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Birth__Death and Salvati BIR'I'E, DEATH AND SALVATION OF B.ECKETTIAN MAN by Ursula Kalt A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Humanities in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 1982 BIRTH, DEATH AND SALVATION OF BECKETTIAN MAN by Ursula Kalt This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor , Dr. Jan W. Hokenson, Department of Language and Linguistics, and has been approved by the members of· her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the College of Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ~1-£ ~ t-+ .J2 . 7.R.alt~ ced Studies ii ABSTRACT Author: Ursula M. Kalt Title: Birth, Death and Salvation of Beckettian Man Institution: Florida Atlantic University Degree: Master of Arts Year: 1982 Samuel Beckett is generally considered to write in the pessimistic tradition. For his characters, life is a process of »dying on» in a chaotic universe. God, if he exists, is cruelly indifferent. Death has no pur- pose, and therefore life is pointless. Suffering is real, however, and made more painful by the knowledge that there is neither Savior nor Salvation. Neverthe- less : Beckett ~epeatedly examines the Christian concept of Salvation in his work. Indeed, it has become frame- work, linguistic storehouse, source of metaphor, and spiritual yardstick in much of his canon. The doctrine of Salvation raises »the old questions» regarding man's destiny which so preoccupy Beckettian man; their contemplation has provided the matter for Beckett's writing, and that writing itself has perhaps saved him from despair. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .. iii Introduction 1 Birth and Death 3 Salvation I: the "old style" 14 Salvation II: "A chance of renovation perhaps" 26 Conclusion . 43 Notes 45 Bibliography . 52 iv Introduction 1 "Birth was the death of him," announces the speaker at the beginning of A Piece of Monologue. So is summarized with punning precision the dilemma of Beckettian man. Born to die, dying at birth, his exist­ ence in between withers into insignificance before the ultimate absurdity of having been born into inevitable annihilation. In Beckett's canon a lifespan is thus just so much time for pondering the unknowable and suffering the inexplicable. Nevertheless in the "world collapsing endlessly"2 of Beckett's canon, where traditional solutions have been carefully scrutinized and scornfully rejected, there yet remains a notion of ultimate delivery from despair to which the writer seems inescapably attached. An examination of the mental landscape, through which the Beckettian prototype wanders, reveals that, however doomed, he takes nothing for granted. He exhaustively seeks answers to the questions of identity and destiny which torment him. Resigned to meaninglessness, he continues to act as though thinking may not be in vain. 1 2 And despite the systematic rejection by Beckett, by this "arch iconoclast of modern letters," 3 of all recog- nized religious beliefs, most notably those of his own 4 Christian upbringing, and his repeated depiction of aimless human existences, his works persistently return to the questions raised by the fundamental Christian doctrine of Salvation. This · study will suggest that a transmuted concept of salvation, not through the grace of any God, but through the dynamics of his own art, is fundamental to Beckett's literary creation. Birth and Death From the perspective of Beckettian man the agony of birth is a fitting introduction to human existence, for life in his literary universe is little more than a second stage of death. To underscore the insult of birth, Beckett's 5 "People" are often conceived in grotesque circumstances, born unwanted and unloved. Such is the case with Molloy, for whom birth was the "first taste of the shit" (Moll. p. 16) and whose mother, "that poor old uniparous whore" (p. 20), "did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing" (p. 19). In First Love a child results from the narrator's union with a prosti- tute. The baby's agonized first cries provoke no paternal affection but decide the narrator's immediate departure. Nor could Molloy's hypothetical son ever have been conceived in a spirit of love, he admits. His mother was. only "a little chambermaid. It wasn't true love" (p. 4). Mouth of Not I describes the pathetic circumstances of her premature birth, "parents unknown ... unheard of ... he having vanished ... thin air ... no sooner buttoned up his breeches ... she similarly r eight months later."~ 3 4 Parents are vile creatures. Molloy arranged to spit on his mother every time he addressed her; the Unnamable searches for his mother to kill her. Hamm curses his father for having caused his birth: 7 "Accursed progenitor," "Accursed fornicator" (Endgame, p. 10), "Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?" Hamm's question is general. Nagg's reply is cruelly specific, "L didn't know ... that it'd be you" (p. 49). Macmann even prides himself on never having procreated; "his 8 semen had never done any harm to anyone." But it is Pozzo who reduces childbirth to horror. Says he, "They 9 give birth astride of a grave." Didi later repeats this phrase to himself and adds, "Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps" ( Godot , p . 58 ) . The womb as tomb has haunted Beckett's people from Belacqua on. 10 Malone feels he is "being given ... birth unto death" and that his "feet are clear already of the great cunt of existence. Favorable presentation I trust. My head will be the last to die" (Malone, p. 391). Indeed, like Malone, some characters are trapped half 'in utero' and half out. Legless Nagg and Nell are held in ashcans. Mahood, with neither arms nor legs, is stuck in a deep jar hoping to "give up the 11 ghost" and "be born at last." Winnie is trapped up 5 to her waist and then her neck in the earth. The nar- raters of Ping, All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine describe naked figures locked into foetal posi- tions. None of Beckett's characters can "be born anew" (John 3:4) and come "to the light" (John 3:20), however, because it is their more likely portion to be "born dead of night," as was the wretched subject of A Piece of Monologue (p. 70). Since birth is the beginning of death, sexual reproduction is abhorrent to many of Beckett's charac- ters. The narrator of First Love tries hard to avoid intercourse with his prostitute, is angry at himself for allowing the seduction. Their relations on a garbage dump are almost as ridiculous as those of Macmann and Moll at the insane asylum in Malone Dies. Reproduction, for the misery it brings, is to be avoided or ridiculed. Molloy does his best to avoid Lousse. For her sexual favors Pam Prim of How It Is is defenestrated and ends up in the hospital with a broken back! Hamm is appalled at the discovery of a flea in Clov's pants: "But humanity might start from there all over again!" (Endgame, p. 33) Horror of horrors, the wretched evolutionary cycle could recommence. Colin Duckworth has remarked, Beckett's attitude towards loving relation­ ships between men and women is deeply 6 affected by the probability that those re­ lationships will result in another birth, another estrangement from the ideal state of timelessness in which we were before birth.l2 Indeed if humanity ever knew happiness it might have 13 been in that time before birth; "La belle epoque," for Clov, and for Molloy, despite his mother's attempts to abort him, "the only endurable, just endurable, period of my enormous history" (Moll. pp. 19-20). According to Christian theology man is born into a state of sin as a result of Adam's fall. But for Beckettian man, spea~ing through Estragon and the Unnarnable, birth itself has inexplicably become the first transgression, the original sin, and the cause of human condemnation to the hell of life's suffering. Beckett is obsessed with death. It is a constant in his canon and the yardstick against which any mean- ing must be measured. For Beckett's people, living is a forced limp to oblivion, and during the death wait they must keep busy with the motions of living, sending the ball back and forth to each other "to give us the impression we exist" (Godot, p. 44). In A Piece of Monologue the narrator reflects on the constancy of death: "Beyond that black beyond ... trying to treat other matters. Never were other matters ... The dead and 7 the gone. The dying and the going. From the word go" (p. 79). Death images crowd the pages of Beckett's prose, poetry, and theatre scripts, and death symbols form the backdrop of his stage settings. "Condemned to life" (Unnam., p. 450), alone, old, sick, destitute, wearing the funereal mouldy overcoat too large for his shrunken frame and topped by his battered black hat, the Beckettian derelict, in wornout boots, crawls, hobbles on crutches or stumbles with his stick across harsh wastelands, at the mercy of snow, wind, rain, and blaz- ing sun. Sometimes his naked body is imprisoned in an issueless box or cylinder where walls compress and contort, light waxes and wanes and signs of life are minimal--"murmuring, no sound,"14 "black right eye ... like hell gaping" (All Strange, p. 59), "heart beating,"15 16 "infinitesimal shudder." Remarkable for his "savoir 17 crever," he is never sure whether he is still alive or already dead.
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