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1 1 Introduction 3 2 Theory of Character 5 2.1 What Is a Literary 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 2 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 3 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. 4 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 5 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
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