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Samuel Beckett's Work in Regress: a Study of the Fiction to 1953

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Samuel Beckett's Work in Regress: a Study of the Fiction to 1953 SAMUEL BECKETT'S WORK IH REGRESS: A study of the Fiction to 1953 SAMUEL BECKET'!'' S WORK IN REGRESS A study of the Fiction to 1953 By HARRY VANDERVLIST, M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University (c) Copyright by H.A. Vandervlist, November 1991 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (1991) MCMASTER UNIVERSITY (English) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Samuel Beckett's Work in Regress: A study of the Fiction to 1953 AUTHOR: Harry A. Vandervlist B.A. (York University) M.A. (University of Toronto) SUPERVISOR: Dr. Joseph Adamson NUMBER OF PAGES: vii, 232 ii ABSTRACT This study shows how the narrative strategies of Bec­ kett's early fiction, developed as a dialogical response to Joyce's work, lead to an implied critique of conventional notions of narrative and subjectivity. Beckett's work, the study argues, takes up the challenge posed by Joyce's "Work in Progress," and Beckett's individualistic reading of Proust, and finally "refus[es] the possibilities of modern­ ist writing" (Said 50). Thus Beckett attempts an "impossible" fiction in which protagonists and narrators reject their roles, the presumption of audience interest is examined and sacrificed, and the speaker's power over lan­ guage radically questioned. Consequently, More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy, watt, Malone Dies and The Unnamable demonstrate the fictional potential of rejected and "impossible" tactics such as silence, futility, and apparent incompetence. The study demonstrates that the isolated individualism of Beckett's protagonists is associated with a breakdown of language and self, a process that provides a fictional anticipation of the theoretical view that language removed from either actual or conventional situations of utterance and reply ("writing" as opposed to speech) becomes an autonomous sign-system which remains silent about questions iii of self and identity. (Since it is only in human dialogue, in taking up an anchored subject-position within language, that a speaker's subjectivity can emerge). Beckett's protagonists, seeking to maintain their distance from the social distribution of subject positions, and seeking to propagate their personal monologue outside any dialogue, find themselves lost in a "moment before speech," or in langue without parole, and thus are unable to base their own subjectivity in the unmoored or ungrounded discourse they inhabit. To explicate these implicit ideas, I turn to theorists of language and the self such as Emile Benveniste and Jacques Lacan (whose ideas were developing at the same time as Beckett was writing the works treated: in Paris in the 1930's). iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My supervisor, Dr. Joseph Adamson, deserves special thanks for combining patient good humour and sensitive guidance. Dr. Linda Hutcheon showed extreme generosity in continuing as a member of the supervisory committee after her departure from McMaster University, and was an invaluable critic. I also thank Dr. Gaby Moyal for his initial encouragement and valuable insights. My wife Shelley Wall has been more than anyone could deserve, as a friend, a wise critic, and a partner. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION: 1 CHAPTER ONE A Perverse Project; An Impossible Art 6 NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 42 CHAPTER TWO The Emerging uses of Impossibility in More Pricks than Kicks 44 NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 82 CHAPTER THREE Murphy: Savoir ne pas faire 83 NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 128 CHAPTER FOUR Watt: Figures of Writing 129 NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 170 vi CHAPTER FIVE Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable: The Relation of Beginning to End 171 NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 220 CONCLUSION 221 WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED 225 vii INTRODUCTION The scope of the study reflects what I argue is a single movement in Beckett's early fiction, from a quirky set of short stories entitled More Pricks than Kicks, to the trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, which is incontestably a landmark of our century's literature. The motivation of the study is threefold. First, it seeks to discover a satisfactory principle of connection behind this body of fiction. Another motivation is the wish to place this part of Beckett's work in a more convincing relation to the work of Joyce than that suggested by the inaccurate cliche which makes Beckett Joyce's protege. Finally, there is the urge to make plain the sustained implicit critique, first of fictional convention, but ultimately of essentialist ideas of discourse and subjectivity themselves, which pervades Beckett's work. Within this implicit criti­ que, I believe, lie the seeds of a rigorous post-modern esthetic which has yet to be fully recognized or acknowl­ edged. The paradigm of "regress" seems to me to satisfy this triple demand. In what sense is Samuel Beckett's fiction 1 2 before 1953 a "work in regress?" Such a description is sug­ gested, in part, by the way these works offer a response to the tremendous challenge of Joyce's "Work in Progress." Beckett has made various statements that suggest we should consider his work as related inversely to that of Joyce. Most notorious is his observation that "the more Joyce knew, the more he could ••. I'm working with ignorance, impotence" (Shenker 1956). Recently Andrew Kennedy has described "Beckett's long-term development as • . moving in a counter-Joyce direction" (8). This "counter-Joyce" movement is perceptible surprisingly early in Beckett's fic­ tion, apd its importance increases on the way to the tril­ ogy. How this response develops and takes shape through Beckett's 1931 reading of Proust is the topic of Chapter One of this study. The term "regress" also applies to the way the fiction discussed here is increasingly refined by a process of sub­ traction. More and more of the elements still considered essential to satisfy a (necessary and conventional) idea of "well-made fiction" are deleted from Beckett's vocabulary. Thismovement toward silence is what makes the term "devel­ opment" inappropriate in speaking of Beckett's work. Ele­ ments that are pared away include the representation of a "complete" or "real" world of some kind; characters that are more than explicitly arbitrary collections of traits; even the presumption of an interested reader. The details of 3 this movement provide the focus for the chapters on More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy, watt, and Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Just as Watt is "lit less and less by the receding lights" until he is "scarcely to be distinguished from the dim wall behind" (14), so the very materials of Beckett's fiction are reduced. As readers we may feel cheated out of what we expect to find between the covers of a novel; that is, the revelation of a world, of a personage. On the other hand, something does emerge in the declining light--"the dim wall behind." The patient, even ruthless effort to reveal the texture of a fundamental impasse which fiction, and lan­ guage itself, tend to conceal, underlies all of the works studied here. Beckett wrote fiction, not literary, linguistic, or psychoanalytic theory. Yet that fiction participates in a cultural movement of which post-Saussurean theory is another expression, and the implications of the fiction seem best articulated using terms borrowed from these theories. Emile Benveniste paints a picture of a subject caught up in lan­ guage, indeed constituted in language. It is of just such a subject, "made of words, others' words," that Beckett's novels speak (The Unnamable 139). The first two chapters of this study show how Belacqua and Murphy try to evade this fate, in particular the entanglement with others which it entails. In Murphy and Watt, it is an outside observer who 4 reports on the way Belacqua and Murphy flee from recognizing their condition. In each case the protagonist is afflicted by the knowledge that "words" are both insufficient and powerful, and that it is discourse which confers upon him all the being he has. Murphy's flight from such a condition annihilates him, while Watt's gradual recognition of his status causes a "breakdown." By contrast, the trilogy will gain much of its unique paradoxical quality from the way its narrator-protagonists are forced to narrate their own flights, and resignations: they must flee words, and them­ selves, in words. In the ways they attempt to write and speak, while fleeing writing and speech, they evoke what I have called "indeterminacy." I prefer this term to Nicholas zurbrugg's "negative relativism" (171) because the term "negative" obscures the deliberate balance which Beckett's novels observe so scrupulously. Indeterminacy is the situa­ tion Molloy faces when his utter lack of a destination means that no road is the right road--or the wrong road. Clearly Molloy does not face an entirely negative situation, just a radically indeterminate one. Only in such a situation could he exclaim "a wrong road was an event, for me" (Molloy 30). What is the interest of a fiction that, perhaps perver­ sely, dedicates itself to evoking something so "futile," indeed so hard for readers to take, as this indeterminacy? To show the importance of the sense of indeterminacy evoked in Beckett's fiction, I turn to allied concepts in the work 5 of several theoretical writers. When susan Stewart des­ cribes "nonsense," when Jean-Jacques Lecercle describes "delire," and when Jacques Lacan and his interpreters des­ cribe the Lacanian unconscious, all attempt to speak of something both ignored and fundamental: something that does not go anywhere, that does not get things done, but which speaks, or which, in Beckett's wonderfully ambiguous term, "goes on." Beckett's narrator-protagonists go nowhere, / accomplish nothing, but speak in a compelling fashion. What they speak of is that ignored or suppressed aspect of lan­ guage in which words do not "work," do not communicate, but instead reveal the extent to which they are material.
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