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No Endon Sight: Murphy's Misrecognition of Love

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No Endon Sight: Murphy's Misrecognition of Love 2 No Endon sight: Murphy’s misrecognition of love Murphy, Beckett’s first novel, centres on the title character’s search for a tranquillity born of nothingness. A deeply schizoid, middle-aged man, Murphy lives in dire poverty and, when first encountered, has recently begun a relationship with Celia, a prostitute who wants them to begin a life together. He feels the world is hostile, offering him nothing but, at Celia’s coaxing, he finds a job in a mental institution. Attracted to the erasure of reality he believes to exist within the schizophrenic mind, he is drawn to one patient, a Mr. Endon. Soon after imagining this man does not value him, Murphy dies in an explosion in his garret-room, leaving unanswered the question to what degree his death was a suicide. Some critics have examined the underlying philosophical themes of Murphy, a work rich in allusions to Descartes, Leibniz, and other early modern thinkers (e.g. Mintz, 1959, Morot-Sir, 1976, and Levy, 1980). It has also been read as satire (Kennedy, 1971) or comic parody (Kenner, 1961). This reading focuses specifically on the experience presented, viewing the narrative flow, the characters, and imagery as reflective of the narrative-self that organizes the fiction. Levy writes: The book, then, is concerned far less with Murphy as one character than with the construction of a closed narrative system everywhere reflecting the abandonment or absence on which it rests. Every element in the novel either reflects Murphy or reflects other elements, which in turn reflect Murphy […] who is just a means of reflecting the experience of Nothing. The narrator has only to step forward, as he will in the later novels, and reveal that he has built this narrative system in order to reflect his own strange experience in it and thereby gain some expres- sion of his identity. (Levy, 1980: 25) This reading suggests the narrative-self is reflected everywhere, as in a dream or psychoanalytical session, and the ‘text’ is a manifestation of the self and its owned, and disowned, parts. In this sense, then, the narrative-self is always stepping forward. The fundamental experience John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/03/2021 02:43:44AM via free access Keller_03_ch2pm 49 23/9/02, 10:56 am 50 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love that dominates the narrative-self, supplying the work’s emotional force is, as Levy points out, abandonment and absence, but in a highly specific sense. At its heart, Murphy suggests an early experience of disconnection from the good mother, her containing love and her joy with her infant. Speaking of Waiting for Godot, Beckett said ‘If you want to find the origins of En attendant Godot, look at Murphy’ (Duckworth, 1966: xiv). An aspect of this is the sense of completion Murphy seeks within the gaze of a maternal, containing object (though he mistakes his motive in this). Robinson (1969: 86) points out that the other major characters have an absolute dependency on Murphy, much as the tramps need Godot. The most glaring example of this is the elaborate sub-plot in which Miss Counihan, Neary, and their group, embroiled in a complex romantic and amorous melange, need to find Murphy to satiate their desires. Murphy functions, like Godot, as an object whose absence motivates and organizes the others’ lives, but there is a more central function of their obsessive quest. Early experiences of maternal absence permeate the work’s underlying emotional state, manifesting within Murphy as feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy and alienation.1 The entire escapade to track Murphy down is a counterweight to this self- experience, as Murphy becomes an idealized object that must be possessed for others’ happiness to be possible. This rights a depleted, despairing-self, and expresses a rage born out of neglect. It is now the others who cannot connect to the vitally needed Murphy, whose affirma- tion they require to secure happiness. Murphy, caught up in his own priorities, neglects them, reversing his own sense of primary abandon- ment, and in this way functions as a sort of proto-Godot, reflecting that part of the narrative-self that is abandoning and resentful itself.2 The organizational framework of this chapter will be the notions, outlined in the introduction, of the centrality of early experiences in the development of a secure inner world, which allows the self to engage others in a productive, living fashion. Levy writes that Beckett’s fiction is preoccupied with self-consciousness. He wonders whether it is the self-consciousness of the ‘artist trying to grasp his own creative act or […] that of a person withdrawing form the world of others, either through insanity or sheer impotence’ (Levy, 1980: 1). In Murphy, we see the answer to this question embraces it as a whole. The narrative-self, in speaking, is attempting to live, to restore a primal, maternal connection within itself. This is the most fundamental, primary act of life, which allows for later creativity, and is one that must be under- taken within the world of (m)others. John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/03/2021 02:43:44AM via free access Keller_03_ch2pm 50 23/9/02, 10:57 am No Endon sight 51 A room without a view Murphy’s opening line ‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new’ (1) perfectly reflects the internal world of the title charac- ter, a closed, lifeless system. No authentic life or growth is possible in this world (i.e. nothing ‘new under the sun’), since the sun loses its generative power in both a physical and emotional/metaphorical sense. Having ‘no alternative’, this source of all life becomes merely a mechanical servant of universal, meaningless laws. This feeling of hopelessness pervades Murphy himself, locked into this deterministic disconnection, living ‘as though he were free’ in a mew, where ‘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 […] for the mew had been condemned’ (1). Murphy’s lifestyle reflects the dehumanized, robotic essence of his internal experience, exposed here as repetitive and meaningless. The outer landscape reflects the dark cynicism that pervades Murphy’s inner world – homes are reduced to ‘cages’ that are part of the same dismal, monadic world of lifeless others. This imagery is reminiscent of a passage in Klein, where she describes the mourning process of a patient, Mrs A., who had recently lost her son: In the second week of her mourning Mrs A. found some comfort in looking at some nicely situated houses in the country, and in wishing to have such a house of her own. However, this comfort was soon inter- rupted by bouts of despair and sorrow. She now cried abundantly, and found relief in tears. The solace she found in looking at houses came from her rebuilding her inner world in her fantasy [... and in] getting satisfaction from the knowledge that other people’s houses and good objects existed. Ultimately this stood for her re-creating her good parents, internally and externally. (Klein, 1988a: 358) Unlike Mrs A., Murphy cannot experience the re-integration that comes from mourning. His internal world does not contain any enduring good objects – all the houses that surround him are crumbling, his condemned flat itself can be seen as the body/mind of a damaged internal mother, failing to contain him. He has no sense of connection to a good mother (there is no mention in the novel of any actual experience with a loving maternal presence). He is, in effect, an emotional orphan (there is only a vague and mysterious relative, a Godot-like figure, who supplies Murphy with minimal sustenance). Whereas for Klein’s patient the houses represent an experience of John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/03/2021 02:43:44AM via free access Keller_03_ch2pm 51 23/9/02, 10:57 am 52 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love reparation, restoration, and re-connection to a loving internal presence, these opening landscapes reveal Murphy’s barren, decaying inner world and its connection to his primary struggle to connect to life. In ‘The Calmative’, these symbolic aspects of houses recur: the narrator wanders, towards the end of the piece, through dark, deserted city streets as an outcast in search of peaceful anonymity. His gait, ‘slow, stiff […] at every step solv[ing] a stato-dynamic problem never posed before’ suggests his rigid adhesion to life in a world where change is difficult, and recognition unlikely: ‘I would have been known again (i.e. by the gait), if I had been known’ (75). Stopping in front of a butcher’s shop he sees a tableau that reflects a dying part of the self, ‘the dim carcasses of gutted horses hanging from the hooks head downwards’, and he tries to retreat into nothingness by ‘hug[ging] the walls, famished for shadow’ (75).3 He fails to call to mind memories of a woman who had some affection for him, but a little girl appears within the building, and he sees her long enough ‘to try and have her smile, but she did not smile, but vanished down the staircase without having yielded me her little face’ (75). Excluded from a loving interaction with the child, he represents a withdrawn part of the narrative-self, yearning for contact, perhaps with his own infantile-self (represented by the child).4 Alone, feeling shunned, he has to stop, propping himself up against a house, where he feels nothing, then slowly: ‘a kind of massive murmur […] That reminded me that the houses were full of people, besieged, no, I don’t know […] many of the rooms were lit […] the sound was not continuous, but broken by silences possibly of consternation.
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