrating that Company is a schizophrenic ejaculation of air. Arthur turns to Deleuze and Guattari for a model on which to base her understanding of the text, employing their “schizoanalytic” approach to literature and culture as a means of revealing the political value of Company’s schizophrenic narration. For Arthur, Beckett’s text is a political act, a work in which fascist philosophies give way to the chaotic and the non-teleological. Arthur comments that “Beckett’s elusive deviser is an example of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘vagabond, nomad subject’” (141), and she argues that Company upholds the French theorists’ paradigm by way of its “disjunctiveness” (142). Arthur concludes: “While this work can be described as schizophrenic because it
104 generates contradictory visions, it is also schizoanalytic in that it allows the reader to see that all texts are caught in the same tangle of unresolvable contradiction and that this can be a source of power” (144). Murphy’s assessment of Company, which he situates within a larger discussion of all three Nohow On novels, is largely a reading of Beckett’s texts through the lens of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, although he makes use of terminology from Kafka, Anti-Oedipus, and A Thousand Plateaus.3 Murphy’s argument hinges on the disharmony of human faculties: “In each of these texts, the narrating/narrated mind finds it impossible to bring its faculties into harmony, to represent or recognize the external world revealed by its senses, or the self or selves correlative to that world, as stable and reliable objects of thought” (234). Murphy wades through the mess of pronouns in Company, finally asserting that “there is actually only one continuously disavowed subject” (241) and that “apparently distinct pronominal subjects are merely prefabricated grammatical states of intensity through which the single narrative subject passes, temporarily comforting but ultimately unstable roles the subject plays on the darkened plain or plane of his body without organs” (242). Murphy’s essay complements Arthur’s article as it skillfully continues the dialogue about the intersections between Company and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, and, as Hamm explains, it is the dialogue that keeps us here. II. “An Oedipalization of the Universe” Company is replete with scenes of the family—mothers, fathers, little boys. As in Kafka’s “Letter to the Father,” Beckett blows up the image of an all-encompassing father, projecting it onto the map of the world: “How often round the earth already. Halted too at your elbow during these computations your father’s shade. In his old tramping rags” (9); “Head sunk totting up the tally on the verge of the ditch. Foothills to left. Croker’s Acres ahead. Father’s shade to left and a little to the rear” (16). Even when absent, the father haunts the narrative as a negative character: “Your father’s shade is not with you any more. It fell out long ago” (26). Near the end of the novel, a vision of early childhood brings all three members of the oedipal triangle into sharp focus: “A mother’s stooping over cradle from behind. She moves aside to let the father look. In his turn, he murmurs to the newborn. Flat tone unchanged. No trace of love” (34-35). Significantly, the image of the father and the tripartite family unit undergoes alterations throughout
105 much of the text, as Beckett amplifies and perverts the family romance, revealing its relationship to other triangles, other powers that depend on the family triangle for survival. One discovers passages in which “diabolical powers” make their way into the family photo, often taking the place of the mother, the father, and the child. Deleuze and Guattari explain oedipal substitutions as they occur in Kafka: Sometimes, one of the terms of the familial triangle finds itself replaced by another term that is enough to defamiliarize the whole thing (thus, the family store stages a scene of father-employees-child with the child placing himself near the lowest of the employees whose boots he wishes to lick; or in The Trial, the Russian friend takes the place of one of the terms of the triangle and transforms it into a machine of judgment or condemnation). Sometimes, it’s the whole triangle that changes its form and its characters and reveals itself to be judiciary or economic or bureaucratic or political, and so on. Take, for example, the judge-lawyer- accused in The Trial where the father no longer exists as such (or the trio of uncle-lawyer-Block who each want K at all costs to take the trial seriously). (11) At least one critic, Phil Baker, discusses similar formations of extra-familial triangles in Beckett’s work, though Baker finally discounts Deleuze and Guattari’s view of Beckett.4 In his exploration of Beckett’s “lifelong interest in Oedipal themes” (24), Baker observes that characters such as Molloy and the unnamable, among others, enter into triangulations with parental surrogates: “Authority in Beckett is frequently configured in a triangular fashion, exemplified by the appearance of ubiquitous policemen. No sooner has the police sergeant interrogated Molloy about his identity in terms of his mother’s name [T.23], then ‘suddenly a woman rose up before me’ with bread and warm liquid” (27). The triangular relationships in Company also explore issues of authority, as Beckett’s descriptions finally expose how mother, father, and child are all at the mercy of molar powers—victims of the same persecution. Like Kafka, Beckett overplays the triangle to show that no such triangle exists, that the tripartite familial zone is a myth. As Deleuze and Guattari assert in Anti-Oedipus: “There is no Oedipal triangle: Oedipus is always
106 open in an open social field. Oedipus opens to the four winds, to the four corners of the social field” (96). The initial memory passage in Company exemplifies how Beckett exaggerates Oedipus with perverse transformations. The scene concerns a young boy and his mother out for a day of shopping: A small boy you come out of Connolly’s Stores holding your mother by the hand. You turn right and advance in silence southward along the highway. After some hundred paces you head inland and broach the long steep homeward. You make ground in silence hand in hand through the warm still summer air. It is late afternoon and after some hundred paces the sun appears above the crest of the rise. Looking up at the blue sky and then at your mother’s face you break the silence asking her if it is not in reality much more distant than it appears. The sky that is. The blue sky. Receiving no answer you mentally reframe your question and some hundred paces later look up at her face again and ask her if it does not appear much less distant than in reality it is. For some reason you could never fathom this question must have angered her exceedingly. For she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never forgotten. (6) The passage reads like something out of Freud’s case histories. A mother walks “hand in hand” with her son. The son asks a question that angers his mother; her biting response lingers—“a cutting retort that you have never forgotten.” Yet mother and child are not alone on this particular summer day. Indeed, they are quite literally entertaining company. While the father is noticeably absent, Beckett completes the oedipal triangle with diabolical economical and financial forces. The mother and son hold hands with each other but also with the invisible hand of Connolly’s Stores. As in Kafka, the familial triangle reveals a breach, consisting of a mother, a child, and the ominous character of capitalism: mommy-Connolly’s-me. The next memory passage further indicates the perversion of Oedipus by introducing a series of extra-familial trios. The memory concerns the activities surrounding a child’s birth, mingling the players of the family romance with company
107 from the larger social field: “You first saw the light in the room you most likely were conceived in. The big bow window looked west to the mountain. Mainly west. For being bow it looked also a little south and a little north. Necessarily. […] The midwife was none other than Dr Haddon or Hadden. Straggling grey moustache and hunted look” (7-8). The presence of Dr Haddon or Hadden illustrates that even at the moment of birth the child is introduced to strangers, extra-familial agents. Before the father can enter into his own filial relationship, a doctor steps in to intercept the child, symbolizing the child’s immediate delivery into foreign, molar hands. Dr Hadden replaces the father in a perverted triangulation of mommy-doctor-unborn child. The doctor’s “straggling grey moustache” is a significant detail, as it further demonstrates that the molar world lurks within the family and conducts its business through parents. Indeed, the doctor’s facial hair is strikingly similar to the “thick moustache” and “greying hair” the father wears in a later memory scene (12). The facial hair confuses the two male figures, intimating the molar world’s paternal disguise. In the same passage, yet another molar force penetrates the family home as the father returns from his walk in the mountains: “When he returned at nightfall he learned to his dismay from the maid at the back door that labour was still in swing. Despite its having begun before he left the house full ten hours earlier” (8). The maid at the back door further illustrates the presence of molar entities, further illustrates that the family home is always host to company. She plays a role similar to that of the three bureaucrat lodgers who move in with the Samsas in “The Metamorphosis” (company, to be sure) to amplify the family’s collusion with the outside world. An intruder from the social field, the maid symbolizes the family’s affluence and, more generally, the hierarchical system in which human beings use capital to dominate (or bow the head of) others. As the doctor attends to the mother about to give birth, the maid attends to the father in his time of anxiety over the coming child. Triangles begin to overlap: mommy-doctor-child; father-maid-child. The father’s ensuing action concretizes his allegiance to the molar powers. As he worries about his child’s entrance into the world, the father retreats into a grotesque womb of capitalism: “He at once hastened to the coachhouse some twenty yards distant where he housed his De Dion Bouton. He shut the doors behind him and climbed into the
108 driver’s seat” (8). The molar world consumes the father as he sits behind the wheel, enclosed in his capitalist machine. His oppression compares to that of the father in “The Metamorphosis” whose bank uniform encloses him. As Deleuze and Guattari note, the father in Kafka’s story “sleeps in his uniform, demonstrating the external power he is still in submission to as if even at home he was ‘only at the beck and call of his superior’” (Kafka 14). Like the father in Kafka’s work, the father in Company serves molar entities; he is not the cause of neurosis but himself a victim of capitalist forces, the man who will subject his son to the same victimization, the same lowering of the head. The father proves a “conduit” for extra-familial triangles—devoured rather than devourer. The De Dion Bouton functions similarly to Connolly’s Stores in an earlier memory passage. Just as the mother introduces the child to the forces of capitalist culture by taking him shopping, the father invites the “diabolical powers” into the home by means of the family automobile. Thus, as Beckett expands the photo of the father, he also amplifies the father’s bondage to the outside, to what Deleuze and Guattari refer to in Kafka’s work as a “whole underground network” (Kafka 10). The child will enter into a family that is always-already non-familial, always-already at the mercy of political and financial investments. Beckett again perverts the family triangle in a scene involving the young boy’s fearful moments as he is about to dive into the sea: You stand at the tip of the high board. High above the sea. In it your father’s upturned face. Upturned to you. You look down to the loved trusted face. He calls to you to jump. He calls, Be a brave boy. The red round face. The thick moustache. The greying hair. The swell sways it under and sways it up again. The far call again, Be a brave boy. Many eyes upon you. From the water and from the bathing place. (12) In his provocative assessment of the diving scene, Abbott contends that the boy’s not jumping is significant in moving Company beyond the bounds of the father-son narrative. Abbott writes, “It is the not-taking-place of a following of a father’s command. It is the not-taking-on of an identity (“Be a brave boy”). It is the nonoccurrence of a baptism of total immersion with a father before the witness of many (“Many eyes upon you”)” (17). For Abbott, the diving scene bolsters his theory that Company is Beckett’s means of
109 escaping the myth of lineal descent, of “finding oneself outside of [rather than in the midst of] an ancient story that absorbs all identity into its relentless functioning” (16).5 Another way to read the diving passage, however, is to see how Beckett overplays (rather than avoids) the oedipal myth, amplifying and parodying the triangular structure to expose the molar forces that haunt both father and son, seek to suck them into the same sea. For even as Beckett amplifies the image of the father’s “red round face,” he also amplifies the presence of a terrifying extra-familial world: “Many eyes upon you.” The father’s call to the young child to be brave is the voice of molar powers, forces “that he submits to and that he tries to get his son to submit to” (Deleuze and Guattari Kafka 12). Notably, the father is already in the water (“In it your father’s upturned face”), signifying his own submersion in the sea of molarity, his own participation in the world of judgment and oppression. The son now finds himself on trial before an all-encompassing tribunal of judgment, of which the father is only a part, one side of a perverse oedipal triangle: father-Many eyes-child. As the molar powers look on, the father attempts to initiate his son into the brave world of manhood, the dive serving as a rite of passage into molar waters. The diving scene reveals not the tension between a father and son but between the molar plane and a boy it would consume through the father, through the already consumed paternal authority. The scene of the little boy at play in a garden offers yet another amplified use of Oedipus. While the young child climbs trees, a molar representative invades the home: You are alone in the garden. Your mother is in the kitchen making ready for afternoon tea with Mrs Coote. […] From behind a bush you watch Mrs Coote arrive. A small thin sour woman. Your mother answers her saying, He is playing in the garden. You climb to near the top of a great fir. You sit a little listening to all the sounds. Then throw yourself off. The great boughs break your fall. The needles. You lie a little with your face to the ground. Then climb the tree again. Your mother answers Mrs Coote again saying, He has been a very naughty boy. (14-15) The mother’s visit with Mrs Coote reiterates the presence of molar systems. As the mother prepares to have afternoon tea with Mrs Coote, she gives place to the customs of organized culture, obeying its etiquette and manners. The scene illustrates not merely a
110 boy’s relationship with his mother but how the mother speaks on behalf of the “diabolical powers” of molarity, for which the young boy will speak, if the molar world has its way, when raising his own children. Like the father in the diving scene, the mother is a condensation of other forces to which she submits and to which she will try to get her son to submit. Afternoon tea (that is, molar customs and manners) perverts Oedipus, turning the family triangle into a mother-etiquette-child or mother-Mrs Coote-child trio. Again, the substitution suggests not that entities from the outside world serve as surrogates for the missing father, but rather that the father is always-already not there, a molar attribute, an extension of the diabolical. Collectively, the memory passages in Company reveal how Beckett amplifies the family photo to demonstrate the many other triangles at work within the oedipal structure. As they emphasize the familial, the passages also play up the exterior forces of capitalism (Connolly’s Stores; the De Dion Bouton; Dr Hadden; the maid at the back door) and the tribunals of judgment that await the child: “Many eyes upon you.” The entire family is composed of bowed heads. Yet the figure who fantasizes about this insidious structure finds a means of escape, a way to raise his head in the face of his oppression. Like Kafka’s animal-characters, Beckett’s protagonist becomes an inhuman creature and retreats rat-like, roach-like into a molecular realm. The voices tempt him to accept the familial images as his own, as evidence of his past, thereby transforming him into a molarized adult citizen, a man with a biography. The figure on his back in the dark, however, seeks loopholes in the system, crevices of escape from leading an existence like that of the mothers and fathers in his dreams. To erase himself from past and future family photos, Beckett’s protagonist must rid himself of human qualities and become animal. III. Lines of Flight: Becoming-Animal In Company, the figure on his back in the dark experiences the becoming-animal by distinguishing himself from the molarized adults in the memory passages. First, as both Arthur and Murphy6 discuss in their Deleuzian readings, Beckett’s creature endures a fragmentation of the cogito. The molar world depends on the bowing of unified subject-citizens, but the protagonist discovers mental mysteries that run counter to and draw attention from the purposes of molarity. Arthur explains: “The inability clearly to
111 define and locate the speaking subject, the fragmentation of self, the sense of separation from self and others and the general confusion about place and identity are all recognisably schizoid features of the narrative” (139). Murphy also addresses the complexity of voices and asserts that the term “deviser” finally encompasses all pronominal states: hearer (him), voice (you), and the “continuously implied first person” (241). The confusion and questioning reveal a mind at odds with that of the unified subject. The figure prohibits the possibility of the first person as he interrogates every who down in who-ville: “Who exclaims thus? Who asks who exclaims, What visions in the shadeless dark of light and shade! Yet another still? Devising it all for company. What a further addition to company that would be! Yet another still devising it all for company” (44). As a result of his relentless questioning, the figure contrasts his mentality with what Deleuze and Guattari call tree-thought; he is always-already lost in a grassy rhizome of voices, murmurs, and whispers. (“Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree” [Deleuze and Guattari Thousand 15]). To adapt Foucault’s comments in his preface to Anti-Oedipus, the figure learns to “[p]refer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems” (xiii). Significantly, as the figure becomes lost in an infinite line of flight from the cogito, he becomes a creature without a biography, further distinguishing himself from the men and women who haunt his visions. Indeed, a key theme in Company involves ownership of memories. If the figure finally knows not who asks and who listens, then he knows not to whom the images of the “past” belong. The problem is a central point of analysis for critics. Gontarski writes, “The hearer is puzzled by the voice because it is not only sourceless but false, not his, and so the ‘life’ not ‘his’ either, the tale not autobiographical. […] Stories of what may or may not be images from the narrator’s past have tended to sound to him like incidents in the life of another” (Introduction xxii).7 The figure compares to the biography-challenged Bartleby, whose lack of history, whose liminality, torments his molarized boss: “Without past or future, he is instantaneous” (Deleuze “Bartleby” 74). Notably, in his autographical reading, Abbott explores the struggle to be instantaneous, the fight to cut free from a family tree (as his aforementioned explication
112 of the diving scene illustrates). Abbott contends that Beckett himself is the one who wishes to erase his past and that the formal structure of the novel reveals how the author aims to prevent coherent narration and, in turn, coherent progression of events in his life. Each memory passage, Abbott explains, is “sealed from narrative intercourse with the others, packed away in thick swathes of blank space and then packed still further in layers of discursive insulation that repeatedly stress its fabricated, propositional, wholly unverifiable nature” (16). Beckett’s attempt to make the past unverifiable allows him to exist as an author without a biography, without an autobiography: “[T]his undoing is not to the end of fictional creation but to the end of being Beckett, Beckett as it were avant la lettre, Beckett before he is Beckett” (18). Other Beckett characters reveal a similar fascination with the process of memory and verifiability of a personal past. As various scholars discuss, the problem of memory and identity surfaces in works ranging from Waiting for Godot to Krapp’s Last Tape to That Time.8 According to Knowlson, That Time represents Beckett’s concern with the tricks of time and memory: “For over the entire play looms the shadow of Beckett’s lengthy meditation on the powers of that ‘cancer Time.’ Time not only deforms […] but sweeps man along on a tide which makes the past appear remote, uncertain, even illusory, and sees the individual human life as the fleeting disturbance of a still, silent, indifferent world” (532). In Come and Go, another work that concerns the passage of time and irretrievability of the past, Vi asks her two companions, “May we not speak of the old days?” (195). Company serves as a response to Vi’s question, demonstrating that speaking of the “old days” may be possible, but who speaks of them (whose old days they are) is finally “unverifiable.” As he experiences a rigorous molecularization of the mind, the protagonist in Company also alienates his body from the molar realm. Earlier chapters of this study reveal how characters such as Victor Krap in Eleuthéria and the narrator of “From an Abandoned Work” move awkwardly and without rational purposes across their environments. The former walks “in every direction” (and thus to nowhere) in his Parisian bedroom of immanence, while the latter stumbles his way into a patch of vicious ferns. Such characters experience movement for its own sake, subjecting their bodies to molecular treatments. From the outset of Company, the creature on his back in the dark
113 likewise demonstrates his intense focus on the body and its sensations: “To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again” (3). As the story progresses, the protagonist continues to explore his immanence, attempting to answer a question Deleuze (following Spinoza) poses throughout his philosophy: What can a body do? In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze writes, “We speak of consciousness and its decrees, of the will and its effects, of the thousand ways of moving the body, of dominating the body and the passions—but we do not even know what a body can do” (17-18). In his visions of familial activities, the protagonist witnesses individuals who exploit their bodies toward a molar end. A mother and child shop at Connolly’s Stores. A doctor situates himself to accept a child into the world. A maid greets the father at the back door of the home. A father sits in his automobile. A mother prepares tea for Mrs Coote. Yet the figure on his back in the dark has no such interests. He uses his body not to take him shopping or to operate the family car but to understand more fully what his body is capable of doing. The figure contemplates fundamental physical movement: “Can he move? Does he move? Should he move? What a help that would be. When the voice fails. Some movement however small. Were it but of a hand closing. Or opening if closed to begin. What a help that would be in the dark!” (13). He soon ponders “all imaginable positions”: Which of all imaginable positions has the most to offer in the way of company. […] Let him for example after due imagination decide in favour of the supine position or prone and this in practice prove less companionable than anticipated. May he then or may he not replace it by another? Such as huddled with his legs drawn up within the semicircle of his arms and his head on his knees. Or in motion. Crawling on all fours. (18-19) At times, the protagonist zooms in to offer close-up inspections of specific organs and the function of human senses. Sight, for example, momentarily preoccupies the narrator’s attention: “There is of course the eye. Filling the whole field. The hood slowly down. Or up if down to begin. The globe. All pupil. Staring up. Hooded. Bared. Hooded again. Bared again” (14). Later, he contemplates his sense of taste, touch, and smell:
114 “Taste? The taste in his mouth? Long since dulled. Touch? The thrust of the ground against his bones. . . . Smell? His own? Long since dulled” (37-38). The figure’s perception of the body from a non-molar standpoint is similar to Gregor Samsa’s altered viewpoint at the beginning of “The Metamorphosis”—a figure who also finds himself on his back: “One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin. He lay on his hard, armorlike back” (117). Significantly, Beckett’s the Unnamable experiences a more literal becoming-insect than the figure in Company. He (it) imagines himself (itself) becoming-worm, becoming-larval man: “But it’s time I gave this solitary a name, nothing doing without proper names. I therefore baptise him Worm. It was high time. Worm. I don’t like it, but I haven’t much choice. It will be my name too, when the time comes, when I needn’t be called Mahood anymore, if that happy time ever comes” (337). Worm is but one of the shapes and mindsets the Unnamable takes, but it reveals a powerful impulse to be other than man, other than what the Unnamable calls “a higher mammal” (337). As Ackerley and Gontarski observe in their recent Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, the movement toward a larval stage extends to such works as Murphy, in which the title character “tries to regain the lost coenaesthesis of the embryonic stage” (309), and How It Is which “determines the phylogeny of ‘l’homme lavaire’ crawling through the mud in denial of metamorphosis” (309). While he may not experience the literal insect-metamorphosis that the Unnamable or other Beckett figures experience, the prostrate figure in Company reveals a similar impulse toward a non-human, animal life-form by challenging traditional or molar understandings of the body, disorganizing and de-oedipalizing it. Over the course of his story and despite the various images of exemplary molarized individuals, Beckett’s nameless protagonist awakens to his own verminization, his own estrangement from the molar world and its expectations, presumptions, and conditions. The protagonist turns Dr. Piouk’s momentary contortions and disjointed dance into a permanent mode of being (see chapter three). The figure further evidences his becoming-animal through the stuttering language of his narration. As Deleuze and Guattari explain in their discussion of the “exaggerated Oedipus,” Kafka’s characters seek freedom not only by fleeing from the forces that
115 would have them bow their heads, but also by discovering a sound that designates their freedom from the major language of molar authority: “In the becoming-mouse, it is a whistling that pulls the music and the meaning from the words. In the becoming-ape, it is a coughing that ‘sound[s] dangerous but mean[s] nothing’ (to become a tuberculoid ape). In the becoming-insect, it is a mournful whining that carries along the voice and blurs the resonance of words” (13). In Company, the narrator communicates in a form of broken English. His narration is often unintelligible: “And in another dark or in the same another devising it all for company” (4); “What with what feeling remains does he feel about now as compared to then” (15); “For why or?” (16); “The light there was then” (17); “Moment when his own unrelieved a relief” (22); “And in the same breath too soon to say and why after all not say without further ado what can later be unsaid and what if it could not?” (31); “In what posture and if or not as hearer in his for good not yet devised” (33). The nameless narrator trumps the stuttering characters in Endgame (see chapter four). He subjects language to a minor treatment, defamiliarizing words and sentences from their conventional usage. It is the minor language of the man without qualities, of the strange creature who causes molar institutions to pause, to halt business with the sound of his extraordinary utterances. Unlike the mothers, fathers, and children in his visions, the figure on his back in the dark thus pursues existence at the darkened fringes of culture, following Victor Krap, the narrator of “From an Abandoned Work,” and others creatures in Beckett’s oeuvre. Voices in the skull provide him with a model of molarity, but he rejects the call of the “diabolical powers.” Gontarski discovers a similar creature of rebellion in Beckett’s Act Without Words I, a play that demonstrates “not the banal dramatic image of defeat some critics have suggested, but a powerful if futile image of rebellion, of artistic rebellion as well, of Sartre’s man freeing himself from outside forces which may be god, instinct, tradition, mythology, human nature, or basic need” (33). The figure on his back in the dark finds a brother in the earlier mime, only in Company the drama becomes an interior struggle. The molar trickster plays not from without but from within, evidencing, as Foucault describes, “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior” (xiii). The figure senses danger in the molar whispers, searches for lines of flight, and
116 discovers a means of deflecting the onslaught. Like many other questers in the Beckett canon, he lingers without qualities—another victor.
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CONCLUSION
BECKETT: THE INVENTION OF THE INHUMAN
In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom claims that literary study has nothing to do with the improvement of culture: “[L]iterary criticism, as an art, always was and always will be an elitist phenomenon. It was a mistake to believe that literary criticism could become a basis for democratic education or for societal improvement. […] The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will improve society” (16, 29-30). In his “Elegiac” conclusion, Bloom further observes: “How can you teach solitude? Real reading is a lonely activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen” (485). Rather, for Bloom, literature is a means of understanding one’s mortality, one’s inevitable encounter with the undiscovered country, to quote one of the Yale scholar’s favorite characters. Deleuze and Guattari, however, could not disagree more. As their writings underscore, the work of authors such as Samuel Beckett contributes to societal improvement, looks forward to the creation of a better citizenry. Beckett provokes a reconsideration of cultural norms and conventions that often suppress and oppress, allowing heedful readers to find themselves amid his rubble, his chaos, his unfamiliar territory that finally proves to be disturbingly familiar. As the foregoing chapters demonstrate, Beckett often portrays characters who simply have no ambition to live by the exacting standards of society at large, who are not willing, to adapt Mark Seem’s phraseology, “to have someone else legislate life” (xvi). They prefer a “minor” existence in the darkened corners, the hollow holes of culture. Murphy stares into another realm for much of his journey through life, avoiding permanent work, a permanent wife, permanent roots in the soil of molarity. He finally relents from his movement toward quality-lessness, but signals one of Beckett’s first depictions of the man who would be new, original, larval. Victor Krap takes up the fight
118 in Eleuthéria, aiming to live out of earshot of molar voices. He prefers to linger in his Parisian bedsit, apart from his parents and their molar salon. Even when the molar representatives come to rescue him and show him the error of his ways, he turns them away, contaminating some of them with his anti-filiative ambitions. He causes us to reconsider our own filial relationships, our own ties to the molar world of families and the insidious forces that often speak through those who live in the rooms next to us. The narrator of “From an Abandoned Work” likewise prefers to roam without a wife, without children, without the respect of organized culture. We last see him descending into a patch of ferns where he experiences his body as a citizen of the molecular, rather than molar, realm. In Endgame, characters subject their bodies and their language to a minor treatment, discovering modes of existence that conflict with majoritarian organizations and institutions. Beckett’s late novel Company reveals how the author pursues molecularity into his final years, depicting a character who inhabits dark closed spaces and refuses to allow the “diabolical powers” to mold him into a respectable individual. Such chronicles finally reveal how western cultural systems steal and cheat the human animal of its immanence. Beckett’s minor literature is an oasis for those haunted by the diabolism of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “great molar powers.” The lure of the molecular plane is strong when one realizes how organizations such as the family and capitalism collude to promote shame and guilt. Where theorists such as Freud step in to prolong the agony, Deleuze and Guattari (via Beckett) aim to put an end to the “sanity.” Like their hero Bartleby, they breathe a little psychosis into western neurosis. Significantly, Beckett’s characters are victors not in the sense that they win their battles but that they fight them at all, that they sense danger in the everyday world and attempt retreat. As they endure quests without qualities, Beckett’s inhuman characters help uncover the injustices and indecencies of molar culture. They give us pause and force us to question why we possess certain assumptions, certain prejudices, certain myths. After one reads works such as Murphy or Eleuthéria or “From an Abandoned Work” (especially in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-oedipal theories), one can never again simply relegate the humming madman to the asylum as insane. One can never again overlook the police car that stops the screaming bag lady as she moves along the
119 sidewalk, interrupting the business day of coffee shops and dry cleaners. Beckett forces us to question why we fear what we fear, why we avoid whom we avoid. To be a keen animal, to be a discerning worm, to be a fierce vermin is preferable to existence as an unquestioning citizen who falls for all the hooks and lines of the state. As Stanley Cavell astutely observes, “Solitude, emptiness, nothingness, meaninglessness, silence—these are not the givens of Beckett’s characters but their goal, their new heroic undertaking” (156). Indeed, the insidious molar world is full of meaning, full of reasoning, full of stories that allow the systems and organizations to work. Yet Beckett’s characters would rather wander aimlessly or crawl into their closed spaces than participate in the games of society. Beckett, then, is not (or not merely) a preparation for death, as Bloom believes all great poets are, but a preparation for life, for a better citizenry. His minor culture of vagrants and wanderers constitutes a community of brothers and sisters that uproots oedipal culture and the powers that hide within the familial structure. Murphy and his followers hail, like Tristan, “from those unknown highways which conceal so much strange knowledge, from that fantastic plain, the underside of the world” (Foucault 12).
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NOTES
Introduction
1. Two other critics discuss the work of Deleuze and Guattari as it relates to Bloom’s theories of literature. In his introduction to “A White Heron” and the Question of Minor Literature, Louis A. Renza discusses minor literature in the context of Northrop Frye, Bloom, and Deleuze and Guattari. Renza’s argument focuses largely on what constitutes minor literature, as well as the inherent contradictions in defining and critiquing minor texts. Réda Bensmaïa briefly mentions Bloom in his discussion of minor literature and Kafka, commenting: “Indeed, for Kafka, literature is no longer related to the desire to tell extraordinary and edifying stories; nor is it a question of inventing a new style or improving upon what the ‘masters’ did, in the hope of relieving what Bloom calls the ‘anxiety of influence’” (214).
2. Bloom looks down on the work of French theorists and, more specifically, French interpretations of Shakespeare. At the end of The Western Canon, Bloom writes, That enterprise [redefining Shakespeare and Dante] is now considerably advanced by the ‘New Historicism,’ which is French Shakespeare, with Hamlet under the shadow of Michel Foucault. We have enjoyed French Freud or Lacan, and French Joyce or Derrida. Jewish Freud and Irish Joyce are more to my taste, as is English Shakespeare or universal Shakespeare. French Shakespeare is so delicious an absurdity that one feels an ingrate for not appreciating so comic an invention. 486-87
3. Daniel W. Smith’s introduction to Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical is an invaluable resource in a study of Deleuzian theory.
4. See Deleuze’s essay “The Greatest Irish Film: Beckett’s Film” in Essays Critical and Clinical (23-26).
5. Throughout this introduction, I am greatly indebted to numerous critics and translators of Deleuze and Guattari’s works. For illuminating discussions, see Mark Seem’s introduction to Anti-Oedipus and Brian Massumi’s introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, both of which have helped to shape and clarify my own understanding of Deleuze and Guattari. I have also benefited from Claire Colebrook’s helpful book Gilles Deleuze and Philip Goodchild’s book-length study Deleuze & Guattari: An Introduction
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to the Politics of Desire. Any similarities between the work of these theorists and my own work should be credited to them.
6. In correspondence with his American publisher, Barney Rosset, Beckett relayed on occasion his trouble with moles. Rosset eventually sent Beckett a keg of molebane. This quote is from Beckett’s January 9, 1959 letter (see Gontarski, Sam and Barney).
7. Deleuze and Guattari propose the idea of an art of “underdevelopment” throughout their book on Kafka. Réda Bensmaïa, among other critics, elaborates on the idea in his essay “On the Concept of Minor Literature From Kafka to Kateb Yacine” (214).
8.P P These are Deleuze’s various appellations for the creature who will not wear the “iron collar of Oedipus.” Deleuze uses such terms to describe Herman Melville’s Bartleby, among other literary characters. See his essay “Bartleby; or, the Formula” (74).
9. The Proustian echo occurs, for example, in A Thousand Plateaus (98) and serves as the epigraph to Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical.
10. For a more extensive discussion of Deleuze’s theory of artistic stuttering, see Smith’s introduction to Essays Critical and Clinical, in which he explains the effects of stuttering on colonial discourses.
11. I return to Murphy’s discussion in the last chapter, in which I continue an in- progress dialogue of Company as a “minor” text. For further discussion of “exhaustion,” see also Mary Bryden and Ronald Bogue.
12. Mary F. Catanzaro’s essay “Deleuze, Guattari, and the Shadowy Other: Samuel Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said” and Jon Erickson’s “The Face and the Possibility of an Ethics of Performance” are two other essays that deal with the Beckett-Deleuze intersection, but that I do not address extensively in my own study. I briefly allude to Erickson’s work in my chapter on “From an Abandoned Work.”
Chapter One
1. Deleuze’s highly complex definition of “exhaustion” involves Beckett’s effort to relieve his art of all superfluity, all “adhesions” (158). According to Deleuze, the television plays are best conducive to Beckett’s creation of an “unsullied image” (158). For more on Deleuze and his ideas of exhaustion, see the third section of this essay (“Murphy’s Molecular Movements”).
2. This essay would not have been possible without the illuminating scholarship of these and other critics. I allude to their interpretations throughout where appropriate. Further resemblances between my ideas and those of other Beckett scholars should be credited as due.
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3. For a more detailed account of “State philosophy,” see the introduction to this study.
4. Deleuze uses these terms interchangeably, but as Daniel W. Smith makes clear in his introduction to Essays Critical and Clinical, one needs to distinguish between the idea that an artist can “invoke” a people and the idea that an artist can “create” a people. Smith writes, “[Artists] cannot create a people, and an oppressed people cannot concern itself with art. Yet when a people creates itself, Deleuze suggests, through its own resources and sufferings, it does so in a way that links up with something in art, or rather that links up art with what it was lacking” (xlv).
5. See Smith’s introduction to Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical.
6. Smith discusses Deleuze’s notion of the artist-as-physician throughout his introduction to Essays Critical and Clinical (xvii and passim).
7. For further discussion of Ahab, see Smith’s introduction to Essays Critical and Clinical.
8. For more on the distinctions/similarities between Melville’s major protagonists, see Deleuze’s essay on “Bartleby” (79 and passim).
9. Agamben’s essay overlaps at times with Deleuze’s reading, although Agamben situates his discussion of Bartleby specifically in the context of “potentiality.” The Italian philosopher argues that Bartleby gives up copying to express the potential of writing both to happen and not to happen: On the writing tablet of the celestial scribe, the letter, the act of writing, marks the passage from potentiality to actuality, the occurrence of a contingency. But precisely for this reason, every letter also marks the nonoccurence of something; every letter is always in this sense a “dead letter.” This is the intolerable truth that Bartleby learned in the Washington office, and this is the meaning of the singular formula, “on errands of life, those letters speed to death.” (269) In his introduction to Agamben’s essays on potentiality, Daniel Heller-Roazen elaborates: “To [Deleuze’s reading of Bartleby] Agamben therefore adds that the zone of indistinction constituted by Bartleby’s reply is equally one between the potential to be (or do) and the potential not to be (or do), a zone in which language, emancipated from both position and negation, abstains from referring to anything as such” (19).
10. Deleuze argues that Beckett’s oeuvre moves through three phases of exhaustion: [L]anguage I was that of the novels, and culminates in Watt; language II marks out its multiple paths throughout the novels (The Unnamable), suffuses the works for theater, and blares forth in the radio pieces. But language III, born in the novel (How It Is), passing through the theater
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(Happy Days, Act Without Words, Catastrophe), finds the secret of its assemblage in television: a prerecorded voice for an image that in each case is in the process of taking form. (159) For Deleuze, Murphy speaks language I, though the theorist will again invoke Murphy’s state of mind to illustrate his arguments about language III and Beckett’s television plays (169-170).
11. For more critical explications of Deleuze’s idea of “language I,” see Anthony Uhlmann’s Beckett and Poststructuralism (137) and Jennifer M. Jeffers’s Uncharted Space (5-8 and passim).
12. In his 1968 analysis of Murphy, Harrison discusses the various games of permutation that pervade the novel, including Neary’s games with the stools (25), Murphy’s game with the biscuits (26), the series Murphy invokes to consider the possible times when he will tell Celia about his job (26), and Mr. Endon’s game with the light switches (26), which I address in the final section of my essay.
13. The narrator of Watt describes the title character’s entrance into the novel as follows: On the far side of the street, opposite to where they [the Hacketts] sat, a tram stopped. It remained stationary for some little time, and they heard the voice of the conductor, raised in anger. Then it moved on, disclosing, on the pavement, motionless, a solitary figure, lit less and less by the receding lights, until it was scarcely to be distinguished from the dim wall behind it. (16)
14. See Deleuze’s essay on Bartleby (71).
15. Jon Erickson analyzes Beckett’s Catastrophe (and Ntozake Shange’s Spell #7) in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on faciality. See his essay “The Face and the Possibility of an Ethics of Performance.”
16. See Smith’s introduction to Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical, in which he discusses Deleuze’s vision of “vitality” in great art. Smith writes, “For Deleuze, it is never a question of judging a work of art in terms of transcendent or universal criteria, but of evaluating it clinically in terms of its ‘vitality,’ its ‘tenor of Life’” (liii). I will pick up this theme in later chapters.
17. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari posit that the “various gaits and methods of self-locomotion [of Beckett’s characters] constitute, in and of themselves, a finely-tuned machine” (2). Later, they refer to the band of schizophrenics at the end of Malone Dies as an “infernal machine” (3). I discuss these references to Beckett in the introduction to this study.
18. At one point in the novel, Celia experiences a similar nothingness when she gives Murphy’s rocking chair a whirl: “In the cell of her mind, teasing the oakum of her
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history. Then it was finished, the days and places and things and people were untwisted and scattered, she was lying down, she had no history” (149). Abbott believes Celia is thus “superior to the other characters in her ability to understand and become like Murphy” (Form and Effect 41).
19. I agree with Ben-Zvi (and critics like her) insofar as “the outer world” means the molar world rather than the physical world. Indeed, Mr. Endon, as I argue throughout the final pages of my essay, is not a solipsist but a Deleuzian machine that enjoys rhizomatic interaction with his environment.
20. For an in-depth analysis of the unreliable narrator in Murphy, see Rubin Rabinovitz’s essay “Unreliable Narrative in Murphy.”
Chapter Two
1. Abbott claims that Eleuthéria is an unsuccessful attempt at autography, though one that will lead to a more successful autographical work eleven years later, Krapp’s Last Tape. Abbott writes, Eleutheria provided an extended opportunity for Beckett to start thinking through the connections between dramatic form and his own special content. When he came to revive Krap as Krapp, he pushed against his first play, recollection as always to invent. But in this instance Beckett, in effect, wrote the earlier play out of his oeuvre. In the process, Krapp became Beckett’s implicit statement on dramatic method. (67) Abbott contends that Beckett’s autographical project continues throughout his career, culminating in works such as Company (9-22) and Worstward Ho (68).
2. Deleuze and Guattari borrow this term from Kafka, whom I discuss later in the essay.
3. Near the beginning of his discussion of Eleuthéria, Abbott mentions in passing that Victor Krap is a “Bartleby-like character who refuses to act according to any recognizable motivation” (Author 67). Abbott, however, offers no elaboration on the comparison.
4. Jennifer M. Jeffers contends that the title character of Beckett’s Molloy inhabits the plane of immanence and experiences his body as a series of intensities. I would like to thank Dr. Jeffers for allowing me to preview her essay.
5. In his essay on Eleuthéria, Peter Boxall observes that the two sides of the stage are “contrasting and conflictual forms of dramatic representation” (249).
6. Other critics compare Eleuthéria to Molloy. S. E. Gontarski, for example, asserts in his introduction to the play, “And chronologically nearer [than Godot or Krapp’s Last Tape], we can see as well the novel Molloy evolving from Victor’s struggles to explain himself” (xx). Cohn, moreover, refers to Molloy as Victor’s
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“coeval” (171) and suggests that Moran “embodies the whole Krap salon rolled into one caricature—before he starts out in search of Molloy” (171).
7. Some critics suggest a comparison between Beckett’s Glazier and those of August Strindberg and Jean Cocteau. McMillan and Fehsenfeld write, “Like the Glazier in Strindberg’s Dream Play who with his diamond opens the door concealing the central character Victoria, this [Beckett’s] glazier has as his major function the task of revealing Victor by evoking from him an explanation of his motivation” (35). David Bradby likens the Glazier to one from Cocteau’s oeuvre: “The manner of his [Beckett’s Glazier’s] entrance is strikingly similar to the entrance of a glazier in another notable Surrealist play, Orphée by Jean Cocteau (1926). In both plays, the main character deliberately breaks a windowpane, an action that is instantly followed by the appearance of a glazier” (68). Boxall associates the Glazier with Brecht’s political theater: “The glazier, who functions as a sort of Brechtian dramaturg, recognizes the force of Victor’s denial, but he can only understand and value this denial when it is engaged with a political referent” (249).
8. Various critics remark that Eleuthéria looks forward to Beckett’s later plays, especially Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Esslin observes that the “basic situation [of Eleuthéria] was, superficially, analogous to the relationship between Clov and Hamm. […] In Endgame, however, that situation has been deepened into truly universal significance” (67-68). McMillan and Fehsenfeld assert: “Gogo and Didi did not spring full blown from Beckett’s brow. Though couched in the humorous language of dramatic parody, Eleuthéria contains the serious theoretical underpinnings of the new kind of drama Beckett was to initiate in Godot. Many passages in it contain the seeds of Beckett’s later work” (30). See also Knowlson, who likens the chess references in Eleuthéria to the “basic chessboard situation” in Endgame (330-31).
9. McMillan and Fehsenfeld mention Artaud as one of Beckett’s influences in their discussion of Eleuthéria (31), though not in relation to the dancing scene but to the presence of the Chinese torturer: “In the true fashion of Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, the script is tossed aside before a Chinese torturer is brought in to interrogate Victor” (31).
10. In his study of Beckett and psychoanalysis, Phil Baker has already noted how the dream indicates Victor’s “textbook Freudian nightmares” (42).
Chapter Three
1. I borrow this term from translator and scholar Daniel W. Smith, who uses it in his discussion of the effects of “minor literature.” See his introduction to Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical (xlv). I employ Smith’s terminology again near the end of chapter four.
2. Susan D. Brienza makes a similar assertion in her analysis of “From an Abandoned Work,” which is less strictly psychoanalytical than O’Hara’s reading.
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Brienza writes, “Knowing that a stoat resembles a weasel, we can perceive—even if the narrator cannot—a subtle correspondence between the stoats and the mother” (60).
3. Bernard, Baker, O’Hara, and Keller indeed constitute a psychoanalytic trend in the scholarship concerning “From an Abandoned Work.” Yet not all studies of Beckett’s text are Freudian or based on Freudian allusions and motifs. See, for example, J. E. Dearlove and, most recently, Justin Beplate, who mentions Deleuze in his study of language and memory in “From an Abandoned Work.”
4. Smith writes, “For Deleuze, the question of literature is linked not to the question of its textuality, or even to its historicity, but to its ‘vitality,’ that is, its ‘tenor’ of Life” (xvi). Smith employs the idea of literature’s “tenor of life” as a central theme in his introduction to Essays Critical and Clinical.
5. For further critical discussion of Deleuze’s idea of the writer-as-physician, see his essay “Literature and Life,” which I discuss in the introduction and other chapters. See also Smith’s introduction to Essays Critical and Clinical (li).
6. At the outset of Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari claim that they seek entrance into Kafka’s “rhizomatic” oeuvre “by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if it seems an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon. We will be trying only to discover what other points our entrance connects to” (3).
7. As critics such as Charles J. Stivale explain, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “minor literature”—Kafka’s specifically—involves discovering how the family triangle is “connected to commercial, economic, bureaucratic, or juridical triangles, which determine the family triangle’s values” (52). For further discussion, see Réda Bensmaïa’s foreword to Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (xvii-xviii).
8. In his essay on Bartleby, Deleuze writes, “Bartleby is the Bachelor, about whom Kafka said, ‘He has only as much ground as his two feet take up, only as much of a hold as his two hands encompass’—someone who falls asleep in the winter snow to freeze to death like a child, someone who does nothing but take walks, yet who could take them anywhere, without moving” (74). Deleuze is here alluding to a story by Kafka from his Diaries 1910-1913 (26-29).
9. Many scholars discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the body and the “body without organs.” See, for example, Colebrook (141-43) and Shelton Waldrop, whose essay “Deleuzian Bodies: Not Thinking Straight in Capitalism and Schizophrenia” reveals the differences between healthy and sinister bodies without organs. Waldrop contends that Anti-Oedipus demonstrates the BwO as a “negative concept” (140) and that A Thousand Plateaus provides a diagram (of sorts) for producing positive BwO’s (140- 142). For feminist readings that involve Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of bodies, see Dorothea Olkowski and Nicole Shukin. I am indebted to all of the above scholars for their illuminating studies of Deleuze and Guattari.
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10. In “He Stuttered,” Deleuze comments that the characters in Beckett’s Watt “speak like they walk or stumble, for speaking is no less a movement than walking” (111). I pick up this motif again in chapter four.
11. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari fail to give a full reference for this passage from Kafka’s Diaries, as their footnote (93) does not inform which date they are referring to, but only that they are referring to the Diaries. Deleuze and Guattari are apparently alluding to one of Kafka’s entries for December 24, 1911, which reads: As a child I was anxious, and if not anxious then uneasy, when my father spoke—as he often did, since he was a businessman—of the last day of the month (called the “ultimo”). Since I wasn’t curious, and since I wasn’t able—even if I sometimes did ask about it—to digest the answer quickly enough with my slow thinking, and since a weakly stirring curiosity once risen to the surface is often already satisfied by a question and an answer without requiring that it understand as well, the expression “the last day of the month” remained a disquieting mystery for me, to be joined later (the result of having listened more attentively) by the expression “ultimo,” even if the latter expression did not have the same great significance. (189) Interestingly, the passage does not contain the wording Deleuze and Guattari refer to in their study on Kafka (“end of the month, end of the month”), even though it is the same translation (by Joseph Kresh) that they use. They are either playing with Kresh’s translation or alluding to a different entry.
12. Deleuze and Guattari devote an entire chapter of A Thousand Plateaus (26- 38) to the case of the Wolfman. For further critical discussion of their theories concerning the Wolfman’s “becoming-wolf,” see Gary Genosko’s introduction to The Guattari Reader (12-15).
Chapter Four
1. All references to Endgame are to the 1958 Grove Press edition. Importantly, Pearson and I both refer to the same Grove Press edition of the play, but some of the lines to which we refer (including Clov’s “I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy”) are deleted from the Revised Text as published in The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Volume II: Endgame. Throughout the essay, I note which lines are deleted in the Revised Text. The reader should also here note that an essay on stuttering relies heavily on a clear understanding of when and how long the characters stutter, stammer, pause, are cut off, and fall silent. I therefore use brackets throughout the essay to indicate my own insertion of ellipses. All other ellipses, such as those that appear in Clov’s line, are as they appear in the text.
2. Declan Kiberd, Charles R. Lyons, and Seán Golden, all of whom Pearson discusses in his essay, address the political/postcolonial intricacies of Beckett’s play. In
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Inventing Ireland, Kiberd writes: “[Hamm] appears the very epitome of a ruling class gone rancid […]. Clov speaks at times to Hamm with the ingratitude of a Caliban who knows that his master’s language has been the medium in which his yearnings for expressive freedom have been improvised” (545). In his essay “Fin de Partie/Endgame as Political Drama,” Lyons discusses the political complexities that surround language and identity in Beckett’s work: “Endgame includes Clov’s recognition that he can speak only within the language and structures of thought that he has been taught by his master, Hamm” (189). Incidentally, Lyons mentions, but never expands on, what he views as a connection between notions of Endgame as a monodrama and the “radical theories of Anti-Oedipus, in which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cite Beckettian texts to document the paradigm of the schizophrenic in which ‘everything divides, but into itself’” (195). Golden’s Marxist approach to the play, “Familiars in a Ruinstrewn Land: Endgame as Political Allegory,” considers how “the proletarian, or colonial, or feminist writer [can] create art without using the forms and conventions handed down by bourgeois, imperial, or patriarchal systems without thereby perpetuating the hegemony and ideology of those systems” (433-34). Golden’s allegorical reading of Endgame puts Hamm in the role of owner and Clov in the role of worker in a defunct but persistent bourgeois culture (444). Notably, Pearson, Kiberd, Lyons, and Golden all consider the characters in the drama as the final players of an archaic discourse/politics/ideology that simply refuses to die. Amanda Cagle’s essay “Looking for Love on Samuel Beckett’s Stage: Homoeroticism, Sterility and the Postcolonial Condition” is similar to all of the above interpretations, though Cagle views both Hamm and Clov as colonized, emasculated Irishmen. At the outset of her essay, Cagle writes, “[Beckett’s] dramas identify Irish people, males in particular, as a people cut off from their pasts, cultures, and identities” (83).
3. One of Deleuze’s salient points is that a writer must not abandon the language of a majority but turn it against itself, inside out. Deleuze’s theory diametrically opposes an idea Lyons posits in his essay (see n. 2). Lyons hypothesizes that Beckett moves to writing in French possibly to avoid the language of the colonizer, as well as the language of James Joyce (189). Golden’s article (see n. 2), on the other hand, has much in common with Deleuze’s ideas about stuttering authors. In the preface to his reading of Endgame, Golden argues that certain Irish writers, such as James Joyce and Beckett, do not necessarily abandon the English language but, rather, use a “disorienting” syntax in crafting their stories. Golden refers to Finnegans Wake as “anti-authoritarian” (441), suggesting that The workings of its language are ambivalent and polysemous. Meanings of words and phrases are multiple, very often mutually and simultaneously contradictory. Meaning cannot be fixed. A generally English syntax and base vocabulary is subjected to disorientation. The text calls attention to itself, and confidence in language usage is shaken. (440) Significantly, in one of his footnotes concerning Joyce’s style, Golden alludes to John Cage’s proclivity for a “nonsyntactical ‘demilitarized’ language” (qtd. in Golden 441 fn. 20), which is highly evocative of Deleuze’s ideas about stuttering syntax in “He Stuttered.”
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Golden eventually turns his full attention to Beckett, asserting that he suffers from a “dis-ease” with inherited rules and conventions: “His attitude toward form, toward style and structure, seems to me to represent a radical reappraisal of received tradition, and his overt dissection of language and style and their forms a radical reappraisal of content” (442). Golden goes on to reveal how Clov’s struggle to invent a style of his own in the language of his master allegorizes Beckett’s struggle as an Irish writer (444-53).
4. Pearson addresses the elliptical speech of Hamm on only one occasion, arguing that Hamm trails off at one point in his dialogue with Clov because he “has lost control of Clov” (231).
5. For the Revised Text (see n. 1), Beckett deleted the yawns from these opening lines.
6. Beckett deleted the yawn in this passage for the Revised Text (see n. 1).
7. Notably, Golden prefaces his allegorical reading of Endgame with a lengthy discussion of what he views as various analogies between langue and parole and literature and writing: “Literature derives from tradition (or traditions), and perhaps the literary tradition assumes a systematic role akin to that of langue. Then each piece of writing becomes akin to parole, and a set of relations may be postulated between the author and his work considering the traditions the author works within similar to those postulated for language and speech” (429-30). Significantly, my usage of langue and parole is more straightforward, a trope to help express how the individual speech blunders of the characters are mini-stutters in a much more encompassing system of artistic stuttering.
8. In a passage in Watt, Beckett writes, “For Watt’s sense of chronology was strong, in a way, and his dislike of battology was very strong” (165). The novel then continues with examples of Watt’s battological experiments: “Ot bro, lap rulb, krad klub. Ot murd, wol fup, wol fup. Ot niks, sorg sam, sorg sam. Ot lems, lats lems, lats lems. Ot gnut, trat stews, trat stews” (165).
9. In his notes to Endgame in The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Volume II: Endgame, S. E. Gontarski reads the banging as part of the play’s continuous allusion to the crucifixion of Christ: “Throughout the play, […] all the banging, including Hamm’s tapping on the wall, echoes this hammer-and-nail or crucifixion theme” (50).
10. In “Krapp’s Rhizome Identity,” Jennifer Jeffers argues that Krapp’s Last Tape is similarly without clear boundaries, “a text that does not follow a straight line of development, but spreads out in all directions. If Waiting for Godot seems cyclical, then Krapp’s Last Tape seems to disperse in several directions at once, yet without a unifying central point that might orient us to the whole” (65).
11. Gontarski offers a full account of the repetitions and echoes in his introduction to Beckett’s Theatrical Notebooks (xix-xxi).
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12. I am indebted to Smith for his insightful explications of some of Deleuze’s salient points.
13. I am here expanding on Deleuze’s comment in his Preface to Essays Critical and Clinical: “Beckett spoke of ‘drilling holes’ in language in order to see or hear ‘what was lurking behind’” (lv). Deleuze is apparently alluding to Beckett’s 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, in which the Irish author explains his desire to voyage to the other side of language. The letter appears in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (170-71). In his essay on Beckett’s television plays, Ronald Bogue also pursues Deleuze’s interest in Beckett’s efforts to bore holes through language.
Chapter Five
1. To my knowledge, Deleuze’s only mention of Company comes indirectly in his essay “The Exhausted.” Deleuze discusses the “splendor of [Beckett’s] final texts” and then closes with a passage from Worstward Ho (174).
2. All of these critics deserve more attention than room here allows. I try to highlight the most significant perspectives and even then cannot do justice to all of the extant criticism. Many analyses (Locatelli’s poststructuralist reading, for example) are highly theoretical and merit careful study.
3. Murphy prefaces his reading of Nohow On with a discussion of Deleuze’s theories on artistic style, “minor literature,” and the exhaustion of language (230-234). I return to and extend the dialogue on Company as “minor literature” later in the essay.
4. Baker’s analysis of oedipal triangles is less assertive than Deleuze and Guattari’s. In his conclusion to Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis, Baker writes that “the Beckett of this [Baker’s] study is a far less radical writer than the Beckett of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus” (173).
5. Abbott’s “autographical” reading of Beckett’s work is often evocative of Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of Beckett. Like the French theorists, Abbott views Beckett as an author without a past, or at least a writer struggling to exist only in the present. I return to Abbott’s reading later in the essay.
6. Murphy’s reading has helped to refine my own thinking about Company, particularly Beckett’s use of the term “deviser” as an overriding identity.
7. The problem of memory surfaces in various critical discussions of Company. For further analysis, see Brater’s The Drama in the Text, in which Brater comments: “The scenes that seem to be culled from the past bring not memory but an artificial construct, in the guise of memory, to the shape this ‘upended’ narrative strives to assume” (118). For variations on the theme of memory as fiction in Company, see also Knowlson (575), Brienza (227), Federman (14), and Thomas (165 and passim).
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8. For a recent survey of Beckett’s experiments with memory, see Ackerley and Gontarski’s The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (363-66).
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Paul Shields was born in Montezuma, Georgia, and grew up in southern California. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Mercer University in 1997 and his master’s degree in Literature from Florida State University in 2001. He has published work in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, and his review of Beckett and Philosophy appears in a recent issue of Modern Fiction Studies. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies.
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