INTELLECTION IN THE WORK OF

Much of Beckett's writing is a representation of the mental activity of the conscious mind engaged in some form of rational thought process, either aloud or to itself. Frequently this thinking takes the shape of obsessive deliberative analysing, especially when it touches on life's imponderables. We would like to call this mode of deliberative analysis in Beckett's mental voices 'intellection'. This paper briefly examines some recurrent characteristics in Beckett's artistic representation of intellection. Beckett's writings are full of the "unformulable gropings of the unstillable mind". 1 The voices of Beckett's characters never stop wrestling with language in their attempt to formulate thoughts about the nature of their predicament in life, or in death. Language is the only instrument at their disposal in this difficult pursuit. And a very refractory instrument it is too, especially in view of the nature of some of the things they are trying - in vain - to express. Take, for example, the speaker in A Piece of Monologue,2who tries to imagine the unimaginable, the world "beyond":

Stands there staring beyond at that black veil lips quivering to half-heard words. Treating of other matters. Trying to treat of other matters. Till half hears there are no other matters. Never two matters. Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and the going. From the word go. The word begone (p. 269). The speaker talks of words "trying to treat of other matters". But the passage is not mimetic: the speaker is not actually listening to, much less using, those words that are trying to speak of other matters. In, for example, , however, the voice that speaks in the book actually explores such an ineffable concept as

The void. How try say? How try fail? No try no fail. Say only - 3 Here the voice breaks down and temporarily follows another line of inquiry. But however powerless the speaker may be, however feeble his attempts, he must always go "on", as both the first and the last word of Worstward Ho impress on us. And indeed he goes on, even to the extent of speculating on what happens when there are no more words - his only aid in his effort:

86 What when words gone? None for what then. ( ... ) No words for what when words gone. For what when . Somehow nohow on (p. 29). The speaker goes on, like the speaker of ,

Devising figments to temper his nothingness (p. 46), formulating propositions, even if he is doomed to fail in his attempts:

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better (Worstward Ho, p. 7). Thus Beckett's characters often appear to be engaged in a form of persis• tent philosophical inquiry. They use language to ask questions and to try to answer them, formulating propositions in the hope that the sum of those propositions will somehow amount to an understanding of their predicament. Or, to put it differently, perhaps, like , they hope for meaning to emerge as a result of their efforts:

( ... )if Watt was sometimes unsuccessful, and sometimes successful ( ... ) in foisting a meaning there where no meaning appeared, he was most often the one, nor the other. For Watt considered, with reason, that he was successful, in this enterJ?rise, when he could evolve, from the meticulous phantoms that beset him, a hypothesis proper to disperse them, as often as this might be found necessary. There was nothing, in his operation, at variance with Watt's mind. For to explain had always been to exorcize, for Watt. And he considered that he was unsuccessful, when he failed to do so. And he considered that he was neither wholly successful nor wholly unsuccessful, when the hypothesis evolved lost its virtue, after one or two applications, and had to be replaced by another, which in its turn had to be replaced by another, which in due course ceased to be of the least assistance, and so on. 4 To be able to voice something is to create meaning. Words need to be harnassed to express something (almost anything - random thoughts, for example) that goes towards 'defining' a situation or giving it meaning. It is a task Beckett's characters take extremely seriously. They do their utmost to be exhaustive and formulate, eliminate, reformulate, re-eliminate propositions and hypotheses, aiming for the greatest possible precision. The mental process the characters employ is what we have termed 'intellection', as, for example, in Worstward Ho:

Enough still not to know. Not to know what they say. Not to know what it is the words it says say. Says? Secretes. Say better worse secretes. What it is the words it secretes say. What the so-said void. The so-said dim. The so-said shades. The so-said seat and germ of all. Enough to

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