1 1 Introduction 3 2 Theory of Character 5 2.1 What Is a Literary

Home , Characterization

1 Introduction 3

2 Theory of Character 5

2.1 What is a literary character? ...... 6

2.1.1 Character as a textual entity ...... 6

2.1.2 Character as a human-like entity ...... 8

2.1.3 Reconciling the puristic and mimetic conceptions ...... 10

2.2 Composing character through text ...... 15

2.2.1 Characterization through direct definition ...... 16

2.2.2 Indirect characterization ...... 17

2.2.2.1 Actions ...... 18

2.2.2.2 Speech ...... 19

2.2.2.3 External Appearance ...... 19

2.2.2.4 Environment ...... 20

3 Corporeal narratology 22

3.1 Phenomenology of character ...... 23

3.1.1 Character as a conscious self ...... 23

3.1.2 Character as an experiencing self ...... 26

3.1.3 Character as an embodied self ...... 28

3.1.3.1 Cartesian heritage ...... 29

3.1.3.2 Phenomenology...... 31

3.1.3.3 Cognitive turn ...... 32

3.1.3.4 Corporeally based experience - Leib ...... 34

3.1.4 Body in (literary) space ...... 36

3.1.4.1 Interaction with the environment ...... 37 1

3.1.4.2 Criticism of sight...... 39

3.2 Body seen from without ...... 40

3.2.1 Degree of embodiment ...... 41

3.2.2 Body as type and archetype ...... 43

4 General characteristics of Beckett‘s fiction ...... 44

4.1 Cartesian split...... 46

4.2 Language and meaning ...... 47

4.3 Beckett‘s (anti)heroes ...... 53

5 Corporeal aspects of Beckett‘s short stories ...... 57

5.1 Perception dead perceive – The embodied ‗eye‘ of The End ...... 59

5.2 Bodies For Nothing – Text 4 ...... 73

6 Conclusion 81

6.1 Issues not addressed ...... 82

7 Works Cited 83

1 Introduction

―The body is our general medium for having a world.‖

(Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception)

―For we are needles to say in a skull‖

(Samuel Beckett, The Calmative)

Just a few artists in the history of Western civilization received so much popular and critical (and uncritical) attention as Samuel Beckett. The intensity and extensity of this attention is even more striking, if one takes into consideration the natural iconography of Beckett‘s art: bleak visions of decaying old wretches crawling in the mud; legless torsos stuck forever in dustbins; stiff figures sitting at a table, reciting fragmentary passages of text; moribund bums, talking nonsense to spare some time when waiting for something to happen. Such is the popular image of Beckett for someone who casts only a cursory glance at his work. The critical appraisal, which brought him the Nobel Prize in 1969, went several steps further, and acknowledged not only his ability to articulate in images the soul of man that witnessed the atrocities of Auschwitz, but also his creative skill to push the possibilities of artistic expression beyond any conceivable limits.

This thesis concerns Beckett‘s literary experiments addressing human body, and the way they challenge the traditional approaches to the theory of literary character.

A systematic study of the action- and consciousness-based approaches will reveal their inadequacy in coming to terms with Beckett‘s revolutionary narrative strategies that

constitute the literary character on a radical interpretation of the Cartesian split between a disembodied mind and a mindless body. In order to comprehend the way these characters function within the narrative, a solution will be offered in the second section.

It is based on the phenomenology of ‗lived experience,‘ introduced by Edmund Husserl and elaborated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A survey of Monika Fludernik‘s conception of ‗experientiality‘ will translate the philosophical issue of Husserlian lived experience into the realm of literary science. The chief merit of Fludernik‘s theory is its inherent openness to literary forms that are not based on classical sequencing of events within a frame structure of the plot. It is broad enough to embrace any type of narration, as long as there is a narrative voice, since – as the cognitive science argues – every voice is implicitly embodied and therefore capable of experiencing the environment, which, in turn, defines it as a literary character.

The intricate relationship between mind and body will be discussed in a detailed analysis of two short stories written before and after the great trilogy of novels.

While in the first story – The End – the protagonist‘s body pervades all aspects of his personality, in the Texts for Nothing (Text 4) the body is deliberately effaced to the limits of body-lessness. In both stories, the interpretation is only possible if based on an assessment of experiential data. Both of them also present a distinctive way of coping with particular topics of perennial philosophy on the background of the all-pervading

Cartesian rationalism, which is accused for rendering both language and life meaningless.

2 Theory of Character

One would not have to concern oneself with any sort of general theory of character in a thesis that is based on a close analysis of particular literary pieces if the author being considered did not take so much pleasure and effort in challenging all the fundamental categories and concepts of narrative, the character included. After having written his first famous pieces before and shortly after the Second World War – such as the novels

Murphy and Watt and the drama Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett‘s attention diverted to literary experiments. A radical break with most of the common concepts and elements of narrative is widely regarded as Beckett‘s major contribution to the development of 20th century literary forms. Whichever concept one might have taken for granted, be it a plot formed by individual events, logical sequence, unity and presence of a character, identity of narrator, etc., Beckett always found a peculiar and strongly individual way to first deconstruct the concept, then to transform its very essence to a great extent, and finally to integrate the newly carved concept into a piece of writing that one would still call a ‗narrative‘. There are plenty of examples to manifest this quality of Beckett‘s writing: famously Waiting for Godot, The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing violate the presupposition of the linear development of a story

(fabula); Ping and Lessness confront the human substance of a character; Not I contradicts all assumptions about dramatic persona; Play opens a discussion about the relationship between character and time/space dimensions on stage. In fiction in general, the scope of these experiments stretches from manipulation with the narrative voice to dissolution of classical syntax and the meaningful sentence. Among the most thoroughly

deconstructed elements of his narratives is undoubtedly the character. In order to understand Beckett‘s treatment of the body, one has to comprehend what a character is, what body in literary discourse is and does, and how Beckett treats his characters in prose fiction.

2.1 What is a literary character?

A literary character is a person who is somehow present in the story. A simple question must have a simple answer, it would seem. However, the question posed in the title of this chapter is a tricky one, and the answer is anything but simple. Various theoretical schools take completely opposite positions regarding the ontological nature of the literary character. At one extreme there are purely linguistic and narratological perspectives, keeping character entrapped in the text; on the other, theorists emphasize psycho-social and cultural aspects, endowing character with an individual and quasi-real ego.

2.1.1 Character as a textual entity

Orthodox structuralists claim that character is nothing but a mere functional element that exists exclusively in and through the text (Fořt 56). Tzvetan Todorov calls these textual entities ―a mass of signs‖ that is bound together by a proper name. This mass-of- signs definition, in other words, expresses a belief that character is just a locus of predicates. Jonathan Culler explains that the

stress on the interpersonal and conventional systems which traverse the individual, which make him a space in which forces and events meet rather than a an individuated essence, leads to a rejection of a prevalent conception 6

of character in the novel: that the most successful and ‗living‘ characters are richly delineated autonomous wholes, clearly distinguished from others by physical and psychological characteristics. (230)

Character is seen as a purely functional component that operates on both the discoursive and the story level; yet according to this purist view it is always just on the syntactical axis. It is naturally treated as a syntactical subject at the level of sentence, but also as the narrative subject, personal though dehumanized, of the events happening in the story.

Translating the traditionally conceived psychological unity of a character into textual or discoursive terms requires a new unifying tool that can link together various parts of a text related to a character. As was mentioned above, some structuralists, e.g. Todorov and Barthes, consider the character‘s proper name to be such a unifying tool. Actually, this proper name is a textually regular entity that spans across a narrative unit of any desired length and, therefore, it really holds all the propositions about a character together and ―produces‖ a closed and consistent structure that is meaningful1 (Fořt 55).

Joel Weinsheimer reasserts this concept when he describes characters as ―segments of a closed text‖, ―patterns of recurrence‖ or ―motifs that are continually recontextualized in other motifs (quoted in Rimmon-Kenan 34).

Such degrading of character to a textual being, having a nature similar to any other entity in the text (even inanimate) results in understanding its role mainly as a narrative agent. Its function within a plot is to carry out actions. In other words, the character is an agent within the narrative syntax (Fořt 25). This very fact is etymologically explained by Algirdas J. Greimas‘s use of two particular concepts: actants and acteurs. At first sight, both words refer to action or activity; the former

1 Some theorists add also deixis as being capable of the same effect, e.g. Monika Fludernik, Seymour Chatman. 7

stands for a role in the structure of the plot, which is very similar to Propp‘s typological taxonomy of Russian fairy tale characters, and its purpose is to operate inside the logical composition of the plot. Greimas also offers, as Propp does, a typology of actants; yet, in his interpretation, they form three pairs of binary opposites: subject and object, sender and receiver, helper and opponent. On the other hand, acteur is a particular manifestation of an actantial role in the discourse. Thus, one actantial role might have more than one acteur; in other words, various characters or objects can serve the same actantial role, e.g. a ‗helper‘ might be expressed by an old pilgrim, a ring and a firefly, all within one story (Fořt 26, Rimmon-Kenan 37).

The above indicate the prevalent assumption of structuralist theoreticians about the mutual relation between character and story. In its heyday (the 1960s and early 1970s) structuralists, driven by their interest in verb-centred grammars of natural languages, keenly subordinated character to the story, because action seemed more essential to their concept of a narrative grammar (Rimmon-Kenan 36). This attitude reflects Aristotelian poetics and its understanding of a character as a performer of actions. Not only their critics but even structuralists themselves later acknowledged that reducing character to an action-bearing element for the sake of methodologically compelling analyses dried the character of all vitality.

2.1.2 Character as a human-like entity

The rise of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries brought an unprecedented range of various characters that were gradually becoming more and more individual and unique.2

2 Individuality and uniqueness are qualities of what Daniela Hodrová calls ‗character-as-hypothesis‘ and E.M. Forster ‗round‘ character. They are described as unpredictatble, open and dynamic, as opposed to 8

Their uniqueness was based on ever richer descriptions of their nature that fully abandoned the medieval functional perception and started to construct characters that resembled their readers in the complexity of their inner thoughts and emotions. This resemblance gave birth to a movement in literary studies often called ‗mimetic‘ or

‗psychological,‘ which abstracts literary characters form the textual fabric and sees them as akin to real-life people, which is considered an absolutely natural way of approaching a narrative when reading it as a common reader. Although these human-like characters inhabit an ontologically different world, readers and theorists alike tend to contemplate them in overtly realistic terms, and to encourage a transition of methods – from psychology, sociology, cultural and gender studies – from real world into particular storyworlds in order to use them as legitimate research methods.

The best known example of analysing text-transcending characters as real people is undoubtedly A.C. Bradley‘s remarkable study 1904 Shakespearean Tragedy.

Bradley‘s outstandingly detailed reading of Shakespearean dramas went through analyzing what a character does and does not do, says and does not say, what is said to him and about him, all of which reveal the hidden motives and reasons (Chatman 136).

Seeking the motivation of deeds and thoughts especially in ‗round‘ characters is eo ipso an act of interpretation, since it goes beyond the discursive level, often surpasses even the level of abstraction, and results in creating images of actual people who happened never to exist (Chatman 137). The text-independent life of character does not mean

―that their ‗lives‘ extend ‗beyond the fictions in which they are involved.‘ Characters do

‗character-as-definition‘ and ‗flat‘ characters respectively, which are taken to be rather functional, built around one psychological feature and static (Hodrová 544, Fořt 17). 9

not have ‗lives‘; we endow them with personality only to the extent that personality is a structure familiar to us in life and art‖ (Chatman 138).

2.1.3 Reconciling the puristic and mimetic conceptions

In the recent developments of literary studies, there appeared a tendency to reconcile both theoretical attitudes, which, in fact, represent two distinctive needs posed by literary scholars. On one hand, any universal theory of narrative – encompassing all kinds of narrative, not only literary – requires a solid methodological and terminological grounding; on the other hand, literary studies cannot avoid contemplating characters in their fullness, which inevitably involves transcending the narrative‘s discoursive level.

When we read texts, it is natural for us to comprehend the characters as separate and quasi-real selves and not as textual narrative functions (e.g. actants). We must also admit that the question of subordination of character to story, or the other way round, becomes futile, or at least relative, once we acknowledge the existence of so-called

‗psychological‘ and ‗apsychological‘ writing, empirical descriptive terms already coined by Tzvetan Todorov. Psychological writing comprises all narratives that focus primarily on a character, its thoughts and emotions, while the apsychological covers all writing oriented towards the action or the story. Drawing a dividing line between character and story is, therefore, completely useless.

All in all, after 2,500 years of literary theory, we are virtually standing again at point zero, trying either to link mimetic and structuralist viewpoints together, making use of their best features and finding common grounds, or to settle a completely new perspective, avoiding the flaws of both traditional approaches. Such an attempt to

reconcile both theories was made by various scholars, among them Seymour Chatman and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. Looking for a new recourse is the point of Lubomír

Doležel‘s ‗fictional worlds theory‘ or Monika Fludernik‘s phenomenological concept of

‗experientiality.‘ To understand Beckett‘s experimental narrative strategies with regard to characters and their bodies, this thesis will rely primarily on both approaches.

Consider the distinction between story and discourse. No matter what it is called, be it story and discourse or fabula and sjuzhet, these refer to two aspects of narrative construction: a chronological sequence of events (story, fabula), and a verbal or visual representation of these events (discourse, sjuzhet). While the sequence of events remains roughly the same, its ordering and manner of representation might change significantly – a movie can represent the same story as a novel, a comic, an oral narrative, etc., but each of these media render it through different discoursive techniques.

The initial question, What is literary character? can actually be put in another way:

Where does the literary character abide? Is it in the story or in the discourse? The previous section revealed that character must inevitably dwell in both dimensions. As

Rimmon-Kenan put it, ―in the text, characters are nodes in the verbal design; in the story, they are – by definition – non (or pre-) verbal abstractions, constructs‖ (35). Such a perspective provides a powerful instrument for analysis, because throuh it one can bridge the gap between the scientific, positivistic approach of the Russian formalists and

French structuralists, and that of mimetically oriented approaches of scholars engaging with a character as an individual (psychoanalysis, phenomenology) or as a totality of determinants (Marxism, gender and queer theories). As an outcome, one can assert with

Chatman that character is an autonomous and open being which is first coded by the author through the discourse (130) and then reconstructed by the reader through the 11

very same discourse (125). What is being reconstructed is a model of a person-like being that is based on a reader‘s conception of people, which means that it lies beyond the discourse; we read, so to say, between the lines, and use our own imagination to supplement the encoded image. This act of extraction from textuality (Rimmon-Kenan

35) is what gives the character the Bergsonian élan vital, as it elicits activity in both the author and reader in a negotiation of meaning (cf. Wolfgang Iser‘s reader response theory).

What a reader seeks is the unity and uniqueness of a character, which cannot be granted only by discoursive means such as character‘s proper name, but requires consistency of features related to the person, wherefore Chatman comes up with the concept of paradigm of traits. Trait in his view is a ―relatively stable or abiding personal quality […] that may either unfold […] or disappear and be replaced by another‖ (126).

Paradigm, on the other hand, is a metaphor of ―vertical assemblage intersecting the syntagmatic chain of events that comprise the plot‖ (127). In other words, a character collects its attributive propositions3, keeps them related to its ‗self‘ throughout the plot, and therewith constitutes a stable unit that helps to secure coherence to the narrative whole. In Barthes‘s later opinion, it is the character that ―is used as a structuring element: the objects and the events of fiction exist – in one way or another – because of the character and, in fact, it is only in relation to it that they possess those qualities of coherence and plausibility which make them meaningful and comprehensible‖ (quoted in Rimmon-Kenan 37).

3 Attributive proposition is a concept originally introduced by James Garvey in an attempt to label the activity of the reader, who constantly gathers the textual information about a particular subject and attributes them to its name or pronominal identification. These propositions consist of ‗predicates‘ (given by the narrator either directly or indirectly) and ‗modalizers‘ that indicate degrees or qualifications of these predicates (Rimmon-Kenan 37). 12

But, what is the glue that makes all the traits of a character cohere?

Rimmon-Kenan argues that there are four principles of cohesion – namely repetition, similarity, contrast and implication. ―Repetition of the same behaviour ‗invites‘ labelling it as a character-trait‖ (41). ―Similarities of behaviour on different occasions

[…] also give rise to a generalization‖ (42). Contrast usually emerges from a tension between two propositions. Implication is a general term for a relationship between psychological or physical attributes and psychological attributive propositions (e.g. X bites his fingernails implies that X is nervous) (42).

Character traits, formed in a paradigm, constitute just one part, yet the most important part, of the character attributive proposition structure. Chatman schematizes the reconstruction of a character‘s self into assigning the character various ―narrative adjectives‖, which we either gather from direct descriptions or infer from indirect indications and signs. Such narrative adjectives take the shape of ‗narrative copula‘

(Chatman 125), i.e. Belacqua is indecisive, Hamm is aggressive, or Krapp is pathetic. A character, then, is a seat of all attributive propositions.4

In Rimmon-Kennan‘s view, these propositions are hierarchically organized in a tree-like structure, ―in which elements are assembled in categories of increasing integrative power‖ (39). Individual propositions are, along the reading process, grouped by the reader on a mind map and given some general labels. Various combinations of propositions form a higher category, a mightier branch of the tree: ―If a common denominator, e.g. ambivalence, emerges from several aspects, it can then be generalized as a character-trait, and in a similar way the various traits combine to form a character‖

(Rimmon-Kenan 40). The integrative power of individual propositions varies from

4 Barthes calls it a ‗sum, a point of convergence‘ (quoted in Rimmon-Kenan 39). 13

character to character, but also from reader to reader. Thus, one reader may emphasize some aspects of a character and regard them as important, while another reader of the same narrative might neglect those features and stress instead completely different aspects. Furthermore, once a reader fails to integrate a proposition into the structure, it might mean that her assumption about the character was either wrong, or that the trait has changed and developed into some other trait. Such a change presupposes a dynamic, directional conception of character-traits, which is especially welcome in round characters, since one of their fundamental qualities is openness to development.

Forster‘s distinction between flat and round characters is not the only classificatory system, at least not the one providing the highest information value, because one can easily find examples of characters that are one-dimensional, but that at the same time develop, or are even felt to be ‗alive‘, and the other way round; some characters may be complex but undeveloping. Attributive propositions of various types can stimulate creating diverse categories, according to which one can classify characters.

This also implies that every reader can build her own classificatory system. However, of substantial help to narratological analyses proved to be the system of Joseph Ewen, who proposes to position characters along a continuum of three axes: complexity, development and penetration into inner life (Rimmon-Kenan 41). The complexity axis places on its one extreme the characters with a single or dominant trait, such as allegorical figures, caricatures and types (a Jew, a Gypsy, a black slave), while on the other extreme, there are multi-dimensional, unpredictable and ambiguous characters like

Joyce‘s Stephen Dedalus or Beckett‘s Murphy or Winnie from Happy Days. Static characters, who usually, but not necessarily – Winnie in Happy Days is a perfect example – overlap with the single-trait characters, occupy one pole on the axis of 14

development, whereas the other pole represents characters that evolve for some discernible reason from one state to another, such as E.L. Doctorow‘s Daniel in The

Book of Daniel. The last axis, that of penetration into inner life, juxtaposes characters, whose consciousness is presented from within, and those seen only from outside

(Rimmon-Kenan 43-44). Ewan‘s analytical tool will be of considerable practical use in discussing Beckett‘s characters, because their nature defies any simple categorization according to flatness or roundness. After a brief excursion into the techniques of characterization, an explicatgion of the basics of corporeal narratology will follow.

2.2 Composing character through text

While the question underlying the first chapter read ―What is a literary character,‖ the second chapter will try to answer the question ―How are the characters constituted in the text.‖ As has been said in the previous lines, a character is an ‗effect‘ of a reader‘s work upon a text – an activity of assembling attributive propositions into a coherent unity, sheltered under a proper name or nominative pronoun. Having acknowledged this definition implies that it is not the text as such what constitutes the character, but the presentation of particular textual phenomena in cooperation with the act of reading.

These textual phenomena form a semiotic construct that is developed like an image from photographic film by the reader. Baruch Hochman assigns to both elements – the text and the reader – their respective activities: textual means for generating images are only capable of signifying, while it is the reader who reconceptualizes the image of a character (Rimmon-Kenan 32). Let‘s now examine the textual devices used by authors to generate these images (or attributive propositions) of their characters.

2.2.1 Characterization through direct definition

Undoubtedly the most common character-indicator in a text is the proper name. Proper name is the most direct way to set up an ontological entity with a clear-cut identity. A significantly less unambiguous device is a pronoun. Beckett is one of those authors, who employ this potential of ambiguity of pronouns to the full. In some short stories, e.g. Neither, Text, in some Fizzles and Texts for Nothing, the chaotic use of pronouns enormously complicates any attempt to determine who the narrative subject is, and if there really is only one, because the voice changes too quickly and unpredictably. In most of Beckett‘s post-war short stories, there are no proper names at all, which helps to create an emphatic Kafkaesque effect of alienation with a pinch of Beckettian irony, because the reader is usually invited to witness diverse weaknesses and deep inner thoughts of rather intimate nature. Proper names, unlike pronouns, might also express some attributive propositions about the character. Thus the name of Joyce‘s Stephen

Dedalus refers back to the ancient myth, while Beckett‘s Krapp alludes to the paronomastic affinity with ―crap‖.

Notwithstanding their importance, proper names and pronouns are still very close to the point zero in the constitution of a character, because their primary function is just to state the character‘s positive value of being. Much more frequent instrument in constituting the nexus of character traits is direct characterization – telling what the character is like, such as ―XY is a tall pensive pianist with a predisposition to depression‖. The more authoritative the narrator is, the more reliable is the piece of information. Direct characterization is also very close to generalization about a particular character, a generalization that is static and supra-temporal (Rimmon-Kenan

62). When a narrator claims that XY is pensive and depressive, she brands the character with these traits more forcefully, than if she did it by means of indirect characterization.

Direct definition of character experienced its heyday in the age of the novel, however, starting with modernism, narrative strategies demanded new character-indicators that would meet the specific requirements of the new aesthetics.

2.2.2 Indirect characterization

Unlike the traditional strategy of telling the traits directly by the narrator, indirect characterization relies on suggestiveness and indeterminacy of indicators that are hidden in the fabric of the discourse, which lays more responsibility on the reader and her ability to infer and interpret these implied indications. There are numerous diverse devices falling under the category of indirect characterization, but all of them share the same quality – they all show or display, rather then tell. In addition, they are encrypted in various depths of the discourse or story, they may run through the whole story or appear just once, and quite often, they work together to create a complex blend of characteristic features. The basic list comprises: action, speech, external appearance and environment. An extended list would include also the Dorrit Cohn‘s ‗narrative consciousness‘ (Fořt 70) or Fludernik‘s experience (Fludernik 15-23). Most of these indirect indicators of character‘s nature work on the basis of analogy, which Rimmon-

Kenan considers to be a tool of reinforcement, rather than a distinct indicator, because its role is to ―enhance the reader‘s perception of [a] trait once it has been revealed through the character‘s action, speech or external appearance‖ (Rimmon-Kenan 69).

When discussing Beckett‘s oeuvre, one has to rely almost exclusively on these indirect

means, since he scarcely gives off any kind of direct description of his characters‘ traits and nature; on the other hand, his indirect hints are so dense and closely-knit, and in certain sense also coherent, that the reader‘s conception of the character is always very distinct.

2.2.2.1 Actions

Actions are one of the most fruitful fields of implicit meanings, no matter whether they are just one-time actions or habitual ones. Habitual activities usually form the basis of flat characters or a static background of the round ones, while ―[o]ne time-actions tend to evoke the dynamic aspect of the character, often playing a part in turning point in the narrative‖ (Rimmon-Kenan 63). It is said to be a particular quality of actions that they require heavy extra-textual pre-conceptions in order to be inferred accurately, because the actions of a character might not be explicable from the previous events of the story.

This is a strong argument for mimetic theories of character, since we would not be often able to make any assumption about a character, if we did not compare his fictitional actions to our real actions in the real world. It is quite clear that actions are always interpreted against particular socio-cultural and literary conventions, as we are taught for example by Laura Bohannan‘s famous story Shakespeare in the Bush. Rimmon-

Kenan further makes a distinction between acts of commission, acts of omission and contemplated acts, hereby acknowledging the importance not only of acts that have been performed, but also of acts that should have been performed, but finally were not, and those that were just thought about. Such a distinction is again particularly significant in Beckett, since all the three modes play an important role in his works.

Assuming the characters‘ nature from their actions might be fraught with pitfalls of

overinterpretation, especially in those actions, which are not endowed with any symbolic dimension. At this point one would readily recall Beckett‘s reluctance to comment or interpret his works, saying that ―If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin‖ (quoted in McDonald 5).

2.2.2.2 Speech

Speech is an element inextricable from the events, actions or interactions. It integrates the characters within their storyworlds and helps the reader to assess and interpret the characters. It is capable of indicating both through its content and its form – we often feel that it is not so important what was said, but rather how it was rendered, especially when the speech acts are only present to delineate a particular person, but they bear no conative function.

As Rimmon-Kenan puts it, ―action and speech convey character-traits through a cause and effect relation which the reader deciphers ‗in reverse‘: X killed a dragon, ‗therefore‘ he is brave; Y uses many foreign words, ‗therefore‘ she is a snob‖

(67). Except for causality, both action and speech are sheerly temporal, which locates them in opposition to external appearance and environment, both functioning rather on the principle of contiguity than on causality, and both being linked to the person in spatial rather than temporal terms.

2.2.2.3 External Appearance

External appearance not only describes the character‘s surface, but also demarcates it against other entities around, and doing so, helps to identify it (Fořt 66). When it comes to appearance, conventions play a crucial role – one can hardly imagine a wise advisor to be young, muscle-bound and richly dressed. However, complying with any extra- 19

textual conventions tends to classify the character rather as a flat one. Implying the character traits through metonymical relations with their appearance is one of the oldest devices ever used in literature. Beckett liked to play with assumptions about external appearance, often producing ironic situations, such as the one in Waiting for Godot, in which Lucky is ordered to ―think‖ and he starts to recite fragments of philosophical treatises. What makes the external appearance still so compelling, is the tension between features that are beyond the character‘s control, and those that can be manipulated. As

Beckett‘s fictional worlds are thoroughly permeated with analogies of various kinds, we can easily trace out that the controllable features of his characters‘ appearance are diminished to minimum, which is an analogy to his characters‘ inability to say or do something meaningful. This issue will be discussed in detail in the general introduction to Beckett‘s fiction.

2.2.2.4 Environment

Environment is a subcategory of a much wider concept of literary space, and encompasses not only the space in which a character dwells and acts, but also the objects that surround her in her environment. It might be just an atmosphere-inducing stage set piece, without any direct link with any of the characters, but it can also function similarly to external appearance on the principle of contiguity, mostly metonymical, but also metaphorical, as a trait indicator. Placing the narrator in

Beckett‘s The Expelled into a black carriage car or in The End into a boat that has a wooden lid and stands in a desolate shed, only connotes the atmosphere of decay, but also functions as an attributive proposition about the character, because it invites the reader to interpret the narrators as, in certain sense, already dead persons, while their

difficult motility even strengthens the idea of them being closed in a funeral carriage or a coffin, respectively. This interpretation is further enhanced by the fact that Beckett‘s characters always transform or modify their environments in order to fit them, or, in other words, to reflect their state of mind. When the narrator of The Expelled is looking for a new room to move in, his only, yet unalterable, requirement is to have all the furniture moved out.

Regarding the relationship between characters and their environment,

Seymour Chatman draws attention to a curious feature – some characters may become just a constituent part of the environment, especially when they are insignificant for the plot, and their role is just to form a part of the story‘s illustrative devices (139-140).

Applying this ontological distinction between characters and character-like figures – that are nothing but a stage prop – helps to better understand all the secondary characters of The End, since their only function is to illustrate the protagonist‘s loneliness.

Robert Liddell distinguished five specific ways of relating environment with characters and plot. The environment can be utilitary, meaning that it is rather simple and subdued, forming a background for the story without much penetration into the plot or character definition. The second category is called symbolic and stands for an environment that is closely bound to the plot, reflecting what is happening. Turbulent events are often followed by thunderstorms; fog and rain illustrates melancholic meditation, etc. The third type, irrelevant, represents an environment completely insignificant to the story setting or development. This type predominates most of the

Texts for Nothing. Ironic environment poses a clash of two natures – that of the character‘s mood or personality, and of her setting. Countries of the mind refer to the 21

inner landscape of the character‘s reminiscences. The last type, kaleidoscopic, is symptomatic for Beckett‘s writing, since it imitates his tattered syntax of narration. It stands for ―a rapid shifting back and forth from the outside physical world to the world of the imagination‖ (Chatman 143). Frequently it is even difficult to distinguish, whether we are inside the character‘s skull, or wandering around outside his mind.

In his general theory of narrative, Seymour Chatman argues that character and environment are so-called existents – the ―material‖ constituent parts of the story

(Chatman 25).

3 Corporeal narratology

The argument that underlies this thesis says that in order to interpret Beckett‘s textually and semantically unyielding and difficult short stories in a meaningful way, one may turn to an analysis of corporeal aspects, which would survey if and how bodies constitute the character and its narrative trajectory within the frame of its representation.

Such an analysis, in effect, traces all the corporeally relevant data, evaluates them as attributive proposals about certain subject, and investigates, whether they convert into functions of narration (become relevant for further actions), or whether they shape the character in a non-temporal dimension. In short, if we incorporate embodiment into our interpretations of characters and their life, we expand and enrich our ability to explain what the narrative texts really mean and do. Once the body is given some meaning, it becomes a part of the narrative discourse, which we can study with narrative hermeneutics, and try to understand how stories become meaningful to readers. Thus, the body is not an ornament, instrumental only to description (Babb 3), but a fully 22

acknowledged narratological object, an element that constitutes the overall meaning of the given story (Punday ix).5

The previous section exposed the devices used by authors to encode their characters‘ nature, and dealt primarily with those attributive propositions that generate in readers‘ minds images of character traits. What is the character like? was the question underlying the previous discussion. A different dimension of presenting a character is the mode of his being-in-the-text, which can be divided basically into being an object of narration or its subject. The following sections will briefly explore both of these basic modes, in which a literary character exists in the world of the story, but the main emphasis will be put on the subjective mode.

3.1 Phenomenology of character

3.1.1 Character as a conscious self

A character-as-object is what was in the previous chapter described as a constituent element of the storyworld‘s environment. These flat characters appear usually in third- person (or heterodiegetic in Genette‘s terms) authorial narratives as minor parts, and are usually depicted as predominantly acting or behaving entities. Sometimes they are supplied with motivation, sometimes with psychological characterization, and in some cases also with consciousness, but all of these are always rendered by the narrator. On the other hand, a character-as-subject, appearing potentially in all three narrative

5 Defining the body as a meaningful object draws us seemingly back into the previously criticised Cartesian dualism, since in order to do so, one tends to think of body in objective terms. However, this reduction is only made for schematic purposes; investing the body-as-such with meaning does not presuppose dividing the phenomenologically determined subject-body into separate parts, because whatever is said about the body inevitably affects also the subject in question. 23

situations, is always endowed with some sort of consciousness, no matter whether she is a teller or a reflector.6 A text barren of any trace of consciousness ceases to be qualified as a narrative. Even the Hemingway‘s ‗tip-of-the-iceberg‘ stories such as Hills Like

White Elephants, despite their inherent effort to present the characters as sheer sayers or behavers, provoke the readers to infer about the quality and nature of their conscious experiences (Herman 142). Suzanne Keen describes this intuitive propensity of readers to automatically attribute thoughts, feelings and motivations to entities which just hint that they might be human, as an intrinsic response natural to all people, because we are simply used to construct characters as anthropomorphic entities, as ‗substantial hypothetical beings‘ (Baruch Hochman), while expecting them to ―correlate in some degree to our embodied experience‖ (Keen 56-58). The Homo Fictus (E. M. Forster) is fundamentally different from real beings, but at the same time phenomenally similar to them, and therefore relatively easy to reconstruct.

What is the purpose of allowing readers into the characters‘ minds?

Portraying fictional people as discrete selves, who possess rich interiority, an unconscious mind, memories, motivations (Keen 59), feelings, sensations, perceptions, occurrent thoughts and emotions (Herman 144), makes them more believable

‗hypothetical beings‘ (Keen 63). In Fludernik‘s point of view, having the opportunity to understand the intentions and expectations of the protagonists enables the reader to interpret the story in a more rewarding way (Fludernik, ―Introduction‖ 79). As a matter of fact, any kind of access to the character‘s consciousness encourages one to perform

6 First-person, figural and authorial narrative situations, according to Stanzel, form a continuum that describes the way in which the story is given to the reader, be it ‗telling‘ in case of first-person and authorial narratives, or ‗reflecting‘ or showing in case of figural situation, e.g. Kafka‘s The Castle or Joyce‘s Portrait of an artist as a young man (Fludernik, ―Introduction‖ 90-95). 24

the act of interpretation, because it links the contents of the ‗irreducibly subjective‘

(John Searle, qoted in Herman, 153) character‘s mind with other elements of the narration, and by doing so, invests them with the meaning they possess within the storyworld. There is a remarkable difference between an object, for example a ring, presented to us in a camera eye quasi-objective perspective and through the consciousness of one of the characters involved in the plot. The latter is likely to present the ring in a more empathic way.

There are basically three modes of representation of consciousness: psycho- narration, performed by the narrator, who recounts what the thoughts and feelings of the character are; narrated monologue or free indirect discourse, which stands for a mode of speech that exposes the character‘s own mental discourse through the narrator‘s voice; finally a quoted monologue that verbalizes the character‘s thoughts through his own voice in a first-person narration (Keen 59-61). These three modes can be used either separately, one at a time, or all of them within a single work, or even within a single paragraph or sentence. In 1980s the narratological research coined a new concept of a so called mind style, which is a ―way of writing in which the protagonists‘ use of specific lexical and syntactic features suggests a characteristic way of thinking which is revealed when their minds and mental processes are represented in the text‖

(Fludernik, ―Introduction‖ 85). Such a narrative device is utilized when the author intends to emphasize the syntactic and lexical deviations, which somehow correlate with the contents of the character‘s consciousness. After finishing the great trilogy of novels

(Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) Beckett abandoned the quoted monologue that implied a coherent indentity of the character, and started to experiment with the narrated monologue, which does not pressupose a stable, unified self, and later with the mind 25

style, because it offered him enough space to involve his experiments with language, and it suited perfectly to his general narrative strategy of uncertainty and fragmentation.

3.1.2 Character as an experiencing self

Since Beckett‘s or Robbe-Grillet‘s experimental prose pieces would hardly qualify as a narrative in traditional plot-oriented and action-based theories due to its lack of fabula coherence, and often also of any fabula whatsoever, some researchers set off for an enterprise to establish a new theory in order to cover also those works of literature that do not revolve around plot and logical sequencing of events. The previous chapter focused on the issue of consciousness and mentioned David Herman‘s argument for setting the consciousness representation as one of the defining cornerstones of a narrative. 7 However, Herman still clings to a concept that relies too much on the sequencing of events. Monika Fludernik, on the other hand, manages with experience on its own, relegating teleology or intentionality in plot and chronological sequentiality of events to a subordinate level (Fludernik, ―Towards‖ 15-17). Her main contribution is the liberation of characters from the plot and acknowledging their mere existence within the fictional world (19). Her concept faithfully echoes the Seymour Chatman‘s term existent, denoting those entities that form or build the world of the story. Characters-as- existents, according to Fludernik, are ―prototypically human and [therefore] can perform acts of physical movement, speech acts, and thought acts, and their acting necessarily revolves around their consciousness, their mental centre of self-awareness, intellection, perception and emotionality‖ (19). In her view, experiencing the existence becomes the

7 The other elements are situatedness, event sequencing and worldmaking (Herman 139). 26

essence of any narrative, while acting is only a secondary attribute, fully dependent on an experiencing self.

Fludernik adopts the Stanzel‘s model of mediacy, but criticizes the limitations Stanzel applied on this concept. According to Fludernik, the only regime, in which the characters in Stanzel‘s scheme exist in the storywolrd, is the regime of telling.

Acting and telling are ―disposable at theoretical level‖ (Fludernik, ―Towards‖ 20), whereas the phenomenal being-in-the-world leads us back to the perception as a ground for the existence of a living creature. To make a distinction between animals and humans, Fludernik inserts at this point Stanzel‘s concept of mediacy, because it is necessary to communicate the information about a perception. Everything else, any kind of intervention into the environment through action, is secondary to experience: ―People experience world in their capacity as agents, tellers and auditors and also as observers, viewers, and experiencers‖ (20). Narrativity thus becomes a representation of experience, which, in turn, enables the Fludernik‘s theory to embrace all possible genres, including drama and film, but also stories that represent rather uneventful stories. One of the essential features of experiential narration is the shift from a goal-oriented sequencing of events in the plot to a goal-oriented discourse. Fludernik sees this orientedness of narration as the dynamic element of natural narrativity: ―[the] dynamic is related particularly to the resolution effect of the narrative endpoint of the tale and to the tension between tellabity and narrative ‗point‘‖(21). Furthermore, the narrative point is what counts as the integrating power and concerns ―after-the-fact evaluations […] as a means of making narrative experience relevant to oneself and the others. All experience is therefore stored as emotionally charged remembrance, and it is reproduced in narrative form because it was memorable, funny, scary, or exciting‖ (21). 27

The centre of gravity moves from the plot to its characters and their consciousness which is essentially grounded in their experience. Such a shift opens new perspectives for analysing Beckett‘s stories. His narrative point is to question ‗the narrative point‘, or the ‗tellability‘ mentioned by Fludernik, but this subversive metacriticism can never be abstracted from particular narratives, because we only learn about the proposed meaninglessness of communication and life in general from the particular experience of his characters. Thanks to this shift in focus, most of Beckett‘s works become more accessbile.

3.1.3 Character as an embodied self

Once we desert the traditional narratological conception of a narrative as a sequence of action-based events, functioning on a simple cause-effect mechanism, and once we accept the conscious experience to be the new basis of an approach that would cover majority of modernist and postmodernist fiction, we have to find a solid ground for a new stance towards literary character. Monika Fludernik rightly recognizes that this solid ground can only be granted by setting the experience into embodiment, because the presence of a protagonist in a storyworld is – by virtue of mimesis – experienced just as in real life, that is, as a series of events and forces provoking some emotional, physical and mental reaction, which, in the realm of narrative, serves as the dynamic momentum of narration itself (Fludernik, ―Towards‖ 22). Fludernik explains this substantial connectedness of existence and embodiment by a reference to a negative state, in which ―postmodernist texts that refuse the reader the consolation of an embodied protagonist (as in Beckett‘s scenarios of a disembodied voice) touch on the

one most vital parameter of narrative experientiality, with baffling and disorienting effects for the reader‖ (22). However Fludernik claims experientiality to be embodied, she limits herself to an isolated notice and does not elaborate on this idea any further.

The idea of a character as an embodied subject is best elucidated by Genie Babb and

Daniel Punday. Both of them start with phenomenological criticism of Cartesian dichotomy of substances.

3.1.3.1 Cartesian heritage

Most of the 20th century models of character inherited the Cartesian ontological separation of body as res extensa from the mind as res cogitans. Descartes conceived the body as a mindless matter extended in space, ―which we cannot know except through the mediation of the mind‖ (quoted in Babb 4). Et vice versa, mind is a completely autonomous substance, a thinking thing: ―It is certain that I, that is to say, my mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it‖ (ibidem). Such a notion implies that there are two worlds completely distinct from each other – the outer world of matter, to which my body belongs just as any other object, and the inner world of my subjective experience that is unavailable to the external world.

Such a distinction was further enhanced by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing‘s influential Laocoon, which ascribed the bodily aspect to painters, who depict the body in the spatial dimension, whereas literature (i.e. poets) handles the character only in terms of a non-physical site of ―character,‖ which sets the temporal dynamics of actions into motion (Babb 7). In the 20th century this strand of thought resulted in various conceptions that emphasized either action (the structuralists), or psychological features,

character traits and consciousness (A. C. Bradley, New Historicism). The disenchantment form this tendency can be aptly illustrated by Hoffman‘s and Murphy‘s question: ―What then is a character: a speaking voice, a thinking mind, a feeling of spirit‖ (quoted in Babb 2)?

As Ulrika Maude argues, a reductionist tendency has always been pervasive in Beckettian studies, too. Most of the criticism up to the beginning of 1990s favoured investigating Beckettian characters in terms of their mind and its capacity to move beyond the body, because the body represented the explicitly inherent otherness, in fact an obstacle made to transcend (1-2). Although these critics, such as Hugh Kenner and

Martin Esslin, acknowledged the importance of body, their one-dimensional and metaphysics-oriented reading downplayed the body‘s multi-faceted significance for interpreting Beckettian works in their complexity.

Vast majority of narratologists thus never transcended the Lessing‘s layout for understanding body in works of literature – they conceive it as an object located among other inanimate objects, to which narrative can only turn through the mode of description. Even Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan assents to such a belief, since she presumes body to be a part of an external appearance facet, which serves as an indirect indicator for implying character traits (65).

Reductive approaches found an opposing voice in philosophical and psychological research that focused on body as an element that is inextricably bound to the conscious subject, and in fact prior to any experience and consciousness whatsoever.

It was phenomenology that came with the idea of a lived body, while cognitive sciences introduced the concept of mind as a functionally embodied entity. Both conceptions share the same interest – they break into the interior of experience and cognition, and 30

examine how they are enacted through the body. These approaches finally entail a multifaceted and complex study of human self, which is situated in a particular body and in a particular culture. Inviting other scientific branches to explain these physiological, psychological, cultural, historical, anthropological and other phenomena only enriches our understanding of our being-in-the-world (Babb 4-5).

3.1.3.2 Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl introduced a model of body that encompassed two distinct aspects:

Körper and Leib. The former stands for a physical, objectified body, a thing studied by science that conveys such properties as color, smoothness, hardness, warmth, etc., while the latter, Leib, represents the lived sensation of embodiment, the body as we sense ―on‖ it and ―in‖ it: warmth on the back of the hand, coldness in the feet, sensations of touch in the fingerprints, of motion in moving one‘s fingers (Babb 6). This is how the body enters into physical relations with its environment. What we perceive in our consciousness can never be separated from our bodily presence, since everything is mediated and filtered through our individual and strictly specific bodies. Merleau-Ponty agrees with this view and makes it the cornerstone of his Phenomenology of Perception.

He claims that ―the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us‖ (quoted in Babb 5), which echoes the Herman‘s idea of situatedness, but gives it a strongly physical feel, completing the historical, cultural and situational location with a corporeal aspect. Although this project of embodied experience was not successful in superseding the Cartesian subject/object dichotomy, it strived hard to point out that the bodily based perception is more fundamental to us than our reflective capacities (Reynolds, ―Internet Encyclopaedia‖),

because these are always only derivative in relation to the practical corporeal concerns.

These corporeal concerns, in effect, invest every single thought and action with meaning.

Thus, all signifying processes have their pre-reflective basis in our bodies. Merleau-

Ponty grounds the subject ontologically into his body and calls it a body-subject. Doing so also presupposes that whenever we perceive, we are accessing the world through our body and henceforth we are automatically already present in what used to be taken for an outer world. The act of perception, in certain sense, merges with the perceived object.

In fact, there is no lived distinction between them (Reynolds).

Grounding the experience corporeally also questions the primacy of sight over other senses. While the characters in traditional action- or consciousness-oriented theories can be visualized as either actors or mere onlookers, the phenomenological approach does not discriminate any channel of sensation, and provides the reader with a fuller understanding of the qualia – what is it like to experience a particular situation in such and such way.

3.1.3.3 Cognitive turn

To make the list of useful theoretical approaches complete, one should not omit the recently blossomed cognitive sciences. Their undeniable advantage is the interdisciplinary nature that makes them a flexible meeting point of psychology, neurosciences, linguistics, anthropology, computer science and philosophy. In short, their argument reads:

―processes of abstract reasoning are shaped and determined by the fundamental fact of our embodiment in the world: ‗our consciousness and rationality are tied to our bodily orientations and interactions in and with our environment. Our embodiment is essential to who we are, to what meaning is, and to our ability to draw rational inferences and to be creative‘‖ (quoted in Babb 6). 32

Cognitive science helps us to a large degree to bridge the distinction between Körper and Leib, which is still too Cartesian, despite Husserl‘s efforts to overcome the thoroughgoing dualism, and to reconcile these two concepts in favour of a unified embodied mind or mindful embodiment. Johnson and Lakoff assert that even the mental act of description (which refers to Körper) of a body grows out of embodiment in terms of spatial relations and categorization. Spatial relations are based on the way we schematize and use our own bodies and objects we interact with. There are dozens of metaphors, or image schemas, in our language, that arise from our body and help us to structure the cognition of the world around us. To list just a few: centre/periphery, straight/curved, near/far, contact, iteration, cycle, link, adjacency, forced motion, support, balance and so on. Categorization – the second aspect of bodily grounded description of the world – structures our experience into discernible parts and helps us to orientate in the world in order to operate within it competently (Babb 10).

Once we acknowledge these cognitive assumptions about the operations of human consciousness, we can easily modify Fludernik‘s statement about the postmodernist fiction that sometimes ―refuse[s] the reader the consolation of an embodied protagonist‖ (Fludernik, ―Towards‖ 22), because even though there is no direct descriptive reference to a body and its situatedness in space, neither the narrator as a teller or a reflector, nor any other protagonist involved within the story, can escape at least some degree of embodiment, because it is encodedin their mental operations.

This is the case of Beckett in Texts for Nothing, in which he strives hard to deny any existence of the Husserlian Körper and limits his narration to an outpouring of sheer consciousness. However, what he cannot refute is the second aspect of embodied

presence, which is the Husserlian Leib – the subjective experiencing through one‘s own body.

3.1.3.4 Corporeally based experience - Leib

Leib is one of the key concepts of phenomenology, as it is the site where Edmund

Husserl had to start with his radical attempt to reconstitute the world as a phenomenon for transcendental consciousness.8 He focused on the most originary layer of experience, which is the experience we gain through our senses, and which is related to our

―incarnate egological consciousness‖ that he labelled Ich-Leib (Petitot 517), in English it is usually translated as subject-body, Merleau-Ponty used the term le corps propre, proper body (Moran 423) This animate, essentially kinesthetic body is the part of our ‗I‘ that is embedded organically in the world around us, and that mediates through sensory, internal, locomotive, visceral and habitual sensations the world to us in a specific way

(Petitot 517-518, Moran 423). Some of these sensations even never enter the consciousness, as they operate on a subliminal level. Neither Merleau-Ponty‘s, nor

David Herman‘s consciousness-oriented conceptions of character that experiences through qualia would accommodate these unconscious features, albeit their importance is uncontestable. There are five basic types of Leib experience:

Exteroception - Exteroception is another name for conscious experiencing of ―external stimuli via the surface organs of the body‖ (Babb 11).

Interoception - Interoception stands for those internal sensations that originate in the visceral stimuli and become available to our conscious awareness (Babb

8 Transcendental consciusness stands for a mind operating vis-a-vis some purpose, thus imposing some meaning on all its content. 34

12). It comprises sensations of euphoria, heaviness of fatigue, hunger, pain, etc. Usually it remains spatially indefinite.

Motility - Merleau-Ponty claims that external space is meaningless without the means to apprehend it. We do it through bodily perceptions of our environment, through kinesthesia, control and internal sensations of motion. Much of spatial and temporal orientation originates in the embodied experience of movement.

Viscerality – As has already been noted, some sensations remain subliminal.

For instance digestion and circulation belong to this group of processes that Richard

Sennett points out in his famous Flesh and Stone as dynamic principles of structuring public life in a city, and which Samuel Beckett uses in a similar manner as a dynamic force that governs the narration in The Calmative and How It Is.

Habitus – The habitual embodied practices also operate on a subconscious level. They are significant primarily for their capacity to recycle the social order. They also shape and condition the way we perceive various types of spaces, borders and relations among individual bodies.

This typology of embodied experience provides a useful tool for analysing the way a particular character exists and operates within the frame of the storyworld.

We are not only able to infer her particular character traits from her appearance, her name, or deeds, but also from the complexity of her experience of the world she inhabits.

Thanks to the mimetic nature of our readerly relation towards the storyworld that we reconstruct in the act of reading, we are fit to perceive through the bodies of the characters, to understand the emotionally charged internal sensations and to enter the world through cognitive schemas and settings. All these insights into the lived bodies

represented by the narration help us to comprehend the trajectories of characters‘ actions and affections.

3.1.4 Body in (literary) space

Both real and fictional bodies are ex definitione spatial. All literary works have to settle the relationship between the characters‘ bodies and the narrative world. Most pieces of literature provide the narrative world with some material space that forms the background of the actions and enters into a complex web of interrelations with other narrative elements. In addition, readers expect the narrative to be set in some space, since we are used to thinking of people and objects as spatially located. Even a zero degree spatiality with no described material environment would already be regarded as spatially positive for two reasons. Firstly, it claims that its space is in fact formed by a non-space. Secondly, even if the author tried to present a completely disembodied consciousness, it would not ‗hang‘ in a spaceless void. One can hardly avoid using language, which is – as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue – inherently full of cognitive metaphors based on spatiality (Johnson and Lakoff 235). The seemingly rational interior monologue can be a presentation of pure thoughts, but thinking itself functions on the following image schemas: ‗thinking is moving‘, ‗thinking is perceiving‘ (Lakoff and Johnson prioritize sight), ‗thinking is object manipulation‘ and

‗acquiring ideas is eating‘ (236 - 242). All these activities presume some spatial dimension – a literary character is, therefore, always ontologically grounded in some literary space.

3.1.4.1 Interaction with the environment

Let us now focus on those spaces that are furnished with some material substance, and the role they play with regard to embodied characters. The endlessly variable relations between a body and its environment can be seen from different viewpoints. The most important for any interpretation is the way a body shapes the space it inhabits, and vice versa, the way a certain space shapes and defines the body of a character. The body can be seen again as Körper, as an object positioned within the physical space, or as Leib, as a subject experiencing the perceived, phenomenal space.

Environment functions as an instrument for creating the overall atmosphere of the narrative (Chatman 147). In some cases, it helps to define the character, just like in Faulkner‘s The Rose for Emily, in which the mouldered house symbolizes the rotten character of Mrs. Emily, but also the horror of her body in an appalling relationship with the dead corpse of her husband. In other works, the environment takes on different roles of a signifier for literary characters, just like in Melville‘s story the office and its walls might represent a literal and metaphorical prison for Bartleby. Bartleby‘s position of facing the wall displays a very particular example of proxemics. In Beckett‘s writing, such distorted bodily ethos is a matter of commonplace practice.

To generalize these examples on a theoretical level, the body can be conceived of as an interface, through which the subject communicates with the environment, and the other way round. There is no other direct and immediate way for these two phenomena to interact but through the animate device of the body, which is inextricably linked to both of them. Hence, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it, the

Heideggerian being-in-the-world can only be enacted through the categories of perception and space, that is, eo ipso, through the body, because ―[t]o be a body is to be 37

tied to a certain world; our body is not primarily in space: it is ‗of it‘‖ (Merleau-Ponty

171). There is no objective, pre-given outer space, into which the consciousness enters to acquaint it; the subject is already spatial through its unity of parts and movement and it inhabits the space as a meaningful, oriented world, to which its body is the central integrating and structuring force (Manjali, ―On The Spatial‖). In fact, body is an extension of the subject‘s consciousness and subcosnciousness into the space (Maude

135).

Exceeding one‘s body can be further enacted by objects that a person uses commonly to handle her bodily needs or ease her bodily pains. Elaine Scarry calls these objects ‗levers‘ (compare Punday 178) and Samuel Beckett makes a heavy use of these aids, as they help his characters to make sense of their being-in-the-world (Maude 1).

Such is the case of bicycle in ―Molloy‖ or of the tape recorder in ―Krapp‘s Last Tape‖.

What we perceive as ‗outside‘ and ‗inside,‘ and are used to reflect – in

Bachelard‘s words – as a dialectics of ‗outside‘ and ‗inside,‘ is nothing but an image schema (compare Johnson and Lakoff 109), or a metaphorical cognitive pattern. The most aptly fitting is the schema of a container, which we pre-reflectively impose on various spatial units (Johnson and Lakoff give an example of a bee in a garden, 117), on the mind and also on the body (Johnson and Lakoff 338). The purpose that we do it for is a simple conceptualization of the phenomena in order to understand them better.

‗Outside‘ and ‗inside‘ stands very close to the notion of the Other, which is, just like

‗the outside,‘ a contrastive category assuming a deicitic ‗me‘ or ‗us‘, or ‗the inside‘.

This brief note takes us to the issue of exteroception. We should start at the deictical frame of reference in spatial dimension, as it defines the situatedness of the subject that perceives (and also cogitates, speaks and moves). The subject occupies a 38

particular setting and from this spatial point accesses other locations. Accessing other spaces can be performed either physically by means of motion, perceptually by means of exteroception, or imaginatively by means of dreaming, imagining or conceptualizing

(Punday 126 - 132). In order to make the narration meaningful through a subject‘s choices, the set of accessible spaces must be definite, especially when it comes to physical and perceptual conditions.

When discussing exteroception in literary works, the deixis transforms into perspective, from which we, as readers, ‗see‘ what is going on. Gerard Genette and

Mieke Bal tend to call this perspective ‗focalization‘. By far the most common way of exteroception to access the space around the focalizing subject is the capacity of sight.

Sight has always been considered the most powerful sense. Within the European culture it gained a pre-eminent position thanks to rationalism and to the rise of scientific thought in the 17th century. Even Johnson and Lakoff submit to this superiority in their embodied schemas of cognition.9

3.1.4.2 Criticism of sight

Vision undoubtedly is an important channel of acquiring experiential data both in real and fictional worlds, however, it implies several features that might turn rather limitating, once we encounter a narrative that is conceptually based on different means of interaction between bodies and their environment. In short, they are the presupposition of distance between the seer and the seen, the avoiding of perceptual

9 One of the basic metaphors of the ―mind is a body‖ system is ―thinking is perceiving‖, where the perception is equalled to seeing. The image-argument follows: The mind is a body – Thinking is perceiving – Ideas are things perceived – Knowing is seeing – […] – An aid to know is a light source – Being able to know is being able to see – Being ignorant is being unable to see – Impediments to knowledge are impediments to vision – Explaining in detail is drawing a picture. At the end of this line stand the other senses: Being receptive is hearing – Taking seriously is listening – Sensing is smelling – Emotional rection is feeling – Personal preference is taste (Johnson and Lakoff 238). 39

causality, and the simultaneity of events (Punday 75). All of them contribute to the previously criticised inclination to neglect the constitutive and interpretative capacity of body in narration, and, on the other hand, nurture the Cartesian dichotomy and propensity to regard the literary characters and the act of reading itself as disembodied.

―The visual model implies that the mind treats the body at best as a place for the mind to occupy rather than as an inherent part of identity‖ (Punday 76). As Beckett was keen on focalizing the stories through bodily experience that tended to reduce the role of sight, an attempt to read and understand his stories exclusively through the common aspect of sight would lead into a dead end.

On that account, Elizabeth Grosz, a prominent feminist critic, suggests to take touch as the primary perceptual instrument of the body in space, because ―it provides contiguous access to an abiding object; the surface of the toucher and the touched must partially coincide‖ (quoted in Punday 76). Building the model of interaction on touch does not presume separating the perceiving body spatially from its environment, because there is an ongoing, immediate and causal exchange between the subject and its setting. If this is so, then skin is the ground for articulation of exchange between the inside and the outside. The primary merit of this theoretical shift is a broadening of the range of instruments by which we can assess the corporeal

‗atmosphere‘ – the attributive propositions revolving around the character‘s body.

3.2 Body seen from without

Now we should turn our attention to the way a particular narrative defines the body as a distinct and meaningful object. Apart from pre-textual, cultural determination, which

distinguishes, for instance, between ghosts, angels, robots and human bodies, there is always a need to distinguish bodies from other objects on the level of narrative (Punday

58-60). Such a distinstion might seem to be pretty easy, because everyone is naturally capable of distinguishing between a chair and a human body. However, there are some narrative strategies of experimental writers like Samuel Beckett, which deliberately obfuscate the limits of such a distinction. At the end of The End the protagonist‘s decaying body is lying on its back in an enclosed boat, and is barren of any volitional motion, so that we can hardly differentiate it from objects that are non-bodies. Inability to tell apart these elements resonate within the whole structure of the story, especially in those passages, in which the protagonist compares his inanimate, vegetative state of being with the past and alludes to himself as being already dead, that are in stark contrast to passages of vivid perceptual experiences. In stories like Lessness or

Imagination Dead Imagine, a distinction between bodies and non bodies is nearly impossible, because the reader faces grave difficulties in attributing most of the propositions to their appropriate objects.

3.2.1 Degree of embodiment

As soon as we discern the body from other objects and ascribe it to certain character, which is in Beckett always a tricky task to do, we can measure the degree to which a character is felt as embodied or disembodied, and what is the ‗distance‘ between the body and the psyche (Punday 66). Measuring the position of particular characters on these two continuums is complicated by another dimension that intrudes into this phenomenon. While the degree of embodiment can wholly fall into the group of features

governed by the author, there are rather strong cultural tendencies to determine this matter, too. Members of ethnic minorities, women and children are often associated with their bodies much more then men from ethnic majority (Punday 66). As Simone

Beauvoir put it, ―man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man‖ (quoted in Punday 66). The same can be said of bodies of colour – characters bearing such a body are often thematized as heavily embodied with a marked body. On the other hand, white characters often enjoy a great degree of liberty from the constraints of their material bodies.

Punday argues that the degree of embodiment is interwoven also inside the fiber stuff of the narrative in a phenomenon he calls differential embodiment (156). He traced down a pattern present in most classical narratives since 18th century, which is a tendency to display central protagonists as strongly mental and rather disembodied, while the marginal characters incline to be heavily embodied and rather limited in their mental activity. Punday ascertains that the sole function of this equilibrium is to gain authority for the narrative voice or for the main protagonist, because readers tend to trust characters with less pronounced bodies more then those with marked bodies. A significant point is the role of vision, since the disembodied character functions as a point of view (Punday 163-164).

Beckett belongs to the category of authors deliberately emphasizing the embodied or disembodied nature of their characters. Both extremes of this continuum present a particular narrative situation. An embodied self filters its experience of the story-world through its bodily perceptions (the previously discussed exteroception, interoception, motility, viscerality and habitus), while in the case of disembodied character the body is thematized through its absence. However, Beckett in 1960s, in the 42

period after the great novels, introduced another type of character, a voiceless body, a character devoid of consciousness. This specific occurrence poses a couple of unsettling questions, because there is very little or no motion at all, no attributive propositions except for bodily positions, which sound like mathematic formulae (Ackerlay and

Gontarski 92), no subjectivity traceable either in the character or in the narrative voice, and finally no stability of identification, since we are left uncertain about the identity of the character-as-object each time its position in the closed space changes. The degree of embodiment, however subjective it might be, presents a legitimate instrument for interpreting the meaning of certain narrative situations.

3.2.2 Body as type and archetype

Once we distinguish bodies from other objects, we can focus on their typology, unveiling their extratextual determinacy. Typology of bodies is directly contingent on their social and biological positioning (Punday 61). Different expectations are bound with a body of a young white protestant male, living in a large city, and with that of a black old female living in a small central African village. Daniel Punday goes even further in sorting the bodies according to health, where ―particular body flaws are taken to signify moral or psychological lack‖, taking an example from Shakespeare‘s Richard

III. Be it the skin of colour, age, sex, religion or social position, the principle underlying the notion of body within a narrative relies on implied understanding of what does it mean to be a person with a body of certain skin colour, age, sex, etc.

When examining Beckett‘s fictional characters, one of the most obvious features that characterizes Beckett‘s writing, is his strong tendency to portray

predominantly old, destitute and often physically impaired males. One of the questions often posed by interpreters is to what extent are these characters still humans, which refers to certain shift that Beckett apparently made – it is a shift from a character as a type into an archetype that helps to explain the text as a whole. Punday calls the corporeal dimension of these archetypical figures general bodies. They are general insofar as they transcend the individual physical and mental instance and represent a complex idea. As an example, James Phelan points at Toni Morrison‘s Beloved, who is a representative of all Middle Passage women, of all Black women in America, but also of Sethe‘s dead daughter and mother (cf. Punday 74). Beckett‘s characters, likewise, serve as presentations of particular acteurs, but at the same time represent through their decaying and wretched bodies the idea of meaninglessness of human life and the inability to change this human condition.

4 General characteristics of Beckett’s fiction

The considerable difference between Assumption (1929) and Stirring Still (1988) provides an irresistible impulse to proclaim Beckett a ―moving target‖, as Henry Porter

Abbott did in his essay on Murphy (Abbott, ―Murphy‖ 306), arguing that each of his works is a new departure from the established norms of whatever genre Beckett engaged himself in. Hence the difficulty in applying a suitable label to pigeon-hole

Beckett – he was a late modernist (if not the last) just as well as an early postmodernist

(if not the first). One does not have to be an erudite scholar to notice the striking change of literary form that started in rather conventional narratives of the pre-war years and which developed into a hardly comprehensible sequencing of single words in 44

unpredictable permutations at the end of his literary career. Backett obviously modified his narrative strategies in order to find a new instrument of expression for his contemporary concerns and as a prolific writer left behind a sample of considerable extent on which his experiments can be illustrated. However, even a slightly closer look at his drama, novels, short stories and poetry discloses a common core that is shared by the works from the early years of his literary production, just as by the late residua from the years preceding his death.

As Alan Astro put it, Beckett‘s work tell the same story again and again, but each time in a slightly different way (5). To use the arsenal of technical terms expounded in the first part of this theses, the story remains to substantial degree unaltered, the plotting in the fabula alters a bit, while the discoursive practices of distinct genres and the sjuzhet change to the greatest extent. Nevertheless, seen from a distance, all Beckett‘s writing retains a considerable coherence in both story and discourse. This quality of sameness also forms what can be assumed as Beckett‘s signature. Most readers would recognize him due to the mannered and difficult language and bleak imagery of muckheaps and desolate cabins, but also thanks to his characters, who are usually old crippled bums ―babbling out their final incoherent mumblings‖ (Pilling, ―Cambridge Companion‖ xiv). All these features are, however, only surface signs of structures that are hidden on various subsurface levels of most of

Beckett‘s works. Let us now examine a bit closer those issues that are relevant for this topic.

4.1 Cartesian split

A brief account of the Cartesian understanding of body and mind has been already given in a previous chapter. Its influence on modern thought can hardly be overrated.

Descartes‘ intention to base human knowledge on a sort of universal mathematics appealed to Beckett as strongly as it repelled him (Gontarski, ―Faber Companion‖

133).10 This ambiguous relationship led to a lifelong discussion on the stage as well as on the pages of his fiction, a discussion between the Descartes‘ dualistic concept on one side and the psychoanalytical reference to the unconscious on the other. These two positions meet in a painful clash in nearly every piece of his writing, since for Beckett they represented two forces with completely opposite drifts: ―One is the rational(-izing) principle, cogito, abstract reasoning, the conscious mind, will and design, determinism, positivism, the imposition of extrinsic order‖ (Davies 43). It views the world as a mechanism that is ruled by laws and principles. In his concept of res cogitans and res extensa, Descartes connected the thinking cogito to the body-machine through ‗vital spirits‘ that reside somewhere close to the pineal gland; however, these two worlds are otherwise completely separate and inaccessible, which stems into a conflict unerlying all the discussed pieces.

In opposition to this scientific vision of man and the world, a new strand of thinkig appeared. It looked up to ancient worldviews intertwined with myths that explained the universe only to a certain degree and the rest remained veiled with mystery, inaccessbile to conscious will. In Beckett‘s stories, this attitude is usually felt

10 Beckett even intended to write a dissertation on Decartes, since he studied him fervidly during his lectorship at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris; but, after two years, he abandoned this issue in his scholarly interest (McDonald 11). 46

as ―a sense of the primordial spring of life, which does not respond to analysis; the stream to which the archetypes are the only fit indicators; the mystery of birth and death, of which biology illustrates only the grossest mechanis; the actual unfoldment of existence, that is, something which we know, as living beings, but which is beyond our power of comprehension‖ (Davies 60). It echoes Jung‘s synergetic and holistict esoteric theory, which was definitely known to young Beckett.

While the first principle is concerned with description, explanation, determination and clarity (hence its popularity in the philosophy of the Enlightenment), the latter favours intuitive command of one‘s life in a mutual equilibrium between the inner world of the subject and the outer world, the Lebenswelt.11 In the act of artistic creation, as Beckett imagined it, the subconscious power arises from the unnamable depths of subliminal spheres and breaks into the world without much activity performed by the author. However, this half-Platonic (the dialogue Ion) view encompasses another issue – once inspiration comes to the author‘s mind, he has to formulate it by means of words. However, language is the first and foremost capacity that fails us when we need it.

4.2 Language and meaning

Language is one of the distinctive Beckettian themes. In the course of writing his trilogy of novels (Molloy 1951, Malone Dies 1951, and The Unnamable 1953), Beckett switched his buoyant Irish baroque quasi-oral storytelling (Gontarski, ―From

Unabandoned‖ xii; Finney 2) for a hardly pallatable verbal discharge of disintegrated

11 Beckett encoded these opposing forces into gendered symbolism – father represents the rational pricniple, while mother the irrational. This dichotomy winds like a red thread through numerous pieces. 47

sentences. Shortly before, in his four post-war novellas (Premier Amour, L’Expulsé, Le

Calmant, Le Fin), Beckett refused to carry on writing in English, because he felt the knowledge of his mother tongue laid too much pressure on him, and started to write in

French, adopting an aesthetics of impoverishment. Although his command of French was excellent, it was still a foreign language – it weakened his usual style and allowed him to write in an unmannered, though laborious way (Astro 3).

But adopting French also had another purpose. It was a part of the overall tendency to deconstruct the language. In ―The Unnamable‖, the first-person narrator starts his interior monologue in a traditional way, thinking and presenting his thoughts in standard sentences, but he soon steps over the common layout and gallops over the chaotic flashes in his mind, contracts and stretches the clauses in an irregular and arbitrary rhythm, and toys with interpunction. Some sentences are short, some extremely long, but cut into separate, sometimes rather disparate, clauses, yet still bearing some trace of syntax. A single sentence does not convey a single idea, the logic of speech is blurred:

[I]t will be I, it will be the place, the silence, the end, the beginning, the beginning again, how can I say it, that‘s all words, they are all I have, and not many of them, the words fail, the voice fails, so be it, I know that well, it will be the silence, full of murmurs, distant cries, the usual silence, spent listening, spent waiting, waiting for the voice, the cries abate, like all cries […] quick now and try again, with the words that remain, try what, I don‘t know, I‘ve forgotten, it doesn‘t matter, I never knew, to have them carry me into my story, the words that remain… (The Unnamable 406).

Beckett clearly demonstrates here the strain his narrator undergoes in an attempt to communicate something. His speech is, metaphorically, a walking in circles, in vicious circles, beginning nowhere and heading nowhere. The linearity of thought and speech

still underlying Molloy gave way to chaos, spasmodic repetition and aporia toward the end of The Unnamable.

Despite the Unnamable‘s exclamation ―I can‘t go on‖, this violent manipulation of language went eagerly on. The Texts For Nothing inherited to a great extent the attitude from the novels, but Beckett went even further and wrote his last full length novel, How it is, in a language that challenged another set of norms that could be set upon literary expression. Ann Banfield called his syntax ‗tattered‘, which aptly captures the act of completely omitting of interpunction and cutting the utterances in a cubistic way into fragments laid out in sudden shifts of speech direction: ―sleep sole good brief movements of the lower face no sound sole good come quench these two coals that have nothing more to see and this old kiln destroyed by fire in all this tenement‖ (How It Is 435).

The short stories that followed after the How It Is-turn‘ only strengthened this tendency of narration towards self-reflectivity (Davies 58). In Ping and Lessness, the narration mutated into a kind of mathematics, firing the solitary words in calculated patterns or permutations: ―All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn. Light heat white floor one square yard never seen. […] Light heat white planes shining white bare white body fixed ping fixed elsewhere‖ (Ping 371).

Towards the end of his literary career, Beckett reached the very limits of verbality by removing all but the essence and coining of new words. The short story Worstward Ho

(1983) begins: ―On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.‖

However, these experiments in narration were not an end in itself. The development from elaborate style through endless but incomprehensible babbling over to monochromatic minimalism (Gontarski, ―From Unabandoned‖ xv) was actually a 49

record of Beckett‘s unsuccessful quest for subduing the language under the narrator‘s control. On the other hand, Beckett succeeded in turning all the impasses and failures of his language into an aesthetic device.

Beckett believed that the language we use is a bad servant and even a worse master. Humans are unable to convey the deep personal meanings that pour from the subliminal spheres of the Real, of their unpronounced authentic selves, because the

Cartesian split and the severely rational materialistic philosophy of the Enlightenment have disarmed the language of this function. One does not possess any control over the meaning of words. They function on the basis of difference from other words, rather than describing the signified, the object they refer to (Davies 59). Thus, each individual is damned to absolute solitude, because there is no way to link with other individuals, since the only means by which one could expressed the contents of his or her experience and consciousness is by the ever failing, partial, non-essential, extrinsic and therefore useless language (Davies 60). ―Named, the world dies. So we sympathize with Molloy‘s

‗whatever I said was never enough and always too much‘‖ (60), and we also grasp the point of calling a novel or its protagonist The Unnamable. Having this in mind, we can understand why so many aporias and ‗perhaps‘ occur in the narration of most of his protagonists.

Even worse, the impotence of language affects not only the social communication, but also the identity of one‘s self. Molloy, Malone and The Unnamable feel compelled to speak in order to find themselves in the words, to constitute themselves as subjects (Finney 7). Spelling out is nothing but ascribing pre-conceived concepts. What the Beckettian protagonists seek is thus silence, both physical and metaphysical. The realm of the Real is actually silent, yet this silence is hearable: it is 50

the noise of the earth when it moves, but also the silence of the time before birth and after death. Beckett goes back in the history of thought to the ancient Greek idea of the music of the spheres. Being eternal and inarticulate, un-translatable into words, this planetary music links human unconscious with the cosmos, which is the only instance that could grant the protagonist the unity of his self.

As the characters are condemned to speak, they are automatically condemned to disunity, to endless longing for silence. Beckett inscribes this substantial disunity into the very fabric of his characters, because in the trilogy and in the Texts for

Nothing, we encounter a deictic chaos in the use of pronominals – one time the narrator speaks in first person singular, then switches suddenly into plural or into second person.

This disintegration of the speaking subject again refers to something deeper, namely to the twofold nature of ‗I‘. There are, in fact, two ‗I‘s, one is the speaking subject, the consciousness residing in the skull, the ‗primordial Ipseity‘, and the second is the subject of speech, the apparent, rhetoricised personality (Finney; Davies 63).

In the course of writing his trilogy, Beckett began to put stronger emphasis on the sound of the words and their rhythm. This drift towards the physical quality of language might be traced back to a short story, written and published in the early 1930s, called simply Text. One can dispute whether it is still a prose and not a piece of poetry, but many of Beckett‘s later prose fiction works resemble the Text in promoting the musical aspect at the expense of suppressing the meaning of words. The further one goes in Beckett‘s career, the more one feels that sound is just as substantial as meaning, if not more. Some pieces are even much more accessible when being read aloud, because the physical nature of their sound forms a significant part of the overall intent.

Beckett called this physical facet of words ―fundamental sounds‖, implying that sound 51

really mattered to him more than the arbitrary meanings, because it was in direct relation to silence, on one hand breaking it, but on the other making it significant (Astro

3, Davies 60).

Investing the language with such an overt physicality likens it to a body, which is not an implausible parallel once we compare the functioning of these two within particular narratives. The fundamental isolation of Beckett‘s characters is not only communicative or social due to the fallacy of language, as was claimed above, but also physical – they are usually to be found somewhere out of populated areas in a deserted cabin or in a den. In The End the main protagonist, after being driven out of his basement (sic!) flat in the town and having slept on a muckheap, refuses to share a cave with another homeless, who is way too sociable for him, and escapes to a run-down shed, filled with ―excrement, both human and animal, with condoms and vomit‖. The shed is hidden on an abandoned estate beyond the town, to which he only goes to beg for money. (285) As the protagonist himself implies, the townsfolk keep distance from him, because they feel repelled by his appearance, and isolate him by refusing to take him on the bus or sell him a milk. As a matter of fact, he does not mind it at all, the other way round, he is glad ―[t]hat no one came any more, that no one could come any more, to ask me if I was all right and needed nothing […]‖ (291). Some two sentences afterwards he complains resignedly: ―Even the words desert you, it‘s as bad as that‖. He is left to die alone in some sort of final delirious hallucination, shifting from words to images. In The Calmative, the protagonist, perhaps the same as in The Expelled and The

End, wakes up among the ruins of an old house. In The Expelled the isolation is being expressed quite poignantly by the expulsion from the house of protagonist‘s childhood.

In the Texts For Nothing Beckett strived to find the silence The Unnamable was looking for. He adopted a slightly different strategy. While the four nouvelles and the three substantial novelistic pieces build on body as one of the key narrative elements, the thirteen Texts for Nothing present an allegedly disembodied voice, a pure consciousness, which soon stops trying to explain its self and its existence, and goes on merely speaking. The silence that is reached between individual Texts is definitely not the silence The Unnamable was looking for. It is a failure equal to the preceding novels, because the silence that closes each Text is just a temporary rest, a ‗provisional conclusion‘ (Finney). Thus, the title, which refers to the musical ―measure for nothing‖, the silent pause between sounds registered in the score, bears an inherent paradox – it implicitly expects a new start.

4.3 Beckett’s (anti)heroes

Although there is an apparent evolution of Beckett‘s characters from early to later works, in which they shift from a relative roundness to radical flatness and from a relative integrity of identity towards a radical dissolution and disintegrity, there is a certain degree of qualitative coherence across the whole oeuvre. These isolated

‗thinking machines‘ (Davies 46) are the most abject beings imaginable (Astro 9), although one cannot deny them a pinch of warm sentiment, usually towards inanimate objects, but exceptionally also towards other humans (How It Is), which leaks now and then between the lines of mechanic record of their thoughts and physical mishaps. They are physically, culturally and socially alienated, isolated and separated from other people. If there are two characters that seem to be soul mates (like Estragon and

Vladimir, Mahood and Worm, Bom and Pim), they are rather so-called pseudo-couples

– a single identity divided into two parts that cannot exist separately. They are unimaginable without the other, just like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (Astro 8). The isolation is, of course, an essential and metaphysical one – most characters are waiting or wandering and slowly decaying in a world separated from truth and meaning. They try to tackle this meaninglessness in more or less the same way by forcing themselves to find something meaningful to say or to do. Yet the only outcome of their urge to speak is a constant repetition of what has been already said hundred times, and the result of their deeds is only easing themselves of their immediate pain, but not doing anything purposeful that would push their current situation in some new direction. An illusion of progress is offered only to conceal the real void and repetitive nature of life (Finney).

The metaphysical stasis is reflected in the physical stasis. Nearly all

Beckett‘s characters are old cripples devoid of motion. Molloy is disabled, Malone is a paralyzed inmate of an asylum house, the Unnamable is a legless torso living in a tray, serving as a signpost for a restaurant, in The Expelled, The Calmative and The End, all the three protagonists, interchangeable in terms of their character traits, are dejected homeless vagabonds with rotting bodies, in the first Text for Nothing the narrator is lying face down in a ditch, the narrator of How It Is is crawling in mud together with another two wretches, a pseudo-couple Bim and Bom, in Lessness and Ping the characters are reduced to inanimate bloodless Körper, lacking any capability of conscious, volitional choice. In theatre plays the situation is much alike. Happy Days,

Endgame and Play display characters half buried in heaps of soil, dustbins or vases. In

Not I there is just a fragment of a body, symptomatically a mouth emitting words in such a pace that the speech is hardly comprehensible. 54

Being enclosed in an object is a visual metaphor of the Cartesian split.

Beckett deprived his characters of motion and will-fullness only to show, first, how thoroughgoing the modern dichotomizing of body and soul is, and secondly, that the separation from truth by a failing language has its physical counterpart. Some characters are nothing but pure consciousness in fundamental discord with their body, the other are pure bodies disjoined from their minds. Their physical impairment, disintegration or fragmentation is not the cause of their overall failure, but its consequence, because the above mentioned separation encompasses also the character‘s bodies: ―[Beckett‘s narrators embody] a split off not only from the environment, but also from its own organism, so that all it is left with is ‗thinking, if that is the name for this vertiginous panic as of hornets smoked out of their nests‘‖ (Davies 45). So be it a dustbin, a jar, a heap of soil, a boat covered with a lid, an empty room, a fiacre, or a white space in the later stories, they all mean what they are, but they can also represent the physical body that shuts the cogito in and the external world out. Hence so many allusions to imprisonment within one‘s skull that is only another trope of ‗cut-off-ness‘ besides the language: ―A head, but solid, solid bone, and you embedded in it, like a fossil in a rock‖

(The Unnamable). J. M. Coetzee comments on the impotence of penetrating the walls of the skull as follows: ―Why are they cripples or invalids or worms or disembodied brains armed at most with pencils? Because they and the intelligence behind them believe that the only tool that can pierce the white wall is the tool of pure thought. Despite the evidence of their eyes that the tool of pure thought fails again and again and again‖

(Coetzee 23).

In the early as well as in later pieces, the body is usually found in a crouched position. In Lessness Beckett plays the mathematical game of looking for new 55

ways of movement or progress, which is, however, not a progress at all, just switching between different aspects of the same stillness. The white, bare fixed body very much resembles Beckett himself during his 1946 visit to Ireland, when he spent most of the time fixed to his bed in a foetal position, unable to move due to heavy depression.

Allusion to the depression can also support the fact that the characters don‘t find any sort of consolation or guarantee in their confinement, but rather a complete void (Davies

53).

Referring to a foetus is not accidental. In the More Pricks Than Kicks story

―Fingal‖, the main protagonist, Belacqua, goes on a walk with his girlfriend and out of the sudden exclaims: ―I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark forever‖ (quoted in Tajiri 20). The caul alludes to another encapsulation of a body, that of a foetus in a womb (the image of a body lying in the dark returned several times in later pieces). What is of primary importance here, is the issue of birth and motherhood.

Beckett‘s longing for return to the primordial state is a desire to reach the authentic being unspoiled by the rationalistic and mechanistic conceptions of the world. Many utterances of his characters paraphrase Pedro Calderón‘s dictum: ―Best is not to be born, or to die quickly‖ (quoted in Gontarski, ―Faber Companion‖ 61). Beckett regarded birth to be the greatest sin of human life, which explains why his characters so often (but not always) avoid sexual intercourse with women, and why they detest children, in First

Love the narrator literally flees away from the house where the his girlfriend is giving birth to their child. The cries of the newborn baby still haunt the narrator even many years afterwards. Descending into matter means being expelled from the blissful timeless Nirvana, being forced to undergo the Lacanian ‗mirror stage‘ and to disunite the desired ‗not-I‘ from the Other (compare Moorjani 182-183), the mystical union one 56

can never grasp with any concepts, and experiencing a whole-life decay and suffering before the death comes to liberate us again (White 11). At many points Beckett draws these two acts closely together, succinctly stating that the birth already implies the death in his famous image of ―the birth astride of a grave‖ in Waiting for Godot.

5 Corporeal aspects of Beckett’s short stories

To summarize what has been said so far: we have discussed what a literary character is and by what means makes it the author appear in the narrative; we examined the field of phenomenology in order to see how the body actually exists and operates in a fictional world; finally, we highlighted some features of Beckett‘s fiction relevant to our argument. In the introduction we proposed the main argument, which reads as follows: any interpretation that implicitly regards literary character to be a pure textual or pure human-like entity fails to grasp the point of Beckett‘s narratives. Further, any interpretation that examines Beckett‘s short fiction on the basis of actions performed by characters fails in the same manner. Beckett ranks among the authors that write psychological narratives, representing primarily the contents of characters‘ minds, rather than actions that would form a particular plot. Focusing on mind might encourage approaching the character as a conscious being. However, such an understanding would be highly reductive, because the contents of consciousness, albeit rich and important, form just a fraction of the knowledge we can acquire about a certain character. On the other hand, grounding the existence of a literary character on its experience, be it a conscious coping with the environment, or a subconscious perceiving of and operating within the same environment, helps us better understand the narrative situations in their 57

complexity as a whole. Any experience is – as a matter of fact – embodied experience.

We introduced the instrument of attributive proposition, that is, of anything that can be said about somebody or something, in order to broaden the field of data that are significant for any interpretation. Attributive propositions gather into groups of various integrative powers. The following analysis will try to demonstrate that the attributive propositions concerning experience, particularly the bodily experience, form in the case of Beckett‘s fiction a group of data of an extreme integrative power, and that a close reading of various corporeal aspects contributes to richer understanding of each of these stories.

Naturally, the issue of body has been addressed by many critics and scholars over the past half a century, but these accounts were rather brief and limited to scrutinizing the body as an object, as what we have called the Körper. The point of these studies was to explain the intricate relationship between body and mind on the background of Cartesian philosophy. Other studies focused on the issue of motion and covered even its subjective experience. What has largely been overlooked, then, was the concern for vivid bodily experience, for various means of perception. Such neglect seems rather peculiar in the light of the fact that Beckett does not only make his readers aware of the corporeal aspects, but forces them, compels them to pay constant attention to these phenomena.

All the previous sections served as a preparatory field for the forthcoming analysis of two particular short stories, written in two different states of mind, approaching the character from two distinct standpoints. The first one, The End, was partially written in 1946 in English as an unnamed story, but immediately rewritten in

French and given first the name Suite (Continuation), and only then re-named to La Fin 58

(The End). The End closes a series of short stories (First Love, The Expelled, The

Calmative and The End) that for the first time in Beckett present a first-person narrative situation of a ‗teller‘, an internal narrator from whose perspective we see the story. As

Stanley E. Gontarski observed, the nature of the narrator is that of ‗pronominal unity‘, although we are not told his name, the deictic pronoun ‗I‘ refers to the same subject across the whole story (xv). Therefore all the attributive propositions we collect can be attributed without doubt to the proper subject. What is more important, however, is the nature of the mind-body relationship, because in the four nouvelles, there is some stable and direct connection between what is happening to and in the body, and what is present in the conscious mind. Such a pronominal unity and mind-body interconnectedness was something that Beckett rejected and gradually disintegrated when writing the trilogy.

5.1 Perception dead perceive – The embodied ‘eye’ of The

End

The sudden alteration of the story‘s title from Continuation to The End somewhat complicates the interpretation, because the story‘s obvious and undisguised concern with death is disturbed by the original title in an evocation of Beckett‘s favourite motif of existential motion: the ‗going on‘, continuing to speak, continuing to live. This optimistic reading is further enhanced by a remark that the main protagonist of The

Calmative utters in his hallucinatory ruminations, that ―we are needles to say in a skull‖

(269), and then by the pinch of meta-narration we are given at the very end of our story, when the main protagonist takes a sudden turn and closes his telling with the sentence:

―The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness 59

of my life, I mean without the courage to the end or the strength to go on‖ (The End

293). Meditating upon the meaning of the original title that was given to the story only a posteriori, about the Beckett‘s decision to name the story in a different way, and about the last, ambiguous sentence, might bear some fruit, but our interpretation will attempt to answer the ‗what is the story about‘ question from a different perspective.

Basically, the plot is pretty simple. An old man dismissed from a charitable institution, which gave him some money and clothes, is looking for a flat, finally finds one, after some time is dismissed again, wanders around the city, meets an old acquaintance with whom he shares his cave, but resolves to move to an abandoned cabin in the hills, starts begging in the city, changes his abode for a shed close to the river, where he finds a boat to sleep in, remains in the boat for most of the time and finally imagines setting on sail in his boat and committing a suicide on an open sea. A plot of such shape may still incite the advocates of action-based narration to follow the traces of activities the protagonist performs and regard him as their subject. However, a closer look at the discursive dimension will reveal that any sort of plot-oriented reading is of no use.

The initial expulsion from the institution (a mental hospital?) follows the pattern of the previous two nouvelles, as all three of them begin with the same motif. In

The Expelled the protagonist is violently expelled from (his birth-) house and falls into the gutter just beneath the stairs. In The Calmative, the protagonist is ousted from a ―den littered with empty tins‖ (261) by some unspecified ―assassins‖ (262). In The End, the expulsion is not violent, yet still fiercely resolute. Some critics liken the imagery of expulsion to the act of giving birth, which for Beckett meant rejection from the Garden of Eden, from the warm and silent (word-less and thus concept-less) enclosure of the 60

womb (Perloff 90). Actually, the narrator gives us a reason to assume so, since after he is dressed by the three nurses tending him, he resentfully complaints ―that they had not let [him] wait in the familiar bed, instead of leaving [him] standing in the cold, in these clothes that smelled of suplhur‖ (276). His fondness for the horizontal position and for closed spaces is a recurrent theme, perhaps indicating his strong desire for a return into the blissful prenatal state. These are places where he takes refuge from the outer world and that gradually become smaller and smaller, until he is surviving in a boat, to which he makes a lid that covers it so tightly that he has to drill a small hole in it to breath.

From the warmth of a hospital bed, where he is lying stark naked and is regularly cared of, his narrative journey leads into a boat that resembles a coffin.

The imagery of ‗birth astride a grave‘ is also fuelled by the fact that at his expulsion from the hospital he is given clothes and a bowler hat after a dead person.

Dressing these clothes means accepting the idea of death. But it can also be a parallel to being born, because in Beckett‘s iconology, being born meant descending into matter, taking on the form of a human body, which is inherently damned to decay and death.

The narrator of The End felt initially uncomfortable in the newly acquired clothes, because the man who used to wear them before was not as thick as he was at the beginning of the story. Gradually, however, his physical decay and meager nutrition made his body fit the clothes and they become inseparable from his body. The only moment he is bareheaded is when he is healing his skull in the cave by the sea: ―I treated my crab lice with salt water and seaweed, but a lot of nits must have survived. I put compresses of seaweed on my skull, which gave me great relieve, but not for long‖

(284) At other occasions, he never puts the hat down. He even learns to doff his hat so as to ―slip it smartly forward, hold it a second poised in such a way that the person 61

addressed could not see [his] skull, then slip it back‖ (279). This fear of exposing the decay of his head leads him to beg with a tin, rather then with his hat, he simply

―couldn‘t use [his] hat because of [his] skull‖ (287). In the final image of being drifted away towards the presumable death, he claims to remember having the hat tied with a string to his buttonhole. The other parts of his garment also become tightly grown into his body. When begging on the street, he admits to urinate in his trousers and stay on the same spot till night, implying that he hadn‘t changed the clothes.12 Later, when lying in the boat, still in the shed, he only pulls down his trousers a little bit to defecate just underneath his body, claiming that ―the excrements were [him] too‖ (292).

Not only that the places of his desired rest diminish in space, but he also tends to spend ever more time in them, leaving them only occasionally. The first flat, which he rents from a Turkish or Greek woman, is a basement flat, apparently partially bellow the street level, because from his bed he sees the feet coming and going on the sidewalk (280). This window view was the only means of access to the world outside, because during his stay, he never left the room, only on occasions of having his room cleaned by the lady, but this did not mean leaving the house. He does not even remember what it looked like, because ―[i]t was dusk when [he] got there‖ and when he was leaving, ―it was a glorious day, but [he] never look back when leaving‖ (280). This tendency towards stillness might allude to the static nature of a foetus in the womb, or of a dead person in a tomb. After swapping the cabin in the hills for the one on the riverside, he reports to cut down his work (begging) and to lie in the shed in his boat

12 An image, again, to be found in The Expelled: ―I had then the deplorable habit, having pissed in my trousers, or shat there, which I did fairly regularly early in the morning, about ten or half past ten, of persisiting and going on and finishing my day as if nothing had happened‖ (251). 62

most of the time (289). As the end was coming, he concedes to stay in his boat all the time (291).13

The last sentence proves that his stillness was both metaphysical and physical, the former stemming from the desire of dark, enclosed spaces, the latter by his physical decay. When it comes to his decay – a substantial issue in Beckett that Kathryn

White interprets as a deliberate amplification of physical malaise that affects us all

(White 9) – we should discern two types of decay – though mutually intertwined – in the figure of our protagonist. One is the decay of his body-object, of his Körper, the other of his living, perceiving body, the Leib.

The gradual decay of the body-object is metonymically alluded to by first the laughter his presence provokes (278) and than the repulsion other people feel when sharing the same space with him. Most of the flats that were free to rent were banished to him as soon as the owners took a first glimpse of his appearance (279). After spending a night on a heap of dung, three buses refuse to let him in (282). He experiences the same rejection when hitch-hiking from his cabin in the hills down to the city. People refuse to take him on their carts, unless he aptly sighs:

―In other clothes, with another face, they might have taken me up. I must have changes since my expulsion from the basement. The face notably seemed to have attained its climacteric. […] A mask of dirty old hairy leather, with two holes and a slit, it was too far gone for the old trick of please your honour and God reward you and pity upon me. It was disastrous‖ (286).

When begging in the city, he tries to perfect the right technique of eliciting mercy and not repelling the passers-by and starts using a board tied to his neck and waist. ―It jutted out just at the right height, pocket height, and its edge was far enough from my person

13 All time expressions are absolutely vague, at several points he admits he does not know, how long he has been in such and such place. 63

for the coin to be bestowed without danger‖ (287). The Marxist orator, who appeared one day just in front of the place our narrator was usually begging, referred of him as of an example of a social wretch: ―Look at this down and out, he vociferated, this leftover.

If he doesn‘t go down on all fours, it‘s for fear of being impounded. Old, lousy, rotten, ripe for the muckheap‖ (289). After a day spent begging, he went for a bottle of milk, but soon had to pay an urchin to buy him one, because the shop keeper refused to serve him. Another quite literal reference to his decay appears in the naturalistic scene of scratching himself. This powerful passage also succeeds to evoke an intensive bodily reaction on the part of the readers. It is worth quoting it in extenso:

I unbuttoned my trousers discreetly to scratch myself. I scratched myself in an upward direction, with four nails. I pulled in the hairs to get relief. It passed the time, time flew when I scratched myself. Real scratching is superior to masturbation, in my opinion. One can masturbate up to the age of seventy, and even beyond, but in the end it becomes a mere habit. Whereas to scratch myself properly, I would have needed a dozen hands. I itched all over, on the privates, in the bush up to the navel, under the arms, in the arse, and then patches of eczema and psoriasis that I could set raging merely by thinking of them. It was in the arse I had the most pleasure. I stuck my forefinger up to the knuckle. Later, if I had to shit, the pain was atrocious. But I hardly shat anymore. (288)

The naturalistic manner, in which we are invited to see such intimate details of the life of the narrator‘s body, is in stark contrast to the nearly complete absence of any purely intellectual content of his mind. The narrator wittily comments on this reduction of his humanity as follows: ―As for my needs, they had dwindled as it were to my dimensions and become, if I may say so, of so exquisite a quality as to exclude all thought of succour‖ (291).

The inner decay, affecting the living body, the Leib, is more intricate. It affects his faculty of speech and all the channels of experience as expounded in chapter

3.1, that is the habitus, viscerality, motility, interoception and exteroception, and joins 64

his natural peculiarities, or as the Greek woman called them, his oddities. The gradual disintegration of motility starts already in the hospital, where three nurses have to dress him up (275). He describes the gathering of fern for making a bed among the excrements, condoms and vomit of the first cabin, as causing him great labour (285), and goes on asserting that begging with a stretched arm was out of question (287) and that his feebleness went so far that ―one day I couldn‘t get up. The cow saved me‖

(285).14 This absolute inability to move is encountered at the very end of the story, when he is lying in the boat, but there is no cow to save him again: ―There were times when I wanted to push away the lid and get out of the boat and couldn‘t, I was so indolent and weak, so content deep down where I was‖ (292).

While standing in the hospital room and waiting to be ordered out, he lets his eyes settle on a stool that must have served him as a prosthetic instrument for a very long time, easing his weighty body from gravity. As Stanley Gontarski pointed out,

Beckett‘s misanthropic narrators in the four nouvelles hold greater pleasure in handling inanimate objects than living creatures. And from living creatures, animals were always dearer to them than humans. The stool ranked among the familiar objects that he called his ―companions of so many bearable hours. The stool, for example, dearest of all‖

(276). As the narrator remarks, the stool became a part of his body, he felt ―its wooden life invaded him‖, till he himself became a piece of old wood (276). Its status of bodily extension is confirmed by a small hole for the narrator‘s cyst, making thus both objects

– the stool and the body – fit perfectly with all their oddities. Another two prosthetic extensions that highlight the distortion of his body, are the begging board and the

14 He tried to suck the milk directly and then to milk her into his hat, but without much success. Nonetheless, it is the second time we are told that his only food intake is milk, which turns us back to the motifs of motherhood and birth 65

wooden boat cover. They are both means of access, an interface between the body and the environment. As has already been noted, the wooden board for begging was a meeting point of charity and repulsion, providing the passers-by with a comfortable access to their act of mercy and at the same time keeping them in proper distance from the abominable countenance of the protagonist. The lid, in a similar way, kept the narrator shut in his favourite dark place, while keeping the greedy rats and the light shut off outside.

Another means of extension into the environment is the faculty of speech, letting the consciousness out of the skull. There are very few moments when the narrator is speaking directly with other people, on one of these occasions, in his desperate dialogue with Mr. Weir, he is told that ―no one understands a tenth of what

[he] says‖ (277). In the sub-plot concerning the Greek woman, he claims to tolerate her strange accent, because his own speech was distorted by ―assimilating the vowels and omitting the consonants‖ (279). The scarcity of speech can be seen as a metaphor for the modest motion the narrator performs. This parallel is justified by a short sequence of thoughts that flash through his mind when he is lying motionless flat on his back in the boat – he first acknowledges that ―even the words desert you, it‘s as bad as that‖ and follows on, conceding that ―perhaps it‘s the moment when the vessels stop communicating.‖ The vessels might stand for the boats, or for containers, an abundantly used metaphor for bodies. Communication, then, might mean either verbal communication, or nonverbal, physical. Two sentences later comes the declaration that he cannot get out of the boat due to weakness (291-292).

Although the physical decay is most easily imaginable in the way our narrator penetrates the world of his story through motion and speech, the attributive 66

propositions most significant for the understanding of his character come from the perceptions gained through the senses and from his bodily sensations (interoception and viscerality). As we noted at the beginning of chapter two, Baruch Hochmann clearly divides the layer of textual representation from that of readerly reconceptualization. In

The End, most of the data we are given relate to some sort of experiencing both outer and inner world, thus the process of reconceptualization inevitably relies on the focalization of the internal narrator, which is, as he admits, fallible (compare Finney).

Let us start with interoception. Upon the suggestion of making himself useful, he wakes up to the feeling of feebleness: ―How weak I felt!‖ (277) and slowly sets on his journey towards death. Sobering up from the expulsion, from the loss of security, makes him – after several days of wandering and complaining about the painful hat – finally long for something, which is a sensation hitherto unfelt. He longs for being ―under cover again, in an empty place,15 close and warm, with artificial light, an oil-lamp for choice, with a pink shade for preference. From time to time someone would come to make sure I was allright and needed nothing. It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible‖ (279). Sighing for an asylum reveals the inner distress arising from the absence of ‗home‘, in which he does not seek just the warmth, but first and foremost a clearly delimited space he can orientate in.

Outside of these enclosed spaces, he feels uneasy and lost: ―In the street I felt lost. I had not set foot in this part of the city for a long time and it seemed greatly changed‖, and a couple of lines later he explains that ―[t]he general impression was the same as before. It is true I did not know the city very well. Perhaps it was quite a different one. I did not

15 His longing for an empty place recalls the hunt for a room to rent from The Expelled: ―I would only have confused him by saying that I could tolerate no furniture in my room except the bed, and that all other peieces, and even the very night table, had to be removed, before I consent to set foot in it‖ (256). 67

know where I was supposed to be going. I had the great good fortune, more than once, not to be run over‖ (278). Thus the metaphysical anguish of his journeying between islands of calm, represented by enclosed spaces, has its counterpart in disoriented wandering in the streets of the city. The feeling of weakness occurs again, symptomatically, after being expelled from his second abode, the basement flat rented by the Greek lady. Overwhelmed by the fact that he is about to move out for the sake of freeing the basement for the owner‘s pig, and that he does not even know the name of the landlady to get the revenue, he enters again the state of disoriented wandering and

―stumbles in the blinding light‖ (282). His disorientation can also have a comic facet, as we can see in his absent-minded reaction to a direct question put to him by the Marxist orator:

Take a good look at this living corpse. You may say it‘s his own fault. Ask him if it‘s his own fault. The voice, Ask him yourself. Then he bent forward and took me to ask. I had perfected my board. It now consisted of two boards hinged together, which enabled me, when my work was done, to fold it and carry it under my arm. […] Do you hear me, you crucified bastard! cried the orator. Then I went away, although it was still light. (289)

The above quoted passage gets us directly to an issue that forms an integral part of our understanding of our protagonist and the story he narrates. His apparent detachment from reality is somewhat ambiguous and inherently paradoxical. His perpetual escapes from the external world into seclusion and the incapability to function normally within the society insinuate a tendency of enclosing himself inside his skull that would ―put an end to the onslaught of sensory perception‖ (Maude 39). As the characters of the forthcoming trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) seek urgently an end to their speaking, that is, an existential silence, the narrator of The End is on a quest to bring his sensory perceptions to a standstill, an existential calm. While they are

compelled to speak and to define themselves through words, he is condemned to perceive and is defined, against his will, by a gradual crumbling and subsequent merging of exteroceptive perception, imagination and memory (Maude 36).

There are two clearly distinguishable processes represented by two dominant senses: vision and hearing. The first process, connected with vision, encompasses deconstructing the faculty of vision as a distanced and objective means of perception, while the second, linked with hearing, presents an inescapable intrusion of the external world into the stillness of the skull. When leaving the hospital, he passes through the cloister and the garden and hears the sighs the earth makes after a strong and persistent rain. The silent sound is given a transcendental spin by a reference to the earth, which is an image that comes again in Molloy, a novel written shortly after the

End: ―perhaps the far unchanging noise the earth makes and which other noises cover, but not for long. For they do not account for that noise you hear when you really listen, when all seems hushed. And there was another noise, that of my life become the life of this garden as it rode the earth of deeps and wildernesses‖ (Molloy 65). The ‗other noise‘ that covers this silent sound, which one can only hear when really listening, comes shortly afterwards. It is the answer the mother gives to her son‘s bewildered question about raindrops falling out of the blue sky: ―Fuck off, she said‖ (The End

277).16 The silence is then being interrupted quite regularly and it always agitates and disconcerts the thoughts of the narrator. He feels very comfortable in his basement flat, with the only exception of sounds that come from the street: ―What lacerated me most

16 One can only speculate about the significance Beckett invested in this image, regarding his complicated relationship with his mother and his attitude to the phenomenon of birth-giving, as it was discussed earlier, concerning the short story First Love, or as it springs up in the stream of narrator‘s consciousness towards the end of The Unnamable: ―I walk the streets, I lash into them one after the other, it‘s the town of my youth, I am looking for my mother to kill her, I should have thought of that a bit earlier, before being born‖ (The Unnamable 391). 69

was the din of the newspaper boys. They went pounding by every day at the same hours, their heels thudding on the sidewalk, crying the names of their papers and even the headlines‖ (281). The noise of the sea was one of the main reasons to leave the cave on the seaside: ―I couldn‘t bear the sea, it‘s splashing and heaving, its tides and general convulsiveness. The wind at least sometimes stops (284). After entering the limbo between life and death (White 45), that is, when lying enclosed in his boat-coffin yet still alive, he reports to hear the shrieking of the gulls ravening about the mouth of the sewer nearby, the raindrops falling on the roof of the shed, the sounds of the wind, ―but what does it amount to? Howling, soughing, moaning, sighing.‖ Immediately he reports, being rather stupefied, that he would love to hear the noise of hammers, clanging in the desert (291). In one of the last perceptual experiences, before sinking into the last agony, he reports that he ―felt them hard upon [him], the icy, tumultuous streets, the terrifying faces, the noises that slash, pierce, claw, bruise (292).

From a general point of view, the acuteness of his auditory perceptions pervades over his ability to see clearly and to build the image of the world by visual perceptions. This makes the only difference between The End and the previous story

The Calmative, in which it is the vision that dominates the inflow of sensory data, as there are peculiarly few sounds being heard throughout the whole story. The embodied

―eye‖ from the title of this section alludes to the popular linguistic pun, however, it also helps to understand one of the pivotal themes of the story. It is the embodied nature of vision, otherwise considered as disembodied, distanced, objective and supratemporal.

Beckett pushes the vision closer to other senses, which are normally taken for immediate, temporal and embodied (Maude 36-38). The narrator of The End presents his visual experience as blurry, hazy and indeterminate. He therefore sporadically relies 70

on the eyes. When narrating his memories of the bench in the park by the riverside and the watering fount for horses, he phrases the individual events by periods of sound and silence. Only at the end he claims to turn his head and discover that the animal is looking at him. Although the water in the river seems to him to flow in the wrong direction, he admits he is mistaken: ―That‘s all a pack of lies, I feel‖ (278). The unreliability is commented on a couple of lines further, when he was approaching the house with the basement flat: ―Now I didn‘t know where I was. I had a vague vision, not a real vision, I didn‘t see anything, of a big house five or six stories high, one of a block, perhaps‖ (279). A paraphrase of this is to be found in his report on the Marxist orator. The whole incident started as follows: ―One day I witnessed a strange scene.

Normally I didn‘t see a great deal. I didn‘t hear a great deal either. I didn‘t pay attention.

Strictly speaking, I wasn‘t there.‖ This is testified by discovering the legs of his trousers being wet at the end of the day, which had most likely been done by the dogs. After being expelled from the basement flat, he insists on not having seen anything definite from the house: ―All I remember is my feet emerging from my shadow, one after the other‖ (280). When begging, he let from time to time his head drop on his chest, and reports to ―see the board in the distance, a haze of many colours,‖ although the begging board was in the level with his waist (288).

All these instances of unreliable sight point to its closeness with other senses.

Being undistanced and physiologically determined, the sight loses its objectivity and

‗descends‘ back to the body. Together with the proximity senses of touch, taste, smell, but also hearing, it forms a sort of chaotic synaesthesia, as in the case of his final thrill of perceptions before death. By decentering the vision and undermining the authority of senses, he blurs the boundaries between the self and the world (Maude 37). His sight 71

also merges with memories and with imagination, as in the case of buildings, chimneys and hoardings of the other quay beyond the river (289), or of the lights in the ground floor of the house standing on the same estate as his shed (290). ―If categories such as perception, memory and imagination lose their differentiating characteristics, the neat distinction between subject and object must also become problematic‖ (Maude 37).

From the very beginning, the narrator seeked a calm, warm, enclosed space, that was later paralleled to a state of his skull. Yet from the original expulsion from the hospital, his skull is being invaded by various perceptions that prevent him from achieving this desired stillness. The phenomenal world collapses with his thought and

―the narrator, in other words, fails to reach a state of detached subjectivity‖ (Maude 40).

Thus the being-in-the-world of our narrator becomes a substantially embodied one.

In the literary character definition scheme outlined in the first section of this thesis, we attempted to build solid foundations for a theory of character that would cover also such boundary cases as the characters of Samuel Beckett. Far from being a boundary case, the protagonist of The End serves as an example of an excessively embodied self, to which we can only understand, if we take into account his bodily- based experientiality. Yet, it is still difficult to define him as a character in theoretical concepts. Avoiding the reductionist Forsterian typology, based on the categories of flatness and roundness, we may use the open classificatory system of three continua, introduced by Joseph Ewen (compare Rimmon-Kenan 43). Ewan analyzes characters according to their complexity, development and penetration into inner life. Regarding complexity, our protagonist is build around one dominant trait along with a few secondary ones, yet we would hesitate to call him a simple character, as the richness of his perceptual experience, often merging with memory and imagination, provides us 72

with a complex insight into his personality. As for development, neither his personality traits, nor any other feature of his character develop at all. Nonetheless, we are facing a continual change that affects his body – that is the profound decay of all aspects of his figure, the perception faculties included. Last, but not least, the penetration into inner life functions in our case – again – in a different mode. We are not given anything but the contents of his consciousness, but we know very little, almost nothing, about his ideas, opinions and points of view. The only fact that we can assert with some certitude, is that he is misanthropic and that he likes the rats, which have designs on his ‗still living flesh‘, much more then any person in the story. Grounding the interpretation on

Monika Fludernik‘s theory of experientiality accounts for establishing the character as a nexus of signifieds, to which all the signifiers concern the body. In other words

(Chatman‘s words), most of the fabric, from which we reconceptualize the existent of a character, originate from the attributive propositions regarding his body, because it is the body that draws the majority of predicates and makes them the most powerful branch of attributive propositions, from which we compose the character in our mind.

5.2 Bodies For Nothing – Text 4

The previous chapter discussed a short story called The End. However, with regard to the development of Beckett‘s whole oeuvre, it should have rather been named The

Beginning, since the chief issues and formal experiments were, at the time of its writing, still yet to come. The novel Murphy and the four nouvelles (First Love, The Expelled,

The Calmative, The End) formed a transitory step between the early works and the great creative years of the novelistic trilogy and the major dramas Waiting for Godot and

Endgame. Although different to great extent, all the pieces written till the end of The

Unnamable, the last novel before Texts for Nothing, share two particular qualities, from which Beckett tried to escape in this collection of short stories. These two qualities are linearity of narration and identity of character (compare Abbott, Beginning Again 106 and van Hulle 253). Both of them contribute to what Dirk van Hulle calls the ‗quest structure‘. A quest implies a subject, an object and a verb of activity. In Texts for

Nothing, all of these are present, yet in a fragmentary and indistinct shape. Beckett speaks about exhaustion after finishing the trilogy and of ―having no ‗nominative‘, no

‗accusative‘ and no ‗verb‘; no ‗I‘, no ‗have‘, and, above all, no ‗being‘‖ (Brater 8).

Beckett transforms the structure of quest into a ‗chaos of fidgets‘, into ‗a restlessness without purpose‖, which is best explained by a short quotation from From an

Abandoned Work: ―I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way‖ (van Hulle 255).

The above quoted sentence affords an illuminating insight into the very nature of the Texts. While the protagonist of The End strives to achieve a calm state of being, the protagonist(s) of the Texts do not strive at all, they do nothing, they do not follow any particular télos, they only desire the end. While Molloy, Malone, The

Unnamable, and their various incarnations, strived hard to invest their words with meaning to define themselves, the narrators of the Texts are only resignedly giving voice to the silence, thus expressing what is essentially beyond expression, because to talk about nothing paradoxically requires talking about something (White 101). While the protagonists of the previous fictions are held together by discursive means of pronominal unity and by experiential situatedness in one‘s body, the protagonists of

Texts for Nothing are lacking a cohesive self, they are so indeterminate in their identity 74

that we are left with very little comfort of knowing who is speaking and who is being spoken about. The nothingness of the Texts for Nothing is a real impasse. They follow up (if the term can be used) the The Unnamable‘s last words ―You must go on. I can‘t go on. I‘ll go on‖ (The Unnamable 407), with ―Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn‘t any more, I couldn‘t go on. Someone said, You can‘t stay here. I couldn‘t stay there and

I couldn‘t go on‖ (Texts for Nothing 295). The linearity of plot is soon lost under the redundancy of language and runs into chaotic narration, presented by a restless voice that throughout the whole series of texts constantly flickers and emits chaos due to its disembodied nature. H. P. Abbott asserts that the ―architecture of narrative itself is pulled inside out, and what ‗happens‘ (if the term can be used) takes place in a narrative void‖ (Abbott, Palgrave 20), while comparing the clear ―sense of trajectory with its increasingly frenetic crescendo‖ of The Unnamable with the ―shards of scene and place

[and] little suggestions of voyages that never go anywhere‖ (Abbott, Beginning Again

107). So far we have been encountering essentially traditional narratives, composed of singular elements in their classical shape, but to comprehend the dislocated narrative strategy of the Texts, one has to overcome the conceptual barrier and accept the condition of thorough decomposition that affects all the facets of these narratives.

As Enoch Brater wittily remarked in his seminal study on Beckett‘s late fiction, Beckett ―had written himself out of his prose with the exception of the voice.

His problem now was to figure out just what to do with it‖ (Brater 9). The Unnamable failed to express the subliminal and primordial core of his self, because it is unnamable, inexpressible. Texts endeavour to do virtually the same, to express the void, the silence beyond thought, the nothingness, from which we came when given birth, but they endeavour to do so through giving up trying, through suspending the verb, the quest, the 75

‗doing‘, leaving the voice alone but with his voice, doomed to fail (White 101). It is a perpetual giving up, starting in every Text from anew, repeating almost the same again and again. This quality of perpetual beginnings was labeled by Beckett himself as

‗aesthetics of commencement‘ (Abbott Beginning again, 109). The artificial pauses between individual texts might signify an endless return to the beginning of a musical composition and the silent ‗bar for nothing‘ the conductor indicates before the orchestra starts to play. Van Hulle considers this pause, this moment of a ‗not yet‘ being, to be tranquil (254), but the silent pause might as well be interpreted contrariwise as full of suspense, withholding the content of the narrator‘s skull till the last moment, and then releasing the energy and giving the matter the form of articulated words, which then flow through the narrative voices in a sort of mechanical outpouring, stripped of any coherent meaning. As the outpouring vanishes soon in the thin air, the voice starts again somewhere else.

Our analysis of corporeal aspects encounters a fundamental problem – there is a very unnatural relation between the narrator and the story world. Detached narrators were common since the rise of novel, but they were usually performing their authorial, often omniscient, third-person narration clearly outside the story world, or clearly inside it. Effacing the distance between the voice and the protagonist, the first-person narratives imply a self that is also clearly located within the world it is narrating about.

Contrary to both these narrative situations, Beckett presents a model of a semi-detached voice, which claims to be disembodied (―I should […] turn away from the body, away from the head – Text 1, 295), but that, at the same time, is given existence only through the speech performed by the body (―There has to be [my life], it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life‖ – Text 4, 307). In the 76

Texts for Nothing, there is always a single character, yet split into two selves, two ‗I‘s, that are separated on an ontological level. In the course of writing the Texts, Beckett randomly switched the location of narrative voice between these two selves. Let us have a brief look at the Text number 4, where the voice is nested within the disembodied self.

At the very beginning of the fourth text, the narrator poses the key question:

―Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me‖ (306, my emphasis)? The question is soon answered, claiming again that ―I am not in his head, nowhere in his old body‖ (ibidem).

It is something we might term, for the sake of simplification, a ‗spirit‘. This ‗I‘ is not only disembodied ―in the pit of my inexistence‖, but also pre-conscious, since ―I know nothing‖, and supratemporal: ―I didn‘t exist, he couldn‘t have that, that was no kind of life, of course I didn‘t exist, any more than he did, of course it was no kind of life, now he has it, his kind of life, let him loose it (306-307). As we noted in the introduction to

Beckett‘s fiction, this authentic, spiritual, archetypal, general and generic self exists only before birth and after death. It is the primordial ‗One‘, unchanging, undistinguished by form, ―me who am everything‖. We cannot understand its nature by using our reason – ―He protests he doesn‘t reason and does nothing but reason‖ (306).

Beckett brings this unnamable ‗I‘ into existence through the second self, the terrestrial,

―mere mortal‖ I, in the case of Text 4 projected into the third person singular, ‗he‘. It is the process of becoming embodied, of ―tread[ing] down the tunnels at first, then under the mortal skies, through the days and nights‖ (Text 9, 325), that sets the link between these two. The narrator ironically comments on this act of creation, he says that ―it‘s the same old stranger as ever, for whom alone accusative I exist‖ (306). In fact, it is the embodied self that is guilty of violating the peace and calling the disembodied ‗I‘ into 77

existence: ―That should have been enough for him, to have found me absent, but it‘s not, he wants me there, with a form and a world, like him, in spite of him, me who am everything, like him who is nothing‖ (ibidem, my emphasis). As the voice narrates exclusively in nominative, the deictic there marks the span between the eternal body- lessness and the embodied terrestrial spatiality. The narrator‘s semi-detached nature refers to this link between the two selves, residing in two worlds at the same time: ―I am not in his head, nowhere in his old body, and yet I am there, with him, hence all the confusion‖. Later on he provides the there with some description: ―I don‘t need to know the details, perhaps I am sitting under a palm. Or it‘s a room, with furniture, all that‘s required to make life comfortable, dark, because of the wall outside the window‖ (307).

Although it might seem that we are dealing – in the corporeal perspective – with a completely opposite situation in contrast to The End, as the protagonist‘s body is made deliberately absent, it is just seemingly so. Once the narrator sets off narrating, in his case hauling the subliminal into the liminal, he is, in fact, wrapping himself up in flesh. It has been already quoted before, but to emphasize the point, the key passage reads:

―There‘s my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don‘t say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that‘s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.‖ (307)

On hand he asserts being fundamentally speechless (306), on the other he seeks a story for himself and self-consciously calls it a mistake. The fallible language, which he ascribes to the terrestrial self, swallows him too – ―I‘ll learn to keep my foul mouth shut before I‘m done, if nothing foreseen crops up‖ (308).

Kathryn White alleges that the Texts for Nothing present again a gradual decay, but this time not physical and perceptual, but spiritual, claiming that the spirit drives itself to exhaustion (102) by writing it‘s own ‗diary of despair‘ with and through the ever failing language (103). This spiritual exhaustion and decay might be traced also in the progressive fleshing out of the speaking ‗I‘, which is a process this same ‗I‘ condemned as leading into death (―The truth is he‘s looking for me to kill me, to have me dead like him, dead like the living.‖ – Text 4, 306). We can encounter this fleshing out in the sparse but important allusions to perceptual experience. The narrator, first, opens himself up to experience certain ‗things‘, saying that ―I won‘t deny them any more, there‘s no sense in that any more‖. They are trees and birds, which might, but not necessarily, allude to the exteroceptive faculties of vision, olfaction and hearing. A perception of water and air follows immediately afterwards, referring probably to the sensations of touch and to the skin as perceptual interface. Later on he adds an interoceptive sensation of bodily motion, when not being able to discern his terrestrial bodily posture: ―I stay here, sitting, if I‘m sitting, often I fell sitting, sometimes standing, it‘s one or the other, or lying down, there‘s another possibility, often I feel lying down, it‘s one of the three, or kneeling‖ (308).

The progressive digression into an embodied state is, however, at the very end, repressed, presumably due to the physical death of the terrestrial body: ―There I am on my own again, what a relief that must be‖ (308). He speaks about restoration and getting far again, and finally purges his being through rejecting the voice, claiming that it cannot be his (ibidem). Then the narration falls into the suspenseful pause of the

‗measure for nothing‘ and starts again in Text 5 with another instance of the unresolved

relation between the unconscious primeval ‗One‘ and an embodied instance, this time alluding to himself as a ―scribe‖ (309).

Just as the narrator of The End became more comprehensible for us when scrutinized as a bodily experience collecting subject, the deliberate decomposition of the subject in Text 4 turned less bewildering, once we identified the origin of its split and the role that the human body with its erroneous language plays in linking these separate realms together. In the structure of attributive propositions, which one uses to reconceptualize the character in a coherent way, the body played again a key role, yet this time not thanks to its pervasive presence, but the other way round, through its proclaimed absence. If we take into account Ewen‘s classificatory system, locating the protagonist alongside the continuums of complexity, development and inner life penetration, the results would seemingly point towards negative values in all three of them. On the complexity axis, our protagonist cannot be positioned among allegorical figures, caricatures and types, that is, among single-trait characters, because he displays certain degree of profundity of thought that transcends the simplicity of those groups.

On the other, classifying him as complex is also problematic, since after all, we know very little, almost nothing about his character traits. The only development detectable is, first of all, the ontological one, the coming into being through the act of birth, and at the end returning to the initial state via the second self‘s death. Kathryn White claims to reveal another trajectory of development – the attrition of spirit that is manifested through its progressive meddling within the terrestrial world (White 100), for instance, in the confession of needlessness of resistance against the world of the living (Text 4,

307). The penetration into inner life is also questionable. Beckett‘s aim was to create as non-human character as possible. Both of his selves are barren of any feelings. The 80

coldness oozes through each clause, each word. It is a part of the narrator‘s ‗mind style‘ to tune the syntax and the lexis of his sentences so as to create an atmosphere of detachment and indifference. Although this is all we can say about the character‘s traits, we would not say that his inner life is completely inaccessible, because the metaphysical background of the Cartesian split that underlies the whole volume of Texts for Nothing, offers a penetration deep enough to compensate for the absence of any traditional contents of a consciousness.

6 Conclusion

This thesis addressed two thematically distinct, yet factually interwoven issues: the general theory of character and its application on two Beckett‘s short stories from his highly productive period following the Second World War. A systematical analysis of traditional conceptions of character revealed its inadequacy when encountering narratives that experiment with various alternative ways of constituting a character.

Aristotle‘s Poetics laid the foundation stone of an approach that based the literary character on its faculty to act within the narrative syntax. Even though this classical theory knows how to cope with the phenomena of motivation and affection of characters, it fails to account for a full comprehension of a character‘s composition once its action, motivation and affection are left out completely or diminished to insignificance. The second chapter discussed the existence of a character within an epistemological framework based on phenomenology, and offered to solve this methodological impasse via the Husserlian concept of Leib – the subjective, lived body, a concept, which was further elaborated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In order to adapt 81

this concept for literary theory, the thesis drew on the elastic approach of Monika

Fludernik, who pioneers founding the character on the basis of experience, be it a conscious handling of their environment, or an unconscious operating within it.

Samuel Beckett did not only peopled his stories with old handicapped wretches that suffer from physical and mental decay, he also constituted new types of character, with whom the classical, action-oriented theory fails to cope, because these characters either do not perform any action at all, or the action lacks motivation or/and meaning. In his narrative strategy, Beckett composed the characters of the two discussed stories on an intricate relationship between mind and body. While In The End the protagonist‘s body pervades all aspects of his personality, in the Texts for Nothing (Text

4) the body is deliberately effaced to the limits of body-lessness. In both stories, the interpretation is only possible if based on an assessment of experiential data. Both stories were also analyzed on the background of Beckett‘s whole-life concern with the issues of Cartesian dualism and perennial philosophy.

6.1 Issues not addressed

In his later prose, which followed the last full-length novel How It Is, Beckett‘s fiction made another radical turn, at which this thesis only briefly hinted, but that could not be covered due to its extent and profundity. It is the fundamental breach with syntactical order in language and a new way of composing a character as a mindless body. These issues would require a separate study.

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Summary

This thesis addresses two thematically distinct, yet factually intervowen issues: the general theory of character and its application on two Beckett‘s short stories from his highly productive period following the Second World War. A systematical analysis of traditional conceptions of character reveals its inadequacy when encountering narratives that experiment with alternative ways of constituting a character. Although they cope with the phenomena of motivation and affection of characters, they fail to account for a full comprehension of a character‘s composition once its action, motivation and affection are left out completely or diminished to insignificance. The second chapter discusses the existence of a character within an epistemological framework based on phenomenology, and offeres to solve this methodological impasse via the Husserlian concept of Leib. In order to adapt this concept for literary theory, the thesis draws on the elastic approach of Monika Fludernik, who pioneers founding the characters on the basis of experience, be it a conscious handling of their environment, or an unconscious operating within it. Samuel Beckett constituted new types of character, with whom the classical, action-oriented theory fails to cope, because these characters either do not perform any action at all, or the action lacks motivation and meaning. In his narrative strategy, Beckett composed the characters of the two discussed stories on an intricate relationship between mind and body. While In The End the protagonist‘s body pervades all aspects of his personality, in the Texts for Nothing (Text 4) the body is deliberately effaced to the limits of body-lessness. In both stories, the interpretation is only possible if based on an assessment of experiential data. Both stories were also analysed on the background of Beckett‘s whole-life concern with the issues of Cartesian dualism and perennial philosophy. 87

Resumé

Tato práce pojednává o dvou tematicky odlišných, přesto obsahově propojených tématech: o obecné teorii literární postavy a o její možné aplikaci na dvě poválečné povídky Samuela Becketta. Systematickou analýzou tradičního pojetí literání postavy autor odhaluje její nedostatky, které se projeví následně při poskusu o aplikaci na experimántální způsoby kompozice postavy. Dějově střídmá a motivace a pocity postav zamlčující díla narušují znemožňují tradičním teoriím jakoukoliv smyslpuplnou interpretaci. Druhá kapitola nabídne východisko z této metodologické slepé uličky, a to odkazem na fenomenologii „žitého těla― Edmunda Husserla a Maurice Merleau-

Pontyho. Adaptaci fenomenologickéo přístupu do literatury zajistí koncept

„zkoušenosti― z pera Moniky Fludernik. Toto pojetí je dostatečně pružné na to, aby metodologicky zvládlo narativy, které neprezentují žádný děj. Narativní strategie

Samuela Becketta vedla v období slavné trilogie k vyostření vztahu mezi duchem a tělem, což je ukázáno na všudypřítomné tělesnosti povídky Konec a záměrně absentující tělesnosti u protagonisty textu číslo 4 z ředy Textů pro nic. U obou případů je zkušenostní analýza Moniky Fludernikové jediným nástrojem možné interpratace.

Otázka těla vzathu mezi tělecm a myslí je projednána na pozadí Beckettova celoživotního zájmu o Karteziánský dualismus a pereniální filozofii.