Beckett's Victors: Quests Without Qualities Paul Shields

Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2005 Beckett's Victors: Quests without Qualities Paul Shields Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] 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 iii 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. iv 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 v 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. vi 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. vii 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

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