Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliche

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Beckett and Authority The Uses of Cliché

Elizabeth Barry

Beckett and Authority

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Beckett and Authority The Uses of Cliche´ Elizabeth Barry

© Elizabeth Barry 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230008335 hardback ISBN-10: 023000833X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barry, Elizabeth, 1972 Beckett and authority : the uses of cliché / Elizabeth Barry. p. cm. This work investigates the relationship between verbal cliché, memory and authority in Beckett’s prose and theatre, and argues that by consciously manipulating the language of clichés, Beckett challenges intellectual, social and religious authority and argues for the creative value of stupidity, a key concept in the thinking of philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Deleuze. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 023000833X 1. Beckett, Samuel, 19061989“Criticism and interpretation. 2. Beckett, Samuel, 19061989“Philosophy. 3. Beckett, Samuel, 19061989“Literary style. 4. Philosophy in literature. 5. Authority in literature. 6. Stupidity in literature. 7. Discourse analysis, Literary. I. Title. PR6003.E282Z566 2006 2006046380 848 .91409“dc22 10 9 15 14

8 7 13 12

6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Pat and Jim Barry

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Contents Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations

x

Introduction I What is cliché? II Cliché and philosophy III Cliché and rhetoric IV Cliché and aesthetics V Cliché and terror VI Cliché and the body: After Ricks VII Beckett and cliché

1 3 5 10 15 21 24 26

1 Cliché, Consensus and Realism I Beckett, verisimilitude and the early fiction II Beyond realism: Towards the later work

30 30 50

2 Cliché and Memory I Introduction: Memory and automatism II Remembering and imagining things III Culture, memory and the body

65 65 69 84

3 Cliché, Autobiography and Epitaph I What time will tell II The myth of hindsight: Beyond the end in Beckett’s theatre

93 94 108

4 Cliché and the Language of Religion I Introduction: Holy Writ II Fallen language and Molloy III Willing and nilling: God and human volition IV The docile herd: Religion and social conformity in the later work V Voice and incarnation VI Theatre, voice and divine communication

123 123 131 135

5 Beyond Cliché: Authority, Agency and the Fall of Rhetoric I Introduction: Condemned to life II Figures of authority

162 162 165

vii

139 149 156

viii Contents

III Agency and the undoing of rhetoric IV Beyond the figural: The later work V Beyond cliché: The body and the law in Beckett’s theatre

181 196 203

Notes

209

Bibliography

218

Index

228

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the generosity of the AHRC, whose Research Grant allowed me to complete this book, and the Department of English at the University of Warwick, which granted me the leave to do so. In particular, at Warwick, I would like to thank Michael Bell, whose tactful suggestions had a profound effect on the development of the argument, and Thomas Docherty for his generous advice on work related to this project. I am also extremely grateful to Colin Davis of Royal Holloway, University of London, and Tom Paulin of Hertford College, Oxford, for their expert guidance with the Oxford D.Phil. thesis which provided the original idea behind this study. Steven Connor has also given enormously useful advice on the project in all its incarnations. I want to thank the staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Reading Beckett Archive, in particular Julian Garforth and Mike Bott, for all their help. James Knowlson and, more recently, Matthew Feldman have also provided invaluable knowledge about all things regarding Beckett. Many thanks too to Helen Craine and Paula Kennedy at Palgrave Macmillan, and Vidya Vijayan at Integra, for their patience and efficiency in bringing the project to completion. On a more personal level, the greatest debt in all senses is owed to Pat and Jim Barry, who supported me through the early days of the project and have been unfailingly encouraging throughout. I also want to thank Richard Serjeantson, Ingrid Wassenaar, Julia Waters, Tim Milnes, Michael Whitworth and Anna Richards for reading parts of the draft manuscript, and Charlotte Wright, Gwen Barry, Zamin Iqbal, Madeline Spokes and many other friends for their more indirect support. Jenny Frith has been an inspiration throughout the writing of this work and in every other sphere of life. Finally, I want to thank Andrew Fitzgibbon for his boundless enthusiasm and faith, for being unforgiving as a proofreader and for being forgiving of so much else.

The AHRC funds postgraduate training and research in the arts and humanities, from archaeology and English literature to design and dance. The quality and range of research supported not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK. For further information on the AHRC, please see our website www.ahrc.ac.uk ix

List of Abbreviations

References to Beckett’s works are to the following editions: D DN P MPTK M PTD PA W MC T Mo Mm I NT CDW CSP FP CC HI C ISIS WH Disjecta

Dream of Fair to Middling Women [1928] (London: John Calder, 1993) Dream Notebook, ed. John Pilling (Reading: International Beckett Foundation, 1999) Proust (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931) More Pricks than Kicks [1934] (London: John Calder, 1993) Murphy [1938] (London: John Calder, 1993) Proust, and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1965) Premier amour [1945] (Paris: Minuit, 1970) Watt [1953] (London: John Calder, 1976) Mercier and Camier (London: John Calder, 1970) Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable [1959] (London: John Calder, 1994) Molloy (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1951) Malone meurt (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1953) L’Innommable (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1953) Nouvelles et texts pour rien (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955) The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1990) The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989 (New York: Grove Press, 1995) Fin de partie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1956) Comment c’est (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1961) How It Is (London: John Calder, 1964) Company (London: John Calder, 1996) Ill Seen Ill Said (London: John Calder, 1982) Worstward Ho (London: Calder, 1983) Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983)

x

Introduction

I said, If your poor mother could see you now. I am no enemy of the commonplace. —Molloy Gilles Deleuze observed in Difference and Repetition that, in Paul Patton’s translation, ‘the worst literature produced sottisiers, while the best (Flaubert, Baudelaire, Bloy) was haunted by the problem of stupidity’.1 The best writers are not bête, stupid, but fascinated by the problem of bêtise, as Deleuze puts it in the original French. Bêtise, often translated as stupidity as it is here by Patton, is not quite simply this, however. It is stupidity that has an element of complacency. It is stupidity that masquerades as wisdom, or at least as truth–the complacency of cliché. For Deleuze, this complacency extends far back in the history of philosophy. Presumptions are made even within the barest philosophical formulation, Descartes’s cogito. It is perhaps no surprise that Beckett, like Deleuze, took issue with the robust self-sufficiency of the credo ‘I think, therefore I am’, when both thinkers so famously challenge the stability of its first term, the ‘I’ itself. Like Gustave Flaubert before him, Beckett was particularly fascinated, and exercised, by the certainty of truth-claims in both philosophical and commonplace utterance. His dissection of the authoritative formulation extends from the scholastic tag to the proverbial ‘true sayings’ of his nanny. In his age, as he commented, ‘one can’t even say what is true’ (Juliet, 16). I will not examine Beckett’s critique of Cartesian philosophy here; this has been done comprehensively and cogently elsewhere.2 But the nature of his attitude towards intellectual complacency, as well as other more explicit kinds, is a question that this study will pursue. Both Deleuze and Beckett recognize that the ‘problème de la bêtise’ is intimately bound up with the idea of repetition. In the wake of the demise of classical authority, certain assumptions persist through habit alone, repeated but unexamined. And as the name of Deleuze’s essay, ‘The Image of Thought’, suggests, it is the fact that certain verbal formulations become fixed in memory and repeated that determines this persistence. This is a symptom of what Deleuze and Guattari have called language’s ‘molar’ tendency: the tendency to organize into a fixed form, just as society tends to 1

2


assemble itself in ideological positions, institutions or even the family unit itself (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 249). Opposed to this tendency is the ‘molecular’: the principle of multiplicity, of instability, of transformation. Revolution is one instance of the molecular; desire and its mobile energy is another. But words, in Anthony Uhlmann’s phrasing, ‘accumulate like iron filings around the molar polarity and flee from the molecular. It is in their nature to hang together, to mean, as it is in the nature of perceived things to relate one to the other’ (Uhlmann, 78). And so it is the image of thought—the molar form that thought has assumed—rather than the act of thinking anew from first principles which is repeated in the history of philosophical thinking, according to Deleuze’s radical account. Beckett, like Flaubert, interrogates the image of thought in its everyday formulations, both writers’ enquiry extending from the most abstract systems to the most immediate social negotiations. The pleasing image of the ‘iron fist in the velvet glove’ takes the place of genuine political enquiry for Flaubert’s purveyor of idées reçues. The euphemistic idea of ‘embarrassed circumstances’ similarly reduces poverty to a question of social nicety for Beckett’s unthinking narrator. And the choice of fiction for the scrutiny of such images and formulations indicates that for both men epistemological enquiry is intimately bound up with aesthetic concerns. In aesthetic terms, too, as Beckett’s age was acutely aware, repetition was an inevitable companion of the creative process. ‘Notable’ for Beckett among little else in Ezra Pound’s paeon to novelty, Make It New, was the epigraph to one essay (as Beckett paraphrased it): ‘Beauty is the gasp between clichés’ (Disjecta, 78). It is cliché itself, however, that Beckett chooses to employ in his own work to creative effect. It is repetition with a difference, the familiar phrase in a newly engineered form or an unexpected context, that works both to critique and to rejuvenate the medium of language. Cliché itself can, used in this way, revitalize thinking without risking the complacency of a truthclaim. Like that of Wittgenstein, as Marjorie Perloff’s suggestive comparison of the two men has demonstrated, Beckett’s work is philosophy ‘written as a form of poetry’ (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 24; Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 115–154). As Margery Sabin has written about Joyce and Beckett, as well as their unlikely bedfellow, D. H. Lawrence, in this respect, ‘their alienation from the world of social intelligence never hardens into a closed structure of irony’. Their relation, Sabin argues, ‘to the unsystematic knowingness of ordinary life’ remains ‘unsettled’.3 And so in consequence does their relationship to common idiom. Beckett is both sceptical and wistful towards the notion of common knowledge and the forms in which it is enshrined. Beckett, like the other writers this study will consider, Flaubert, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, was nonetheless predisposed towards the selfconscious cliché as verbal strategy. He fled the ‘eternally invariable formulae’ of ‘cheap quip’ and ‘contemptuous potin [tittle-tattle]’4 that he found at

Introduction

3

Trinity College, Dublin, but his early work is saturated with such language, and murmurs of a similar idiom continue to surface, often incongruously, even in his most reduced and sparest late work. In his memoir about Paris in the 1960s, Peter Lennon touches on this attachment in Beckett: It soon became clear that [Beckett’s] taste for idiomatic Dublin speech and playful way with cliché was not put on. It was part of his preference for informality. Using the cliché and satirizing it at the same time is a very Dublin way of dealing at a tangent with relationships. It is partly a way of displaying your Dublin credentials, sending reassuring signals that you are of the same tribe—relaxed about drink, mocking, at least privately, about religious attitudes, and privy to all the mortifications of a puritanical society dying to be pagan.5 To use cliché thoughtfully (rather than to be used by it), as both Gilles Deleuze and Lennon from their different perspectives understand, is to explore the most profound beliefs of one’s culture at a tangent. It is to find a form in which this culture already mocks itself.

I What is cliché? How is it that cliché can have this double nature, at once stupid and satirical, complacent and knowing? It is time to examine what is meant by cliché and justify these improbable claims. There are two related aspects to the idea of cliché, both of which will be crucial in understanding its function in Beckett’s work. First, cliché, in its general sense, is a judgement felt to apply to borrowed, lazy and banal forms of thinking. As a formulation that has, in Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen’s definition, been ‘thrown out into the public arena’, a clichéd expression is felt to represent the lowest common denominator of thought—to be, in the modern sense, merely commonplace.6 It falls foul of ideas of taste, even today, by virtue of being deemed to belong to everyone. Secondly, and more particularly, this study will concern itself with verbal cliché. This is a phenomenon of expression: a figure of speech felt to be repeated to the point where the original image has ceased to be striking. It is no longer newly coined metaphor, but neither has it become neutral and grammatical, part of the polysemy of everyday language. In an appropriate example, when we talk about flogging a dead horse, we do not see the horse vividly in our mind’s eye, but neither does it entirely lose its metaphorical status, as an expression such as ‘mouth of the river’ has done. It is a metaphor that is sleeping, as William Empson put it, rather than dead (unlike the horse).7 There is common to these definitions of cliché a discourse of loss. The trope is felt to have degenerated, its language losing its fluidity, and the speaker’s

4


apprehension of the world becomes similarly inflexible in submitting to it. Cliché has also lost its provenance and hence its authority, circulating anonymously as it does in the public sphere. It is not, however, simply the degree zero of language, repeated endlessly in neutral utterances without drawing attention to itself. Cliché differs from idiom in this respect. An important aspect of the phenomenon is that it is felt to have fallen, that it is a failed or superseded effect of style or analogy rather than just an unmarked grammatical feature. Cliché, then, is judged but somehow survives this judgement to surface again frequently in everyday speech. And Beckett embraces cliché in both these aspects. He uses the censure that cliché brings with it to interrogate the ideas that it communicates. He also, however, explores its tenacity. He asks what it might be about the language of that cliché that makes it come involuntarily to mind, however carefully we might try to avoid it? His work explores the hidden appeals its language makes to us, invoking our physical experience, our psychological drives and—perhaps most intriguingly—the ways in which we are interpellated into society in spite of ourselves. Finally, as Peter Lennon intimated, the doubleness in cliché reflects Beckett’s own deep ambivalence towards the loci of authority in his intellectual and social background. Cliché is often literary in origin, snatches of fallen poetry in commonplace speech or writing. It provides a way, then, for Beckett to negotiate the pervasive influences of past writers consciously, and with a certain detachment, rather than speaking in their voices unwittingly in his own writing. Beckett also treats religious language as though it were cliché, removing the odour of sanctity and using it playfully or with derision. Even where it is delivered ‘straight’ and retains something of its power, it is cut off from a context of belief or theological system. Similarly, the voices of social authority—the patriarch and his extended arm, the law— cannot be silenced, but their most complacent forms are instead held up to scrutiny. The way in which the impasse of attraction and resistance to cliché is most cleverly resolved in Beckett’s work, as have suggested, is to make his narrators ignorant—often wilfully so—of its conventions and its meanings. Like Flaubert’s Garçon, Beckett’s characters choose to ‘se déclarer bête’, to display their ignorance in order to avoid the complacency of believing themselves to be cleverer than they are.8 Their incomprehension or misunderstanding of this verbal phenomenon often results in their understanding its metaphors literally and so making revealingly inappropriate use of it. This in turn disarms the cliché’s rhetorical power and questions its initial premise. Even in the late work, the narrators make constant reference to their own ‘mis-saying’, suggesting that even the most innocuous words fit badly with experience and carry their own misleading associations. The ignorance of Beckett’s characters comes to represent an innocence that has devastating implications for those who think themselves ‘in the know’.

Introduction

5

II Cliché and philosophy The challenge of innocence To pursue this strategy of innocence, it is useful to look more closely at the philosophical construction of cliché, or bêtise, with which I began. Integral to the idea of cliché is the fact of repetition—a connection that brings the phenomenon under the scrutiny of modern philosophy. Cliché can, as Gilles Deleuze argues in Difference and Repetition, indicate a fundamental problem with thinking itself. As a kind of unreflective thought, repeated out of habit, it represents a distorted and debased version of a mistake that even the most elevated thinking makes: the mistake of not scrutinizing its presuppositions. Stupidity for Deleuze transcends the local instance or the uninformed attitude to infect, as has been suggested, even Descartes’ cogito itself. Descartes’s assumption in the postulate cogito ergo sum is that everyone knows what it is to think, and can therefore take possession of their own identity. And this is just one instance of a philosophy that believes itself to have ‘begun again’ from the very origin of thought. In this, as in other cases, Deleuze argues, this is not so. He calls philosophy to return to first principles: to look for a true beginning by ‘deny[ing] what everybody knows’ (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 130). What he pits against the complacent stupidity of cliché, then, is in fact a more radical form of ignorance. Beckett gives full rein to this idea in the imaginative structures of his work. His characters display what Deleuze calls ‘the necessary modesty’ not to ‘know what everybody knows’, and to deny ‘what everybody is supposed to recognize’ (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 130). Beckett also suggests that the subjective presuppositions inherent in, say, Descartes’s cogito—that one knows oneself, that the mind can escape from the body, that there is an impulse towards being and knowing rather than non-being and ignorance— are as problematic as the objective presuppositions of belief that Descartes has had to strip away to arrive at this point. Beckett explores, then, as Michael E. Mooney has argued, the flip side of Cartesianism, the possibility which Descartes acknowledges but refuses to accept as true in his First Meditation: humanity’s ignorance of its own ignorance. Descartes cannot concede the idea that ‘God has wished that I should be deceived every time I add two or three or count the sides of a square, or form some judgement even simpler, if anything simpler can be imagined.’9 The premise of an ignorance or misapprehension of the simplest things possible is the condition that Beckett, on the other hand, sets out to explore. The beliefs that cliché tends to embody are clearly not, or not all, representative of these fundamental presuppositions. Nevertheless, cliché is a useful instance of a thought and a way of expressing that thought which has had widespread and unreflective assent, but which has perhaps fallen some distance away from universal approbation. In Murphy, the hero’s mocking

6


invocation of the idea that ‘time is money’ is indulged by the reader, whose time, after all, is itself being employed ungainfully by reading a comic novel. Beckett tempts this reader to join him in unpacking the assumptions of these forms towards which he or she already feels some disdain, in order to then apply the same principles to ideas which seem more self-evident and transcendent. Murphy’s indolence extends to existence itself, and causes him (as many other of Beckett’s heroes) to question why consciousness is of necessity better than the alternative. Beckett is a supremely knowing writer, but his narrators and characters nevertheless present the reader with the challenge of innocence. It cannot be, as Deleuze would understand, the first time we as readers have encountered the language he uses, but it is the first time that we have encountered such an attitude to it. The narrator of the late text Company argues that the ‘need for company’ is ‘not continuous’: ‘Moments when his own unrelieved a relief Finally what meant by his own unrelieved?’ (C, 41–42). This kind of ingenuous question in fact raises many other questions: how is it that we can understand the concept of interaction with ourselves (one’s own company)? Is such interaction always a conscious act of the imagination? Is it felt as a consoling response to isolation or the intolerable burden of it? The reader is surprised by the most familiar language. To ‘know’ such an expression, even to be able to use it, is not, it appears, necessarily to understand it. Such an observation as the last one brings the thinking of another philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, to mind. Is his argument not that to use language is implicitly to understand it? The idea in the philosopher’s later work that using language is a matter of rule-following locates its meaning in the public sphere, rather than as an inner mental process, however. Its meanings are agreed by a community: a community from which Beckett’s narrators feel excluded. In fact, as Stanley Cavell puts it in writing about Wittgenstein, even everyday language ‘strain[s] against itself, against the commonality of criteria which are its conditions’ (Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 58). Cavell, like Deleuze in a different key, suggests ‘never claiming a philosophical victory over (the temptation to) scepticism’—not knowing, in other words, ‘what everybody knows’. Deleuze’s ‘modesty’ translates into Wittgenstein’s ‘poverty’—taking the simplest and least controversial utterances to task—or what Cavell calls the ‘innocence’ of Wittgenstein’s work. Just as Wittgenstein counsels, Beckett scrutinizes the humblest language and the ‘commonality’ that underpins it with an innocent but—properly speaking—sceptical eye. The genealogy of knowledge Beckett’s narrators’ innocence is of course partial, more a distance from the social world than a complete estrangement from it; otherwise, of course, their utterances would be completely unintelligible (as Wittgenstein would

Introduction

7

argue). They have in fact, as the narrator of The Unnamable puts it, great ‘general knowledge’ (T , 376), but cannot apply such knowledge to their immediate situation, or use it to their profit. Even such innocent repetition of this ‘knowledge’ as theirs, however, is not allowed to escape the authority of its origins altogether. Leslie Hill has written of the biblical language in Beckett’s work as acting as a ‘genealogical forbear’, a ‘minimal ironic frame’ that gives Beckett’s texts a ‘temporary guarantee of legitimacy’.10 Like the other authoritative discourses in Beckett’s work, this one necessarily harks back to a world where these words have currency, even though they may not in the particular world of this narrator. Beckett, it seems, cannot quite escape the double bind of his relationship with authority. Cliché is language that has been repeated to the point where it has lost the link with its origin and devolved to common ownership. Nonetheless, as it advertises this second-hand quality, it cannot quite escape from this original identity, in respect to which it is felt to be inferior. Deleuze argued in Difference and Repetition that we are, in Steven Connor’s summary, ‘unable to conceive of difference as such, needing always to see difference as a variation of an identity’ (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 342–343; Connor, Samuel Beckett, 5). The founding authority behind cliché—be it the Bible or Shakespeare or the voices of patriarchal law—casts its shadow over the later manifestation. William Empson wrote memorably of Beckett that he shared the condition where ‘we cannot believe in Christianity and yet without that everything we do is hopelessly bad’ (Empson, Seven Types, 593). Even a rejection of religious language is, then, a confirmation of its influence. As Deleuze puts it, ‘even when difference takes the form of negativity or contradiction, the originating concept still controls and delimits the forms of the contradiction, contradiction being the shadow behind which identity is confirmed’ (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 343). As Hamm says of God: ‘The bastard, he doesn’t exist’ (CDW, 119). Beckett’s work explores the notion of an origin that one cannot find, expressed through Molloy’s search for his mother’s room, or Winnie’s unsuccessful attempts to remember her ‘classics’, or the specious beginning to his existence that the Unnamable imposes ‘for the sake of clarity’ (T , 298). These searches, the goal of which is seen to be arbitrary, are perhaps in fact only a displacement of the interior research Beckett advocates in Proust, a research that ‘is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent’.11 The self itself, however, is discontinuous and dissonant; one cannot, as the Mandarin in Dream of Fair to Middling Women argues, find a ‘stable architecture of sentiment’ (D, 101) in an individual’s experience. Correspondingly, Beckett’s characters look for this architecture outside themselves, but are thwarted. Quests for an external point of origin or a founding moment of authority in Beckett’s work often turn out to answer to an internal need, by definition one which they can never satisfy. For this reason, Beckett’s characters cannot find their home in any of the systems of belief or relationships that are offered to them, a situation

8


in which ‘home’ also encompasses, as it does for Jacques Derrida, being at home in language itself: ‘self-recovery, self-recognition, self-mustering’.12 They are usually engaged in a journey, often without clear direction, as early criticism of Beckett would often comment, and so perhaps appeal particularly to Deleuze and his followers, who define the modern subject as deterritorialized and divided. Cliché, as quotation that has lost its author, halfway to anonymity, is a language appropriate to these figures. They use this common language, but cannot recognize its diminished forms or find in them a password into human society. Phil Baker has written at length of the incident in Molloy when Moran terrorizes his son over the ‘Timor’ (or ‘fear’) stamp in the boy’s collection, a stamp that he had given his son and which bears an image (of a moustachioed man) that seems to resemble Moran himself (Baker, 37–41). This stamp seems to carry the image of paternal authority which Moran’s son is compelled to acknowledge: ‘Show me your new Timor, the five reis orange, I said. He hesitated. Show it to me! I cried’ (T , 109). By contrast, Molloy, as will be seen, gains his identity from his mother, a more problematic legacy: ‘perhaps I knew nothing of Mother Molloy, or Mollose, save in so far as such a son might bear, like a scurf of placenta, her stamp’ (T , 113). This psychoanalytic image of the stamp can be compared to Beckett’s language itself, which circulates without its original function, but which still carries the ineradicable mark of the source that put it into circulation. Usure and the linguistic coin This account of cliché borrows of course from perhaps the most famous formulation of the concept in modern philosophy, that of Nietzsche, which goes further than Deleuze in identifying what is currently accepted as truth as itself a form of cliché: Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins.13 Philosophical thought cannot be free of metaphor of this kind, and the work of this metaphor, in both philosophical and everyday thinking, is for Nietzsche misleading and corrupting because unseen. Abstract thought becomes a web of catachreses, metaphors with no literal basis, in which meaning is endlessly deferred. Derrida too emphasizes the role that metaphor plays in metaphysical thought in his influential 1971 essay ‘White Mythology’. He re-examines there Hegel’s characterization of the process of abstract thinking in his Aesthetics,14 whereby concrete images are transposed into the higher register of philosophical thought and leave behind their material trappings (Derrida, ‘White Mythology’, 24–25). Begreifen, for example, originally to ‘grasp’ with one’s hand, takes on the meaning of

Introduction

9

‘to apprehend’, and this second figurative meaning becomes literal through frequent usage. What Hegel sees as innovation, however, Derrida recharacterizes as idealization, the occlusion of the metaphorical origin of concepts. This is, for Derrida, one more instance of the dissimulation which makes spirit (and culture) the higher term, body (and nature) the lower (Derrida, ‘White Mythology’, 25–26).15 Like the theorists of cliché, Derrida talks in terms of a ‘semantic loss’. Derrida balances this loss of the original metaphoric import with the perceived ‘gain’ of the abstract concept and the authority that it accrues by dissimulating this metaphorical origin. The concept of enlightenment, for instance, is founded on the borrowed idea of light; the trope of seeing itself is translated, not unproblematically, into the non-sensible sphere of thinking, as Heidegger famously observed.16 Derrida puts to work in this argument the double meaning of the idea of usury, as usure, or erosion (loss of the original figure), and usury as the accumulation of profit through the acquisition of interest (the conceptual gain). The perception of the particular semantic loss that creates grammaticalized or ‘dead’ metaphor is then necessarily an unstable one. Derrida cites as example Anatole France’s account of this process in The Garden of Epicurus. France sees these words, whose faces have been erased like those of coins, as having both unlimited exchange value, and in another sense no value at all. Derrida likens the effaced metaphor in philosophical concept to the commodity in a capitalist economy, both hiding the labour involved in their conception. This metaphor has, in Derrida’s terms, a ‘linguistic surplus-value’ which is unknown to its speakers (Derrida, ‘White Mythology’, 7). Crucial here, however, is the easily overlooked gap between the dead metaphor that is Nietzsche’s truth or Derrida’s idealized philosophical concept and the still faintly beating heart of the metaphor in cliché. Cliché is on this model felt to be a metaphor that has lost its charge in a similar process, but not to have achieved the authority and transcendence of the abstract concept. In failing to completely hide its metaphorical origin, the labour in its origin, it is devalued in the economy of the marketplace and felt to be ‘worked’ in a vulgar fashion. Beckett in turn plays with this tension between profit and loss in his own writing, worrying at the paradoxical impression that language is excessive, that one inevitably says more than one intends and cannot rein in the meanings and associations that words have, while at the same time one never feels that language is adequate to the feelings and sensations it aims to express. He, long before Derrida, explored the metaphorical basis of philosophical concepts—enlightenment, the journey of discovery, the storehouse of knowledge, even the habitual privileging of speech (over writing) itself—but he also sees these as continuous with the images that underpin everyday concepts and our ways of understanding them. The tension between semantic profit and loss is in fact most strikingly brought home to Beckett’s literal-minded narrators when they remark the figurative nature of language used habitually and comfortably by others, but

10 Beckett and Authority

which presents bewildering problems to them. The narrator of the thirteenth ‘Text for Nothing’ can only approach death obliquely, locutions spilling out compulsively: But what more is waiting for me now, when there’s no doubt left, no choice left, to stick a sock in its death-rattle, yet another locution. To have rounded off its cock-and-bullshit in a coda worthy of the rest? (CSP, 153–154) He is left with these ‘last images’ that are simply the ‘end of [the] lie’ that language necessarily represents.

III Cliché and rhetoric The face of the school and not the world The terms of this study have so far been those of philosophy. They have, however, been humble terms, such as those of Deleuzian ‘modesty’ and ‘ignorance’, or the ‘ordinary language’ of everyday talk that Wittgenstein and Cavell embrace. The study proposes that Beckett deals in a kind of stupidity, an innocence that returns him to the literal meanings of words, and to the epistemological presumptions that lie behind their apparently self-evident claims. It is necessary, however, that the philosophical context for reading cliché in Beckett’s work does not eclipse the historical context for the idea: the development of the concept in literary aesthetics. As was suggested early on in this introduction, philosophy and aesthetics are indissolubly bound up with one another in Beckett’s work. Beckett’s education and literary heritage was a rich but complex one, a grounding in a traditional ‘English’ literary tradition in the peculiar context of the Irish public school system, and also an awareness of French literature from a relatively young age that came to dominate both his education and his cultural life. Attitudes to cliché are differently nuanced in both cultures, as Margery Sabin has argued in a valuable pair of articles in the journal Raritan: ‘The Life of English Idiom, The Laws of French Cliché 1 + 2’.17 There follows, then, as a necessary prelude to looking more closely at Beckett’s bilingual work, a short examination of the origins of cliché in rhetoric and its changing fortunes in both English and French literary history. It has been argued that cliché only exists in the eye of the beholder. We can only distinguish cliché from metaphor by virtue of our own context for encountering it. We ask of it a number of questions in this respect. Have we seen this expression before? Is it current in our particular cultural climate? Does it have a particular value as a cultural password or touchstone beyond its immediate sense? Lying behind any technical discussion of cliché and its working is the idea that cliché in its fullest sense entails a judgement, and

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therefore is contingent on recognition. As different ideologies and fashions emerge, dominate and recede, so will the reader’s ability to recognize certain clichés. It follows then that cliché is an effect of reading, a property of an audience as much as of a text, as Michael Riffaterre has argued. The effectiveness of the ‘fait de style’ is not limited by time; what changes is the reader’s competence—in Riffaterre’s words, ‘the aptitude of the reader to recognize cliché’.18 This changes with the evolution of the ‘linguistic code and the mythologies and ideologies that it reflects’. Amossy and Rosen comment similarly in their study of cliché on the ‘incontrovertible relativity of the phenomenon’ (Amossy and Rosen, 9) and the difficulty with which a consensus might be reached on what exactly a cliché is. Not only is cliché context-bound, but it only came into being at all with a change in historical conditions. It is a modern phenomenon, bound up with the emergence of print culture and attendant changes in the conception not only of the artwork but of the whole realm of human understanding. The long view of the development of cliché takes in a profound shift in the history of learning itself. Commonplace and cliché The key to this shift comes in looking at the distinct histories of commonplace and cliché, now all but synonymous notions. The commonplace [locus communis] in classical rhetoric was in fact a neutral concept. In Aristotle’s time, places were generic procedures of arguing. Cicero—following Aristotle’s rhetorical system—spoke of ‘the place [locus] of an argument’, common [communis] in its ability to ‘be transferred to many cases’,19 rather than in terms of its status or ownership. By Cicero’s time, the first century BC, the term had come to apply to particular ideas, themes, precepts and analogies which were seen to illustrate universal truths and enhance formal argument. Both were ‘common’ in appealing to common understanding, but to handle them properly was an art: they were not within the reach of someone untrained in rhetoric. Moving forward, the Renaissance initially seemed to embrace the classical inheritance of the commonplace with enthusiasm. Commonplaces were to be found in the collections of proverbs, maxims, aphorisms and sententiae in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They too constituted pithy formulations felt to encapsulate universal perceptions about human experience. Their role, however, had changed. Renaissance commonplaces were seen as illustrative material rather than the formal basis for argumentation, as had been the case for Aristotle and Cicero. Their collection and transmission became a matter of individual habit and they were used, when used at all, by the author’s own design rather than following a generic set of rules. The cultural habit was still a strong one: in Peter Beal’s words, ‘a mechanical and even ritualistic process of distillation’ (Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison’, 3).


In the course of the seventeenth century, however, the derivative nature of the transcriptions contained in one’s commonplace book came to seem increasingly problematic. Writers newly confident about the idea of individual authorship consequently disparaged the reliance on commonplace in others and diagnosed it as compensation for their lack of originality. Jonathan Swift’ s narrator in his Tale of a Tub (1704) snipes at what is perceived to be dilettantism: ‘ what tho’ his Head be empty, provided his Common-Place-Book be full ’20 Furthermore, the commonplace books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began to consist largely of trivial material copied from contemporary sources. Oliver Goldsmith indicates in An Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759) how far these works had fallen from favour: ‘the generality of readers fly from the scholar to the compiler, who offers them a more safe and speedy conveyance’, his or her ‘lazy compilations’ supplying ‘the place of original thinking’.21 The role of the commonplace gradually diminished in importance: from the study of carefully organized ideas as universal bases for argumentation, it became little more than the collation of a stock of neatly packaged aphorisms, principally ornamental and often trite. By the nineteenth century, even the most resonant or useful of classical commonplaces were seen simply as undistinguished cliché. Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Clichés charts this fall from grace. Cicero’s fluctus excitare in simpulo becomes the proverbial ‘storm in a teacup’; behind the common ‘you’re a rare bird’ once lay Juvenal’s rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno (‘a rare bird upon the earth, and exceedingly like a black swan’). So commonplaces became private—a contradiction in terms. In fact more often than not, as Roger Chartier has observed, the author of a commonplace book ‘[was] also its addressee’.22 And it turns out that this change in habit was bound up with a more profound development. A sea change in understanding, as well as a change in practice led to the decline of concepts such as ‘rhetoric’ and ‘commonplace’ into today’s pejorative terms. The connection between rhetoric and logic—the appeal to the probable—came under threat in the seventeenth century with the growth of the idea of neutral, scientific truth. The desire to persuade came to seem at odds with the pursuit of such disinterested truth. The authority of existing commonplaces, passed down in the schools from the first classical philosophers and rhetoricians, waned in the face of both truths held to be demonstrable in nature itself, and those rational scientific formulae that seemed to exist in self-evident abstraction outside any interest or argument. Both the growth of method and the belief in observable fact contributed to the confidence in individual authority, and hence authorship. Commonplaces were felt to be closed and artificial forms of thinking rather than being open to the reality of the observable world. Francis Bacon approved of commonplaces as an educative resource in principle, but finds no example of them in practice that did not ‘carry in their titles merely the face of the

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school and not of the world’, and which did not use ‘vulgar and pedantical divisions, not such as pierce to the pith and heart of things’.23 The clear alternative was a literal, neutral language—one that carries the face of the world in it—and the perceived need for such a language led to the famous commitment to an ‘anti-rhetorical’ language, to which the new scientific body, the Royal Society, rashly pledged itself in the late seventeenth century. Thomas Sprat in writing the first History of this Royal Society in 1677 celebrated the work its members were doing to remedy the corruption of plain speech and spoke of the need for ‘one word for every thing’. Not only formal rhetoric, but figurative language itself was a dangerous corruption of natural language: figures of speech were an ‘extravagance’ at odds with a ‘natural way of speaking’, ‘swellings of style’, which should be cut away in order that the ‘luxury and redundancy of Speech’ should not have a malign influence on the discipline of science.24 Thomas Hobbes had written similarly a few years earlier in Leviathan that metaphors were devices which ‘openly professe deceipt [sic]’. Their transfer of meaning by way of language played no part in reason, which relied instead on direct demonstration, or at the very most an ‘apt similitude [sic (for simile)]’.25 In the parallel French context, Bernard Lamy, a logician of the Port-Royal school, also criticized the excessive nature of formal commonplaces, arguing that ‘il n’est besoin que d’une seule prevue qui soit forte et solide, et que l’éloquence consiste a` e´ tendre celle prevue’.26 Eloquence, the suggestion is, has only attenuated and so weakened the initial solid proof. Rhetoric and violence This charge of attenuation, if not deceit, has become the dominant view of rhetoric even today, despite the failure of the rational language project and the partial rehabilitation of figurative language in Romantic theory. The severing of the link between rhetoric and logic has been a profound and irreversible one. Paul Ricoeur asks in his The Rule of Metaphor, in describing the persuasive intention of rhetoric: What distinguishes persuasion from flattery, from seduction, from threat—that is to say, from the subtlest forms of violence? (Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 11) It is no accident that these questions arise in a discussion of the demise of rhetoric as a formal discipline. Rhetoric, for Ricoeur, ‘oscillates between its two constituent poles—proof and persuasion’ (Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 35). When persuasion escapes the criterion of proof, it becomes dangerous: the divergence of these two aspects prepared the way for the modern use of the term ‘rhetoric’, which is used not only in a derogatory but also in a fearful way. Rhetoric is seen as both empty and also strangely powerful, linked as it is to the exercise of power, of deception, of coercion that disguises itself


as persuasion. Style becomes merely ornament, but it is precisely this gap between expression and meaning that can deceive and seduce its hearer or reader. Beckett’s work reveals that while formal rhetoric is no longer a feature of our education or public activity, everyday verbal activity is still rhetorically constructed and charged with the imperative to persuade. Bruno Clément’s fascinating study of rhetorical trope in Beckett’s work indicates how sensitive the writer is to both its technical operation and its persuasive power.27 Beckett’s use of cliché has two effects: first, he shows that what seems like innocent language is in fact figurative and rhetorical; secondly, however, the strategy of making cliché literal removes its rhetorical power and detaches it from its rhetorical function, the better to examine both. Adam Piette argues in the conclusion to his book on sound-memory in Beckett and other writers that Beckett’s characters have a ‘violent desire for rhetorical control’, but it is also to Beckett’s purpose that these characters recognize that they cannot achieve such control.28 The working of rhetoric breaks down in the famous ‘syntax of weakness’ of which Beckett spoke.29 Similarly, these characters are ‘reason-ridden’ (C, 75), as the narrator of Company puts it, but they recognize this as a kind of disease, a mania that is irresistible but which can never yield the perfectly accurate observations about the world that it seeks. Both the absolute power of optimally achieved rhetorical effect and the idea of an anti-rhetoric, a language of pure reference, prove themselves unattainable in Beckett’s work. The answer—of a sort—to both dilemmas for Beckett is to make language plain, to take it at face value—even when this in fact makes it, and the world that it describes, all the stranger. Stanley Cavell has seen in Beckett’s work a kind of attachment to ‘poverty’ akin to that in Wittgenstein’s work: a commitment to the redemptive quality of ordinary language, and a belief in its power to reveal truths about human understanding.30 Wittgenstein’s writing encourages us to live, like Beckett’s Watt, ‘among face values’: ‘Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. – Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain’ (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §126). Beckett emphasizes the fact that this attentiveness to the obvious can be taken for ignorance, or presented as something akin to Deleuze’s commitment to ‘not knowing’. The imaginative universe that Beckett creates, and the willed ignorance of his protagonists, is of course laced with irony. But, I would argue, there is a real commitment to this imaginative strategy in Beckett’s work, and a belief in its power to explode illusions and reveal truths, if these are only the truths about our own ignorance. Cavell calls Wittgenstein’s work ‘innocent’, as has been seen; Beckett’s work too, for all its knowing reference to past intellectual history, maintains a consistent commitment to first principles and takes nothing for granted. The most profound implication of this observation is, however, less to do with intellectual authority than authority per se. Beckett wants to disarm

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language itself: to investigate and in his own writing at least to severe the connection between rhetoric and the violence of persuasion. An intriguing aspect of Beckett’s work is the degree to which it relinquishes persuasion, dismantling its own means of gaining power over its reader or its audience. The ways in which Beckett’s writing refuses to seduce its reader are legion. His early work harangues its audience, his later work denies them purchase on its stories or situations. Any emerging narrative thread or passage of description is hastily aborted: ‘to hell with all this fucking scenery’ (T , 279); ‘But it is not at this late stage of my relation that I intend to give way to literature’ (T , 152); ‘Yes, let’s go. (They do not move)’ (CDW, 52). There are memorable phrases, unquestionably, but these generally convey the most desolate messages, and the narrators or speakers have a particular penchant for the dying fall: ‘But habit is a great deadener’ (CDW, 84); ‘Mortal tedium’ (T , 218). There are also more profound strategies at work, however. Beckett’s work refutes its own claims to truth, admits its artifice, and raises questions over the reliability of its characters’ memories, perceptions and even feelings. Even the narrative present that gives an anchor to all the past-tense reference in his works is, in the theatre as in the prose works, bereft of concrete context, temporal location and often even a future beyond it. The most thoroughgoing strategy of all in this respect is, as this study will argue, the relentless literality of Beckett’s work. No corner is given to metaphor or trope: the hellish light of the literal banishes this refuge for connotation, emotional displacement, understanding by analogy, or any other of these ways of persuading and seducing the reader or the audience. The submerged metaphor of cliché in particular is brought out into the light and robbed of its power to work unheeded on the mind. The assumption that we understand and have mastery over our everyday language is mercilessly sought out and destroyed under Beckett’s unblinking scrutiny.

IV Cliché and aesthetics Repetition and print culture This argument returns us to Derrida’s ‘surplus-value’, the hidden working of metaphor in language we understand to be plain and uncontroversial. It must be further recognized, however, that what Derrida calls ‘usury’, the wearing away of stylistic effects, has a historical context that his own language of the marketplace itself unwittingly brings to light. If the language of philosophical aesthetics begins to understand cliché with reference to the economics of the capitalist market, this reflects a long-standing tendency in literary aesthetics, which had long seen the reception of style itself in terms of the mass market that was opening up for the consumption of literature. The new technologies of mass production had a profound impact on the question of literary taste and created the conditions for the concept of cliché itself to emerge. The development of widespread mechanical reproduction of


text had allowed for an increasingly rapid dissemination of words and ideas, which in turn meant that an increasingly powerful reading public for the literary work also emerged. As a result, however, stylistic effects were felt to ‘wear out’ more quickly. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Francis Jeffrey accurately predicted that popular taste and that of the ‘refined and fastidious’ critic would become increasingly polarized. He suggested that it is not because ‘the ornaments of popular poetry are deficient in intrinsic worth and beauty’ that they are rejected by the critic, but that her or his ear has been ‘palled by repetition’.31 The mass dissemination of text meant that the life of a literary effect became shorter. The growth in size and diversity of the reading public was met with ambivalence, at best, on the part of the writers themselves. In the wake of the ideas of English Romanticism, a more urgent anxiety about the public and its influence on the literary product made itself felt. This was linked explicitly to the greater mechanization of printing by contemporary writers. Here is Coleridge in a well-known passage of his Biographia Literaria: now, partly by the labours of successive poets, and in part by the more artificial state of society and social intercourse, language, mechanized as it were into a barrel-organ, supplies at once both instrument and tune. Thus even the deaf may play, so as to delight the many. Sometimes I have attempted to illustrate the present state of our language, in its relation to literature, by a press-room of larger and smaller stereotype pieces, which, in the present anglo-gallican fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic periods, it requires but an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary indefinitely and yet still produce something, which, if not sense, will be so like it, as to do as well.32 Coleridge anticipates the analogy between a mechanical use of language and the technical equipment of printing, an analogy which fosters the figurative use of the term stereotype later in the nineteenth century. He makes an equation here between the technology of printing and the frozen habits of writing that he encounters around him. At this stage, however, it is the Augustan style of tailored ‘wit’ and epigram, measured periods and maxims that he criticizes. He wants to break both with this mannered style of writing, and, implicitly, the vulgarization of such language into a mechanical ‘barrelorgan’ by the culture of mass production. Both phenomena come about because the technology that facilitates repetition of effects also precipitates a fall in the status of literary tropes. Mass dissemination vulgarizes literary expressions, exhausting the faculties of appreciation and enjoyment in their recipients. The etymological basis of the word cliché itself asserts, albeit with greater subtlety than that of stereotype, the link between the mass production of text and the new emphasis on originality. The part of the printing press that

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allowed countless copies of a unit of text to be made was called in French the ‘cliché’, deriving from the clicking noise that the machine made. The term came to be used figuratively in the mid-nineteenth century to mean an idea or expression repeated countless times, and hence—the implication was— worn-out, its point blunted. The fear of cliché, then, emerges as the flip side of these developments in the production and reception of literature. The commonplace, once a neutral element of classical argumentation, became a derogatory label in the wake of the new demand for originality. If knowledge can be stored and retrieved easily, the reiteration of old forms of expression quickly becomes redundant as an aid to cognition, and is as quickly felt to be undesirable with respect to good taste. The desire among Romantic artists such as Coleridge and Wordsworth for a rejuvenation in literary language in order to produce more emotive and enduring effects itself created the conditions for the idea of cliché to take hold of the aesthetic imagination. Laurence Lerner has written on the significance of cliché as a failed literary attempt to excite or move; a fallen poetry, in short. The cliché desires to have an emotive effect on the hearer or reader, rather than simply to instruct: the bad Renaissance poet, according to Lerner, lays out commonplaces in dull but ordered poetry, whereas the bad Romantic poet overreaches, effects of feeling tipping over into hysterical sensation. Romantic attitudes to language therefore created new possibilities for failure. If they no longer demanded truth via a rational, scientific purity in language, they wanted something almost as difficult to achieve, the fluid or ‘tensive’ creation of metaphor, where new meanings are held in tension with old, and new ways of seeing apprehended. English Romanticism was itself struggling to find a creative tension which avoided either sensationalism, on the one hand, or banality on the other. Its relationship to the idea of commonality was a vexed one in this respect. It had lost the confidence that a rhetorical art once had in the idea of using an appeal to the audience to provide authority. Where classical rhetoric had appealed to its audience, even in its mimetic art, through shared ideas about what was plausible and probable in human behaviour, Romantic art had a more difficult relationship with the commonplace. Wordsworth both relied on the language of common experience, for its claims to universality and its purifying recourse to the touchstone of nature (both human and nonhuman), and sought to transcend it. As Coleridge observed in Biographia Literaria, Wordsworth’s version of such a language was far away from its supposed sources in life as a result. Coleridge himself expressed the dilemma in observing that certain ‘truths’ are often ‘considered as so true, that they lose all the life and efficiency of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors’. The task of poetry was to rescue these truths from the ‘impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission’ (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, I, ch. 4, 82). The ordinary had to be removed from its appearance of ordinariness without causing it damage.


Wordsworth’s answer seems to constitute a kind of precedent for Beckett’s own strategy: Wordsworth too experimented with a kind of childlike ignorance as a key to the unlocking of human nature, as he comments in a note to his poem ‘The Thorn’: It was my wish in this poem to show the manner in which such men [the superstitious and slow-witted] cleave to the same ideas; and to follow the turns of passion by which their conversation is swayed.33 In practice, however, as Coleridge suggests, Wordsworth was forced to silence such figures in his poetry, to eulogize about their simplicity without being confined by it. Beckett’s answer is to create a kind of anti-type, not representative of human thinking but radically different and other, in whose mouths to place familiar language. He too struggles with conflicting feelings over ordinary language, however. As Stanley Cavell has argued, it is in the very poverty of this language that insights about human thought and expression lie. The investigation of its poverty in Beckett’s late work can, however, seem to a reader or theatregoer a profoundly bleak experience. The ‘Stoic Comedians’ Beckett is nonetheless a very funny writer. Even in his sparest late works there is a flicker of irony, an inflection of playfulness in the language, whether it be the wry observation of improbable homonyms or the terse commentary on the narratives’ failure to say right. The text’s consciousness of its own voice—and the contradiction inherent in the very idea of a written ‘voice’— creates a level of detachment that expresses itself in sardonic humour. In this respect, Beckett follows writers such as Gustave Flaubert and James Joyce in a tradition of writing called by Hugh Kenner that of the modern ‘Stoic Comedians’, a tradition which is particularly aware of the status of language in a print culture. Joyce and Beckett, in particular, bring to the surface, thematically and stylistically, the anxieties over originality produced in reaction to Romantic thought. The context for understanding originality was changing once more, however. All three of Kenner’s subjects respond to the disintegration of cultural hierarchies that the mass dissemination of text has been seen to precipitate, raising questions about how far distinctions between polite and vulgar language, creativity and banality, and public and private expression can be maintained. And cliché, as Kenner has suggested, is crucial to this enterprise for all three. Flaubert, for instance, destabilizes the authority of the public voice of narrative realism by deftly interpellating the clichés of the most vulgar and obtuse of his characters into it. Later, Joyce and Beckett undermine the authority of conventional literary representations of subjectivity itself, suggesting that these, equally, cannot maintain a defence against cliché when cliché is, as social discourse, always already constitutive of a subject’s self-awareness.

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All three writers, then, are particularly aware of the autonomous nature and behaviour of language in a print culture, where every utterance has ` within it the echo of Roland Barthes’ déja-lu—discourse always already read. Fritz Senn has remarked of Joyce that he is one of the first writers consciously to observe the work of ‘attrition’ in cliché and to exploit it in his writing.34 Terry Eagleton has taken this argument further in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, describing the ‘sweated Flaubertian labour’ involved in Joyce’s Ulysses, a labour that is deliberately ‘kept under our gaze’.35 Eagleton’s description of Joyce’s work seems in fact to identify two lines of continuity between Flaubert and the later writer. First, their language shares this property of workedness, whereby it advertises its constructed quality against the Romantic idea of an organic language of feeling. Eagleton’s argument converges here with that of Derrida: the surplus-value of metaphor that is its hidden labour is exposed and so diminished. Secondly, and less explicitly, the materials used by both writers are also confessedly public, second-hand, and so both submit themselves deliberately to the lowest common denominator, however hard they pretend to aspire to distinctive eloquence. While Flaubert’s characters are infected by cliché, or the fear of it, however, Joyce brings the deadened language of print culture back to life in the volatile furnace of his protagonist’s mind. Embracing the dissonant variety of cultural forms, however familiar and debased, can be an enlivening process, as Bloom’s character demonstrates. The critic Margery Sabin has argued in connection with Joyce that his writing shows personality to be multiple rather than singular, integrally bound up with social affiliations and the subject’s transactions with communal discourse (Sabin, Dialect, 236). Bloom’s relationship to cliché—the strange verbal amalgamations he makes of familiar language, for instance, or his gestures towards familiar romantic or political attitudes—do not stand in for or hide his personality; they are his personality. One cannot distinguish between a direct, expressive, personal language and a mimetic social one in these narratives. Bloom cheerfully embraces the language of others as a kind of property, available for him to purchase, consume and make his own. Even Stephen finds literary tags and cultural references gloomily inescapable, and is, if anything, less individual and more bound by tradition than the irreverent Bloom in applying them to the world around him. There is no personal language or language of feeling against which to measure and judge the language of these characters, because there is no moi profond, no imperishable core of identity or feeling that is untouched by public life. How might this argument about personality be applied to Beckett’s protagonists, who have few such transactions with society? Sabin identifies the force of spoken language in unexpected places in Beckett’s work, long after the influence of Joyce is felt to have left it (Sabin, Dialect, 59). Yet Beckett’s protagonists seem, like God, most often defined in their encounters with humanity by what they are not. A vestigial echo of community floats behind


Beckett’s distorted idiomatic language, but the authority of that community itself comes into question in Beckett’s work, when its verbal remnants are so unhelpful in offering an understanding of the most basic situations in which his characters find themselves. These characters play the paradoxical role of jaded innocents. The narrator of How It Is harps continuously on the knowledge he once had—‘the humanities I had’ (HI, 33), ‘the history I knew my god’ (HI, 38)—but insists on the fact that it has all dissipated. The usual social investments in allusive language, for whatever it might bestow of metaphysical intelligence, rational knowledge or religious salvation are mocked by Beckett’s texts. And it is the rhetorical form of this language itself that undoes it: when this form is threatened by manipulation in Beckett’s hands, the authority of the allusion often falls away or reveals itself to be specious. Beckett may threaten the power of such rhetoric to persuade, but he does not replace it with a neutral or objective language of his own. He situates his protagonists in its ruins, disinherited but defiant, and savours the persistence of speech itself to find a form in which to perpetuate itself, even if this means expressing itself negatively in the discourses it rejects. The workedness of language is even more apparent in Beckett’s tortured formulations than in the broken expressions that tumble into Bloom’s ill-disciplined consciousness in Ulysses. In one characteristic example, Molloy takes apart the common idea of the ‘heavy eater’: My appetite! What a subject. For conversation. I had hardly any. I ate like a thrush. But the little I did eat I devoured with a voracity usually attributed to heavy eaters, and wrongly, for heavy eaters as a rule eat ponderously and with method, that follows from the very notion of heavy eating. (T , 53–54) Such language no longer passes for second nature. It is instead forced to yield the cost of its labour, on Derrida’s analogy, allowing Beckett’s reader a new scrutiny of the concept, whether that concept be philosophical or prosaic. The latest chapter of the history of the commonplace emerges in distinct ways in the work of these three writers. Flaubert’s last work, Bouvard et Pécuchet, is often seen as the ultimate reflection on the limitations of human knowledge. Its protagonists are copyists, trying to create the definitive collection of the fruits of human understanding, but instead arriving at a commonplace book which is gargantuan, unusable and without logic. They are the definitive Swiftian characters whose heads are empty, even though their books may be fuller than ever before. The final stage in the degenerative history of understanding-through-imitation, the demise of the commonplace, is found here. Joyce’s Ulysses, seething with particularity and sensual experience, seems antithetical to this account of the grand folly of learning in abstraction.

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In fact, however, its pathos has a similar source. Joyce’s vast informationgathering exercise, focusing on Dublin in the early twentieth century, may interest itself in the particular rather than the general learning of Bouvard and Pecuchet, but the resulting encyclopaedic style of Ulysses shares something of the deliberate failure of Flaubert’s novel, whereby exhaustive method becomes in the end simply exhausted structure. In Eagleton’s argument, the novel builds into its structure the suggestion that some particular moment of epiphany in Bloom or Stephen’s life might become Hegel’s ‘concrete universal’, when the individual becomes the meeting point for absolute meaning and concrete realization. The doubleness of the mockheroic structure likewise gives hope that there is a form behind all details in the book that gives them meaning. Yet this aspiration fails, deliberately: Bloom and Stephen’s meeting towards the end of the novel, for instance, is as bathetic and as unpromising as Bouvard and Pécuchet’s encounter at the beginning of Flaubert’s work. The mock-heroic emphasizes the distance between Joyce’s version and the original myth, and if, at this distance, no particular element of the former is more significant than any other, the symbolic system itself breaks down. Just as there is no hierarchy of knowledge for Bouvard and Pécuchet, no experience, sensory or otherwise, can provide either answer or consolation in Bloom’s ever-questing existence. Beckett proves himself a worthy legatee of these writers, despite his profession of inadequacy and his intention to go in the direction of poverty rather than abundance. He himself kept copious commonplace books, transcribing Augustine, Descartes, Kant, as well as medical vocabulary, physics, geology, astrology and opera libretti in a sort of amalgam of Flaubert and Joyce’s practice. In a more contracted form, he also produces his own version of spurious scholarship: all systems of thought failing in their application to the degraded condition of his protagonists and contradicting one another in a dissonant clash of clichés.

V Cliché and terror It is both appropriate and inappropriate that the word cliché, etymologically related to the noise made by the printing press producing thousands of copies of the same phrase, originated in France. On the one hand, the fear of cliché took longer to influence literary practice in this country. The ancien régime practice of learning and employing stock tropes persisted in France into the nineteenth century as part of an education in composition, and continued longer still in the practice of poetry itself. On the other, the backlash was correspondingly violent when it came. Romantic writers such as Victor Hugo first criticized the use of ‘rhétorique’ in literary writing, and figures such as Verlaine and Rimbaud were highly critical of the idea of studied ‘éloquence’. Jules Renard spoke of the ‘corruption’ of literature by the attachment to cherished rhetorical expressions (Paulhan, 30).


At the time when Beckett was beginning to write his mature work, these issues were formulated with particular directness by the critic Jean Paulhan. Paulhan wrote an important essay on cliché and literature in 1948, arguing that writers should deliberately embrace cliché rather than try to exterminate it from their work. He describes the anxious censure of cliché—meaning for him literary stock phrases—among modern writers as a kind of Terror, an absolutist attitude that threatens their own literary practice. The preoccupation with avoiding cliché in one’s work, Paulhan argues, not only invites insidious cliché to emerge unbidden there, but also, which is worse, might give one’s work in general the flatness and passivity of cliché itself. The reaction to the long-seated tradition of formal composition was a hostility to cliché that threatened to paralyze French literary composition. The kinds of Terror that can be identified from Paulhan’s survey are abiding concerns in the debate over metaphor itself. First, there is the familiar fear of ornament, language that is too overblown. Paulhan’s nineteenthand twentieth-century commentators talk about ‘swollen’ language (Simone Weil) and ‘verbosity’ (Taine) in the same way the early scientist and advocate of ‘rational’ language Thomas Sprat did in the seventeenth century about ‘swellings of style’ (Paulhan, 63). Writers such as Verlaine and Rimbaud cement the link between rhetoric and redundancy, rather than seeing rhetoric as the indispensable aid to argument and expression it once was (and perhaps still is). Paulhan suggests, however, that the real source of hostility towards clichés is the secret fear that these expressions are not rhetorical enough: that one cannot ever definitively distinguish cliché from other types of language. One can never be sure whether a cliché is knowing or innocent, old hat or newly coined by a writer ignorant of its existence. More recent critics have taken this argument as a justification for eschewing metaphor itself, in an even more extreme version of Paulhan’s Terror. C. M. Turbayne’s The Myth of Metaphor, for instance, argues that we are in danger of taking metaphor literally and missing the changed meaning of its words, of making what Gilbert Ryle has called a ‘category mistake’.36 The remedy to this anxiety that Paulhan proposes is not the extreme hygiene which tries to banish all cliché from writing—to ‘décrasser les mots’, or scrub them clean, as Jean-Paul Sartre puts it in an essay on the poet Ponge.37 In fact, Paulhan counsels the opposite course of action. If we attach the stigma to cliché after the fact, as these observations suggest, then we could also do the opposite, Paulhan argues. We could agree in advance a communal store of clichés that can be used without censure and therefore can regain their former force and sanctity—agree, in short, ‘to make commonplaces common’ (Paulhan, 80). In fact, what Paulhan advocates is in effect a return to the classical conception of rhetoric: a set of calmly and rationally agreed observations and meanings. Paulhan also turns on its head the ever-present fear of stupidity that motivates hostility towards cliché. He not only cites Flaubert’s censure of bêtise, the idiocy that seems to creep into any common utterance, but also reiterates the idea that no expression, however elevated in aim, is completely

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immune to it. Paulhan remarks, ‘commonplaces can be intelligent or stupid, I don’t know which, and I don’t see any way of ever knowing it with any rigour’ (Paulhan, 138–139). This question has been restated frequently in more recent criticism. Barthes, discussing Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet in his study of realism, S/Z, asks, ‘how can stupidity be pinned down without declaring oneself intelligent? How can one code be superior to another without abusively closing off the plurality of codes?’38 Christopher Prendergast similarly probes this apparent helplessness, also in discussing Flaubert’s dissection of the idée reçue, asking, ‘Where is the “living” language in the name of which the ironic incisions into the dead language are justified; what are the conditions of linguistic health?’39 Flaubert after all found that he was uttering the banalities of his romantic heroes and heroines in earnest to his lover, Louise Colet, and said as much on many occasions. Paulhan offers the positive face of this grudging submission to the power of social discourse: a deliberate consensus of approved expressions rather than the shame of falling into banality after aiming for distinction. Paulhan’s suggestion that clichés should be used rather than suppressed provides an interesting frame for the writers examined in this study. He addresses the modern dilemma whereby writers feel compelled to be original but have the attendant suspicion that everything had been said before. Paulhan’s solution is a utopian one, but ultimately one at odds with the creative experiments of modernism. On his model, writers should be freed from thinking too hard about language by having an established rhetoric as a resource. Beckett, on the other hand, engages and forces his readers to engage with the mechanisms of expression by exposing and manipulating them. In one sense, Beckett returns to a rhetorical way of thinking about language, just as Paulhan advocates, and is never in danger of using language unwittingly, passively or with the inertia of Paulhan’s Terrorists. His intentions are very different, however, from the poetics of calm deployment of cliché that Paulhan suggests to release the writer (and also, crucially, the reader) from an anxious sensitivity to language and its origins. Beckett appears to aim for the opposite, intending to increase the anxiety of his readers in this respect. Paulhan argues that his contemporaries, adopting the Terrorist attitude that he decries, ‘hésite et tatonne’ (hesitate and agonize) between several meanings of a word, or between interpretations that might cast them as idle cliché users. Beckett stages this struggle, rather than resolving it, expressly keeping his narrators on tenterhooks (or, in his own term, tâtons) in this respect. Negotiating language is, for Beckett’s protagonists, as cumbersome as limping or dragging themselves on ‘crutches’ or ‘sticks’ around their inhospitable environments. Malone in Beckett’s novel Malone meurt talks of his existence as ‘une sorte de tâtonnement’ (Mm, 82), a kind of painful groping that applies to the progress of his narrative as much as to the exhausting process of dying. Beckett wants to put his readers or his audience in exactly the same kind of uncomfortable position that Paulhan describes, struggling


to understand both its new usage by the unworldly protagonists and the effects of its knowing manipulation by Beckett himself. Beckett uses several techniques to rejuvenate the clichés that he uses without returning them to a pristine condition. He might modify them, usually to make their meaning weaker or more gloomy. Belacqua hopes that the doctors will give him ‘a new lease of apathy’ (MPTK, 234). Malone observes morosely at one moment, ‘when you have the will, you do not have the way, and vice versa’ (T, 131). The Unnamable contemplates the unthinkable idea of existence alarmedly: ‘for it would be to sign his lifewarrant, to stir from here’ (T , 361). Beckett might also put clichés, relatively untouched, into unexpected and inappropriate contexts, as in this comically disturbing passage about Molloy’s past relationships: Now men, I have rubbed up against a few men in my time, but women? Oh, well, I may as well confess it now, yes I rubbed up against one. I don’t mean my mother, I did more than rub up against her. (T , 56) Alternatively, he might put them into contexts in fact newly—and often grotesquely—appropriate. Christopher Ricks in his study of Beckett’s language of death gives the famous example from First Love in which the narrator cheerfully remarks that he has, personally, ‘no bone to pick with graveyards’ (CSP, 25). Beckett gives these expressions the density of poetry, establishing new meanings for them by manipulating their form or by creating new relationships on a semantic level between their occluded images and those in the surrounding text. In this way, he makes it particularly and deliberately clear that we cannot be sure, as Paulhan observes about cliché in general, whether his clichés are being used unwittingly or deliberately by his characters. Ricks has argued about Beckett’s clichés that they come back to life, and are made poetic and meaningful. This is undoubtedly true, but they also retain a vestige of their vulgar or despised status. In fact, it is central to Beckett’s endeavour that he should exploit this status and the reader’s discomfort at enjoying such language. We are unable to situate Beckett’s writing as high or low art, and so are forced to rethink our attitudes to the hierarchies of style and the authority of the powerful discourses of our culture. We also struggle to evaluate the insights that his protagonists’ experience might provide, so far are they from our own viewpoint or attitudes, but so close are they at the same time to our most basic concerns.

VI Cliché and the body: After Ricks Like his fellow Dubliner Joyce, in particular, there is another side to Beckett’s writing that goes beyond the formal manipulation of the written word. Both writers create close and surprising connections between language, even

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ostentatiously written language, and the energies and drives of the body. And the source of this relationship lies in great measure in the kind of material qualities that the writers quoted in Paulhan’s study attribute to cliché. The negative associations that these eighteenth-and nineteenth-century critics make between language and bodily disgust are harnessed to positive ends in the later work of Joyce and Beckett. Cliché is a phenomenon that is frequently characterized in bodily terms, and which seems to provoke a visceral disgust in its critics. Indeed, the nineteenth-century rhetorician Jean Fontanier suggested that we cannot do otherwise than to speak of cliché, or metaphor itself, in these terms. There is no literal alternative to the idea of a ‘figure’ of speech, as Fontanier explains, Le mot figure n’a du d’abord se dire, a` ce qu’il paraˆıt, que des corps, ou même que de l’homme et des animaux considérés physiquement et quant aux limites de leur e´ tendue. Et dans cette première acceptation, que signifie-t-il? Les contours, les traits, la forme extérieure d’un homme, d’un animal, ou d’un objet palpable quelconque.40 [The word figure—as it appears—must first refer only to bodies, or perhaps man and animals considered physically and in terms of their spatial limits. And in this first sense, what does it mean? Contours, traits, the exterior form of a man, an animal, or of any palpable object whatsoever.] The first principle of the distinction between figurative and literal language is itself a trope: an analogy between language and body. Christopher Ricks’ 1990 study of death in Beckett’s writing, Beckett’s Dying Words, is the critical work that makes the most explicit examination of clichés in Beckett’s work, and it is of course no accident that it also takes as one of its principal arguments Beckett’s recovery of the bodily metaphors and images that lie obscured in cliché. Beckett is, for Ricks, a writer who is attuned to the ‘subterranean energies’ of this buried language (Ricks, 87). It becomes clear that particularly in English culture, a subject’s understanding of the world is both through the body and by analogy with it, language reaching out to the world like an extension of our limbs. Theorists of metaphor such as Paul Ricoeur talk about the ‘disturbing fecundity’ of dead metaphor and the fascination of this creeping ‘oblivion’ at work in language (Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 344); Ricks makes an explicit link between this phenomenon in language and the exploration Beckett makes of death. By using cliché creatively, Beckett puts us back in touch with bodily energies—in particular those strange sensations and associations that are connected with death— by discovering that they pervade our most ordinary expressions. He also suggests that our understanding of the world is not only necessarily coloured and limited, but also enriched by the fact that it works by reference to our unruly (and mortal) bodies.


Gilles Deleuze also situates repetition in the context of bodily energies in his study of the concept, allowing us to think about the cliché in Beckett’s work—language that bears the mark of repetition—in that light. Deleuze cites Freud’s pleasure principle as a product of repetition, the need continually to produce excitation in order to then resolve it (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 18–19). The death instinct is also a form of repetition: the drive to ‘repeat the Same’, to restore an earlier condition (that, ultimately, of non-being). The death instinct encloses the pleasure principle within its larger frame of repetition—the final resolution, as it were. Steven Connor has explored the expression of this phenomenon in Beckett’s work: in the Unnamable’s impulse to ‘first dirty’ with images and inventions, and ‘then [to] make clean’ again; in the sensory pleasure taken in the repetition of words; in the repeated narrative strategies of beginning and ending. This study will investigate the phenomenon more explicitly in relation to Beckett’s cliché. It will bring Ricks’s account of the ‘subterranean energies’ and the desire for oblivion in Beckett’s work together with the Freudian accounts of the link between repetition and death observed in Deleuze’s study. The death instinct proves itself to be very much alive in Beckett’s work, restoring a kind of deathly energy to moribund language. The repetition in Beckett’s work goes beyond this, however: it also expresses the desire to continue to create, to go on speaking as well as living. This desire, unwished for as it is, can be compared to the dark force of Schopenhauer’s Will, which appealed so forcefully to Beckett in its inhuman tenacity. The persistence of cliché, to the point of automatism, becomes expressive of the necessity for speech, the idea that we are compelled to language, ‘spoken’ in Heidegger’s well-known formulation, rather than speaking. Beckett explores the idea that thinking and speaking are bodily imperatives, rather than transcendent ones. There is a new ‘image of thought’, as Deleuze puts it, in Beckett’s work: a flickering, reason-ridden brain that hungers after something to know, or at least something to perceive. But this is a new kind of necessity, one not wanted or celebrated, which turns Descartes’s cogito on its head and makes of reason an inexhaustible appetite that can never be satisfied.

VII Beckett and cliché It emerges from these preliminary comments that an investigation of cliché and repetition in Beckett’s work necessarily turns into an investigation of the idea of authority and the origin—whether this be the intellectual authority of Cartesian rationalism, the social force of religion or the law, or simply the power of the unreflective but implacable drive that forces the organism onwards. This study looks, then, at different kinds of authority and how Beckett’s writing interrogates and resists them. It looks first at Beckett’s engagement with the claims to authority made by literature itself, beginning, as Beckett does in his early fiction, with the authority of consensus,

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the claims to universality and objectivity made in realist fiction. Beckett’s resistance to the expectations of the bourgeois literary product is communicated through his manipulation of its cliché, be these local, verbal expressions or larger narrative gestures. His engagement with representation and the mechanisms for creating realism then develops in his later work into an exploration of how problematic the relationship between rational language and the real can be. The study goes on, following Beckett’s interior turn in his own work, to look at the authority of experience itself, championed by Romantic art, and the authoritative structures that have traditionally determined the telling of a life and the exploration of the ‘gain’ of past experience. Beckett challenges the assumptions made about memory, feeling and temporal progression itself in literary art: what one of his narrators calls ‘the eternal straight-line effect of the pious wish not to die before my time’ (HI, 52). The ‘change from ignorance to knowledge’ that Aristotle sees as necessary to the idea of a temporal narrative is refuted in the persistent, if not deepening ignorance of Beckett’s characters, an ignorance that develops rather than being dispelled in time. Beckett also scrutinizes the conceptual basis of the authority that accrues to discourses associated with the end of a life: last words, epitaph and memoirs under the apprehension of death. What is it about this event, accidental and material as it is, that gives it a spurious necessity, and invests those that approach it with the appearance of authority? The argument then emerges in line with Beckett’s work out of the long ‘siege of the room’ (Cronin, 372) that was Beckett’s exploration of the subject to examine his broader engagement with the authority of religion and religious language, perhaps the central authority with which his work wrestles. Finally, it examines the idea of the law, detached (to some extent) from its religious context, both in its exterior, social manifestation and in its internalization through the family structure. Beckett’s interest in cliché takes him beyond the clichés of social authority into an investigation of the discourses of power and the common verbal and rhetorical structures they adopt in their different contexts. The famous turn towards the political perceived in Beckett’s latest works might more accurately be seen as a continuation of the engagement with power in its most brutal forms throughout his work, as the last chapter of this study demonstrates. This account of my argument is far from the whole story, however, as this introduction has intimated at various points. Beckett’s work, as has been argued, also finds itself in a double-bind with respect to the question of authority. Running through it is an undercurrent of desire for authority, or at least an acknowledgement of the inability to relinquish it. Beckett is unable, of course, entirely to forego the mechanisms for suggesting consensus, as the awkward vacillation between narrative perspectives in his early work suggests. He, like Winnie, decimates past literary sources, but cannot relinquish them entirely, and relies, albeit ironically, on the genealogical frame


(in Leslie Hill’s phrase) that they provide. His manipulation of the retrospective illusion that legitimizes past experience cannot diminish the centrality of memory in his work—both his own memories and the more general structure of feeling provided by memory itself. His ambivalence towards religion is well understood, and his narrators’ relationship with social and familial authority shows them often willing to ‘give satisfaction’ to such authority, whether or not they are able to do so. Beckett’s relationship with ‘ready-made’ language in all these spheres of enquiry, be it literary quotation, religious doctrine or legal formulae, recognizes the fact that he cannot stand completely outside the frames of reference that they provide. The perspective that he offers on such language is nonetheless a radical and surprising one. Cliché itself, the degenerative metaphor of everyday language, is, Beckett recognizes, expressive of fundamental desires and fears and truths. This accounts for its staying power: it is tenacious because it speaks to some expressive need. It also highlights, however, the problem of expressing such basic drives and forms of resistance without banality or—worse—the promise of a complete understanding of human experience. And this latter problem accounts for the flip side of cliché’s ‘success’: its perceived vulgarity. Beckett recognizes that he needs to present both a ‘cleansed’ version of cliché, a re-engineering of its tropes to show their hitherto unexamined appeal, and— crucially—cliché as such, to show also the function and significance of the censure that such tropes have accrued. From the very earliest of Beckett’s writing this double view has applied to language itself: both closer to our basic physical and emotional experience than we often allow it to be, and more mendacious. His writing is torn, then, between a love of language and the more usually championed despair. This study revisits, as these comments suggest, some old arguments about Beckett. A study of the anonymous and borrowed currency of cliché in Beckett’s work shows it to be an important strategy in his re-constitution of the relation between artist, artwork and ‘occasion’ for creation, a relationship that suffers for Beckett from a ‘sense of invalidity, of inadequacy’ (PTD, 21). It also indicates one important element in the related enterprise of ‘misusing language efficiently’, as Beckett famously claimed as an intention in the letter to Axel Kaun he wrote in 1937 (Disjecta, 171). To this end, the hackneyed language of cliché, somewhere between archaism and vulgarity, provides him with a tool for creating his famed ‘syntax of weakness’ (Harvey, 249). Cliché also articulates in a fascinating manner the dilemma of going on and lacking the will to go on that is so intransigently present in Beckett’s work. It is language that seems to have a momentum of its own, but at the same time sabotages the momentum of the text in which it appears. It is also appropriate in a related sense to Beckett’s exploration of physical experience, being language that, when used playfully, demonstrates on a sensory level

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the pleasure of repetition and repetition with a difference that Freud identifies in the pleasure principle itself. In this way, my argument takes up again familiar but unresolved issues to do with language, subjectivity and the body in Beckett’s work, and offers a new dimension to their treatment there. The organization of this study is thematic, but broadly follows the sweep of the development of Beckett’s work, as has been suggested, distinguishing between the density of clichés, often unfiltered, in his early work, his appropriation and manipulation of them to his own ends in his mature fiction, and the startling juxtaposition of language and image in his theatre. It concentrates on the major works, where the reader finds the most committed and creative use of cliché—his trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable of the 1950s, the 1961 How It Is and the theatre of the 1950s and 1960s—but it gives attention to the strategies for going beyond cliché, the muted tone and rhythm of everyday idiom in his later work. It aims to give a full account of both the verbal strategy of cliché in Beckett’s work, and also how Beckett remakes the discourse of cliché to create a language that is at once impersonal and vigorously his own, innocent and ironic—a language which communicates authoritatively while severing the connection between persuasion and power.

1

Cliche´ , Consensus and Realism

Insidious question, to remind me I’m in the dock. —CSP, 118

I Beckett, verisimilitude and the early fiction It is well understood that the most famous statements of the objective method in fiction come from writers who seem to believe least in objectivity. Both of Beckett’s fellow ‘Stoic Comedians’, Gustave Flaubert and James Joyce, made memorable pronouncements redefining the artist’s relation with the work of art. Flaubert declared famously that the author ‘should not appear any more in his work than God in nature’, that is, should be present everywhere but visible nowhere. Joyce’s narrator in Portait of the Artist reprised this image in a more facetious vein, envisioning the writer behind the work of art, outside it, paring his fingernails.1 Both statements have of course become clichés of the realist endeavour, introducing a new conception of the long cherished goal of ‘impersonality’ in literary creation. Yet as H. Porter Abbott has argued in relation to Beckett, whom he sees as following Joyce and Marcel Proust (to whom might also be added Gustave Flaubert) in this respect, these writers in fact display an ‘extraordinary intimacy’ with their works of art. They do not, it is true, express there their personal feelings or ideas, but they nonetheless inhabit every word and shape their work according to a very particular artistic vision.2 These famous descriptions in fact speak not so much of the impersonality of art as of the mammoth work of construction needed in order to keep the constructor out of the frame. Beckett’s early work explicitly distances itself from these statements and the analogy between writing and divine creation that his forebears, perceive however playfully, in the act of literary production. Not only does he banish God from the world he describes, he also banishes any hint of divine authority from the act of literary creation itself, drawing attention to the ignorance and flawed design of his narrative at every turn. The artistic impotence that Beckett famously claimed in place of Joyce’s omnipotence is made 30

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theme and reimagined as human ignorance which can make no appeal to or claim on higher authority. The reader does not find in the early fiction the purifying innocence of the later protagonists, but he or she does find there a playful commitment to the display of ignorance that is turned towards more serious ends later on. It is not just Joyce’s stylistic virtuosity that Beckett eschews, but any trace of omnipotence in the narrative voice. What Beckett does in his early fiction is to scrutinize the mechanisms for creating the true-seeming, the lifelike, in narrative. The discourse of consensus—the set of popular beliefs to which realism appeals—persists in his later work only as an echo in the secondhand language of cliché. In his early work, however, he examines it in a more coherent fashion, albeit often as the negative image of the experience of his own asocial protagonists. The familiar sentiments of cliché are in fact set against the erratic behaviour of his characters, and often manipulated by, or on behalf of, these characters to acquire new and subversive meanings. Beckett begins to employ in his early writing the semantic re-engineering that is so characteristic of his later work. The context is at this stage still the social world, however, and his language conscious of the literary conventions of the social work par excellence: the realist novel. Cliché and consensus The very earliest formulation of realist principle, Aristotle’s account of mimesis, talks in terms of consensus rather than truth. Roland Barthes writes in ‘L’ancienne rhétorique’ of how vraisemblance [verisimilitude] relies on ‘ready-made pieces of language with which the orator must simply be familiar’.3 Classical mimesis duly deals explicitly with what is probable and plausible according to a shared and pre-established collection of beliefs, rather than depending on argument that is evidence-based and inductive. The modern deconstruction of the codes of realism encountered in the work of Barthes and other structuralists simply returns us to this ancient awareness of the method and craft behind verisimilitude. As Quintilian observed of classical rhetoric, ‘what if rhetoric does not infallibly consist in always speaking the truth, but always speaking “true-seemingly” [verisimile]? At least [the orators] are aware that what they say is true-seeming.’4 Likewise, verisimilitude in modern literary realism requires not only that characters have plausible traits and engage in recognizable activities, but also that the narrative makes second-order references to a collective body of ideas and assumptions that belong to the culture in which the text is written. Beckett invokes the classical model himself in creating an audience for his story within the story itself: Mr Kelly, listening to Celia talk about her relationship with the protagonist in the novel Murphy, ‘wanted to know the who, what, where, by what means, why, in what way and when. Scratch an old man and find a Quintilian’ (M, 14). Mr Kelly knows that description never aims simply to depict objects, but also to propose meanings.


These second-order meanings are of course what allows realism to critique the culture that finds its assumptions so presented. Joyce too follows this imperative of realism even when, in Ulysses, he harnesses the narrative voice to Bloom’s erratic perspective. The associative progress of Bloom’s mind may break up the logic of the bourgeois point of view, but he still rehearses familiar positions and ready-made opinions. His observation of both discrete objects and his own motions of feeling or sensation are mediated through such attitudes. Even the Jewish Bloom tries hard to behave ‘in orthodox Samaritan fashion’.5 The idea of consensus becomes in Joyce’s book the very site of contention itself, however. Bloom’s appeals to the authority of bourgeois consensus are particularly fraught as he is shown to be domestically, professionally and racially marginalized, an outsider in a country itself wrestling with its own historic marginality as a colony. The clichés of bourgeois living are viewed obliquely in the context of a country without political unity or autonomy. Among so many other allusions to Shakespeare in the novel as the site of cultural value and authority, for instance, Bloom’s unwittingly ironic reference to ‘our national poet’ (Joyce, Ulysses, 589) destabilizes this authority and suggests that none of these characters’ attitudes can be fully their own, produced as they are under a foreign regime. Beckett’s own attitude to Ireland in his earliest fiction indicates a similarly critical stance on the positions available. The narrator in the short story ‘Fingal’ reiterates the protagonist Belacqua’s ironic characterizations of the country: ‘A land of sanctuary, he had said, where much had been suffered secretly. Yes, the last ditch’ (MPTK, 34). The discourse of romantic history that often attaches to Ireland is undercut by the cliché ‘last ditch’, providing two conflicting versions of Ireland and its past. Is Ireland the home of stoic fighters and defiant martyrs or the last resort, a ditch to die in? Peter Lennon’s comments about the ‘Dublin way’ of using cliché, both owning it and decrying it, are borne out in these knowing but ambivalent remarks, and Beckett’s position as an Anglo-Irish writer makes his an even more uneasy negotiation of such positions. This stance is, however, as has been argued, a thoroughgoing one in Beckett’s work, whatever the context. The attitude of Beckett’s earliest protagonists towards all such common positions is an ambiguous one. They repeat them compulsively, yet they cannot establish a meaningful relation between such expressions and the world itself. Their own experience is different, incoherent, violently individual, and they are often unable rather than unwilling to adopt the consensus that these clichés represent. Instead, these early protagonists engage in flights of allusion and linguistic virtuosity which detach them from the world they inhabit rather than allowing them to describe or interpret it. Beckett brings the clichés of realist fiction to the surface by juxtaposing them with the more conspicuous formulations of other discourses; they are so densely and incongruously arranged in


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these early works that he obliterates any context in which they might have appeared natural. Beckett’s desire to reject the ‘domain of the feasible’, as he called it in Proust, involves a kind of purgative struggle with the means of realist fiction in his early work. In the thick of the popular belief In the earliest statement of mimetic theory, Aristotle argued elegantly in the Poetics that the convincing impossibility had a surer place in mimetic writing than the improbable possibility.6 Plausibility, the touchstone of mimesis, is as much about what the reader expects as what the individual author knows to be true. Plausibility in realism has always been by its nature elliptical, convincing on the basis of appeals to a pre-established consensus rather than to demonstration and evidence. The classic realism of the nineteenth century still relies on this idea of consensus to construct its narrative. Honoré de Balzac, for instance, one of the subjects of lectures that Beckett gave at Trinity College in the 1930s, offers opinions as immutable truths in the magisterial narrative voice of his novels, taking for granted his readers’ assent and so, conversely, creating his readership in his own image. When, for example, his narrator says in Cousin Bette (1847) of the ‘coffee-house magnificence’ of Crevel’s apartment that money ‘never yet missed the smallest opportunity of being stupid’, or observes that ‘no one will be surprised to learn’ of the Baron’s rash actions faced with the seductiveness of ‘resisting virtue’,7 a general law is invoked to explain local instances of behaviour and circumstance. Plausibility is as much about the moral as the epistemological; the narrator’s reference to what should have happened as much as to what might or might not have done. Beckett wrote to Thomas MacGreevy of Cousin Bette that he found Balzac’s ‘bathos of style & thought so enormous that I wonder is he writing seriously or in parody’.8 This ‘thought’ is packaged so neatly as to seem trite. Yet Beckett comments to MacGreevy that he is compelled to ‘go on reading’: there is something seductive in such tacit appeals to the reader’s good sense. There is also a satirical bent to the stable irony that Balzac adopts in his presentation of prevailing social norms. The narrative voice is of course often critical of the society it describes: it is precisely a voice apparently speaking from nowhere that can say those things which everyone might think, but which no one dares say. Beckett, on the other hand, employs a third-person narrator in his early fiction precisely in order to disrupt and question the idea of a stable irony in the narrative method. This third-person narrator is sometimes identified with the protagonist’s mind, and sometimes not. Furthermore, not only does this narrator speaking in his own right make explicit comments about his own strategy for creating the story, but his position on this strategy changes with the wind. Nowhere is this clearer than on the issue of plausibility itself. At moments in the narrative, for instance, the narrator of Dream of Fair to


Middling Women deliberately refuses to be plausible, to let the fictional world even appear to work by itself. He suggests at one point that his characters might rise to the demands of the storyline and conduct themselves plausibly: ‘the territorials might behave’. But this would be to ‘place ourselves for a moment in the thick of the popular belief that there are two sides to every question’ (D, 113). In fact, the dice are loaded in favour of unpredictability. The impression of chance that lifelike realist fiction creates is, he suggests, a popular fantasy that his own novel will not feed. He is, on the contrary, laying bare his strategy for the reader to see. A few pages on from the above disclaimer in Dream, a second and contrary position is established, however. The narrator seems to acknowledge that to be willfully implausible is as difficult and artificial an undertaking as to be plausible. The territorials do start behaving more plausibly, then, but only as a result of a deliberate lapse of effort on the part of the narrator. He has the following to say about how he is shaping their ends: If new life in this case, with the Syra-Cusa and Lucien, could be the fruit of a collision, well and good. One can always organize a collision . But how could it? How could it be anything but the fruit of a congruence of enormous improbability? We are too easily tired, we are neither Deus enough nor machina enough to go in for that class of hyperbolical exornation [embellishment] (D, 117) He abandons the idea of giving two characters a baby together—an ‘enormous improbability’—only because it would take a great effort of will on his part to go against the grain of realist convention. Underlying the studied carelessness of the narrator’s pose in both these instances, there is the question of authority. He has, he suggests in breaking up the deus ex machina cliché in this negative way, neither the authority nor the technical apparatus [machina] in the telling of the tale to go against convention. Beckett sets the creative efforts of the narrator, in a strategy to which he will return often, against those of God, rather than imitating the notion of an author-God as Flaubert or Joyce imagine themselves doing. Realism has to keep within the bounds of the plausible, Beckett suggests, because there is not divine authority to do anything else. God alone is able to elaborate on life, to create; humanity is limited to imitating in the realm of the literal. And this imitation, furthermore, is an imitation of convention rather than life itself. A second tenet of mimesis that harks back to Aristotle is that of causality, a principle that is conspicuous by its absence throughout Beckett’s work from his earliest writing to his latest. Aristotle’s Metaphysics introduces the notion of efficient cause, akin to the modern understanding of causality, and this also underpins his description of plot in Poetics, where he describes the relationship between ‘causal necessity’ and the structure of drama:


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A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles. (Poetics, 1450b28–29) Beckett’s challenge to the structure of ‘beginning, middle and end’ in his mature fiction and theatre will be explored in Chapter 3 of this book, but he first scrutinized the relationship between causality and narrative structure much earlier in his writing career. The treatment of realism in Beckett’s 1931 monograph, Proust, and his annotations of his copy of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, made in the course of writing this early work of criticism, first signal his distrust of anything that is presented as knowable cause. Beckett’s scepticism is a kind of Deleuzian stupidity, a return to the most basic conventions of philosophical thinking: the law of cause and effect. In the words of Rachel Burrows, a student of Beckett’s at Trinity who heard his comments on Balzac, what Beckett most hated in Balzac was ‘what he called the snowball act, which means that you do something that has causes, causes, causes, so that it’s all perfectly consistent’. Proust and Gide were favoured, on the other hand, because they were committed in Beckett’s words to the ‘incomprehensibility of the real’.9 Beckett suggests in his work on Proust that we routinely attribute to what we observe a unilinear principle of cause and effect for which there is no evidence. What he himself looks for in literature is an object ‘detached from the sanity of a cause’ (P, 11). This is rarely found, but Proust’s work at least achieves a certain ‘scepticism before causality’, in providing more than one possible cause when trying to explain certain effects. Beckett’s annotations to A la recherche keep returning to this theme. In a certain passage of ‘Albertine disparue’, the narrator reflects that Albertine may have left him not, as he thought, to pursue lesbian affairs, but either because her grandmother was worried about her ruining her reputation with him, or to force a marriage proposal from him—or both. Beckett writes in the margin of this passage: ‘relativism multiplies cause’.10 There is no omniscient point of view to determine the matter, and so the unsatisfying relativism of true experience is communicated. There is no truth, as Flaubert famously observed, but only ways of seeing.11 Burrows also reports Beckett’s affinity with this perspective, ‘seeing things from various angles and reaching a truth that way’, in Gide’s Les Faux monnayeurs among other novels (Burrows, 12). Elsewhere in Proust’s work, Beckett notes the reverse phenomenon: whereby one cause produces more than one effect. The climate at Marienbad causes one character, Charlus, to get heavier and coarser, and another, Legrandin, to become livelier and quicker. Beckett writes in the margin at


this point: ‘1 cause 2 effects’.12 The suggestion in Proust’s novel is that the logic of causality is often a feature of human perception rather than material reality. Beckett suggests in his monograph on the author that Proust is unusually true to the complexity of the real experience of perception, whereas ‘the order and exactitude of the perception’ of other artists is too often ‘distorted into intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of cause and effect’ (P, 66). Beckett’s early fiction explicitly distances itself from the logic of cause and effect, leaving causality a mystery. In ‘What a Misfortune’, the question as to whether Hermione Näutzsche, the elderly passenger in the bath-chair at Belacqua’s wedding, put her feet to the ground when being wheeled along ‘from coquetry or fatigue’ is left to the reader—helpless in this case—‘to determine’ (MPTK, 158). When the narrator of classic realist fiction leaves a motive to the reader to determine, this is simply an ironic and conventional gesture: the reader is left in no doubt as to how to interpret it. George Eliot’s readers are in no doubt when reading Middlemarch, for example, as to why the relatives of the elderly and dying Mr Featherstone might be ‘manifest[ing] more their sense of the family tie and [be] more visibly numerous now that he had become bed-ridden’.13 Balzac makes doubly sure in Cousin Bette: although ‘one may imagine’ why a look has passed between Monsieur Wenceslas and Hortense in the curiosity shop, the narrator goes on to help the reader do so correctly: ‘it was a flame; for virtuous lovers have not the least hypocrisy’ (Balzac, Cousin Bette, 93). Such characters are for Beckett, writing of Balzac in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ‘clockwork cabbages’: ‘Balzac has turned all his creatures into clockwork cabbages and can rely on their staying put wherever needed or staying going at whatever speed in whatever direction he chooses’ (D, 120). Beckett provides no such comforts for his readers in a world where the individual is ‘incoherent’ and unstable; as a character called the Mandarin reminds Belacqua in Dream: ‘the reality of the individual, you had the cheek to inform me once, is an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently’ (D, 101). In the later stories, Beckett exposes the flaw in the logic of cause and effect when there is no divine cause for events. The narrator says of Belacqua at one moment in the story ‘Love and Lethe’ of his drastic decision to commit assisted suicide: How he had formed this resolution to destroy himself we are quite unable to discover. The simplest course, when motives of any deed are found subliminal to the point of defying expression, is to call that deed ex nihilo and have done. Which we beg leave to follow in the present instance. (MPTK, 95) This ex nihilo makes explicit what has been suggested elsewhere. God, as has been seen, is offered in principle as the force that might resolve all questions


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of cause, but in fact is only ever a creaking deus ex machina, a contrivance that remains resolutely absent from Beckett’s narrators’ tales. John Peter recognizes Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as the ‘purest form of abandonment of cause and effect’ (Peter, 13–14). There is little exposition or motive given for any of the actions in the play, nor is there any sense that the world is different for these characters having inhabited it. Beckett even imagines, in a later prose work, the fifth of the thirteen Texts for Nothing, an inquisition over this lack of causality in the play: ‘Why did Pozzo leave home, he had a castle and retainers. Insidious question, to remind me I’m in the dock’ (CSP, 118). He returns to this issue of cause and effect elliptically throughout his later work, commenting in Malone Dies that ideas of guilt and punishment were confused in Macmann’s mind ‘as those of cause and effect so often are in the minds of those who continue to think’ (T , 240). Beckett’s characters often seem to deduce their guilt post hoc by reason of their experience of being punished for some obscure crime. Malone comments on Macmann: ‘And without knowing exactly what his sin was he felt full well that living was not a sufficient atonement for it or that this atonement was in itself a sin, calling for more atonement, and so on ’ (T , 240). In fact, the difficulty in distinguishing ideas of cause and effect structures Beckett’s whole imaginative universe, in so far as his characters can never discern the agency behind what happens to them. Are their actions the effect of some unseen plan or malevolent force, or is the universe pure ‘incoherence’, the ‘chaos’ or ‘mess’ that are taken to be watchwords for Beckett’s particular vision? Alternatively, as Beckett’s latest works seem to envision, might not the universe around them in fact be projected or controlled by their own mind? Not only the characters’ actions, but the working of the world itself comes to seem subjective and without external necessity. Beckett rejects, then, not only the God-given power of invention, but also the objective necessity of causality itself. J.M. Coetzee, an early critic of Beckett’s work now so famous in his own right, mentioned Beckett in writing more generally of the rhetorical structures that express ontological experience of an ‘empty’ universe. Coetzee comments on Beckett’s use of the participle ‘pre-established’ in the following sentence in Beckett’s later novel Molloy: ‘At a given moment, pre-established if you like, I don’t much mind, the gentleman turned back, took the little creature in his arms, drew the cigar from his lips and buried his face in the orange fleece’ (T , 12). Molloy acts the part of the ambivalent narrator of realist fiction at this moment, asking in whose gift such ‘given moments’ might be. Beckett draws mocking attention, Coetzee argues, to the question of who could establish such a thing in advance, as well as to beliefs (such as that of Leibniz to whose ‘pre-established harmony’ Beckett alludes several times) that make such actions God’s design.14 In playing with narrative technique so wilfully and often laboriously in his early fiction, Beckett stages questions of agency and authority that will return more explicitly in his later works. First, he


introduces his reader to the idea that he or she sees the world a little as they experience the world of a novel, their experience and understanding authorized by an omniscient power who makes chaos and chance unthinkable, and, secondily, he deposes this power by having his narrator systematically deny responsibility, motivation and knowledge. Belacqua, Murphy and the ‘type’ in Beckett’s early fiction Beckett’s early fiction treats flippantly, then, what will become a central theme of the later work. There are many instances where his narrators unabashedly renounce interpretative responsibility in matters of causality and motivation. Earlier in the story of Belacqua’s wedding, the narrator hastens to detach himself from the idea that the hero’s passion for his lover, Thelma, could have financial considerations: to suggest that [Thelma’s fortune] was implied, however slightly, in his brusque obsession with the beneficiary to be, would constitute such an obloquy as we do not much care to deal in. (MPTK, 127) A financial motive is the kind of stock interpretation often suggested by a narrator’s appeal to a ‘type’ in realist fiction, as Eliot’s vulturine relatives hanging over Mr Featherstone’s sickbed in Middlemarch illustrate. It is likely according to convention that the narrator’s mention of gold-digging in Beckett’s story will introduce, or even confirm, this interpretation in the reader’s mind—as indeed it does here quite clearly—but the narrator insists on his own detachment from the doctrine of probability. He comments with a disingenuous scrupulousness that he ‘can’t straddle the fence nicer than that’ (MPTK, 127). The narrator here is breaking with the convention that in classic realism the narrator should provide general maxims, the clichés of bourgeois society, which explain the actions of individuals in realism. Such maxims, as Gérard Genette has argued, are ‘received as the recovery of causes from effects’.14 They constitute deep unwritten rules that are perceived to underlie all social behaviour in these novels. Beckett’s narrators deny their readers such guidance, but with an irony that acknowledges their dilemma. Characters which do not conform to type, whose behaviour is not plausible according to familiar patterns, are simply unfathomable and opaque. The narrator of Dream holds up his hands on this issue at the beginning of the novel, saying of his characters: ‘It is to be hoped that we can make them stand for something’ (D, 9). Indeed, the early fiction makes frequent self-conscious comments on the presence of an anti-type at the heart of their stories. The narrators often remark, for instance, that their protagonists never become regulars in any of the public houses they visit. The Belacqua in the short story ‘Ding-Dong’, another version of the hero of Dream, is a good example. When he enters a pub, the narrator comments,


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Here he was known, in the sense that his grotesque exterior had long since ceased to alienate the curates and make them giggle, and to the extent that he was served with his drink without having to call for it (MPTK, 43–44) He nonetheless can never be a ‘regular’. He is at best ‘tolerated’ and ‘let alone by the rough but kindly habitués of the house’, but it is clear that he will never join their number. This quality of passing incognito—without intending or, indeed, desiring to do so—seems to infect Beckett’s protagonists throughout his work. The phenomenon recurs in the 1976 play That Time, in which the speaker comments, ‘till it dawned that for all the loathing you were getting you might as well not have been there at all the eyes passing over you and through you like so much thin air ’ (CDW, 394). Adam Piette comments similarly that Bloom’s loneliness and isolation make a ghost of him in Ulysses (Piette, 188). When someone comments about Bloom having been in the bar in the ‘Sirens’ episode, Simon Dedalus asks, ‘Was he?’ (Joyce, Ulysses, 237). Stephen speaks tellingly later, in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ section of the novel, of a ghost as ‘one who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners’ (Joyce, Ulysses, 180, my italics). A ghost, the suggestion is, need not be dead. Beckett is more self-conscious than Joyce, however, about the ‘change of manners’ that make his characters difficult to recognize. When he first raises this issue in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, indeed, he seems to make an oblique and selfconscious comment on the concept of characterization in the novel. He says of Belacqua: ‘Almost it seemed as though he were doomed to leave no trace, but none of any kind, on the popular sensibility’ (D, 127). This seems to be true for the sensibilities of Belacqua’s readers as well as his fellow characters: we do not recognize in him any of the features of E.M. Forster’s ‘round’ characters of realist fiction, characters that critics at the time Beckett began to write were still expecting to tally with their ‘severe’ examinations of ‘daily life’ (Forster, 48). The narrator comments archly in this respect: ‘Is it not curious that [Belacqua] should thus be excluded from the ring of habitués and their legitimate benefits?’ Our curiosity is not rewarded, however, by any explanation or motivation for this exclusion; it remains curious, and we, like the pub regulars, are kept at a distance from this perplexing creature. To create such enigmatic heroes is to deny one’s readers the ‘recognitions’ that Aristotle thought necessary to mimetic art. The idea of types is central to nineteenth-century realism such as the ‘clockwork cabbages’ of Balzac. While Beckett’s narrators take care never to fall into this kind of writing unawares, they nonetheless measure their own heroes and heroines against such predictable creatures in such a way that these characters come to seem ostentatiously eccentric. The idea of the ‘type’ is used to better effect, if with no greater subtlety, in Beckett’s later novel, Murphy. All the characters in this novel are described


explicitly as ‘puppets’ (M, 71) apart from the protagonist himself, although none is a straightforward stereotype. Murphy’s own behaviour is thrown into relief, however, by the more conventional or typical actions of those around him, and his predicament emphasized. One such puppet is Miss Counihan, who is highly conscious of her role as romantic heroine (however compromised), first as Murphy’s lover and second as that of his rival, Neary. She is described as an ‘omnivorous reader’, and in her fiction-ridden mind there is a plan on which the world should work, even if it does not always do so. What is natural, in the classic realist text, is as has been seen often conflated with what is moral, the text employing in Gérard Genette’s words, ‘a body of maxims and prejudices which constitute both a vision of the world and a system of values’.15 So are Miss Counihan’s expectations ordered here. The combined forces of Neary and Wylie are, for instance, enough to prevent her just cause being rewarded: ‘It struck Miss Counihan with sudden force that here were two men against whom she could never prevail, even were her cause a just one’ (M, 118, my italics). Miss Counihan can be likened to the café-owner in Proust’s novel who ‘always compared everything he heard or read with a certain alreadyfamiliar text and whose admiration was aroused if he found no differences’.16 For Miss Counihan, just causes should prevail. She convinces herself that by the rigid application of stock assumptions she is in touch with the necessary laws by which the world works. She therefore alternates her behaviour towards Neary with careful regularity, playing an absurdly formal version of the courtship game: ‘she could no more welcome his arrival at the hotel than green, yellow, green is a legitimate sequence of traffic lights’ (M, 35). This ‘romantic’ logic comes to take on the appearance of the internal logic of reality. C.J. Ackerley identifies in Miss Counihan’s name ‘the echo of Voltaire’s Counégonde, beloved of Candide, both victim and impossible proponent of the best of all possible worlds’.17 Miss Counihan in Beckett’s novel similarly invents rules according to a utopian vision of the world that is constructed around her own desires at its centre, but it cannot be made to fit with the true world. Applying the spurious logic of stereotype to a world that is chaotic and unpredictable is a strategy that unsurprisingly fails. Henri Bergson in his essay on ‘Laughter’ identifies this kind of mechanical behaviour as an absence from self-consciousness: suppose a man has taken to reading nothing but romances of love and chivalry. Attracted and fascinated by his heroes, his thoughts and intentions gradually turn more and more towards them, till one fine day we find him walking among us like a somnambulist.18 This quixotic living by the book reveals a gap between language and reality, human ways of explaining the world and that world itself. Beckett suggests


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that only Murphy, a ‘strict non-reader’ (M, 93) unversed in the conventional logic of literary fiction, can fully escape these assumptions. Yet elsewhere in the novel it is suggested that Murphy does have some familiarity with these conventions, despite his professed resistance to the world of books. His sometime lover, Celia, has the following conversation about him with her aged grandfather, Mr Kelly: ‘Did it go something like this?’ said Mr Kelly. ‘ “I pay you the highest tribute that a man can pay a woman, and you throw a scene.” ’ [ ] ‘Damn your eyes,’ said Mr Kelly. ‘Did he or didn’t he?’ ‘It’s not a bad guess,’ said Celia. ‘Guess my rump,’ said Mr Kelly. ‘It’s the formula.’ (M, 15–16) Neary portrays himself as the unworldly idealist, but deals similarly with his former lover, Miss Dwyer: ‘He insisted, by word and deed, that he was not worthy of her, a hackneyed device that had the desired effect’ (M, 31). Both he and Murphy know how to play the game. Murphy in fact also seeks an external set of rules for his own behaviour, albeit beyond the human design of romantic fiction in the dictates of the stars: the ‘celestial prescriptions of Professor Suk’ (M, 25). Just as Miss Counihan finds in romantic fiction an external frame for her own idiosyncratic behaviour, Murphy’s horoscope fits with his own programme of idleness and empty habit, but only in his artfully ‘concocted’ (M, 24) mind. Nonetheless, Murphy makes considerable efforts not to become a type, challenging in the process the public identities that are available to him. Like Watt, for instance, he cannot easily identify himself with the idea of being a ‘man’ as this term is commonly used. What is a semantic crisis for Watt, unable to connect words with things, however, has a social dimension for Murphy. As has been noted, Celia tries to ‘make a man’ of Murphy, but he refuses this role and the narrator expresses amazement that Celia should ever have attempted it: her desire to make a man out of Murphy! Yes, June to October, counting in the blockade she had almost five months’ experience of Murphy, yet the image of him as a man of the world continued to beckon her on. (M, 41) Perhaps Murphy recognizes this idea as deriving from the discourse of Christian manliness, for which Beckett himself had a personal antipathy. Celia wants to make him ‘decent’ (M, 26), a ‘man of the world’ (M, 41), a ‘new man’ (M, 80) and encourages him to find honest work: all things to which the successful bourgeois Christian should aspire. James Knowlson notes in his biography of the writer that such phrases were exactly those that Beckett’s


mother had used to exhort him to fulfill the role of a respectable and energetic Christian subject (Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 215). In a similar vein, the narrator has commented of Murphy earlier that ‘To die fighting was the perfect antithesis of his whole practice, faith and intention’ (M, 26). It is part of the irony of the novel, and perhaps a source of private satisfaction for the writer, that these sentiments should come from the mouth of a prostitute. Displaying a disposition that appears to be the contrary of Murphy’s, the narrator of Beckett’s later prose text, From an Abandoned Work, muses that ‘a good woman might have been the making of me’ (CSP, 158). It is not to be in his case either, however: none of Beckett’s protagonists follow the dictates or ultimately meet the requirements of the model of masculinity that a Christian society offers. Murphy’s determination to be, if anything, a kind of anti-type also diverts Beckett’s novel from any of the conventional plots associated with realist fiction. The expanding circle of the ‘ambition’ plot that Peter Brooks identifies in his Reading for the Plot is the antithesis of Murphy’s aspirations, which involve a retraction from the ‘big world’ of public activity into the ‘small’ one of his own mind. He abandons Celia, the prostitute whom he could have saved in the version of the love story that the novel seems at first to promise, and he never makes contact with Miss Counihan, who has pursued him from Ireland in another version—an unconventional rendition of the quest narrative. The extent to which the love story with Celia is unpromising is demonstrated by the censoring of any reference to the true basis of this relationship, on Murphy’s part at least, sexual desire being archly alluded to as ‘music’ to avoid ‘the filthy censors’ and ‘their filthy synecdoche’ (M, 47). Other plot-lines are made equally unlikely. Murphy’s origins are left obscure, ruling out a return to a familial fold, and what little inheritance he has is dwindling. There is no possibility that he will be, say, the deserving recipient of an unexpected windfall when he is swindling the distant relative who might emerge as its source. In the classic realist novel, good behaviour is often rewarded; idleness, opportunism and petty rapacity—such as defrauding the waitress out of 0.83 of a cup of tea—are not. Yet Murphy does in another sense perfectly fit the model of hero of nineteenth-century realist fiction, or at least a comic version of that hero. Leo Bersani has argued that the personality of such a hero is organized around their ruling passion, be it Père Goriot’s paternal love or Silas Marner’s miserliness. Their personality is stable in so far as any action, word or gesture can be referred back to that passion and reliably interpreted.19 In this sense, Murphy’s personality is completely intelligible, albeit in a negative sense, structured as it is around his desire to be idle, preferably to the point of slipping out of consciousness altogether. The narrative insists on this attitude at every possible opportunity: Murphy stigmatized work as ‘the end of them both’ (M, 16); ‘to sit down’, he thinks at one point, ‘was no longer enough, he must insist now on lying down’ (M, 48); his response to attempted rape


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is to ‘go quite limp at the first sign of its application’ (M, 52); he longs for the ‘long rapture flat on his back’ (M, 56). Perhaps this reversion to realist type on Beckett’s part, albeit in comic vein, owes something to the fact that this feature of realism, unlike many others, is retained in Proust’s great novel, upon which Beckett made a critical apprenticeship. Swann’s jealousy of Odette in A la recherche du temps perdu, as Bersani observes, structures and consumes much of the novel. In fact, the terms of Jacques Rivière’s early study of Proust’s novel, almost certainly familiar to Beckett as it was published not long before his own research on Proust in the early 1930s, remind us uncannily of Beckett’s heroes, those ‘grotesque’ creatures who are shunned by society: Those for whom the will, and the form which it takes, is that proper to humanity are free to turn away from this strange object. But they must at least appreciate the importance of his appearance among us. For us a man has entered the foreign seas of an infinite leisure.20 Marcel, too, is an oddity, a ‘strange object’ whose cultivation of idleness— ‘infinite leisure’—like Murphy’s cuts him off from society. The character Murphy in fact follows the model of the realist hero more closely than Marcel in pursuing his ruling passion to its conclusion: death, the ultimate preservation of inertia. He cannot behave otherwise than in accordance with his ordained psychology, even though the distraction of sexual desire briefly and—as it turns out—misleadingly threatens to throw him off course. The novel also constitutes a version of a particular (tragic) form of realist novel in pitting its hero against the structures of society, and destroying him when he cannot be contained within them. Society cannot understand or incorporate Murphy’s particular ruling passion, which is perfectly solitary and which seems to challenge the necessity and the naturalness of the capitalist activity going on around him. Similarly it is often the case, Bersani argues, in the realist novel that the hero’s great passion is at odds with the society around him and ‘awakens the self-preserving energies of [this society’s] powerful orders’ (Bersani, ‘The Subject of Power’, 8). Murphy is no exception in this regard, bringing the judiciary, the capitalist market, the institutional guardians of mental health, and the institution of literature itself (in the shape of the poet Austin Ticklepenny) down upon him. Bersani argues that the only privileged place of exile within the bourgeois literary work from the demands of these establishment forces is the prison cell (Bersani, ‘The Subject of Power’, 9). The trajectory of Murphy’s engagement with society plays with these conventions. The ‘mew’ (M, 5) that Murphy is staying in at the beginning of the novel is described as a ‘cage’, an old meaning of the word ‘mew’, a space where someone or something is confined forcibly or through choice. To initiate the narrative, there is a development—Murphy’s mew is ‘condemned’—which forces him to


become involved with the world of society. Ultimately, however, Murphy, like Beckett’s other characters Watt and Macmann, finds a sanctuary which offers even greater immunity than Bersani’s prison cell: the padded cell of the lunatic. Beckett’s parody of the realist singularity of disposition, his emphasis on inertia, constitutes a playful attack on the Protestant work ethic that often underlies the realist novel of capitalist society, where individual success is earned in the face of adversity. The abstract treatment of Murphy’s retreat into his mind seems to move Beckett’s novel away from realist convention, however, towards another kind of contemporary writing. The Surrealist Salvador Dali had suggested an imaginative practice very similar to Murphy’s retreat to the asylum in 1931. He proposed, in a piece on ‘Surrealism and Madness’ excerpted in the same edition of the Paris journal This Quarter for which Beckett made some translations, the recreation in art of ‘a condition which will be in no way inferior to mental derangement’.21 Its aim would be to lead us to the edge of madness and show us what is going on in the ‘magnificently disordered’ minds of those whom the community shuts up in asylums. André Breton similarly embraced the idea that the Surrealists would be labeled with ‘what, following Bleuler, has been called autism’: the translation here in the same essay in This Quarter is Beckett’s own.22 This idea of ‘autism’, meaning at this time a ‘morbid interiority and indifference to external reality’ is facetiously recreated, as Phil Baker has argued, in Murphy’s rejection of the ideological and commercial imperatives of the bourgeois social world.23 Beckett celebrates the ‘escape’ from the ‘colossal fiasco’ of the social world (M, 101) that this disorder might in fact represent. By ‘playing’ with the mind, Dali wondered whether we might not succeed in ‘systematizing the confusion and so assisting the total discrediting of the world of reality’. Murphy’s retreat to the ordered disorder of the asylum might be seen to respond in similar manner to Beckett’s famous aspiration to ‘find a form’ in art with which to ‘accommodate the mess’ that was his experience of existence.24 In fact, however, this retreat simply follows the logic of the tragic realist novel in which the rebellious hero (invariably male) ultimately complies with the social world’s attempts to contain and in the end remove him. Surrealism, realism and commerce The Surrealist writing of Dali and Breton, with which Beckett came into contact early in his career, also offers an important but little-examined precedent for Beckett’s manipulation of the clichés of bourgeois realism.25 The resistance to the world of reality is, as has been suggested, a feature of the Surrealist work that Beckett was translating early in the 1930s in Paris. A particular point of convergence between Beckett and such writers at this time was the metonymic shorthand they found for this world of reality in the language of financial transaction and the mass market logic of


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the lowest common denominator. Paul Eluard’s ‘Poetry’s Evidence’, which Beckett translated in 1932 for the same Surrealist edition of This Quarter, suggests that writers such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, adopting positions such as loneliness and madness, created an evil but imperishable art in opposition to the ‘bourgeois good, the insurance-of-property good’ of most conventional writers (Breton (ed.), This Quarter, 143). Beckett later adopts this language when speaking to Georges Duthuit in 1949—if Duthuit’s creative transcription of their conversations are to be believed, at least—to describe the kind of art from which he too wants to turn away: art which is a ‘desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living’ (PTD, 125). The latter is the kind of realism that runs for Beckett along ‘correct cash register lines’. Another passage of Surrealist writing which Beckett had also translated in the same journal, André Breton’s introduction to the edition, reads similarly: The realist attitude is made up of mediocrity, hatred and flat selfsufficiency it is giving itself up to flattering opinion in the lowering of tastes: clarity bordering on moronism, a dog’s life.26 In Murphy, Beckett takes up the cliché of a ‘dog’s life’ again on his own behalf, in describing the outer world where the individual is constrained by the necessity of earning money. Murphy is compelled to: expose himself vaguely in aloof able-bodied postures on the fringes of the better-attended slave-markets, or to drag from pillar to post among the agencies, a dog’s life without a dog’s prerogative. (M, 47) Unlike Murphy, who is able to transcend and create a ‘radiant abstract’ of this ‘dog’s life’ (M, 65) by a retreat into a solipsistic mental world in the much discussed sixth chapter of the novel, the realist writer is enslaved to the demands of the public ‘slave-market’ of commerce, unable to cultivate the purity of the inner mind. Beckett uses clichés, the currency of this everyday world, in such passages as that above, but he makes them unfamiliar and so releases them from this economy of orthodox recognitions. The piling-up of collocations and double-barrelled expressions in this passage about Murphy’s finding work underlines the laboriousness of his task. The weary cliché ‘from pillar to post’ does not pass unnoticed thanks to its close conjunction with the mention of the ‘dog’s life’: the image of a dog dragged from pillar to lamp-post is a familiar one in the reader’s experience of life, if not in their experience of literature. Beckett’s clichés often chime in striking ways with the world to which they refer, but here, as elsewhere, this is by making them literal rather than dissociating the words completely from their referential function. On occasion, he disrupts the flow of conventional clichés not by indicating their distance from real experience but by evaluating them in relation to


experiences usually felt to be too marginal and banal to be made into literary capital. Beckett’s characters make a point, as we have seen, of not offering value for money in the economy of literary realism: they provide the reader with few of the recognitions that Aristotle deemed essential to the literary work. In particular, Beckett flouts the requirement that his characters should already have a recognizable social background erected around them when they appear in his writing. The narrator of Dream of Fair to Middling Women declines to give us his heroine’s ‘Milieu, race, family, structure, temperament, past and present and the papas and mammas and paramours and cicisbei and the morals of Nanny and the nursery wallpapers’. This would be to subscribe to a view of fiction that allows the reader to evaluate the character in material terms and leads them to make socio-economic judgements about them: ‘As though the gentle reader could be nothing but an insurance broker or a professional punter’ (D, 13). The characters of realist fiction, the suggestion is, do not give value for money unless they can be accounted for according to a certain set of categories. This impression is reinforced at the beginning of Watt when the characters discuss the provenance and status of the individual (Watt himself) to whom Mr Nixon once lent money: But you must know something, said Mr. Hackett. One does not part with five shillings to a shadow. Nationality, family, birthplace, confession, occupation, means of existence, distinctive signs, you cannot be in ignorance of all this. Utter ignorance, said Mr. Nixon. He is not a native of the rocks, said Mr. Hackett. I tell you nothing is known, cried Mr. Nixon. Nothing. (W, 19–20, my italics) Once one is engaged in the commercial world, identity is a kind of financial guarantee, a summary of one’s capacity to earn, produce or procure money. Ignorance becomes infectious here, suggesting that Beckett’s protagonists have something to teach those around them, if only the possibility that there are beings who do not fit into the orthodox framework of interpretation. Mr Nixon’s ‘utter ignorance’ of Watt’s true nature reflects Watt’s own, and the former’s agitated repetition of the word ‘nothing’ establishes the failure of traditional epistemology, of positive knowing, throughout the novel as a whole. All values, whether literary or otherwise, must be reconsidered by those entering the fictive world of this novel. A certain characterization of the terms of realism equates this mode of writing with the circulation of money itself, as Beckett himself does in his comments about the ‘good housekeeping’ of contemporary art. He described the idea of objective representation in his monograph on Proust as the ‘penny-a-line notation’ of a literature that aims to give one simple value


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for each sign (P, 57). Olivier Burgelin has used a similar metaphor to argue that mimetic realism exerts a ‘deflationary pressure’ on signs and symbols, making their meaning as simple as possible.27 This is the realism that Proust identifies in A la recherche du temps perdu as desired by the ‘financiers and diplomats’, and which he rejects, concerned as it is with an external reality which does not accord in the least with one’s inner experience. A certain kind of representation can, for Proust, only reflect a certain kind of reality, what he calls ‘this waste product of experience’, a phrase that Beckett underlined in his copy of Proust’s text. Describing such a reality can only reproduce an experience that is ‘more or less identical for everyone’.28 This is reality reduced to its lowest common denominator: material, habitual, public, unreflective. Meanings cannot be created in this economy of representation, as Burgelin suggests, but only redistributed. In Jacques Derrida’s argument, as has been seen, this apparent deflation can be misleading, abstractions and conceptualizations hiding a ‘surplus value’ of metaphorical meaning. Even the flattest realist register contains such ‘idealizations’, as Beckett’s scrutiny of this language reveals. Beckett’s language is particularly overwrought in this early fiction, wrestling with realist conventions and, as has been argued, displaying the ‘workedness’ of his language in order to demonstrate the labour and hence the contrivance of what it habitually presents as natural. In Burgelin’s terms, Beckett’s novel Murphy seems to resist the economy of literary value which rewards recognizable, which is to say, typical signs and symbols. The minds of characters such as Miss Counihan in Murphy work along such ‘correct cash-register lines’ (M, 101), consumed as they are by the ‘petty cash of current facts’. The protagonist on the other hand is oppressed at every juncture by the realization that the outer world operates in this manner. Cries from the street reach him in his mews and sound the message, ‘Quid pro quo! Quid pro quo!’ (M, 5). Life in the outside world is for Murphy, like the literature of ‘notation’ for Beckett, a form of reductive give-and-take that he rejects. He scorns what he described in the three famous dialogues with Georges Duthuit as the ‘farce of giving and receiving’ (PTD, 112). Murphy of course rejects the logic of Burgelin’s deflationary realist system of reference, the ‘apparatus for doing sums with the petty cash of current facts’, in favour of his own mind and the ‘beatific idols of his cave’ (M, 101). Beckett does not, however, dispense with the analogy between literary value and money altogether, but uses it, as many realist writers before him have done, in an irreverent manner to create his own idiosyncratic economy of value. Clichés that, like old coin, are destined only to lose value as they circulate in the economy of realism are re-engineered and gain a new potency that threatens the system in which they originally participated. Beckett’s fiction indicates how the clichés of the outer world proliferate with meanings once they are freed from the deflationary economy of conventional story and character and attached to the mind of a seedy solipsist such as Murphy.


The protagonist returns home from seeking work at the same time every day, with, it seems to Celia, ‘inhuman regularity’ (M, 43). He explains to her that this is because he is anxious ‘to cultivate the sense of time as money which he had heard was highly prized in business circles’ (M , 43). In fact, this bourgeois maxim of ‘time is money’ is turned on its head: in order to be near Celia, Murphy waits in the vicinity of their home all day, saving time but preventing himself from finding work elsewhere. The clichés of the commercial world so common in conventional realism take on an anarchic life of their own in Beckett’s deregulated system. Murphy’s observation of commerce in action in the market turns a familiar cliché on its head, representing for him a ‘frenzied justification of life as an end to means’. Business seems to be the furious spending of the resources and reserves that one has, rather than a means to a higher end, an observation which ‘threw light on [his] prediction that livelihood would destroy one or two or all three of his life’s goods’ (M, 42). Leo Bersani has argued that ‘the most frequent confrontation in the realist novel is between society and a hero who refuses to accept the definitions which society proposes of his duties and satisfactions’ (Bersani, ‘The Subject of Power’, 8). In fact, then, Murphy is such a hero in the most literal sense: he refuses to understand society’s founding principles in the traditional way, and so denaturalizes them and makes them into mere cliché, formulae that can be reorganized and superceded. In Beckett’s later work such financial clichés are similarly reinvigorated. Molloy says of Lousse’s house: ‘If she lived in embarrassed circumstances there was no sign of it. That kind of embarrassment I feel at once’ (T , 37). Molloy is oblivious to most social conventions, but the euphemism is one that is applicable to himself and is therefore easily recognized. The narrator of More Pricks than Kicks may not be able to safely identify Belacqua’s desire for financial gain, as we saw earlier, but Molloy is fully conversant with the rhetoric of poverty. In the second novel of the trilogy, the attempt by the Saposcats to evaluate their son’s development on the bourgeois scale of economic value is derailed by the specificity of their comparison. Mr Saposcat considers his son’s age: Mr Saposcat took over the erroneous figure, murmuring it over and over to himself as though it were a question of the rise in the price of some indispensable commodity, such as butcher’s meat. And at the same time he sought in the appearance of his son some alleviation of what he had just heard. Was it at least a nice sirloin? (MD, 188) He understands his son’s rearing to have been a kind of financial investment, but begins to perceive that it will be one from which there will be little reward. The boy’s body is, he believes, being corrupted by fruitless and ‘lascivious speculations’ [speculations lascives] on sex, the word ‘speculation’


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a pun on the disappointed expectations which his parents had of the boy. The pun also exposes their hopeless attempt to apply a financial analogy to what should be an act of love—to try to make a sound investment out of what can only ever be a wild gamble. The language of realism is not, in Beckett’s hands, the deflationary system which Burgelin makes of it, but a system in which the labels are coming loose from their original objects. The very fact that clichés attract censure reveals that their original meaning has been replaced by a more habitual one. It also shows, however, that there is a metaphorical ‘excess’ that still lurks beneath the surface. The phenomenon of cliché, one step removed from dead metaphor, highlights the semantic loss, in Derrida’s terms, at the expense of the conceptual gain. If literary metaphor loses value in becoming cliché, it is precisely this, for Beckett, which means that the system of literary meaning does not atrophy and become ideology—in other words, reproducing the same old meanings without censure or revision. Beckett exposes the clichés of financial rhetoric: both euphemisms such as ‘embarrassed circumstances’, and cold economic judgements that see ‘time as money’, or evaluate individuals as ‘indispensable commodities’. Just as Beckett exposes the rhetorical element of such expressions, Karen Lawrence has similarly described the self-conscious use of cliché in Joyce’s ‘Eumaeus’ as drawing attention to the idea of wastage in language use: ‘waste of all kinds in the chapter suggests a kind of expenditure, to use Bataille’s word, that cannot be captured in the economy of utility and production’.29 Freed from the economy of realism by its playfulness, the language in both men’s work resists the commercial expectations made of the language of representation, the ‘penny-a-line’ view of language. In both Joyce and Beckett’s writing, however, this waste is recuperated by the production of new meanings: for Joyce by thematic coincidences and unexpected sympathies of thought between characters; in Beckett’s work, by the ignorant or perverse redeployment of familiar expressions in new contexts by protagonists freed from social convention. For Beckett, however, the conceptual gain is not made at the expense of a semantic loss: his language regains a literalness, albeit often a perverse one, in these new contexts. Karen Lawrence argues similarly of Joyce that his ‘economy of surprises arises from within, rather than transcends, the banality of the “everyday” ’ (Lawrence, ‘Beggaring Description’, 373). Force is restored to quotidian language. One example might be the common cliché ‘at the eleventh hour’ used by Bloom in ‘Eumaeus’ of Stephen’s lucky escape from the ‘regular deathtrap’ (Joyce, Ulysses, 570–571) of Nighttown. This casual expression in fact extends and develops the central place in the novel of the number ‘eleven’, which unites Bloom and Stephen. Stephen was eleven when Bloom’s son, aged eleven, died; Stephen, on the other hand, escapes at this eleventh hour, allowing the coming together of the two men and Bloom’s assumption of the role of surrogate father. Such verbal coincidences are for


Joyce often motivated ones, either within the fiction of the work by the characters’ unconscious similarities or the convergence of their desires and concerns, or by the underlying thematic or symbolic structure of the book itself, both making themselves felt in the seemingly casual and unknowing language of idiom. Beckett’s work tackles the meanings of its clichés more directly, and in their own right. The interrogation of Christian parables and exempla by making them literal is a strategy that he applies consistently from his first short stories in More Pricks than Kicks onwards. In ‘Dante and the Lobster’, Belacqua sweeps away the crumbs from his sandwich ‘as though there were no such thing as a sparrow in the wide world’ (MPTK, 11); he thinks later that ‘Fish had been good enough for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. It was good enough for Mlle Glain’ (MPTK, 19). The inappropriate use of biblical analogy undermines the proverbial authority of these expressions and relegates the idea of the imago dei, Christ as the perfect example of how to live one’s life, to a prosaic set of comparisons to be evaluated on their own merits. By taking language at face value—that is, as literal again—Beckett reawakens the images and ideas in familiar figures of speech, revealing in his work the ideological import they contain.

II Beyond realism: Towards the later work Cliché and the real There is, however, in Beckett’s work another dimension to the exploration of what Jonathan Culler calls the conventional natural, one that goes further than a simple scrutiny of literary practice or even social habit. Beckett offers a new and idiosyncratic take on the idea, become a commonplace of modern thought, that we apprehend not reality but the mental forms of our own consciousness. This idea derives most directly from Kant, whose work Beckett read carefully and transcribed in his early notebooks, but it is perhaps Martin Heidegger who provides the most suggestive way of reading this aspect of Beckett’s work. Heidegger criticized the Western metaphysical view that, in Michael Zimmerman’s words, ‘the structure of all things is akin to the structure of products or artefacts’. Aristotle, for instance, thinks of all things, even organic life, as ‘formed matter’ (Zimmerman, 167). On one level, Beckett takes a negative approach to this situation, exaggerating the intrusion of form into the individual’s perception of the world by emphasizing in the narrative voice how often the ideas received as revelation are only formulae that have been learnt. Belacqua is absurdly pleased by the moment in ‘Yellow’ when, at ‘the end of all [his] meditations’, he reaches the phrase: ‘I am what I am’ (MPTK, 172). The tautology of language masquerades as insight or definition. On another level, however, Beckett gestures to something beyond these forms, albeit without promising any redemptive power for this insight. The


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problem is not so much, for him, that realism tries to pretend that there is a shared real where there is not (as modern theory would have it), but that it fails to communicate how real the real is. We miss, or cannot face, the obvious. Beckett wants to give his reader the imaginative experience of living, as his protagonist Watt does, ‘miserably it is true, among face values’ (W, 70). This is a utopian version of Deleuze’s complacency-busting ‘stupidity’ or Cavell’s salutary ‘poverty’. But such face values cannot be communicated by language, even the plainest language, which already carries with it superadded meanings and relationships. Watt’s tussle with the word ‘pot’ is not because he cannot comprehend the real object but that language does not for him always already adhere to it. Beckett’s early protagonists cannot do justice to the very poverty of their vision. Shorn of the comforting beliefs and epistemological methods of those around them, they have not yet developed a language with which to represent this experience of seeing truly, or even of seeing that they do not see. Watt’s problem with the word ‘pot’, often discussed in Beckett criticism, is not confined to the problem of naming, but extends to every aspect of the link between language and the world. George Steiner represents one of Heidegger’s key ideas as the observation that ‘our relations to existence, which constitute the core and rationale of human speech, have receded into grammatical banality’.30 The word ‘is’, in Steiner’s account, ‘is diminished to a mere copula’ linking subject and predicate: it tells us nothing about what it is to be, but only functions to create tautologies in identifying one thing with another. The problem that Beckett identifies is not the banality of this language so much as the fact that this banality masquerades as riches: we can use such language erect a great edifice of knowledge on the least stable or edifying of beginnings. Heidegger describes language as ‘an indispensable but masterless means of communication that may be used up as one pleases, as indifferent as a means of public transport’.31 Watt himself rides the tram and train systems at the beginning of the novel and the railway again at the end but seems indifferent both to the transport itself and to where he ends up. As Mr Nixon observes, Watt appears to get down as a ‘request stop’, indicating a certain agency on his part, but in fact he travels only the arbitary distance that his limited money will take him. Mr Nixon, even in the English original, appropriately uses the expression ‘facultative stop’ (W, 17), from the French ‘arrêt facultatif’, perhaps to indicate that this is more truthfully an accidental (facultative) destination than a pre-ordained one. Watt’s relations with this transport system, as with language itself, are not under his control. Nor can it take him home as it does those more familiar with the railway, when later in the novel ‘the driver, the stoker, the guard and the station staffs all along the line, were anhelating towards their wives’ (W, 28). Even the signalman Mr Case waits longingly to go home, and reads George Russell’s Homeward Songs by the Way. The concept of ‘home’ is for Jacques


Derrida a grounding metaphor, as has been seen, in that it suggests being at home in language itself, that is understanding: the ‘self-recognition’ or ‘self-mustering’ (Derrida, ‘White Mythology’, 55). Watt has no home to go to; nor can he find a word that can anchor him in reality. He wants to join the ‘thousands of [his] fellow-creatures’ in calling a pot a pot, so that he, like them, may be called a ‘man’, but he finds no comfort in these arbitrary ascriptions of names to things. Much of Beckett’s work with cliché involves making this language ‘clean’ again by restoring the literal meanings of the words of its familiar metaphors, albeit in unusual or surprising contexts. Belacqua offers a parodically flat take on this strategy in Dream when he spells out his meaning in place of the common idiom to the Smeraldina: ‘ “You look as though you had lost something of great value and found something of no value at all, or next to none” ’ (MPTK, 23). The qualification, ‘or next to none’, is a characteristic one in Beckett’s work, and a significant one. Even the literalization of figures of speech cannot achieve a true or precise expression of ‘face values’. Even in his early fiction Beckett goes beyond the negative deconstruction of rhetoric to a positive expression of the impossibility of describing with these means. Murphy, as has been argued, embodies a resistance to available labels: Celia’s attempts to ‘make a man of Murphy’ succeed only in making him ‘more than ever Murphy’ (M, 107). He is, as the novel says, a ‘surd’ (M, 47) to those around him: not only an unknown but an impossible quantity. Beckett’s characters have an unknowable quality that comes from their refusal or inability to deal in the shared values of their society. In his later work, Beckett makes a more sustained engagement with the problems of representing the real, as criticism of his work has argued at great length. The particular role that Beckett’s use of cliché plays in this respect has been less conspicuous in this criticism, however, and deserves a closer look. Realism, the move to French and the mot juste Beckett’s attitude to language at the beginning of his career was bound up with his own particular cultural background and training. His academic study and teaching seemed at times at odds with the aim of writing creatively. Beckett gave voice to his concern over the matter of expression in an early letter to Thomas Macgreevy, writing to his friend in 1931 on his return to Dublin and to teaching at Trinity College: ‘I wish that we could meet and talk—before I become inarticulate or eloquently suave.’32 Precision was impossible in either direction. These alternatives seemed also to beset his creative endeavours. The danger of using language in an artificial and over-intellectual manner was as real as that of losing the power to use it competently at all. The impression one receives reading Beckett’s early fiction is that he cannot quell the ‘tempest of emblems’ (D, 182), as he puts it in Dream, that surface when he comes to write in his native language: the allusions and quotations, the gratuitous


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scholarship, the stylistic parodies that all seethe in his head. As has often been suggested, the move to French was for Beckett, paradoxically, a way to regain control over the tool of language when words came too easily, rather than not easily enough, to his tongue or pen in English. A passage in Dream reinforces this suggestion. Belacqua comments on writing a stern letter to the Smeraldina’s mother: ‘I don’t know how to write a stinger in English, I always overdo it. In French I can write a fine stinger, but in English I overdo it’ (D, 64). These early texts indeed give the impression of ‘overdoing it’, showily displaying their own stylistic excess, their ‘surplus value’ in Derrida’s terms. This excess is, however, countered in the texts by an expression of self-disgust, his narrators and protagonists displaying a disdainful hostility towards the abundance of their own language. The tensions involved in this position, and the particular context it inhabits for Beckett himself, crystallize in the texts’ preoccupation with the idea of the mot juste. This phrase describes the notion of precision in writing: the idea that there might be a perfect word or phrase for a certain concept or phenomenon. The very phrase itself is, however, already a cliché, as many loan-words from the French in English are, and so its own precision, as well as the precision it offers as a concept, is already in doubt. It is telling that at the moment that the concept is mentioned explicitly in Beckett’s Dream, the author himself seems to insert himself into the text. The narrator identifies or reveals himself to be a certain ‘Mr Beckett’ and Belacqua describes himself to this Mr Beckett, using a phrase which the narrator describes as ‘a red-letter term in the statement of Belacqua and a notable arc of his botched circumscription’: ‘Behold, Mr Beckett’, he said, whitely, ‘a dud mystic.’ He meant mystique raté, but shrank always from the mot juste. (D, 186) Why does Belacqua always shrink from the mot juste? Some interesting issues arise from the doubling that the two languages produce in this context. To begin in the abstract, we might observe that the phrase mot juste, as well as being a cliché, presents a self-defeating paradox. How is it, if a perfect formulation is possible, an objectively and incontrovertibly ‘right word’, that the phrase ‘mot juste’ itself does not exist in English? Secondly, why does Belacqua steer away from the specific French expression ‘mystique raté’ [failed mystic]—a more well known expression, it is suggested, than ‘dud mystic’ (which is itself possibly his own coinage)—in this instance? Is it that he cannot tolerate an accurate description of himself? Or is the idea of a precision that would require one to import expressions from other languages is itself an affectation, an excessive gesture? The degree zero of language— the absolute precision of one word for one concept—here seems itself to be a rhetorical strategy, a contrivance that Belacqua rejects.


The idea of the mot juste in fact throws into confusion the question of what is good writing. Earlier in the novel, Belacqua, musing on the phrase ‘the black diamond of pessimism’, talks admiringly of the French writers Racine and Malherbe for eschewing style in favour of the shining phrase, the pearl of speech among stock phrases: the little sparkle hid in ashes, the precious margaret and hid from many, and the thing that the conversationalist, with his contempt of the tag and the ready-made, can’t give you; because the lift to the high spot is precisely from the tag and the ready-made. The same with the stylist. You couldn’t experience a margarita in d’Annunzio because he denies you the pebbles and flints that reveal it. The uniform, horizontal writing, flowing without accidence, of the man with a style, never gives you the margarita. (D, 47–48)33 He goes on to comment: ‘Perhaps only the French can do it. Perhaps only the French language can give you what you want’ (D, 48). Smooth-flowing, unobtrusive prose is abandoned in favour of a polished phrase, a worked object, which has a dissonant relationship to the words or phrases around it. The unassuming prose of realism is rejected in favour of the ‘greater’ perfection of a piece of language that is prized, the suggestion is, for its own shape rather than its proximity to the world. Belacqua feels at this moment that—as the phrase mot juste itself suggests—the French language is better suited to the expression of such polished periods than the English. The mot juste is not the most accurate or precise language with reference to the world, then, but the language with a rhetorical authority that is born of its own euphony and design. His own attachment to the ‘tag and the ready-made’—an attachment which I contend is central to his work—is underlined by this autobiographically inflected passage, which also casts an interesting light on his quest for the utopian goal of precision in language itself. It is no accident, as Beckett is aware, that French should seem to offer this capacity to create the aphoristic ‘pearl’ of speech. French cultural history tells the story of the protection of the French language in its traditional form under the ancien régime, via the Académie Française and government legislation, a tradition which itself implies that there is an originary and perfect Ur-language to be preserved. The authority and status of this language was of course based on its unchanging nature; French culture cherished the idea—already pejorative in the English term—of the ‘stock phrase’, inflexible and unchallenged. It is this characterization that underlies the ascription of ‘life’ to English idiom, in opposition to the ‘laws’ that create French cliché, in Margery Sabin’s work. The French have then always had a concept of the mot juste that has been lacking in English culture, as well as in its lexicon. It is often argued that English, prizing a greater level of concreteness, has had to approach concepts


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more often via physical analogy, whereas the French prefer the specificity of the concept’s ‘own’ abstract noun or phrase. And it is perhaps the latter’s confidence in a language that can perfectly encapsulate the world in stable units in this way which itself creates the impression of a cliché when French words are used in English. These loan-words from the French create phrases that flaunt their own precision, but which in this particular usage also reveal a laziness in the speaker, too indolent to create an equivalent expression in English. It is more than feasible that Beckett should like such self-defeating words, whose very authority and status count against them when they are used out of context. The very idea of the mot juste arises with the printed word, as Hugh Kenner has argued in his Stoic Comedians. Kenner’s own discussion underlines the paradoxical nature of the concept, and raises the question of how far the idea of the mot juste concerns exactness of reference at all. Kenner describes it as ‘a beauty we owe to the omnipresence of the printer, because oral delivery tends to blur it’ (Kenner, 42), a comment that reinforces the idea that one judges the mot juste in terms of the medium rather than the message. The whole notion of the ‘juste’, which we might assume concerns a ‘natural’ and objective fit between word and world, seems in fact to be about aesthetic taste. The paradox is brought out by Kenner’s comment that ‘exactness of language is pleasing in the way a manufactured thing is’ (Kenner, 42). Exactitude seems to entail artifice; the more exact a thing the more artifice seems to have gone into its construction. As this study has argued, both Joyce and Beckett emphasize the workedness of their language to the point where this effect of exactitude is lost and its authority is undermined. Soon after the discussion of the mot juste in Kenner’s book, he describes Beckett’s work in the following way: Both Flann O’Brien in At-Swim-Two-Birds and Samuel Beckett in his great trilogy of French novels capitalize on the anti-social quality of literature, the fact that the writer is not speaking, is not drinking, is confronting nobody warming and warming to nobody, but exists shut away in a room setting on pieces of paper word after word a deed the very antithesis of everything that Irish culture prides itself on being. (Kenner, 49–50) Kenner’s sense of the ‘writtenness’ of Beckett’s work corresponds to the prominence of the mot juste there. In fact Beckett also creates spoken effects in his writing, as Margery Sabin has argued in her incisive study The Dialect of the Tribe, but he uses the tension between these effects in his writing and its highly worked character to creative ends. The confidential tone and colloquial language comes into collision with arcane allusion and tortuous syntax. An early critic, Edwin Muir, described his prose as ‘good’ but ‘calculated’ talk.34


Even in Beckett’s dialogue, he uses borrowed words, French and otherwise, to illustrate that speech has been infected by the written word, that it is always already influenced by the weight of print culture around it, as the etymology of cliché suggests. Similarly, the strand of stereotypical Irish comedy in his early fiction is always balanced by the over-written nature of the wordplay. Again, the dialogue does not come across as good talk, but as a carefully written version of good talk—perhaps what Muir means. Spoken idiom is reorganized within complex formulations born of a print culture. In the following permutatory examples, Neary and Wylie in Murphy congratulate each other on the craft of their dialogue: ‘I greatly fear,’ said Wylie, ‘that the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech’s daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.’ ‘Very prettily put,’ said Neary. [ ] ‘What I make on the swings of Miss Counihan,’ said Neary, ‘if I understand you, I lose on the roundabouts of the non-Miss Counihan.’ ‘Very prettily put,’ said Wylie. (M, 36, 37) The Irish oral culture is infiltrated and undermined by bons mots learned from a book. These formulations still do not equate to the mot juste, however. Wylie looks for the ‘right word’ to describe Murphy. ‘There seemed to be’, the narrator comments, ‘for once, a right word’ (M, 39). Wylie settles on ‘his surgical quality’. Alas, ‘It was not quite the right word’ (M, 39). It might be argued that Beckett’s move to French later in his writing career did not provide the distance from his cultural heritage for which he might have hoped. French had in fact an important place in Irish culture in Beckett’s time. It was a language of social aspiration in Ireland with the added advantage of providing an alternative cultural allegiance to that of the colonial centre of England. Ironically, of course, it was primarily the educated Anglo-Irish class in Ireland that had had the luxury of such an allegiance, and it was the Anglo-Irish bastion of Trinity College that adopted such habits most enthusiastically, as Beckett’s sarcastic attack on his colleagues’ potin, the French word for tittle-tattle, ironically illustrates. It is no accident that in Flann O’Brien’s ‘Myles na gCopaleen Escort Service’, a satire on Irish aspirational middle-class society published like his similar ‘Catechism of Cliché’ in The Irish Times, many of the ironically exemplary instances of polite conversation are in French. Beckett’s own relationship with the language was of course a more profound one, but it did not lose all of this ambivalence. His playful comment that he chose to write in the French language ‘pour faire remarquer moi’ (to get himself noticed) contains a further paradox in this respect. He may try to divest himself of the relationship


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between rhetoric and power that operates in the language that he inherits, the voice in his head that seethes with the colonial inheritance of English literature, the biblical language of the Authorized Version, and Christianity’s more diffuse legacy, but he is well aware that French brings with it a whole new set of associations and is no more pristine for being new, or at least newer, to him. The real in Beckett’s later fiction This preoccupation with precision, and its seductive dangers, develops in Beckett’s later writing, where his engagement with the conventions of classical realism wanes. What results from this preoccupation, however—as Beckett is well aware—is precisely the opposite of what his narrators intend: an inevitable fall into imprecision. In trying to be precise they both overdo it and yet never say enough. As Molloy memorably comments, ‘whatever I said it was never enough and always too much’ (T , 34). Gilles Deleuze has written of this constant tension in Beckett’s work: ‘What Blanchot says of Musil is equally true of Beckett: the greatest exactitude and the most extreme indeterminacy; the indefinite exchange of mathematical formulations, and the pursuit of the formless or the unformulated.’35 Both writers try, for Deleuze, to be exhaustive in their description as his essay ‘The ´ Exhausted’ [L’Epuis´ e] argues, and hence to exhaust the process of naming itself. This is what Deleuze calls ‘language I’ [langue I], a language that makes words identical to things in order to exhaust the possible and, the suggestion is, to find something beyond the limitations of the rational mind. The first stage of this process, for Beckett, is to probe the clichés that are habitual in the description of external behaviour. How is it, his work asks, that language designed to create the effect of precision in verisimilitude can turn so easily into its opposite? Beckett already deals playfully with such cliché in certain passages of Murphy. At the beginning of the novel, for instance, Celia startles Murphy as he rocks naked, tied to his rocking chair, and the chair falls over to trap him: Only the most local movements were possible, a licking of the lips, a turning of the other cheek to the dust, and so on. Losing no time in idle speculation Celia undid the scarves and prised the chair off him with all possible speed. (M, 20) Beckett interleaves flat description with familiar clichés, expressions themselves so banal that they are barely recognizable as figurative. The reader registers, however, that there is something out of the ordinary, something of Derrida’s surplus in these expressions, the merest shape of a formulation familiar from another context. These phrases hover therefore between the literal and the metaphorical: Murphy does not turn his cheek to the dust,


but his other cheek, using a favourite biblical image that Beckett reprises later in the novel. To turn one’s cheek: this idea represents the passive side of Christianity, and therefore its most attractive side for one such as Murphy. But here the expression is literal: he can with some effort put either cheek in the dust, although it is unlikely he would make such an effort. Celia, by contrast, operates ‘with all possible speed’. This second description reads at first glance as the discourse of a mystery or adventure novel, by which Beckett is giving a ridiculous situation an ironic veneer of dramatic energy. Yet the opposite is true. The irony in this passage rests in Beckett’s ability to make more explicit language that few would recognize as anything other than plain and direct in the first place. These clichés are not reanimated, then, but their particular applications to this context are drawn out with fastidious care. They become, somehow, too true: obvious, and so redundant. Celia’s speculation would indeed be idle: how could she possibly interpret such strange behaviour? She operates with all possible speed: as fast as she could in this particular set of circumstances. The descriptions of Mr Kelly, Celia’s grandfather, similarly reveal a narrator sceptical about the possibilities for verisimilitude in description: Mr Kelly started up in the bed. His eyes could not very well protrude, so deeply were they imbedded, but they could open, and this they did. (M, 11) Mr Kelly saw no reason why he should contain himself any longer. He started up in bed, which opened his eyes, as he knew perfectly well it would (M, 15) The general laws to which actions in realist fiction are meant to conform, and in particular the logic of cause and effect usually to be found there, are both parodied here. The narrator is over-scrupulous in establishing the initial gesture: we might, according to the familiar repertoire of gestures in realist fiction, expect Mr Kelly’s eyes to ‘protrude’ as he starts up in bed in shock. The narrator may flout this convention, but he creates another: an association with Mr Kelly that once established becomes a stock element in his characterization and is used again a few pages later. This is the knack of Nabokov’s ‘professional novelist’, who, having ‘given a character of his some mannerism or a dog’, has ‘to go on producing that dog or that mannerism every time the character crops up in the course of the book’.36 In addition, the gesture that was intended to signify surprise seems in fact fully stagemanaged and deliberate on Mr Kelly’s part the second time around: he, like Murphy, begins to ‘know the formula’. Mr Kelly knows his own status as a ‘puppet’ in this story of Murphy, and plays the part with a studied deliberation. These descriptions may contain elements that are ironically superfluous, but they do give some minimal information about the characters themselves,


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and are in keeping with their demeanour: Celia as practical, Murphy as passive, Mr Kelly resigned to the role of aged and unheeded relative. But do we find, in addition to what is retained of characterization in Beckett’s writing, any of the most ‘real’ of realist writing, what Roland Barthes called the ‘reality effect’: objects and elements in a description that offer nothing to advance our knowledge of character or plot, that are simply there?37 In Beckett’s earliest works, there is little external description, and even in Murphy this is kept to a minimum. Mr Kelly chides Celia for telling the story of her liaison with Murphy with too much external detail: ‘ “But I beseech you,” said Mr. Kelly, “be less beastly circumstantial. [ ] Get up to your man” ’ (M, 13). In Beckett’s later fiction, however, he tries a new tack. In the vain hope of making language adequate to description, his narrator takes an object and aims to describe it with crazed exhaustiveness. Here, for example, is Malone’s description of Macmann’s coat: In other words, when he walks, or simply stands stockstill, the tails of his coat literally sweep the ground and rustle like a train, when he walks. And indeed this coat terminates in a fringe, like certain curtains, and the thread of the sleeves too is bare and frayed into long waving strands that flutter in the wind. And the hands too are hidden. For the sleeves of this vast rag are of a piece with its other parts. But the collar has remained intact, being of velvet or perhaps shag. Not as to the colour of this coat, for colour too is an important consideration, there is no good denying it, all that can be said is that green predominates. And it might safely be wagered that this coat, when new, was of a fine plain green colour, what you might call cab green, for there used to be cabs and carriages rattling through the towns with panels of a handsome bottle green, I must have seen them myself and even driven in them, I would not put it past me. (T , 228) At first, this looks like the purest possible example of what Philippe Hamon has called ‘une thématique vide’: a thematic emptiness that attaches to pure, unmotivated reference or description.38 Nothing is at stake in such description but its showing of the world: it constitutes, in Barthes’s words, ‘literary tautology’ in aiming to create an exact replica of the world in words—at the far pole of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’.39 In fact, however, Beckett’s version of such description is deliberately counterproductive. The most curious aspect of such passages is that they fail to set their object before our eyes in a vivid manner. This is in part—like the failed clichés of action in Murphy—because they are too accurate: this passage does not give us the overall impression of the coat, or the type of coat, preferring instead to break the object down into its constituents. It proceeds by a kind of parody of method that is in fact unsystematic. Such passages are, however, in other respects too inaccurate: the analogies that the narrator chooses are invariably


unhelpful, and his scrupulous recording of his doubts and uncertainties as to the detail makes it impossible for the reader to picture the object as any one determined image. The theme, if we can identify one, is the wandering journey of memory and perhaps language itself around an object that is gradually lost from view. A more complete sabotage still of the reality effect are the mysterious objects that the narrators of Beckett’s trilogy fail to identify. Beckett’s narrators try to apply scientific principles to the task of description, conforming to a distorted notion of system whereby if one is ascertaining dimensions, angles, textures and so on, one is identifying an object (rather than, in reality, simply collecting discrete pieces of information about it). The idea of rational language, and precision itself, breaks down here. We see that description must be motivated, and therefore partial: language must be precise according to a specific set of requirements, rather than simply in the endless accruing of information. The paratactic organization of the description of Macmann’s coat (the ‘and and’ structure) appears to follow some sort of order, but in fact illustrates that no piece of the information gathered has any more importance than any other piece, that there is no hierarchy of significance, and therefore no meaning attached to this description. The buttons on Macmann’s coat are treated in this deceptively precise manner: Now with regard to the buttons of this coat, they are not so much genuine buttons as little wooden cylinders two or three inches long, with a hole in the middle for the thread And cylinders is perhaps an exaggeration, for if some of these little sticks or pegs are in fact cylindrical, still more have no definable form. But all are roughly two and a half inches long (T , 228–229) Not only are these pieces of information unmotivated, but the effort to be precise means that the description concentrates on and refines its own terms, unseating every statement made about the buttons. This is what Beckett has called a ‘syntax of weakness’ (Harvey, 249), a kind of verbal backsliding whereby the more words are said, the less meaning is communicated. Such a syntax is not simply a matter of verbal structure, but also a kind of ‘mental syntax’, the principles of method themselves. The most famous of such descriptions in Beckett’s work is perhaps that of the object that Molloy steals from Lousse: Among these latter there was one which haunts me still, from time to time. It consisted of two crosses joined, at their points of intersection, by a bar, and resembled a tiny sawing-horse, with this difference, however, that the crosses of the true sawing-horse are not perfect crosses, but truncated at the top, whereas the crosses of the little object I am referring to were


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perfect, that is to say composed each of two little identical V’s, one upper with is opening above, like all V’s for that matter, and the other lower with its opening below, or more precisely of four rigorously identical V’s, the two I have just named and then two more (T , 63) This object frustrates all attempts to fully describe it, and all analogies that Molloy tries to assign to it. The syntax is characteristic here of what Walter Ong called Beckett’s ‘ostentatiously logical’ style of writing (Ong, 14), something Ong associates with the self-consciously ‘written’ nature of Beckett’s prose.40 The description makes a qualification of every statement to no clear end. Even the terms ‘right and left’, ‘upper and lower’ cannot be applied to this object, as it is unclear which way up it is supposed to stand. There is a certain fascination in such descriptions, but it is a fascination not with the object of the description, but with the mind that is itself so absorbed by, or at least so compelled to record, its perception of such objects. Its lack of function is of course what gives this object its fascination for Beckett’s narrator: I could never bring myself to sell it, even in my worst need, for I could never understand what possible purpose it could serve, nor even contrive the faintest hypothesis on the subject. (T , 63) It is tempting as a critic to load this functionless object with all the significance of Kant’s thing-in-itself, the motiveless object that can for once be seen in its own right, in its existence as autonomous ‘stuff’, without the burden of the spectator’s interest or anthropocentric desire to relate this object to his or her own needs or desires. The thematic emptiness of realist fiction is thus converted into a real engagement with the world in itself. Yet this is not quite what we see here. It is, as has been suggested, the emptiness of his own mind—his lack of a ‘hypothesis’—rather than the object itself that so fascinates Molloy. Anthony Uhlmann invokes Bergson in reading this passage: normally, the perceiver gives the object ‘a continuity in time and a place among all the other perceived objects in space’ by means of memory and habit. This habitual context gives the objects and the response to them the quality of the ‘ready-made’.41 This encounter of Molloy’s is qualitatively different, however, a ‘quasi-religious experience’, the ‘emptying [of] the body of all conscious thought, of all perception’ (Uhlmann, 76). To this extent, the object itself is irrelevant. Furthermore, the object is a manmade object, and so cannot help but conform to the view of the universe as formed matter that thinkers such as Heidegger as well as Bergson wanted to dispel. Consequently, it does not challenge Molloy’s view of the world in the way that, for example, the black tree stump challenges Roquentin in Sartre’s La Nausée with its alterity: a ‘soft, monstrous’ mass, ‘in disorder—naked, with a frightening, obscene


nakedness’.42 It is not the object’s otherness, outside the context of the ‘ready-made’, that enthralls Molloy but the perception it affords him of his own ignorance, the breakdown of his own ratiocination. Beckett’s writing does not escape the constraining human forms of reason to represent the real in itself, but it does explore the experience of returning to first principles and challenging the authority of any one mode of explaining the world, any totalizing discourse. Ignorance becomes, as Uhlmann argues in relation to such passages and I have suggested in the introduction to this study, a redemptive strategy. Not only does it prevent the kind of ‘complacency’ that Gilles Deleuze describes in authoritative philosophical and epistemological systems, but it also allows us a more positive mode of engaging with the world. It is apposite then that Uhlmann borrows the term for this experience from Deleuze himself, whose idea of ‘apprehension’ allows the subject to experience the world without fixing it with a label or reducing it to a single meaning as the ‘reason-ridden mind’ would habitually have us do. Molloy is famously lyrical about the boons of actively choosing such a strategy: For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker. (T , 64) Uhlmann observes that Molloy talks about his ignorance of the provenance and function of the object in ‘quasi-religious terms’ because it gives him an ‘opening’ onto ‘pure concatenation’, the ‘true absence of relation’ (Uhlmann, 77). Perception gives way to apprehension. This would be the ‘undimmed’ moment of epiphany imagined in Worstward Ho when words were silenced: ‘Blanks for when words gone. When now how on. Then all seen as only then. Undimmed. All undimmed that words dim’ (WH, 124). This is, in Deleuze’s terms, the true ignorance of the uncomplacent thinker. This is still, however, to mystify the experience of the thing-in-itself. Uhlmann correspondingly invokes the famous passage in Proust about the object ‘detached from the sanity of a cause’: when the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and then only may it be a source of enchantment. (P, 11) The episode in Molloy seems to me to have a rather more ironic, even parodic relation to this passage, so often invoked by Beckett’s critics, than


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Uhlmann suggests. It is clear that the object has a function, and so its wouldbe exhaustive (but never complete) description is for the reader at least a continuing puzzle, the answer to which we expect with every new detail given. However ‘incurious’ Molloy might be, the reader discovers that she or he is not yet ready for this beautific condition. The reality effect, however thematically empty, relies on the fact that its unmotivated content is at least recognizable. By flouting this fundamental contract with the reader, Beckett shows us our own attachment to the habit of assigning fixed and habitual identities to objects, rather than allowing us to luxuriate in the freedom of perception that Molloy’s wide-eyed ‘apprehension’ might bring. That we later discover it to be a ‘knife-rest’ (T , 259) or ‘knife-holder’ (ISIS, 37)—‘Question answered’ (ISIS, 37) as the narrator in Ill Seen Ill Said puts it—closes down the possibility that the reader can preserve this experience of freedom or ever read this passage in anything other than an ironic light. Beckett cannot, in words, give us the ‘blanks when words gone’, but only show us how words expend themselves uselessly in trying to convey the ‘absence of relation’ that a true apprehension of the object would entail— the object ‘detached from the sanity of a cause’, as Beckett puts it. Words, even in Beckett’s hands, cannot exhaust themselves—in Deleuze’s sense of the word—so fully as to go ‘nohow on’, to stop and reveal what lies beyond. ∗

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∗

Using cliché, as Beckett does, so that the reader’s attention is drawn to it anew, reveals to us that we both as individuals and as a society forget the processes whereby we arrive at meaning—we lose the ability to think from first principles, accepting the ready-made concepts and forms of expression that are at hand around us. Roland Barthes has asked, as was cited earlier, how we can deflate such stupidity without assuming intelligence in ourselves (Barthes/Miller, S/Z, 212). Flaubert’s novels, as has been seen, provide a clear example of a strategy whereby one foregrounds stupidity and habit without analysing it and thereby risking the communication of the writer’s own preconceptions and prejudices. This linguistic mimesis can teach us about general patterns of thinking from which no one is immune. Beckett too finds a strategy whereby his characters use commonplace language, but in such a way that they themselves are detached from it; this is language in the mouths of babes, every word seeming genuinely unfamiliar to the character who utters it. These are figures radically untutored in the ways of the world, negotiating it with inappropriate linguistic means. This very ignorance, in a theological paradox, makes them wise, however—if only in so far as they know that they are ignorant. As the Unnamable puts it, they can identify themselves and others with a rare authority as ‘those that are not in the know, that is to say, all mankind’ (T , 347).


Flaubert’s idea of bêtise, a common language resistant to appropriation by an individual voice, is evidenced in the cliché in Beckett’s work. For Flaubert, bêtise permeates our every utterance, making the content of our minds indistinguishable from that of those around us: self is in danger of being conflated with other. Christopher Prendergast describes Flaubert’s bêtise as a sponge ‘absorbing and appropriating all those orders of discourse that seek to reject or subvert it’.43 Deleuze similarly described bêtise as the apprehension of a mind which is as unformed as ‘the cesspool a universal substance [that is] to be digested, vegetal’ (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 196). Yet metaphor and the tropes of cliché are formal entities: they have a cognitive function, and work as an organizing principle by which we make associations and reconcile new ideas to existing conceptual systems. Indeed, cliché can be seen to approach pure form: an instance of figure in which the form of the figure has ossified, has become, in Paulhan’s terms, a hypertrophy of words at the expense of the idea (Paulhan, 77). Is it not, then, the opposite of the chaos or mess that Beckett sees confronting us in the world? Bêtise, for Flaubert, is after all to ‘vouloir conclure’.44 How can this be the form which Beckett was looking for in order to ‘accommodate the mess’ and ‘let in’ the ‘confusion’ around us (Driver, 22)? Cliché seen as a kind of total form, detached from its referent, approaches mere sound. Form and content are in danger of being conflated. The ordering mind becomes ‘légumineux’ in Deleuze’s terms and can no longer order the world; both have lost their shape. Cliché is like Murphy’s coat, to be compared to a ‘punctured ball that will not retain an impression’ (M, 82). It may be possible to puncture and deflate the ideas contained in this vocabulary in a particular situation, but the vocabulary itself seems immune to rejuvenation by contact with new information or inspiration. We talk about the world in phrases which form a self-enclosed system, as Jonathan Culler suggests in response to Flaubert’s work: like Molloy’s sucking-stones, language is ‘a set of objects with which man plays but which do not speak to him’.45 Beckett does not then, in my argument, gesture beyond language towards the noumenous ‘real’, so much as showing us the face values contained within our own language and how much falls outside these values, despite the illusion of the real that this language can contrive.

2

Cliche´ and Memory

my memory obviously that too all-important. —HI, 16

I Introduction: Memory and automatism To look for the ‘real’, what it is that might be ‘represented’, in Beckett’s mature writing is of necessity to look for memory. First of all, to write any character from any point of view is to concern oneself with his or her memory, his or her past. And in addition, much of Beckett’s work in particular is first-person narrative, concerned exclusively with a character’s own memories. The first works in French in particular—Beckett’s novellas of the late 1940s, the great trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and his early theatre—all give particular emphasis to the idea of memory and its relation to the narrating subject. How much of this memory, this chapter asks, can be seen to be the subject’s ‘own’, and that authority is this ambiguous material given in their negotiation of themselves and the world? Cliché itself is a kind of collective memory, a storehouse of expressions that hark back, as has been suggested, to the world of the distant or the recent past. It is strange, then, that Beckett’s characters, whose own memory is so unreliable and whose reminiscences are consequently so vague and elliptical, should have so much of this common language to draw on, albeit without a firm grasp on either its meaning or its provenance. Nonetheless, the status of this kind of verbal memory in Beckett’s writing, and its relationship to the idea of lived memory there, is a crucial part of the function of cliché in Beckett’s mature work. The status of the memories in Beckett’s work is an intriguing one. His characters often cannot, or at least feel peculiarly disinclined to, acknowledge their memories as their own. It is often left unspecified whether the past-tense episodes that surface in the present tense of Beckett’s texts are memories at all, rather than imagination or borrowed anecdote. More than 65


in any other work, furthermore, the status of other kinds of textual material as a kind of ‘memory’ is explored: images, phrases, and even rhythms and sound-patterns, as Adam Piette has argued, recur across texts and constitute a kind of reserve of personal association that blurs the distinction between the characters and contexts of the different works. Many questions are raised about these textual echoes, not least where they come from. Critics have also long been fascinated in particular by the relationship between the fictional memories in Beckett’s writing and the writer’s own life. It is particularly tempting for Beckett’s critics to find an explanation for unmotivated textual material in the forbidden garden of the author’s own experience. The tone of Beckett’s work makes it hard, however, to determine the motivation of its material. The reader or audience for Beckett’s work is constantly alert to the question of whether the expression of this textual memory is strategic, for rhetorical or aesthetic effect, or born of involuntary feeling. Furthermore, it might be argued, this is a question that applies not only to the narrators’ performance in the dramatic situation of the text, but also to Beckett’s own creative process. Adam Piette makes an interesting and subtle argument on this point in his book on sound-memory in modernist prose. He argues in relation to certain acoustic patterns in Beckett’s text that the reader struggles between two interpretations of these effects: are they a sign of real feeling or a stylistic flourish, a matter of ‘authorial control’? What is so fascinating about Beckett’s work, however, as Piette argues, is that this question is internalized there: it is ‘increasingly unclear to the narrative voice itself’ which motivation is the correct one (Piette, 231). Beckett’s characters can speak no more authoritatively about their own past lives, or their favoured expressive gestures, than those of others. Such memories are indeed no more authoritative or revealing than the fictional stories that they tell about themselves, and they often struggle to tell the two apart. The relationship between the ‘natural’ language of feeling and the artificial language of story or stylistic gesture founders in Beckett’s work, making even more opaque the question of his own investment in the memories his works obliquely or directly represent. The question that Piette raises about the motivation of the acoustic memories in Beckett’s texts can also be applied to the specific allusions in Beckett’s writing. The issue seems clearer in this case, with respect to material that is manifestly the words of others, but I would argue that this is not necessarily so. There is no stable language of the self from which these allusions diverge: instead, Beckett’s narrators compose themselves through these different rhetorical positions, and risk ‘forgetting themselves’ as Beckett’s narrators often put it in giving rein to a beautiful phrase or vehement opinion. What happens purely at the level of style in the earliest fiction starts to apply to the content of the later works, Beckett’s narrators trying on ready-made positions, as well as registers, for size. Some opening remarks are necessary in introduction to the complex and ambiguous presentation of memory in Beckett’s works. First, it should be

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remarked that memory is often considered dangerous by Beckett’s narrators. They may, I would argue, display not only their memories but also—and perhaps principally—the strategies for protecting themselves against the more painful or psychologically disturbing of these memories. They are aware in any case, as are many literary narrators (and Proust’s Marcel, notably comes to mind), that memory is recreated or rewritten in the present, and so the memories in the narratives are only a sort of facsimile of their past experience, if not a deliberate travesty of it. As the narrator of How It Is says of a recounted memory, ‘is it me I’m not like that any more’ (HI, 18). Finally, they are also aware that writing or speaking memories can produce feelings in this narrative present, as well as simply awakening old ones. Feelings other than those attached to the original incident can be generated by the artful expression of a memory; likewise, emotive memories can be chewed over so often as to become tasteless—but also safely innocuous. All of these considerations might act as caveats to the reader who might draw a direct connection between the apparent expression of a memory, and the past emotional life of the character who expresses it, let alone between such a memory and the author Samuel Beckett himself. This chapter will consider in particular what relationship cliché has to the presentation of memory in Beckett’s mature works of the 1950s and 1960s and to the writing process in this period that Beckett called the ‘long siege in the room’ (Cronin, 372). Cliché is, as has been said, a kind of textual memory, the echo of an original utterance that is not one’s own but part of the collective memory of common cultural reference. As such it might appear to have little to do with the questions hitherto raised, questions about the link between memory and identity, between memory and imagination, between the art-work and artist (in this case) himself. This is far from being the case, however, as this chapter argues. The public language of cliché is often used to express what appears to be a character’s private memory, or is invoked when the narrator is trying to understand a particular incident or experience of his past life. Why might this be so? And how does Beckett in particular make public cliché into so very idiosyncratic and sometimes obscurely private a language of his own? Even the most hackneyed clichés often gain some personal resonance in being applied to Beckett’s narrators’ lives, and in their reworking in these narrators’ particular voices. The strategy, if it is one, of using impersonal language to keep the personal at bay is more often than not confounded by the new meanings this reworked cliché accrues. Sometimes, as Deleuze puts it in his essay on ‘exhaustion’ in Beckett’s work, ‘the image doesn’t fully succeed in disengaging itself from a memory-image’ (Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, n. 22, 26). Far from the narrators being unable to express themselves in the language given to them, it turns out that it may often become more expressive than they intend or wish.


Cliché’s status as automatic language is then a double-edged one. It comes to the lips or the pen ready-made and so advertises its prefabricated, secondhand quality. This is discourse that comes from elsewhere and has been made by someone else. On the other hand, its familiarity makes it rise unbidden, thoughtlessly, as if the speaker is somehow possessed, and as such it might have the potential to take them back to some earlier moment, to reveal an underlying association, much as physical sensation does in Proust’s imaginative scheme. Beckett began to think about this possibility early in his life. He wrote to Thomas MacGreevy, at the time of his lengthy period of psychoanalysis in 1936: As I write, think, move, speak, praise and blame, I see myself living up to the specimen that these 2 years have taught me I am. The word is not out before I am blushing for my automatism.1 It is worth asking in this regard how far the cliché in Beckett’s text presents itself as a strategy for rhetorical control, and how far it in fact represents a ceding of this control in the face of an irrepressible fear or desire. Borrowed or contrived memory in general, and cliché in particular, seems at first to be a way for Beckett’s narrators to avoid feeling and to suppress their own origins. The confusion of rhetorical and ‘direct’ expression of feeling is rather a strategy which Beckett’s narrators cultivate than a condition to which they submit. The drama in Beckett’s writing comes in the failure of these techniques of self-protection, however. In fact, their seemingly unmotivated choice of expressive gesture generates unexpected feeling and reproduces earlier textual moments, compelling them in the end to reiterate the most fundamental drives, desires and attachments of their existence. The authority of ‘lived experience’ is not then for Beckett’s characters their own authority, a wisdom or emotional expressiveness born of experience and the reflection on experience in tranquility. Instead, it is an authority which they somehow experience as outside themselves, frightening and painful, and to which they submit. As in many areas of experience, Beckett’s characters relinquish agency to the point where what is subjective is recast as objective and outside the self. Memories recur unbidden, and are dangerously unstable. Even when the memory itself lies hidden, its symptoms— unconnected images, rhythms and compulsions—surface in their utterances. Memories may only be words, but these words become almost physical objects of attachment, provoking violent reactions in their speaker and conjuring images over which this speaker has only partial control. The only cure seems to be to repeat certain memories until they become innocuous, or consciously to borrow the words of others to distance one from such attachments. To deal in memory for Beckett’s narrators is then to relinquish control even over what is most one’s own.

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II Remembering and imagining things Proust, Beckett and memory avoidance Beckett’s mature work both develops and moves away from the influence of Marcel Proust, the great artist of memory. In particular, the ideas about involuntary memory in Proust’s novel seem to be treated with some ambivalence by Beckett in his own work, as the proceeding remarks have suggested. Proust’s narrator is given, suddenly and uncharacteristically, ‘genuine and fruitful pleasure’ by these flashes of involuntary memory, these sensations that transport him to a state of consciousness that he describes as both past and present simultaneously: in other words, ‘withdrawn from Time’.2 These moments of obliviousness to the present and the passage of time are, of necessity, ‘fugitive’ but they give Marcel, as he says, the creative ‘method’ and the structural ‘edifice’ (Proust, In Search of Lost Time, VI, 442) with which he will proceed to write his book: the task was to interpret the given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas, by trying to think—that is to say, to draw forth from the shadow—what I had merely felt, by trying to convert it into its spiritual equivalent. And this method, which seemed to me the sole method, what was it but the creation of a work of art? (Proust, In Search of Lost Time, VI, 232) The experience of ‘extra-temporal joy’ (Proust, In Search of Lost Time, VI, 231) and the intimation of the inexorable march of Time is the double (and paradoxical) gift that Proust’s involuntary memories seem to offer. Beckett’s narrators, on the other hand, are implacably against the expression and exploration of such involuntary memories. ‘Memories are killing’ (CSP, 46–47), the narrator of his novella, ‘The Expelled’, observes somewhat out of the blue at one moment: the pain and the psychic danger of memories returning unannounced is often felt to be overwhelming, ‘literally unendurable’ (T , 12) as Molloy puts it. A character in Malone Dies, too, is ‘flayed alive by memories’ (T , 268–269), and the narrator sympathizes with his desire to hit his own head, ‘the seat of all the shit and misery’. In this context, the goal for Beckett’s protagonists seems to be precisely to remove the feeling from such episodes, in order to disarm them. The narrator of ‘The Expelled’ describes one strategy for doing so: Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you. Or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little. That is to say, you must think of them for a while, a good while, every day several times a day, until they sink forever into the mud. That’s an order. (CSP, 46–47)


In this way, the danger involved in the unexpected possession of the mind by an involuntary memory is protected against. As Jean Paulhan counseled writers on the topic of cliché, this passage seems to suggest that to repeat something voluntarily until it becomes unremarkable is to draw its poison. This strategy itself is not approached without a certain ambivalence, however. Quite apart from the questionable psychology of this advice, there is a strange note struck at the end of this passage. ‘That’s an order’: what had read as benign self-help suddenly turns into something more sinister. A continuity is established at this moment between this early text and the late drama—plays such as Rough for Radio II, Play and What Where—in which characters are constrained under a kind of interrogation to speak their memories under threat of pain or death. Remembering, the repetition of inevitably painful experience for Beckett’s narrators, is always felt as a form of torture, albeit an inescapable one. Beckett’s work seems to situate itself at the opposite pole from Proust’s in this respect. This strategy of repetition makes voluntary memory more important and more valued for Beckett’s narrators than the involuntary kind. Beckett perhaps inclines towards Joyce here: a passage in Proust’s novel which dwells on the capacity of material to fade from the memory is scored and described in the margin of Beckett’s copy as ‘Utterly non-Joycian’.3 Joyce’s exhaustive regurgitation of detail in Ulysses contrasts strikingly with Proust’s emphasis on the centrality of forgetting to an epiphanic experience of the past. Beckett’s relationship with the past in fact differs from both. His narrators certainly extol forgetfulness. The significance of their memories, however, is neither in illuminating a wealth of present detail (‘Joycian’) nor in revealing underlying assocations between events or emotional milestones in their past (Proustian). In fact, it is advantageous for Beckett’s narrators to stress the disjunction of the memories that they describe from one another, to avoid any suggestion of connections between their memories, or the existence of key desires or preoccupations beneath the surface of their narrative. Molloy digresses at one point on the subject of the bicycle he once owned: ‘To describe it at length would be a pleasure’ (T , 16). The ‘at length’ is revealing: the pleasure is precisely in the unnecessary length of the description, the restful attention given to an innocuous and commonplace memory detached from the narrative itself. But this strategy is a poor one, insufficiently ingenious, and its failure is laid bare shortly after these comments: What a rest to speak of bicycles and horns. Unfortunately it is not them of which I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. (T , 16) If this is a version of Freud’s ‘screen memory’, a voluntary recollection produced by the ego to conceal the real scene of trauma, it is (deliberately on Molloy’s part) only a poor and obvious imitation of one. It does

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represent a strategy widespread among Beckett’s narrators, however: that of taking memories as a starting point for a rhetorical elaboration—here that of sentimental personal reminiscence on the pleasures of bicycle-owning—that distracts from the dangerous emotional subject matter to which the narrative has come close. As The Unnamable will show much more dramatically, this strategy confines memory to the repetition of mere words, and words interchangeable with other such verbal material rather than memories that run threateningly deep. The plagiarism of the self This strategy gives an indication of the character of Beckett’s mid-period works. The narrators there cannot recognize any words or thoughts as more appropriate to their self-expression than any other, but nonetheless allow themselves to be caught up in the occasional expressive gesture. The idea that the self may be constructed rather than discovered is of course there in Beckett’s work from the very beginning. This lies behind Beckett’s very particular reading of Proust’s work in his monograph. What resonates for Beckett most in Proust’s novel is the suggestion of a discontinuity of the self, Proust’s idea of the ‘intermittences du coeur’, and he calls the section where the writer elaborates on this idea in the ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ section of the novel ‘perhaps the greatest passage Proust ever wrote’ (P, 25). The subject is constantly vigilant, Beckett argues in Proust, to paper over the cracks that appear at the moments of transition between different emotional and behavioural attitudes, different habits of living. As a result, as Proust puts it and Beckett (unashamedly but without acknowledgment) quotes him in Proust: ‘at any given moment, our total soul, in spite of its rich balance-sheet, has only a fictitious value’ (P, 27).4 The self is created from the constant work of voluntary memory, a ‘function’ of its ‘impeccable habit’, which gives the illusion of a uniform experience of life and so a uniform perceiving subject. Beckett’s essay on the author reiterates Proust’s suggestion that we sustain an awareness of our identity by this ‘plagiarism of the self’—a self-plagiarism whereby we repeat certain patterns of behaviour and repeatedly invoke memories and cultural associations until they seem characteristic of us (P, 20). Just as Freud compares the self to a text that is ceaselessly written and rewritten by the ‘censor’ of the ego, Proust indicates that the construction of a subject in literature enacts the same mechanisms that we use constantly but unwittingly to sustain an idea of ourselves.5 This question of subjectivity itself is confused in Beckett’s early work with the allusiveness of his own prose style in a very direct manner. His protagonist, Belacqua, in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks than Kicks perceives himself largely through the medium of the books he reads. Beckett himself acknowledged that this is reflected in the style and content of the works, calling Dream ‘the chest into which I threw my wild thoughts’,


a chest that he ‘pilfered’ throughout his writing career (D, xiii–xiv). John Pilling has similarly described the book as ‘part loose-leaf folder for any passing expressive gesture’.6 Both comments identify it as reminiscent of the commonplace book kept by pre-Romantic writers, where their most cherished (or hated) material would be stored and organized, but never entirely subsumed into an artistic vision or subdued to their own imagination. Like Swift’s Tale of a Tub, this work was a résumé not of Belacqua’s (or Beckett’s) experience of life, but of all that peculiar mode of experience that books contained.7 The self is not constructed with reference to feeling or experience in this work, but in relation to more mediated sources of value and knowledge. Questions of authorial control, in Piette’s words, therefore attach not only to the utterances of Beckett’s characters, but also to Beckett’s own creative endeavour. In fact Beckett’s allusion in his early works is not a sign of a failing in his own creativity so much as an active commitment to other people’s words that continues throughout his writing life. In the early work, it is a submission to learnt stylistic gestures; later, it is the more active engagement with the ordinary language of everyday speech. Beckett remakes familiar words and images in this later work according to his own design, but his narrators are always emphatic that these are other people’s and that it is outside the self that they go in order to elaborate their sense of selfhood. The cliché in his work, providing the link between fallen literary allusion and more prosaic everyday idiom, underlines the fact that even the most innocent language is marked by traits that impose themselves upon the speaker’s identity. To acknowledge this is as close as one can come, for Beckett, to speaking ‘truly’ and in earnest. The development of Beckett’s work also seems to follow in exemplary fashion the advice Proust gave in an essay on Flaubert in Contre Sainte-Beuve. Proust counsels that the young writer should ‘Do wilful pastiche to find your own voice, become original again, and thus avoid doing involuntary pastiche all your life’ (CSB, 594).8 The process is not quite as simple as this in Beckett’s work, however, where the relationship between another’s voice and one’s own is an anxious one, and where this anxiety itself is made a central theme. The early work gives voice to this issue at many points. Belacqua apparently adopts the phrase ‘I am what I am’ as his own without such anxiety: ‘That was the end of all [Belacqua’s] meditations: I am what I am. He had read the phrase somewhere and liked it and made it his own’ (MPTK, 172). The ironic nature of the relationship between the content of the phrase and Belacqua’s calm appropriation of it is, however, clear. In a similar vein Beckett included in his addenda to Watt the Latin maxim (of—ironically— uncertain origin) pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt (W, 251)—‘let those who used our words before us perish’. What is ‘our own’ in both these instances is a comically muddy issue. Freud wrote on the unconscious submission to outside influences, calling the unwitting reproduction of others’ ideas or

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words as one’s own ‘cryptomnesia’ (Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, XXIII, 245). Cliché as a quotation that has lost its author but which nonetheless advertises its own borrowed nature allows Beckett to keep his borrowings conscious, if not directly acknowledged, and to avoid the danger of this unwitting repetition. These words have been thought of, like voluntary memories, ‘a good while, every day, several times a day’, rather than being found in the mind by accident or surprise. Another strategy in Beckett’s early work for signaling his awareness of the second-hand nature of his language is the exaggerated disgust that often accompanies his protagonists’ own utterances. This is signalled both within these works and by Beckett’s attitude to them. Just as the narrator comments disdainfully on Belacqua’s ‘sweet style’ in Dream, Beckett himself wrote more candidly of a very early short story ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’ that ‘of course it stinks of Joyce in spite of the most earnest endeavours to endow it with my own odours ’9 Later on, however, he stages this powerlessness in the fabric of his narrative itself, and so disarms it. The narrator in the English version of Molloy gives us a characteristically Joycean pun: imagining himself ‘on the black boat of Ulysses’, he writes, ‘from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake’ (T , 51, my italics). He manages to evoke the idea of both ‘poring’ over a book (Ulysses, explicitly, but perhaps also Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which Beckett helped to translate) and recapitulating Joyce himself (rejoicing) in an ambivalent fashion (sadly rejoicing). Fittingly, the theme of this passage as a whole is the futility of the human will—Beckett also reprises here the philosopher Geulincx’s image of crawling eastward on a ship that sails inexorably westward. Imitating Joyce in a deliberately Joycean fashion, he wards off unwitting cryptomnesia, but he also writes large the ‘impotence’ as an artist he ascribes to himself in contrast with Joyce’s ‘omnipotence’.10 Even in Beckett’s early writing he is asking questions about verbal performance and personal feeling that anticipate the deliberate complication of this relationship in his later work. In the story ‘A Wet Night’ in More Pricks than Kicks, a poetry reading occasions some remarks on this topic. As the Poet rehearses his poem, the narrator comments, ‘he had to have it pat in order not to have to say it pat, in order to give the impression that in the travail of its exteriorisation he was being torn asunder’ (MPTK, 65–66). The narrator goes on: he deemed that this little turn, if it were to conquer the salon, required stress to be laid not so much on the content of the performance as on the spiritual evisceration of the performer. Hence he paced to and fro, making a habit of the words and effects of Calvary by Night. (MPTK, 66) The idea of making the internal external in poetic creation is described graphically as ‘evisceration’ in this passage, undermining by parody the idea


that there is some site of creation corresponding to the heart (or the guts). Beckett puts into question the whole concept of spontaneity itself: it requires in fact, as the narrator remarks earlier in this passage, a ‘lather of volition’ (66). The Poet must make his poem a ‘habit’—automatic—but this requires careful deliberation and preparation. This passage is made more significant, however, when we look at another instance of this cherished idiom of Beckett’s, the idea of having something ‘pat’. The following passage occurs in the novel Mercier and Camier: You cultivate your memory till it’s passable, a treasure-bin, stroll in your crypt, unlit, return to the scenes, call back the old sounds (paramount), till you have the lot off pat and you at a loss, head, nose, ears and the rest, what remains to snuff up, they all smell equally sweet, what old jingles to play back. (MC, 108) Remembering involves having yourself ‘off pat’, recalling an already constructed and memorized self. Tellingly, the French original of this passage reveals that the original phrase for which ‘off pat’ is the translation is of course ‘par coeur’ (MCF, 189): one’s heart, the site of feeling and authenticity, translates into something learnt mechanically, an endlessly repeatable comedy routine. The travesty of memory is a particularly resonant theme for this novel of transition, the work in which Beckett begins to write in French but in which the landscape and history of Ireland irresistibly surface. Beckett himself ‘return[s] to old scenes’ but constructs a very different version of them here. It is a key moment in Beckett’s own life for the construction of a new self, one more ‘passable’ than the tortured Joycean disciple of his younger days. Voluntary, involuntary and Beckettian memory This image of cultivated memory is as far as possible away from Proust’s idea of the involuntary memory, which, stimulated by a bodily sensation, can transport the subject back in time, and draw unseen associations between moments and emotional experiences in one’s life. Beckett writes of the role of this memory in artistic creation in his monograph on the writer. Proust had a bad memory—as he had an inefficient habit, because he had an inefficient habit. The man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything. His memory is uniform, a creature of routine, at once a condition and a function of his impeccable habit, an instrument of reference rather than an instrument of discovery. (P, 29–30) Beckett’s reader finds here a textual memory that brings us back to a key passage in Beckett’s early work, that of the margarita hidden among the

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ashes in the 1928 Dream. In that passage, Belacqua concludes his meditation on the phrase ‘black diamond of pessimism’ with the observation that the ‘uniform, horizontal writing, flowing without accidence, of the man with a style, never gives you the margarita’ (D, 48). There is the unmistakable echo, in ‘the man with a good memory’ of the ‘man with a style’ in the earlier passage. This is compounded by the fact that both good style and good memory are ‘uniform’ and impose uniformity on one’s expression. There are several implications to the link that Beckett’s language draws between these two moments in his early work. One point of connection between style and memory is the idea of the real, as we have seen: remembering the details of ordinary experience is necessary to creating the effect of the flow of realism, the seamless imitation of the surface of everyday life. The artist with a good memory, as Proust put it, would create an art that flows in this way, but would stay at the level of the surface. There is a certain hostility in Beckett’s early fiction to this kind of writing, as I argued in the last chapter, and his comments in Murphy about the ‘correct cash-register lines’ of conventional thinking chime with his characterization of the views on realism in Proust’s novel, the ‘penny-a-line notation’ of conventional writing. Beckett’s novel Watt seems to parody the idea of a good memory as the basis for art, shifting the idea away from the ability to remember heterogeneous detail and towards the relentless recall of information for its own sake. He offers an example here of what he calls in Proust the ‘infallibly complacent servant of [one’s] reminiscential needs’ (P, 17). Characters in this novel revel in the ‘uniform’ memory that Proust shuns. In one instance, Mr Case vaunts his famous memory skills when he recognizes Watt: And yet I have a great memory for faces, as a rule. Particular a face like that, said Mr. Nolan. And for arses, added Mr. Case, as an afterthought. Let me once catch a glimpse of an arse, and I’ll pick it out for you among a million. (W, 242) Earlier in the novel, Arsene strings together enormous lists of past employees of Mr Knott; the uniformity of the syntax and often the names themselves implies the negligible value of each element. He produces catalogues of extraordinary length, both of individuals remembered and of individuals forgotten: For Vincent and Walter were not the first, ho no, but before them were Vincent and another whose name I forget, and before them that other whose name I forget and another whose name I also forget, and before them that other whose name I also forget and another whose name I never knew (W, 58)


This lengthy enumeration is interrupted by a parenthetical acknowledgement of the ‘shortness of human memory’ (W, 59). He religiously mentions those forgotten, contradicting—strictly speaking—his perfunctory lament that ‘all trace is lost’ of them: what the narrator takes to illustrate the fallibility of voluntary memory seems instead like its over-attentive application. All this information, and these scrupulous traces of lost information, could be happily forgotten, but memory is exercised with a kind of automatism that parodies the human esteem for such feats. Even had Arsene remembered these names, the reader would not have here the picture or record of a world, but an account that soon became a hypnotic string of empty sounds, what Piette calls an ‘acoustic memory’ rather than a referential one. There is also arguably a second point of convergence between the ‘man with a good memory’ in Proust and the ‘man with a style’ in Dream. Good memory gives one, as Beckett explains in Proust, a continuous and coherent impression of one’s self. ‘The uniform, horizontal writing, flowing without accidence, of the man with a style’ (D, 48): Beckett’s use of the unusual word ‘accidence’ in the passage in Dream brings this connection to light via another literary influence. In ‘A General Introduction for My Work’, W. B. Yeats writes that the poet ‘is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete’. Likewise the novelist, for Yeats, could ‘describe his accidence, his incoherence’, but in Yeats’s view ‘must not’.11 We may find our experience incoherent, but we must subdue this impression and make ourselves whole and homogeneous through art. In giving ourselves a style, in other words, we can give ourselves a self. Beckett does not agree. A novelist who writes without accidence cannot communicate the true nature of the self. The writer, for Beckett, must own this incoherence, as he indicates in his famous entreaty to the artist to ‘find a form’ to ‘accommodate the mess’ (Driver, 22). The phenomenon of involuntary memory means that even the great architecture of the novel that Proust writes cannot adequately contain and interpret the true workings of the mind and heart of his narrator. Walter Benjamin has described the ‘crushing weight of memories’ that threaten the narrative: some of the narrator’s involuntary memories may comfort, but others threaten his present existence and condemn him to endless revisions of his interpretations of past events.12 Even Proust’s novel has something of what Deleuze in ‘The Exhausted’ calls ‘language II’ [langue II]: a language not concerned with naming, but expressing the compulsion to repeat stories and memories, the rhythm of these preoccupations and their subterranean emotional life. We might expect, then, that Beckett’s work follows Proust in using involuntary memory as a creative resource, sharing as he seems to the French writer’s ideas about the discontinuity of selfhood. And to some extent it does. But there is a dramatic frame for the phenomenon in Beckett’s work that situates it rather differently from that in the earlier writer’s work. Beckett’s

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narrators have few comforting or emotionally sustaining memories from their pasts, and few of the corresponding insights that they might offer. The direct allusions to Proust’s novel in Beckett’s Molloy seem to underline this absence of restorative emotional memory in his work as a whole. Critics have commented on the parodic echo in Molloy of the poignant scene in Proust’s novel in which the young Marcel communicates with his grandmother by knocking on a pipe in the hotel at Balbec. In Beckett’s novel, Molloy rather less ceremoniously knocks on his mother’s skull, and then thumps her, as a form of conversation: ‘I got into communication with her by knocking on her skull’ (T , 18). Similarly, Marcel’s reverie over the scent of hawthorn near his childhood home finds an echo in Beckett’s novel by the following terse reference: ‘The white hawthorn stooped towards me, unfortunately I don’t like the smell of hawthorn’ (T , 27). Elsewhere, sentimental Proustian associations are denied to Beckett’s narrator altogether: ‘And if I had not lost my sense of smell the smell of lavender would always make me think of Lousse, in accordance with the well-known mechanism of association’ (T , 48). Beckett’s narrators, as has been suggested, are more likely to experience the memories that they find ‘in their mind’ as ‘killing’ than epiphanic. What Beckett dramatizes, then, are both the strategies which his narrators employ for denying or keeping such involuntary memories at bay, and also, even more importantly, the ways in which these protective strategies fail. Cliché allows Beckett’s narrators to distance themselves from their memories in a number of different ways. Their attempts at precision in describing these memories in fact fail, as we have suggested of their descriptions of the real in the last chapter. In the case of their memories, however, this impecision has a more positive value. Molloy describes the awful phenomenon whereby his mother’s image ‘mingles’ with those of past lovers in the following passage. He says of these lovers: there are days, like this evening, when my memory confuses them and I am tempted to think of them as one and the same old hag, flattened and crazed by life. And God forgive me to tell you the horrible truth, my mother’s image sometimes mingles with theirs, which is literally unendurable, like being crucified, I don’t know why and I don’t want to (T , 59) Molloy’s description here may seem quite precise enough, but the clichés work nevertheless to distance the reader from the event. The confessional tone is overdone, suggesting insincerity: ‘And God forgive me to tell you the horrible truth’. Is this the truth, or is this a bluff, engineered for effect? Or is this a double bluff that plays with styles of delivering the story in order to keep the immediacy and pain of the real event at arm’s length? Readers of Joyce are also alert to the treacherous adverb ‘literally’ (famously identified as the ungrammatical language of the gauche chamber-maid in


Hugh Kenner’s reading of ‘The Dead’).13 What Molloy tells is, precisely, not literal: the memory is not unendurable as he has clearly endured its recurrence many times. This hyperbole from Molloy is perhaps employed, wittingly or otherwise, to distance the narrator from the pain of the memory in the very process of bringing its horror to our attention. In an earlier passage about Molloy’s mother, cliché serves a similar purpose. As noted above, Molloy reluctantly leaves aside his talk of ‘horns and bicycles’ for that of his mother: ‘unfortunately it is not them of which I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct’ (T , 16). The empty formulation ‘if my memory is correct’ is in fact full of meaning. His memory is not (the reader assumes) correct: this anatomical imprecision is another instance of helpful inaccuracy that keeps the actual event at a distance. It is implausible that a memory of this event exists at all, even among Beckett’s narrators, attuned as they are to their pre-natal lives. This is a kind of unpoetic licence, a screen language that is all but meaningless in these clumsy applications. As has been suggested, another way in which Beckett’s narrators try to forestall the return of such painful memories is to cultivate more innocuous ones. Molloy tries to replace his mother’s image with the ‘restful’ one of bicycles and horns. He also goes along with his mother’s senile reminiscences, in which she identifies him with her husband, without needing to recognize them: Dan, you remember the day I saved the swallow. Dan, you remember the day you buried the ring. I remembered, I remembered, I mean I knew more or less what she was talking about, and if I hadn’t always taken part personally in the scenes she evoked, it was just as if I had. (T , 17) Again, it is precisely the vagueness and second-handness of these memories that appeal to Molloy in them. He ‘couldn’t have borne’ for her to call him son; his father’s name would do just as well. These memories have on the surface the air of conventional family memories, modest family lore. The more sinister reason why he might be able to imagine these scenes— that corresponds to other hints of incest elsewhere in his narrative—is left unspoken, and the faint trace of obscenity in the language of this passage unexamined. These disturbing scenes cannot be domesticated, however; indeed, as the deliberately awkward language of such scenes suggests, the domestic is the most malign and disturbing relation of them all in Beckett’s fiction. Proust’s narrator emphasizes the distance between the ‘extra-temporal’ status of his involuntary memories and his present reality, but remains hopeful at the end of the novel that they might provide the basis for a coherent written life, the creative enterprise of his planned novel. Beckett’s narrators adopt only the most negative aspects of this experience of memory.

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They often cannot recognize the experiences that appear in their minds as their own, and frequently question their veridicality or their significance, and so they do not even try to position them as the novelist or autobiographer would in a story or emotional pattern. In this way they emphasize the dissonance, the discontinuity, rather than the cumulative picture of themselves that these memories might create. Malone emphasizes the ‘lapses’ in his memory, commenting that he ‘benefit[s] from a hiatus in my recollections’, and just afterwards, more laconically, that ‘the loss of consciousness for me was never any great loss’ (T , 184). This is very different to the extended work of therapy that Proust’s narrator seems to be involved in, investigating the impact past memories might be having on the present self, and, ultimately, the future self as a writer. The therapeutic drama of Beckett’s writing is deliberately seen to fail, however, emphasizing as it does not only the discontinuity of the self but also the impossibility of mastering the fragmented memories by inserting them into benignly conventional narrative patterns. ‘But perhaps I’m remembering things’ The restfulness that Molloy finds in ‘more or less’ imagining things rather than precisely remembering them is one that recurs in his narrative and the trilogy as a whole. For Beckett’s characters, telling stories is far more comforting than speaking of themselves. Malone resolves at the very beginning of his narrative to ‘pay less heed’ to himself. As he says, ‘I shall not answer any more questions. I shall even try not to ask myself any more. While I am waiting I shall tell myself stories, if I can’ (T , 180). This is another strategy that fails, however: like such narrators’ clichés, their stories are often revealing and the strategy they represent transparent. They often claim to invent, but elsewhere come clean, Molloy, for instance, claiming that in truth: Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten (T , 32) How should we interpret this passage? Christopher Ricks in Beckett’s Dying Words argues that this passage should warn critics of simply conflating memory with invention in Beckett’s work, preferring to leave Beckett to speak for himself about this ‘elusively complicated’ topic (Ricks, 150). In How It Is, as Ricks demonstrates, the narrator is even more explicit on this score: real or imaginary no knowing it’s impossible. that life then said to have been his invented remembered a little of each (HI, 80)


What the passage from Molloy does suggest, however, is that both memory and invention are somehow determined, that—once again—speaking or writing is not spontaneous but that one recovers a version of the self, a pensum that one has ‘got by heart’ or has ‘off pat’ as the passage of Mercier and Camier earlier indicated. Moran seems to reinforce this view when he corrects himself over the question of his alter ego, Molloy: ‘Perhaps I had invented him, I mean found him ready-made in my head’ (T , 112). To recover one’s inner self—whether it be memory or cherished invention—is not to find something authentic but simply an older set of evasions. The relationship between imagining and expressing personal feeling is constantly renegotiated in the course of Beckett’s work. For the most part, however, the priority is for these narrators the reverse of the conventional one. Not for them the authority of the truth: imagining is, they claim, by far the preferred option. Molloy paints a picture at the beginning of the trilogy that seems to hover between the two actions. After a burst of feeling on the subject of saying goodbye at his imminent death, he resumes a flat and prosaic tale of two men on the outskirts of a town. The scenery involves ‘cows chewing in enormous fields’. Perhaps I’m inventing a little, perhaps embellishing, but on the whole that’s the way it was. They chew, swallow, then after a short pause effortlessly bring up the next mouthful. A neck muscle stirs and the jaws begin to grind again. But perhaps I am remembering things. (T , 9) At first this seems like memory: ‘that’s the way it was’. The admission that he might be ‘inventing a little’ seems only to underline the fact that this is, in the main, a true account of lived experience. But at the end of this snapshot of the cows, his comment that he might be ‘remembering things’, in place of the conventional locution ‘imagining things’, in fact reverses this impression. To be ‘imagining things’ is conventionally to be engaged in a trivial and deluded exercise: this substitution suggests that memory is less reliable and less productive than an invention would be in this context. Perhaps he is not remembering anything truly experienced at all. The image comes not, as does the cows’ ‘next mouthful’, from rumination, a meditative way of thinking about past experience, but instead rises arbitrarily and unbidden in the narrator’s head, and seems of little significance. A similar image of ‘beasts observ[ing] each other’ that the narrator of How It Is ‘saw once’ is equally unproductive, the narrator dismissing his own image and its motivation: ‘let him understand who has a wish to I have none’ (HI, 61). The critic Michèle Touret places this passage of Molloy in the category of pseudo-memories that are in fact pastiches, passages that seem intended in the emotional logic of the novel to displace more painful thoughts. She reads this passage in the French original of Molloy as a ‘leçon de choses’, a standard French schoolbook account that might appear under the heading

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‘La Rumination’.14 It is in this respect exactly what classical rhetoricians might have called a commonplace. I am undecided as to whether or not it is this specific linguistic phenomenon that Beckett is looking to recall, but the moment certainly seems self-contained, a set-piece gratuitously delivered, and as such both calls for and resists interpretation in the context of Molloy’s tale. Roger Scruton makes a similar reading of this passage, describing it as ‘a huge, still, isolated image, detached from the narrative’. He goes on: ‘it is as though the narrative has been dissolved, released from the control of any dramatic meaning, and the reader condemned to search for the emotion with which to match the image in the text’.15 Within the logic of Molloy’s narrative, however, this release from dramatic meaning might itself be intended. The immediate effect of this story may be precisely to calm its teller by its very arbitrariness. What seems like unmotivated content can in fact be read as meaningful in this respect. Furthermore, the content here is not as unredeemable for interpretation as either Touret or Scruton seem to think. Chewing the cud is of course a conventional analogy for memory itself, making it an emblem here of the narrative’s own attempt to be tasteless, to replace Molloy’s painful thoughts of death by a regurgitated and commonplace image of cows in a field. This is more memory than imagination then, but memory—as is often the case in Beckett’s work— of what one has read or encountered second hand, rather than experienced. The image of regurgitation is, as will be seen, one key to the trilogy as a whole. There are numerous moments in the trilogy where the narrators suggest that story and memory can become interchangeable. As many commentators have pointed out, the way in which this relationship develops in the trilogy is that the narrators gradually replace their own experience with stories of others, or claim to, until the Unnamable at the end of the third novel denies having had any life of his own at all. Molloy makes an ambiguous comment in this respect, commenting of his account of a certain ‘period of [his] life’ spent at the house of Lousse: ‘If I go on long enough calling that my life I’ll end up by believing it. It’s the principle of advertising’ (T , 53). It is not clear at this juncture, however, whether he means that his choice of memories is arbitrary, not a representative ‘life story’, or whether these words do not represent his life at all. Later, the narrators become more forceful. Malone says of an anecdote involving his mother: ‘My mother? Perhaps it is just another story, told to me by someone who found it funny’ (T , 270). Finally, the Unnamable dismisses the fiction that he has memories of which to speak: ‘Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden’ (T , 326). The versions of experience that he is told about are lies and clichés, none of them plausible accounts of any life, let alone his own. Yet there is another contradictory reading of this last comment. What it implies, perhaps, is that it does not matter ultimately which ‘memories’ are


true and which are false, which personal and which conventional. Beckett was well enough versed in Freud’s work to be familiar with the idea that a narrative could be—in Freud’s theory, at least—therapeutic without being true: true to the emotional logic of a traumatic experience, perhaps, without being true to the facts of it. He takes this idea to its ludicrous extreme, however, in The Unnamable. Words and memories are, Beckett’s narrators claim, interchangeable: ‘the same words recur, and they are your memories’ (T , 399). What is being expressed here is a kind of compulsion, whether it be to invent or to remember, that answers to a deep need in these narrators. This is what Deleuze calls ‘language II’: both the compulsive repetition of painful memories, and also the compulsion to invent stories about other less concrete desires. If Molloy does not remember acting the part of his father in reality, it is nonetheless ‘just as if’ he did: the false memory answers to the same emotional need (an Oedipal desire, in this case) as the true one. The failure of the structure of the narrative to identify the motivation for such material suggests, however, that the feelings attached to it will never be resolved. In fact the question remains, as Adam Piette has commented, why those words in particular recur (Piette, 202). This recurrence is a prominent and intriguing feature of Beckett’s works. Not only are details repeated frequently between works, but certain intimate and emotive memories also appear several times in different works. The image of a father coaxing his son off a high diving board or rock, for instance, is found in Beckett’s earliest (draft) play Eleutheria, in the late text Company, and in elliptical form in the radio play Embers—as an image of the son’s failure to gain his father’s approval and the corresponding sense of self-worth. Another such, often cited by critics, is the incident when a young boy asks his mother how far away the sky is, an episode that occurs in Malone Dies, ‘The End’ and again in Company. What is most significant about this phenomenon, however, is that these memories recur in altered and revised states. The latter incident happens when mother and son are walking in the ‘steep hills’ that recur in Beckett’s writing, sometimes but not always identified with those around Dublin. The detail of these changes, seemingly trivial, illustrates that such deliberately poor or inaccurate memory is a deliberate strategy in dealing with this kind of material. Beckett holds off from identifying these hills in the second instance of the anecdote, that of the trilogy, where Malone comments, ‘we were walking along the road, up a hill of extraordinary steepness, near home I imagine, my memory is full of steep hills, I get them confused’ (T , 269). Is Malone ‘near home’ in his mind? A little later in the text Malone summarizes the content of the most recent section of his narrative, concluding that the last element, roughly corresponding to this memory, is ‘agony recalled’ (T, 270), suggesting a trauma in this story that is not here expressed. This passage illustrates that, as Malone says, he and his mother ‘were often not of the same mind’ (T, 269), a poignantly euphemistic expression

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of what seems to be a deep rift between them. This is, however, the most restrained—and therefore plausible—of the tellings. The boy asks whether the sky is ‘further away than you think’, eliciting the response: ‘It is precisely as far away as it appears to be’ (T , 270). Although not outwardly malicious, this cold reply seems symptomatic of a more general failure of closeness between mother and son. Even here, however, Malone’s exaggerated telling of this incident suggests that he exaggerates its effect as a way of distancing himself from it. He goes on: ‘at the time I was aghast’ (T , 270). The highflown expression ‘aghast’, as—in a different way—the French ‘ça me terrassa’ [that floored me] (Mm, 158), is deliberately incongruous if we are dealing with the reminiscences of a child, and puts a calculated gap between the adult Malone and this young incarnation. Like Molloy’s description of a memory of his mother as ‘unendurable’, Malone seems to be choosing a deliberately indirect and even factitious way of remembering. The narrator of Company does not give the wording of the ‘cutting retort’ but observes that the subject has ‘never forgotten’ it (C, 13): an ironic comment in the light of the shifts in representation of this incident, the misremembered hills of the trilogy version, and the fact that the prim ‘It is precisely as far away as it appears’ in Malone Dies becomes the more shocking and less plausible ‘Fuck off’ (CSP, 81) in ‘The End’: A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said. I suddenly remembered that I had not thought of asking Mr. Weir for a piece of bread. (CSP, 81) The narrator of ‘The End’, it might be argued, perhaps ‘remembers’ and translates the impact of the words, equivalent to a verbal slap in the face, rather than preserving the precise expression. This is consistent with the fact that the narrator appears to see this incident happen between other people, although it reminds him that he has been given no food by his former guardian, Mr Weir: that he—like the boy—receives rejection rather than nurture from those with a duty to care for him. The pain of the memory seems to recur in these episodes but the depth of feeling does not translate into indelible and reproducible detail: one argument might be that the deliberate modification of both tone and detail is the only way in which such a memory can be contemplated. Such a repetition seems to be simultaneously pain and cure, compulsion and therapy. They recur because they are painful or emblematic of a problematic relationship—they are, indeed, ‘killing’—but it seems that Beckett’s narrators find that the only thing to do is indeed to repeat them until they sink. As we have seen, however, the writing of these memories becomes therapeutic not simply by recalling and so exorcising the trauma. What is key to this process is that this is repetition with a difference, that the


narrator has control over the telling of the memory, and therefore the ability to change and modify it: to introduce an element of invention, in short. The Ur-memory is definitively lost not only to the reader in between these different textual versions, but also to the teller. The comfort that this evasive strategy represents is, nonetheless, a temporary one. If the true source of the trauma is elided, the experience cannot be mastered and the work of repetition will be endless. This plagiarism of the self suggests a failure to progress. Invention itself fails, pulled back again and again to the same unpalatable material, telling a story instead of unresolved feelings in what Beckett called the ‘liminal consciousness’ (Burrows, 6). Both drama and meaning are produced by the failure of narrative authority.

III Culture, memory and the body The strategy of repetition is used to several different ends in Beckett’s writing of memory. He himself regurgitates Molloy’s image of cows chewing the cud, discussed above, at the end of the third novel of the trilogy, to describe the Unnamable’s ongoing search for matter of which to speak. The French ‘petite envie dans l’arrière-gorge’ translates as a ‘cud of longing’: when plans fail there are always aspirations, it’s a knack, you must say it slowly, If only this, if only that, that gives you time, time for a cud of longing to rise up in the back of your gullet, nothing remains but to look as though you enjoyed chewing it, there’s no knowing where that might lead you, on tracks as beaten as the day is long (T , 405) The image suggests not only that these aspirations are contrived, but also that they are former aspirations revisited, beaten tracks. Hope is recast as nostalgia for old hopes and desires, reiterated with no prospect of fulfilment. Both past and future have become tasteless in this metaphor, posited mechanically in the endless present tense of the first-person monologue. What is most striking here, however, is the visceral nature of the language, the idea of bodily habit that is used to characterize activities that should be psychological—a matter of feeling. The clichés pile up in this passage, conveying the tastelessness of the material and the lacklustre process of going through the motions of aspiring, of appearing to think to the future. It is also instructive to look at the French version of the same passage in this respect. faute de projets il y a les aspirations, c’est un truc a` prendre, il faut parler lentement, Si seulement je pouvais, ça vous laisse le temps, c’est bien le diable s’il ne vous remonte pas une petite envie dans l’arrière-gorge, il n’y a plus qu’à paraˆıtre vouloir la combler, ça peut mener loin, sur des chemins battus a` souhait (I, 191)

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The empty helplessness, given up before they are started, of these aspirations is even clearer in the French ‘si seulement je pouvais’. This is velleity, a Beckett speciality, the phenomenon of wishes too frail to get themselves achieved. The condensation of two clichés (beaten track and as as the day is long) in ‘on tracks as beaten as the day is long’ is substituted in the English version for the more economical French original: ‘sur des chemins battus a` souhait’ (I, 191). The weariness of the French expression is emphasized, however, by an intertext with Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, a text which gives the ultimate account of the weariness caused by time and repetition. Proust’s ‘routes battues des heures’,16 marked by Beckett in his copy of A la recherche, sets a precedent for the layering of expressions with similar (and similarly tired) meanings. Memory is not quite tasteless in these passages, however: there is a strange rawness, born of the physical imagery, that the density of familiar expressions does nothing to diminish. The back of the throat is a site affected by emotion, suggesting strong, even overwhelming feeling. Similarly, the word ‘longing’ is not quite able to evacuate its meaning or power to move. What starts as a contrived attitude to the world seems to result in genuine feeling. As Proust’s narrator so often does, the Unnamable here seems— momentarily, at least—to talk himself into being moved. This is meant even more literally in Beckett’s prose, however. The very associations that the words have provoke feeling where the context cannot do so. It is likely that the image of memory as bovine rumination was first encountered by Beckett in Augustine’s Confessions, a text he thoroughly chewed over, as his notebooks show, and often regurgitated in his work. Augustine describes the memory there as the ‘mind’s stomach’, apologizing for the forced metaphor, but finding nonetheless many analogies between the two concepts. The significance of Augustine’s image for Beckett is its suggestion that although joy and sadness are ‘entrusted to the memory’, when they are stored there they ‘cannot be tasted’. Similarly, even when brought up from the memory as food is brought up from the stomach, the ‘sweetness’ of joy and the ‘bitterness’ of sorrow are not ‘tasted’ in the mouth: Perhaps then, just as food is brought from the stomach in the process of rumination, so also by recollection these things are brought up from the memory. But then why in the mind or ‘mouth’ of the person speaking, that is to say reminiscing, about past gladness or sadness is there no taste of sweetness or bitterness?17 Beckett also alludes to this idea, mimicking the style of Augustine’s paradoxes, in his early story, ‘A Wet Night’: When with indifference I remember my past sorrow, my mind has indifference, my memory has sorrow. The mind, upon the indifference


which is in it, is indifferent; yet the memory, upon the sorrow which is in it, is not sad. (MPTK, 85) In a direct contradiction of the sensory flood created by Proust’s involuntary memories, Beckett instead follows Augustine’s model of memory which repeats experience in a diminished and even tasteless form. Beckett is challenging in this way a central tenet of post-Romantic art, the abiding idea that recollected emotion is the basis for the work of art. His famous desire to redefine the relation between artist and artwork finds a manifestation in this strategy. These textual memories of Augustine suggest that emotion is recollected not so much in tranquillity as with indifference. And yet the language itself betrays him. For one thing, the very presence of the past tense in a present tense narrative always has a kind of feeling attached to it. At the very beginning of Beckett’s work, Belacqua comments in ‘Dante and the Lobster’ that the ‘past tenses’ of his Italian teacher ‘were always sorrowful’ (MPTK, 18); in the late play ‘Rough for Radio II’, the Animator comments on Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘There all sigh, I was, I was. It’s like a knell’ (CDW, 278). Beckett’s literal use of cliché also gives back to this language a surprising emotive charge: clichés that seem to mimic the worn-out and evacuated nature of such associations in fact turn back into powerful images. There is another willed failure in this tendency to make memory indifferent by connecting it to material image. It is precisely because the body is implicated so centrally in the thinking and feeling of Beckett’s protagonists that these clichés regain their power. Beckett distances himself from the Romantic artist, however, in that the message of his treatment of memory is consistently a negative one. Molloy gives a negative twist to the canonical form of Romantic remembering early on in the trilogy: ‘It is in the tranquillity of my decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life’ (T , 25). This impudent allusion, reconstituting Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’,18 signals Beckett’s defiance of this aesthetic tradition. Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen argue that a literary allusion becomes a cliché (that is to say, authorless) when it is the ‘byword for certain polemical values’ (Amossy and Rosen, Discours du cliché, 16). Wordsworth’s dictum has come to stand for an aesthetic that privileges individual feeling and a belief in the creative uses of past experience. The dismantling of Wordsworth’s phrase, and its message of a productive reflection in maturity on more youthful experience, provides an ironic comment on the decomposition of self, identity and memory that age and ultimately death will effect. It is again the body that appears to scupper the transcendent role of memory in traditional aesthetic practice. Again, however, the body seems to introduce instead a more immediate kind of memory, an analogy between

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Molloy’s decomposing body and the confused recollection of his life that he has. This is in fact both analogy and physical reality: his mind is decomposing, rendering these memories still more confused. In the next line of the French text, there is an apposite pun: ‘Décomposer c’est vivre aussi, je le sais, je le sais, ne me fatiguez pas, mais on n’y est pas toujours tout entière’ (Mo, 39, my italics).19 The French idiom [on n’y est pas entière] recalls the English ‘to be all there’, both expressions suggesting an association in colloquial speech between cognitive failure and physical inadequacy. There is also an equivalence in this respect between the decomposition of Beckett’s narrator’s body and the composition of the text. The Unnamable defers a development of the narrative until ‘time is not so short, and the mind more composed’ (T , 358). But this will never happen: in Beckett’s world, the mind only loses integrity over time. The detachment that Beckett’s narrators feel, and cultivate, towards their own memories is reflected in their treatment of memory as material. Body and text are, for instance, frequently conflated in images of forgetting as physical erasure. Far from lamenting their loss of memory, Beckett’s narrators embrace the possibility that their mind might be purged of memories that would otherwise be far more likely to torment than to console. Their project is in this respect too the converse of that of Proust’s Marcel, who wants to recapture his past. They want rather to return to the tabula rasa that preceded existence. The physical means by which they might achieve this end preoccupies them: clichés of evacuation, erasure and excretion pervade Beckett’s trilogy. In Molloy, the messenger Gaber’s instructions have ‘gone clean’ out of Moran’s head, the idiom suggesting that they had never fully been absorbed. Again, in The Unnamable, the narrator comments that he had had ‘a certain number of highly promising formulae’, but that ‘all has gone clean from my head’ (T , 310). The French version, ‘tout s’est effacé’ (I, 35), is similarly physical but without the same whiff of detergent. Elsewhere, the Unnamable asks, What makes we weep so? Perhaps it is liquefied brain. Past happiness in any case has clean gone from my memory (T , 295) Tears, the index of sentiment in a literature of sensibility, have been recast in the discourse of anatomical observation. Feeling can be fully purged in this model and hygiene restored. The Unnamable’s brain is clean of innate ideas, including, he insists, the abiding painful memory that the trilogy tries to exorcise: that of the mother. ‘Can it be innate knowledge?’, he asks. ‘This seems improbable to me. Innate knowledge of my mother, for example, is that conceivable? Not for me’ (T , 300). Individuality involves being purged both of this kind of ‘conventional’ attachment and of learnt wisdom: ‘Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll by myself, in the end’ (T , 327). Similarly, Moran in Molloy speaks


approvingly of the messenger Gaber’s skill for incomprehension, particularly in relation to his ability to repeat his messages mechanically and then forget them. Gaber offers a model to Beckett’s narrators in being completely dissociated from the words he speaks: in the English idiom, ‘dead without knowing it to the meaning of [his] instructions’ (T, 107). Again, Beckett’s characters can put this down to nothing but the physical capacity of the brain. Moran comments, ‘I have often wondered if the messengers were not compelled to undergo a surgical operation, to induce in them such a degree of amnesia’ (T , 107). By the time of Beckett’s late work, The Lost Ones, even more drastic measures are taken by the anonymous figures which populate the text. The narrator comments calmly: ‘Their solitary attempts to brain themselves culminate at best in brief losses of consciousness’ (CSP, 203). The phrase to brain oneself, where ‘to brain’ is ‘to destroy one’s brain’, contains an ironic self-cancelling gesture of a kind that Beckett relishes in his writing. Even to Malone, the ‘loss of consciousness was never any great loss’ (T , 184); he, like the characters in The Lost Ones, comes to appreciate, on the contrary, that ‘catalepsies of the soul’ can, compared to the alternative, only be ‘good’ (T , 199). The physical erasure of memory is expressed by making literal clichés of remembering, thinking and speaking: clearing out the mind, being dead to the meaning of one’s words. The irony of Beckett’s use of cliché as a cherished strategy is that where cliché’s images and sensory effects might usually fade in favour of its message, in Beckett’s texts its images linger when the colloquial sense of the expression has long since been forgotten, if it were ever known. Memory persists as pure matter, impersonal and anonymous. This reduction of memory to the physical is the most extreme detachment of memory from subjectivity that Beckett can make. The relationship between memory and sensation in Proust’s novel is turned around here: if memory is connected to physical experience, it is also vulnerable to physical decay and disintegration. Memory becomes identical with the body and loses as a result its capacity, so cherished in Proust’s work, to escape, even momentarily, the effects of time. As a material entity, subject to decay, it cannot give a transcendent perspective on or a coherent meaning to the disparate experiences of Beckett’s narrators. The culmination of the idea that memory must be made anonymous is the Unnamable’s rejection of all memory as alien to him. He refuses to assimilate the words of others, and so expels every image, memory or idea as foisted upon him from elsewhere. He says of the words that his unseen interlocutors teach him: I’ll fix their gibberish for them. I never understood a word of it in any case, not a word of the stories it spews, like gobbets in a vomit. My inability to absorb, my genius for forgetting, are more than they reckoned with. (T , 327)

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Cliché, regurgitated automatically without being assimilated to the self, is the perfect discourse to represent this undigested matter. All learning and memory become a form of cliché when treated in this way. All culture is equally antipathic to Beckett’s protagonists, who are devastatingly evenhanded in their rejection of what is human. This fictional framework for understanding the allusions in Beckett’s work gives these allusions a peculiar status, depicting them as cultural matter regurgitated automatically in a gesture of rejection. By virtue of his ‘inability to absorb’, the Unnamable will, he says, ‘be myself at last, as a starveling belches his odourless wind, before the bliss of coma’ (T , 327). He brings to mind those characters of Proust’s in A la recherche who ‘fail to assimilate what is truly nourishing in art’ but ‘need artistic pleasures all the time victims of a morbid hunger which is never satisfied’.20 They are in the French original victims of a kind of aesthetic ‘bulimie’ (bulimia). This lack of satiation recalls the narrator of Beckett’s French L’Innommable, whose mouth fills with saliva but ‘qui n’en a jamais assez’ (I, 39)—which never has enough. The English version makes it ‘speech’ of which the narrator cannot get enough, describing a ‘speech-parched voice’ (T , 312). The Unnamable goes on to envisage monologue that is finally purged of all expressive content: ‘My speech-parched voice at rest would fill with spittle, I’d let it flow over and over, happy at last, dribbling with life, my pensum [task] ended, in the silence’ (T , 312). Proust’s characters, in line with the writer’s more positive depiction of the project of art, at least seek spiritual nourishment from their culture, however. Beckett’s narrators, on the other hand, will starve their speech of expressive content, and themselves of cultural nourishment, rejecting the matter that is ‘rammed down [their] gullet’, more anorexic (a ‘starveling’) than bulimic. Beckett’s memory of this passage of Proust is evidenced more directly in his early novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, where his own protagonist is more closely aligned with such characters. Proust gives another grudging expression of approval at the cultural hunger that besets these culture vultures a few lines earlier in the novel: with their sterile velleities, the art-lovers are as touching to contemplate as those early machines which tried to leave the ground and could not, but which yet held within them, if not the secret, the still to be discovered means, at least the desire of flight. (Proust, In Search of Lost Time, VI, 250) Beckett’s fondness for the idea of the ‘velleity’ explains his attachment to this moment in Proust’s text, but he also borrows the image of the grounded flying-machine to imagine the novel that Belacqua, like Marcel, imagines himself writing. Belacqua comments,


If I ever do drop a book, which God forbid, trade being what it is, it will be a ramshackle, tumbledown, a bone-shaker, held together with bits of twine, and at the same time as innocent of the slightest velleity of coming unstuck as Mr Wright’s original flying-machine that could never be persuaded to leave the ground. But there he was probably wrong. (D, 189–190) Belacqua, like Proust’s art-lovers, is a voracious consumer of culture, as the allusive free indirect discourse in which much of the novel is written shows. He recognizes the resulting ‘ramshackle’ nature of his expressive register, a word that applies all too well to this brilliant but ill-disciplined early draft novel of Beckett’s itself. The cryptic narrative comment that follows this observation is an intriguing one, however. In what respect is he wrong? Simply, perhaps, that Wright’s aeroplane never flew. Is his book, then, destined in fact to fly, or at least have the potential to do so? The ironic relationship between this notional book and that which Beckett is writing is compounded by this observation, Beckett’s own book never in his lifetime appearing in this form. Or perhaps it is the case that there is a slight ‘velleity’ involved: that Belacqua has a secret desire for this book to take flight, even if it is one that remains unachieved. He, like Proust’s characters, manifests at least the minimal desire necessary to participate in cultural activity, to provide the fertile ground in which true art might, in the future, grow. The Unnamable, however, would spurn such activity if he could. Having it forced upon him, he maintains a stance of willed incomprehension. He returns to the topic of his force-feeding with knowledge later in the novel: ‘they gave me some lessons in pigsty Latin too, it looks well, sprinkled through the perjury’ (T , 332). The Latin of the schoolroom is on the same level perhaps as ‘pig Latin’, the made-up language of schoolboys. Later he comments, ‘I expiate vilely, like a pig, dumb, uncomprehending, possessed of no utterance but theirs’ (T , 372). If he is to be force-fed learning after the manner of an animal reared for slaughter, he will respond in the same spirit and will refuse to assimilate this knowledge. The attitude that Beckett’s art takes to its sources is then a troubled one. It is explicitly allusive, but displays its learning only in order to reject or travesty it. The Unnamable’s ‘gobbets’ of culture that stick in his throat make him into the bad artist figured in T. S. Eliot’s famous essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, for whom past tradition is a ‘lump, an indiscriminate bolus’.21 The Unnamable too finds the collective cultural memory a difficult pill to swallow, but Beckett makes this a mark of integrity rather than ill-breeding. Rather than forging a relationship with past culture, Beckett’s art dismantles its certainties and avoids involuntary contamination with its styles and ideas by regurgitating them in a gesture of disgust. Yet he cannot, ultimately, resist having this material foisted upon him. The ‘bliss of coma’ is itself a ‘velleity’, a futile aspiration that typifies the

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kind of power-through-weakness that Beckett’s works seek. The process of renunciation can never be complete, however: his narrators must continue to ‘dirty’ in order to be able to ‘make clean’. Their strategy of making cliché literal is as far as they can go to purify it of its accumulated associations, whether cultural or personal, and to make it innocent once again. ∗

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Beckett’s treatment of memory then seems at first to be an exploration of the strategies for holding memory at bay, whether drawing the sting of personal recollections or resisting the temptation to capitulate to cultural traditions that cannot be identified as one’s own. His narrators seem to aim to overcome the tyranny of the psyche, whereby memories can loom out of nowhere unexpectedly and painfully, by revisiting them consciously and representing them with calculated imprecision. Their use of cliché is one strategy of evasion, then, whereby they employ hyperbole or impersonal language to describe seemingly intimate experiences. These narrators also consciously resist the impulse to create a story from these memories, which would be to own the influence such recollections have on their lives. Instead, the memories emerge unmotivated and isolated in the narrative. Often, furthermore, a painful topic or memory will occasion a digression onto the most inconsequential topic. And the more voluntary this digression is, the better. Beckett, like Proust, emphasizes discontinuity, then, but unlike Proust, does not appear to give weight or value to the involuntary memories that irrupt so incontinently into his characters’ minds. In the case of personal memory at least, however, Beckett’s work also explores how difficult it is to keep such memory at bay. As Deleuze puts it in ‘The Exhausted’, ‘the voice’ in Beckett’s work is sometimes ‘animated by a perverse desire to impose a particularly cruel memory’ (Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, n. 22, 26). The unmotivated nature of the memories that occur in works such as the novellas, the trilogy, How It Is and Company only compel—or in Roger Scruton’s words, ‘condemn’—the reader to ‘search for the emotion with which to match the image in the text’ (Scruton, 197). The screen memories either fail to be distracting enough, or lead unwittingly back to the painful matter that they seek to evade. And cliché itself trips up Beckett’s narrators. This public language often takes on a private resonance, or—used inappropriately—displays an unexpected connection that reveals the incomplete nature of the narrators’ detachment from their memories. Finally, in reinvigorating the physical images of cliché, bodily experience is given presence. Far from this having the effect of deflecting feeling in favour of dumb materiality, however, in fact it reasserts the link between bodily sensation and feeling. Furthermore, it brings to light the connection between the body’s energies and the psychological imperatives that the narrators feel: the desire to return to, or recapture closeness


with the mother, for instance, being in Freud’s model an impulse fundamental to existence. The authority of private experience is hard to evade, even for characters increasingly cut off from both their past existence and the network of social relationships that would allow them to gain some objective verification that they exist at all. Memories reassert themselves, however, whether or not the characters can remember the original event, and produce emotive effects in the present tense of the narrative if not a coherent trajectory of experience over time. The authority of cultural tradition, another kind of ‘memory’ with which Beckett’s works engage, seems easier to throw off. Beckett’s innocent narrators notice the material basis of analogies that have become occluded or, in Derrida’s words, ‘idealized’, in the conceptual language of philosophy and literature. The aspiration to escape both the needs of the body and the effects of time through aesthetic, intellectual or spiritual means are undone by the very medium of the attempt. Yet here, too, the power of this cultural authority is tenacious and even necessary. Beckett’s narrators cannot escape the cultural material that is foisted upon them, or that appears involuntarily in their discourse. They can only regurgitate it in a decomposed form. The analogy between physical and spiritual nourishment is itself a classical commonplace, indicating that all Beckett’s narrators can do is to embrace and embody the negative image of this tradition, the ‘starveling’ that casts itself out from the feast of learning. Once again, the double bind of authority in Beckett’s work reasserts itself, in the language of cliché as in other types of memory—both disdained and at the same time involuntarily reproduced.

3

Cliche´ , Autobiography and Epitaph

the eternal straight-line effect. —HI, 52 The wider context for examining memory in Beckett’s mid-period work is the particular approach taken in this work to the idea of the past itself. The exercise of looking back at a life, whether through autobiography or biography, memoir, or epitaph, is one of the most respected and authoritative of cultural activities. This method implies two key assumptions. First, it presupposes that there is an end-point, the time of writing, which can provide an authoritative perspective on one’s life or another’s, and allow a coherent causal narrative to be plotted of this life. Secondly, and relatedly, it assumes that experience is cumulative, that—as the Enlightenment promised—we inevitably progress, personally and culturally, towards some putative point of perfect knowledge and wisdom. Beckett’s work dismantles both assumptions by exposing their own selfdefeating logic. The only point at which a life can be accurately evaluated is at one’s death, meaning that the form of autobiography anticipates the extinction of its own subject. As Molloy observes in a characteristic pun: ‘perhaps there is no whole, before you are dead’ (T , 27). Similarly, the Enlightenment machinery of rationality looks forward to its own dismantling in the event of achieving the perfect knowledge towards which it reaches. H. Porter Abbott has written perceptively on the ironic Victorian clichés of onwardness and progress in Beckett’s work, echoed even in the spare syntax of the verbs of ‘going on’ at the end of The Unnamable and in later work such as Worstward Ho (Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett, 33–34). The imaginative condition of Beckett’s work, which suggests that all might be ‘over’—recall the Unnamable’s pronouncement that ‘the days of sticks are over’ (T , 303), or the ‘soft place’ in the heart of the narrator of ‘From an Abandoned Work’ for ‘all that is over, no, the being over’ (CSP, 162) —recasts these aspirations and asks where exactly (if anywhere) one might be heading, and why being further down the line should confer wisdom and illumination. In these conditions, his narrators are sceptical about the idea that one’s life 93


has, or can be made to have in its telling, the stable structure of a beginning, middle and an end. Furthermore, the very structure within which memory operates is brought into question: the present tense of these texts, in relation to which all evocations of the past are made meaningful, is described as a ‘mythological’ convention. The cultural memory of past literary voices is similarly consigned to ‘pastness’ in Beckett’s work, inscribed as it is in the fallen language of literary cliché, a language that is unable to respond in a dynamic way to the present condition. This chapter therefore builds on the previous one to develop the discussion on the value of memory in Beckett’s work in relation to wider questions of time and the cultural processes of reflection on the past.

I What time will tell Beckett famously presents in his work a condition where culture, and history itself, seems to have come to a standstill, and perhaps a permanent one. For his protagonists at least, time, as Vladimir memorably puts it, ‘has stopped’ (CDW, 35). As I have already suggested, memory in this condition cannot offer comfort nor induce sadness in its own right. It produces feeling, if it does, only from local emotive effects in its telling in the present tense of the narrative or the dialogue. Furthermore, the structure of progress and so also retrospection is itself undermined in Beckett’s narratives by the particular imaginative conditions for their production. If we are not moving forward, then the boon of looking back becomes meaningless. The comforting illusion that ‘time will tell’, that time will yield up its mysteries and that looking back will one day explain the significance of the present, are dismantled in Beckett’s work. Even the cold comfort of hindsight is denied. Cliché becomes a fitting language for writing about this world gone cold. Such language has markedly aged but does not correspondingly gain in authority. It also looks forward to its own extinction, its figures nearly extinguished, but having nonetheless a certain tenacity. Like Beckett’s characters the Saposcats in Malone Dies, cliché seems to draw ‘the strength to live from the prospect of [its] impotence’ (T , 188). As a phenomenon, it warns every cultural tradition of the possibility of its own future demise. No knowledge is immune to obsolescence, as Nietzsche suggests in his famous essay on truth and lying. This property in cliché allows Beckett to write large the hidden self-destructiveness of cultural documents and discourses that claim the authority of retrospection. If autobiography and epitaph look forward to or rely upon their subjects’ own death as a defining limit, they risk in so doing a simplistic and over-hasty conclusion. Instead, Beckett suggests, one lives and can think only in the present tense. The mechanisms of anticipation and retrospection are fictions. The narrator of Beckett’s 1961 work How It Is comments accordingly: ‘time will tell it’s

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telling’ (HI, 76). Time promises in popular wisdom to reveal some meaning or design behind one’s experience, but in fact it merely expresses itself in a negative fashion on the physiognomy, body or faculties (it ‘tells’ in another sense). A beginning, a middle and end: Telling a life The narrator of How It Is talks at one moment of ‘the eternal straight line effect of the pious wish not to die before my time’ (HI, 52). In this economic snatch of discourse Beckett acknowledges the habitual idea that we move through time in a line and travel towards a pre-ordained end that can give shape and sense to our lives. This conception of time as linear is one of the important conventions controlling one’s experience. Kant has said of self-perception that ‘in order that we may make inner alterations thinkable, we must represent time figuratively as a line’.1 In addition, the idea that we are enriched by experience and learn from our past is often received as a self-evident proposition. Merleau-Ponty spoke of the fact that we consider the past, and particularly our own past, as an ‘incontestable acquisition’.2 There is, we are led to believe, a narrative to our lives, a beginning, middle and end, and an important feature of this narrative, as Aristotle maintained in the Poetics, is that it instigates a ‘change from ignorance to knowledge’ (Aristotle, Poetics, II, 2324). Beckett’s narrators put such maxims under scrutiny. It appears that such a narrative is necessarily the product of invention rather than memory. The Unnamable comments at one moment: ‘I invented it all [to] allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road moving between a beginning and an end’ (T , 414). Beckett instead undermines the stability and intelligibility of the traditional terms of narrative and autobiography both by explicit statement and in the structure of his narrators’ stories, which fail to proceed in a straight line. The narrator of How It Is asserts repeatedly that his account of his life is ‘the natural order more or less’ but concedes each time that it is incomplete, only ‘bits and scraps’ (HI, 7, 22 and passim): less rather than more. Beckett makes ironic reference to the cliché of how to tell a story in Molloy: All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. (T , 31–32) Molloy suggests here that to lay out an autobiographical narrative in this way is implicitly to orient it with reference to one’s death, which will provide its shape and define the terms of its middle and its end. This is to skew it in a curious direction, however. Purpose and direction, via the ‘straight line effect’, are bestowed upon actions and experiences in reality likely to be


much less coherent and consecutive (if perhaps, taken for their own sake, much more vivid). Some lines later, Molloy reconstitutes the phrase: The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle. (T , 32) The original cadence is broken, but there is also sufficient of the cliché to see an unravelling of the process so neatly presented earlier: an unravelling, it is suggested, that also applies one’s strengths and memories. In ‘Text 8’ of Texts for Nothing the narrator similarly pleads, ‘if I’m guilty let me be forgiven and graciously authorized to expiate, coming and going in passing time, every day a little purer, a little deader’ (CSP, 132–133). The work of memory, as I have suggested, is presented as expiation, the divesting of one’s attachments and ideas rather than their preservation. Each of the terms of the cliché of storytelling is taken to task in Beckett’s work. Molloy’s story is written from the perspective of the narrative present, as many first-person narratives are, and begins in that present: ‘I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now’ (T , 7). The chronological beginning of the story proper is hence already deferred, albeit in a manner whose conventions we recognize. This beginning itself is then further deferred, however. The narrator seems pathologically reluctant to unveil the official starting point of his narrative: I began at the beginning, like an old ballocks, can you imagine that? Here’s my beginning. Because they’re keeping it apparently. I took a lot of trouble with it. Here it is. It gave me a lot of trouble. It was the beginning, do you understand? Where as now it’s nearly the end. Is what I do now any better? I don’t know. That’s beside the point. Here’s my beginning. It must mean something, or they wouldn’t keep it. Here it is. (T , 8) Critics most often talk about deixis in relation to the first person pronoun in Beckett’s work, but it is equally effective in these other mocking examinations of linguistic reference. Molloy’s insistent repetition of the shifting deictic gesture ‘Here it is’ in fact makes the point of origin of his narrative impossible to locate. In fact, the ‘middles’ of Beckett’s stories threaten to engulf both beginning and end in this present bereft of shape and meaning. Beckett writes in the English The Lost Ones of the ‘unthinkable end’ (CSP, 222); a release from the claustrophobic cylinder that the people of the text inhabit. This is impossible to imagine, the world winds down so slowly. The perpetual ‘last stage’ that is the setting for most of Beckett’s novels similarly consolidates nothing. The narrator of the story ‘The Calmative’—asked for the ‘grandes lignes’ (NT, 65) or, in the English version, ‘the main drift’ (CSP, 72) of his life—cannot trace


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its outline. Beckett’s narrators in general are in the same predicament, only catching at snatches of experience seemingly irreducible to a larger meaning. If the beginning is a contested idea in Beckett’s writing, then, the ‘middle’ is no less problematic. The Unnamable states at one point in his narrative: ‘The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere little matter thanks to what dispensation’ (T , 341). The Unnamable perceives himself to be suspended in transit, never arriving, but even this is too purposeful for the narrator of the appropriately titled From an Abandoned Work, who says of himself: ‘I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way’ (CSP, 156). The innocent idioms of being ‘one one’s way’, or ‘going somewhere’, or—in the idiom of commercial or cultural success—‘having arrived’, idly used in everyday life, are exposed as mendacious illusions in Beckett’s work. Olga Bernal, quoting the Unnamable’s words mentioned above, comments on Beckett’s protagonists that ‘The narrator is never more vigilant than when ensuring that no teleological knowledge creeps into his language’ (Bernal, 59).3 Time itself, for Beckett, is not on its way anywhere, but simply on its way. It is a paradox that time must be felt to pass in a linear fashion for it to become an ‘acquisition’. The narrator of the 1946 novella First Love comments on the importance of time being felt to pass, and by implication his narrative to continue, whether or not this constituted a gain in knowledge or wisdom. Describing the scene in his house after his departure, he comments, ‘All imagination to be sure, I was already on my way, things may have passed quite differently, but who cares how things pass, provided they pass’ (CSP, 29). As Beckett suggests elsewhere, imagination is as fruitful as memory if one simply wants matter for the continuation of the narrative. It is questionable, however, whether time itself is obedient to this impression of passing created by the narrative. The philosopher Merleau-Ponty writes of the experience of time that ‘the upsurge of a fresh present does not cause a heaping up of the past when time begins to move it moves throughout its whole length’ (Merleau-Ponty, 419). For Beckett’s narrators, however, time is not felt to behave in this way. The Unnamable asks, why time doesn’t pass, doesn’t pass why it piles up all about you, instant on instant deeper and deeper, thicker and thicker, your time, other’s time, the time of the ancient dead and the dead yet unborn, why it buries you grain by grain (T , 393) The imperative felt by most of Beckett’s narrators is simply to continue being in the hope of being released, making this pile-up of time untenable. Neither are these grains felt as an acquisition: despite the tangibility of this time, they fail, as they fail for Hamm in Endgame, to ‘mount up to a life’ (CDW, 126).


The discrepancy between the lack of a past and the ‘heaping up’ of time without progression in this passage from The Unnamable is mirrored in Beckett’s language itself. The build-up of phrases here demonstrates how clichés give substance to a dramatic situation otherwise stripped of content. In fact, however, the text is losing ground in semantic terms, by the repetition and permutation of these idioms. ‘Text 8’ of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing comments on its own enslavement to images, hindering its investigation of time and expression: ‘to speak of instants, to speak of once, is to speak of nothing, but there it is, those are the expressions it employs’ (CSP, 153). Locutions accumulate, near-synonyms that cannot explain one other but simply provide more matter to obscure meaning and disrupt the ‘transparent’ function of language. This is graphically expressed in the later passage touched upon in the introduction: But what more is it waiting for now to stick a sock in its death-rattle, yet another locution. To have rounded off its cock-and-bullshit in a coda worthy of the rest? soon there will be nothing where there was never anything, last images (CSP, 153–154). If the text comes to a final conclusion it can be no more than rhetorical. As it is, the text goes on: ‘end of dream, of being past, passing and to be, end of lie’. The last images that Beckett chooses here echo a cadence from Yeats’s 1926 poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. Yeats’s bird sings of what is ‘past, or passing, or to come’, a symbol, albeit an ambivalent one, of an objective art that observes and preserves a certain kind of world from a position of authority. Yeats’s world obeys the conventional laws of time, events passing smoothly between past, present and future without disruption. Beckett undercuts this image of the world as an illusion: ‘end of dream end of lie’. This is the end of the lie that says there is an ending, which promises that one will participate in a recognizable sequence of states and then make a timely end. There is no end in language, images seething in one’s brain from infancy to death and perhaps beyond. ‘Text 8’ ends in a present tense that is an admission of defeat rather than an assertion of endurance: ‘when all will be ended, all said, it says, it murmurs’ (CSP, 154). The cliché ‘when all is said and done’ hovers behind this piece, mocking it with its failure to come into being. Instead, the text murmurs on; the act of making an end in and through language can only be a rhetorical gesture. The experience of ‘ebbing’ strength, vitality and consciousness at the end of life is transformed rhetorically into an ‘ebb’ in the flow of time. In How It Is Beckett’s narrator comments that ‘my strength is ebbing it’s inevitable’ (HI, 82) but later imputes this to ‘the current’ that ‘carries me out the awaited ebb’ (HI, 94). The experience of time for Beckett’s narrators is always such a passive one, making obsolete models of temporality based on intention— time as movement, as a function of action. The dismantling of the structures


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of time in Beckett’s work is connected to the condition of aboulia, of the loss of will, that characterizes his protagonists’ existence. Most often, in fact, this ebb leaves Beckett’s characters stranded. They experience a strange death-inlife without having reached the event which would give shape to their lives; they are not ‘achevé’ as the French would have it. We encounter an accumulation of images of being beached beyond the tide. Malone has ‘missed the ebb’ (T , 254). The French original offers an interesting twist on this expression: Malone has ‘manqué le coche’ (Mm, 132), or missed the boat that might have taken him over the river to death. The narrator of How It Is is similarly beached beyond the current that could take him ‘home’ to the longed-for end of existence. In the seventh Text for Nothing the narrator turns the image around, describing himself as, ‘me there, whence all life has withdrawn’ (CSP, 130). The narrator of the story ‘L’Expulsé’ is similarly left behind even by a funeral procession, and cannot other than by proxy partake of the ‘relâche’—a respite, but also a nautical port of call—that it would offer. Finally, the narrator of How It Is suffers ‘shipwreck’ (HI, 42) before coming, in Mrs Rooney’s words, safe to haven. Like Arthur Schopenhauer’s image of man, ‘shipwrecked’ beyond the possibility of happiness before the end of his life, these narrators are stranded in a helpless state of near-demise, the peace of death out of reach.4 This situation is far from the extra-temporal vantage point envisaged by Proust that might give their memories shape and significance. Neither is it the culmination of any process or completion of any acquisition. These characters cannot reach a condition that allows them to survey, organize and interpret past experience with authority, because no such condition exists, and even if it did, there is no assurance that the passage of time would bring it into being. Idioms of ending, even stockpiled as they are in the later Texts for Nothing, cannot then satisfactorily bring an end to Beckett’s works. As far as the narrative itself goes, Beckett tries another tack. He suggests another characteristically defeatist strategy in relation to his early novel, Murphy, writing to Thomas MacGreevy in 1936 that he is giving up on his protagonist in Murphy: ‘the sympathy going so far and no further (then losing patience)’ (Disjecta, 102). Murphy’s abrupt death and summary dispatching, his ashes tipped out onto the floor of a London pub and swept up with the rubbish, give unsentimental form to this process. Beckett reprises this strategy of losing patience in Molloy. The first section ends with the narrator abandoning Molloy to an endless ‘middle’ that is, in consequence, nowhere: ‘Molloy could stay, where he happened to be’ (T , 91). The narrative voice detaches itself from its subject and abandons him in media res, unaccounted for and unhoused. The autobiographical form consists in bringing the reader up to date, that is, concluding with the moment of writing, ‘the present’. At the very least it provides a way of making the connection between the events told and the moment of their telling. Here we are never brought up to date. Molloy

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fails to reach the point of the narrative present, and so cannot connect the speaking subject with the object of the narrative—cannot, in fact, speak of and for himself. The abandonment of Molloy is part of a wider strategy for disconnecting the memories in Beckett’s texts from one another and from the narrative voice. These memories are not held together by their relationship with the speaker or the present moment of reflection as we might expect them to be in a confessional work. Malone of course disowns his memories altogether, giving them to various characters such as Sapo and Macmann with whom he identifies only reluctantly. These are also, however, instances of a larger strategy still: that of the written text itself, which in displaying its textual nature severes itself from the ‘voice’ that the reader persists in attributing to it. When one reads a prose narrative, one has the impression of a speaker, a spectral voice behind the text, however undemonstrative the language. Andrew Gibson has asked in an article whether it is ‘currently possible to think narrative without thinking voice?’.5 In Beckett’s irreverent hands, however, this impression is undermined. The protagonist in How It Is, for instance, tells us that he cannot speak at all for much of his narrative at least: he can speak then that’s the main thing he has the use without having really thought about it I must have thought he hadn’t not having it personally (HI, 62) Other texts relinquish the illusion of presence behind the narrative present altogether. As Molloy comments, I speak in the present tense, it is so easy to speak in the present tense, when speaking of the past. It is the mythological present, don’t mind it. (T , 26) The self-consciously written nature of Beckett’s prose draws the sting of memories that would be literally re-lived with immediacy in an oral narrative. The narrators of Malone Dies, The Unnamable and other first-person narratives seem to have gone beyond their natural term and to exist solely in the telling of their lives. As Roquentin famously puts it in Sartre’s Nausea, ‘you have to choose: to live or to recount’ (Sartre, Nausea, 61). Beckett’s protagonists are telling rather than living and, as a result, they inhabit a realm with a different order of existence. This applies particularly to temporality itself. The narrator of From an Abandoned Work remarks on his new ability: he has ‘nothing to add before I move on in time skipping hundreds and even thousands of days in a way that I could not at the time, but had to get through somehow ’ (CSP, 161, my italics). Writing his life allows him far greater power than living it. The text itself slows and speeds up as an effect of language.6 The text of The Unnamable similarly gains a new momentum


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in gaining as a new subject the further dilapidation of its narrator: ‘And yet it appears that I have rejuvenated. they whip off a leg and yip off I go again, like a young one ’ (T , 317). Beckett dismantles recognizable temporal experiences by emphasizing the discrepancy between textual and ‘real’ time. This ‘textualization’ goes as far as to affect the level of reference itself. Molloy remarks, at one point in his narrative, that he has ‘laid too much stress on my legs, throughout these wanderings, to the detriment of the rest’ (T , 82). There is a deliberate ambiguity here over whether ‘wanderings’ refers literally to his physical journey, or figuratively to the wayward process of telling the story itself. These distinctions are further complicated for Beckett’s reader by the fact that the literal reference is to an element of the story (the journey) that is a fiction, whereas the figurative meaning involves the (real) structure of the text itself. Reference itself is always double: to the telling as well as to the putative living of the experiences described. The life itself, as the memories of the last chapter, sink beneath these written versions of it, something that can only be a relief to Beckett’s unhappy narrators. More profoundly, however, we are always, like Molloy, ‘where we happen to be’ until death gives the final conclusion to our lives and provides the point of authority from which a true and whole narrative of those lives can be given. Walter Benjamin wrote in his influential essay on ‘The Storyteller’ that this figure takes his authority from his communication of death and its meaning.7 Beckett’s works seem steeped in death, but the conclusion of his narrators is that they still cannot speak from an authoritative perspective because their lives are never completed. Malone imagines this position: The truth is, if I did not feel myself dying, I could well believe myself dead, expiating my sins, or in one of heaven’s mansions. But I feel at last that the sands are running out, which would not be the case if I were in heaven, or in hell. Beyond the grave, the sensation of being beyond the grave was stronger with me six months ago. (T , 184) The irony is that experiencing his own demise removes the perspective of indifference which death might eventually bring, the perspective which would allow him to write with equanimity and the wisdom of hindsight about his life. Beckett offers in this passage an oblique chastisement to works such as Chateaubriand’s high Romantic Mémoires d’outre tombe, which presumes to imagine, and speak from, this unimaginable position. Experience, Enlightenment, progress The idea of a ‘straight line’ narrative, as I have suggested, assumes that time is somehow invested with a design or dynamic of progress. Our everyday idioms, Beckett observes, lend weight to this idea. Time will resolve questions

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and give us knowledge: it will ‘tell’. Beckett unpacks this assumption in his writing. The Unnamable proposes this idea at the beginning of his narrative: Where there are people, it is said, there are things. Does this mean that when you admit the former you must also admit the latter? Time will tell. (T , 294) But time is more likely to erase certainty for Beckett’s narrators, who are increasingly in the dark, literally and figuratively. The protagonist of How It Is denies the truth of the proposition that time will provide answers to questions about existence: I am not dead to inexistence not irretrievably time will tell it’s telling but what a hog’s wallow pah not even not even. (HI, 76) A double reading of ‘time will tell’ presents itself, as has been suggested, ‘telling’ here the process of physical and mental demise. The resonant locution turns out to be as hollow as Murphy’s assurance that ‘Providence will provide’ (M, 16). The English ‘The Calmative’ gives another idiom a similarly weary resonance: ‘It always seemed to me I died old and that my body bore it out, from head to foot’ (CSP, 61). The verbs to ‘tell’ or to ‘bear out’ are transformed from promises of enlightenment to agents of demise. Progress ‘properly so called’ is, as the narrator of How It Is comments, to have ‘ruins in prospect’ (HI, 24). Beckett’s language is imbued with the idea that this weary degeneration might be the only story that time tells. As has been suggested, H. Porter Abbott’s observation about the clichés of onwardness in Beckett’s work points to a persistent scepticism about what he calls the Victorian ‘dead metaphor’ of progress (Abbott, 33). Abbott reads this trope as central to an understanding of the ending of The Unnamable (‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (T , 418)), and key passages in Worstward Ho, the title of which is a pun on the ‘Westward course of Empire and, more specifically, Charles Kingsley’s classic tale of adventure and combat on the Spanish Main [Westward Ho!]’ (Abbott, 36). The trope of onwardness is embedded in the text itself, giving the abstract play of Beckett’s language in this text an intriguing new dimension: On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nowhow on. (WH, 7) There is also surely another pun here, on the idea of ‘knowhow’, playing on the idea of self-reliance and practical wisdom and suggesting that the gain of such attributes through experience is equally fruitless from this bleak perspective.


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Such manipulations of the idioms of progress are another example of Beckett’s assault on the idea that time, as an acquisition, makes both the individual and the society itself wiser, stronger and more knowledgeable. In fact, the dynamic of these narratives is in the opposite direction, as the corruptions of the idiom of ‘beginning, middle and end’ have shown. Molloy sums it up in a passage about the failure to commit suicide that could stand as a mise-en-abˆıme for the imaginative condition of the whole of Beckett’s work: ‘And backsliding has always depressed me, but life seems made up of backsliding, and death itself must be made up of a kind of backsliding, I wouldn’t be surprised’ (T , 61). In a characteristic fashion, the style of the passage illustrates the entity that it describes, the casual nature of the syntax and the repetition themselves a kind of backsliding, a gesture of defeat. The clichés also contribute to this impression: ‘I wouldn’t be surprised’ is an observation recurrent in Beckett’s work, suggesting a situation where nothing is or can be new. Beckett’s language correspondingly makes a feature out of losing its momentum. This is another instance where the attempt to be precise in fact leads to greater and greater imprecision. The mental efforts of Beckett’s narrators are often of this sort: the harder the mind tries to articulate an idea, the more impossible it becomes to do so. The tools of reason themselves are subject to this insidious tendency to collapse. Molloy’s attempt to educate his senile mother into remembering a rudimentary language, a code of knocks, fails initially because of her poor memory. One knock meant yes, two no, three I don’t know, four money, five goodbye. I was hard put to ram this code into her ruined and frantic understanding (T , 18) He does so ‘in the end’, however, by simplifying the code and replacing the knock of his knuckles with a ‘thump of the fist, on her skull’. With awful irony, he is ‘enlightened by these considerations’ (T , 18)—taught, it turns out, to try ever more cruel violence in order to make progress with his futile task. Despite Molloy’s scornful and brutally indifferent tone in this passage, his own and Beckett’s other narrators’ memories are scarcely better than his mother’s, and their own capacity to forget the meaning of everyday words is often remarked upon. This incident seems consistent with not only the larger failure of human knowledge in Beckett’s work as a whole, but also the tendency for the human race to try and enforce ‘enlightenment’, as Molloy might put it—to educate others along arbitrary lines through violence. Molloy himself fears the policeman’s blows when he is under interrogation later in the novel. Malone’s visitor gives him a ‘violent blow on the head’ (T, 270). By the time of How It Is, torture is a routinized part of human society, each abused person in turn practising torture on someone else: ‘all the Pims tormentors promoted victims’ (HI, 116). The

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narrator writes calmly of similarly violent actions to those of Molloy towards his mother, and how these too are intended as a ‘lesson’: I dig my nails into his armpit right he cries I withdraw them thump with fist on skull his face sinks in the mud his cries cease end of first lesson. (HI, 69) Just a few sections later, however, this treatment is reciprocated: not that I should cry that is evident since when I do I am punished instanter. (HI, 70) These instances prepare for a more direct exploration of this idea in Beckett’s late theatre, where memory itself is elicited by violence: the protagonists give an account of themselves under interrogation and torture. These practices are authorized and given a bureaucracy and an administrative machinery: enlightenment and power are explicitly bound up with one another. All of these brutal procedures are to no avail, however. Failure here constitutes a defiance of this connection between knowledge and violence. The individual failures to progress in Beckett’s work are made to stand for a universal one. Indeed, his commitment to the investigation of the failure of reason has made his work a key text for post-Enlightenment thinkers. Theodor Adorno said of absurdism in connection with Beckett’s work that its content had become ‘the critique of the omnipotence of reason’, and therefore had produced a ‘land of darkness’ (the enlightenment obliterated). This darkness, he argues, ‘must be interpreted, not replaced by the clarity of meaning’ (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 22). It is wrongheaded to search as Beckett’s authority figures do for the ‘right word’ (T, 368) or the answer to questions that cannot be answered. It should be pointed out that Adorno’s darkness is a new darkness: not the darkness that the Enlightenment could combat and ultimately defeat, but a more impenetrable entity. Beckett’s world gives dramatic form, or perhaps lack of form, to this new and implacable darkness. The appropriation of stupidity that I have argued for in Beckett’s work is often presented from this perspective and with these wider implications. The pun on ignorance and the dark is a favoured one at the beginning of the trilogy. Molloy says of his mother: ‘As to her address, I was in the dark, but knew how to get there, even in the dark’ (T , 22). Later in Beckett’s work, however, in both senses, the narrators are rather ‘in the grey’. Indeed, it is to avoid the misleading positivity of the binary structure of dark and light altogether, perhaps, that Beckett chooses to situate his imaginative universes in this ‘grey’ light. The narrators of The Unnamable and later How It Is are not in ignorance, ‘in the dark’, suggesting they will or could one day progress into the light, but remain in perpetuity in this murky limbo. Correspondingly,


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the Unnamable suspects that his attempts to impose the structures of day and night on his surroundings are in fact misleading: ‘perhaps I am the prey, on the subject of grey, in the grey, to delusions’ (T , 303). On a literal level, he tries to carve night and day out of a uniform greyness; on a figurative level, he cannot even be truly ‘in the dark’, as this would imply the possibility of an alternative enlightenment where none in actuality exists. The comforting structure of night and day, ignorance and knowledge itself has disintegrated. There is in consequence a deep irony behind the justification made by the narrator of How It Is that he will use tenses ‘for the sake of clarity’ (HI, 26). The presentation of time in the majority of Beckett’s work is in fact a conventional structuring of what is in essence a blank eternity. Human structures can gain no purchase on this world. Beckett was fond of this cosmic irony. Every use of the term ‘clarity’ in his work is laced with it. Human structures of thought are in fact seen to be arbitrary and, in a philosophical sense, accidental rather than necessary. In How It Is the narrator divides ‘a single eternity’ into three in the interests of clarity and the Unnamable is obliged at one moment to ‘assign a beginning to my residence here, if only for the sake of clarity’. He goes on: Hell itself, although eternal, dates from the revolt of Lucifer. It is therefore permissible, in the light of this distant analogy, to think of myself as being here forever, but not as having been here forever. (T , 298) Beckett’s translation is precise here, ‘in the light of this distant analogy’ rendering directly ‘à la lumière de cette lointaine analogie’ (I, 15). The vocabulary of enlightenment (and the Enlightenment or le siècle de lumière) reconnects, in this passage from The Unnamable and perhaps even more strikingly in the French L’Innommable, with its etymological beginnings (clarity and enlightenment deriving from literal illumination), but in an ironic context. The narrator’s thinking about time lacks clarity; in fact it is beset by semantic obscurity. The word ‘clarity’ reads as doubly disingenuous here in the light of Beckett’s comment in his review of Denis Devlin’s ‘Intercessions’ that ‘art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear ’ (Disjecta, 94). In the French original, the Unnamable assigns himself a beginning for the ‘commodité du récit’ (U, 14), drawing attention ironically to the demands of traditional art. Beckett’s art resists such commodification, however, and dismantles the structures that might make this world intelligible for the reader. Beckett’s narrators feel a particular detachment from all systems of thought and symbolic representations of the world, as has been argued. As a result, the kind of cumulative knowledge that they might be expected to gain through experience is insignificant. Molloy illustrates the price that one pays for this kind of objectivity, remarking with a rather desolate equanimity: ‘don’t come talking at me of the stars, they look all the same to me’ (T , 60).

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An all-encompassing detachment from the world results in such observations, statements that are incontrovertible but which resist the hierarchy of significance that culture establishes. Malone does understand in principle the tenet of Enlightenment thinking whereby one can learn to analyse and discriminate, and that memory is crucial to this process. He says of the ‘disaster’ of losing his stick: I suppose the wisest thing to do now is to live it over again, meditate upon it and be edified. It is thus that man distinguishes himself from the ape, and rises, from discovery to discovery, ever higher, towards the light. (MD, 255) He too has made a despairing comment about the nature of such discoveries, however, earlier in the novel: ‘ideas are so alike, when you get to know them’ (T , 225). It is all the same to Malone as it is to Molloy. The cliché is literal: the world around these protagonists comes to look ‘the same’ from their equitable perspective. Stars no longer have a special symbolic position, one idea is as good as another, and the whole Enlightenment project is brought to a kind of stalemate. Deleuze identifies an earlier instance of this failure to prefer in Beckett’s work—that of the incident of Murphy and the biscuits in Beckett’s 1938 novel (Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, 4). Murphy ‘had learnt not to prefer any one’ type of biscuit ‘to any other’, also using the analogy of the stars to explore this tension between difference and sameness: Overcome by these perspectives Murphy fell forward on his face in the grass, beside those biscuits of which it could be said as truly as that of the stars, that one differed from another, but of which he could not partake in their fullness, and he had learnt not to prefer any one to any other. (M, 57) As Murphy’s biscuits are different, so are the stars, but the human perspective on them makes it hard to prefer one over the other. The human subject cannot partake of the world’s fullness, its many shades of difference, so it ‘learns’ to suppress its knowledge of this difference in order not to be overwhelmed. Progress in the world, rather than refining one’s apprehension, is in fact a process of habituation: ‘every time a little purer, a little deader’ (CSP, 132–133). If anything, the Enlightenment project in fact works in reverse. Experience, then, leaves Beckett’s protagonists more and more ignorant, and with an increasing desire to distance themselves from the world. Their radical innocence dismantles more and more of the commonplaces of Western thought. The development of Beckett’s prose itself seems to adhere to the principle that it should be ‘a little less, in the end’ what it was ‘in the beginning, and the middle’ (T , 32). As his writing career develops, his


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prose becomes increasingly spare and devoid of human feeling or experience. It continually confounded reviewers’ powers of imagination: when they claimed he could not go any further down the road of sparseness, any further towards dismantling the form of narrative itself, he did just that. He forced them to face the challenge that he set himself: to write about less and less, to contemplate the idea of thinking about nothing itself. His late prose is a challenge in terms of genre too. There are fewer and fewer generic signals: no beginning, middle and end to these pieces; no character or plot. Play scenarios shade into narrative aporetics (who is speaking, of whom?). David Lodge’s review of the late prose text ‘Ping’ comments on the collapse of structure in that particular work: ‘the repetition overwhelms the reader and disrupts the sense of specificity and of logical, temporal progression’.8 Lessness, another prose work of this period, explicitly situates the ruins it describes in ‘time out of mind’ (CSP, 197): this is a time that cannot be thought, ‘beyond memory or record’ as the dictionary might put it, but also unthinkable, without the sustaining but artificial structure of human thought. By the time of Worstward Ho, the text seems to proceed by ‘invent[ing] obscurities’ (T , 269) as the Unnamable puts it at one point, the attempt to exhaust the permutations of speaking themselves driving the narrative on in the absence of object of which to speak. The work pronounces ‘Enough’ towards the end, and seems to decide ‘Nohow on’. The endlessly deferred ending is, however, deferred once more. Someone has said ‘Nohow on’ and there is therefore a position, albeit nowhere identifiable, from which to witness this saying. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on. Said nohow on. (WH, 47) The last statement of the book is not ‘Nohow on’, then, but ‘Said nohow on’. Speech itself presupposes a listener. The past tense suggests in fact a next step, a relentless cycle of speaking and witnessing of speaking like the endless chain of torturer and tortured in How It Is: a ‘hunger to utter’ that cannot be extinguished, but cannot, equally, find a vantage point outside this purposeless speaking. Speaking, and therefore thinking, takes on the appearance of a rudimentary and almost vegetable activity, a flickering of organic energy that is bodily in origin (from the ‘soft ooze’ in the skull) and that cannot therefore transcend or analyse the material existence from which it derives. Beckett gives shape, paradoxically, to that unformed state of mind or ‘cloaca’ that Deleuze described as producing bêtise, ‘a universal leguminous and digestive ground’ (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 188). Proximity to death does not elevate but reduces to the most fundamental and therefore banal of experiences.

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II The myth of hindsight: Beyond the end in Beckett’s theatre The longue vue Even before this extreme position emerges, the attempts that Beckett’s characters make to speak from beyond the perspective of human forms of reasoning are beset with problems. An authoritative standpoint on their lives can only be one after their death, outside the misleading structures of temporal narrative, as we have seen, but they necessarily fail to imagine such a standpoint. The narrator of the French Premier amour writes his own epitaph in the form of a rhyming joke, a pun that explodes itself in its own telling: Ci-gˆıt qui y e´ chappa tant Qu’il n’en e´ chappe que maintenant. (PA, 13)9 The universality of death brings even the most eloquent consideration to the level of a cliché. Malone also imagines a headstone for his character Macmann with the help of a cliché: it will record, in his words, ‘the time he took to be excused’ (T , 273). His epitaph is as trivial and resistant to poetry as that of the narrator of First Love: ‘Here lies a n’er-do-well, six feet under hell’ (T , 273). The idea of summing up a life is a ludicrous one, which can produce only triteness. Wordsworth explored this vexed question in his 1810 Essays upon Epitaphs, where he too concedes that language that tries to contain the truth of a life cannot help but fall into platitude. His meditations on the dilemmas involved in offering a final statement are perplexed, but they are also illuminating for a reading of Beckett’s work. The escape from time that such a perspective requires seems to bring with it this problem of register. At the moment when most eloquence is needed, language in fact seems to become most banal: ‘general or even trite’. Where discrimination would seem to be necessary above all, a ‘want of discrimination’ is found. Wordsworth goes on to suggest, however, that this is a necessary cost attached to the duty of epitaphs to universalize, going to some lengths to justify the triteness of the epitaph by recourse to the ‘general language of humanity’ in which they are written. He also offers, however, the more jaded view of Samuel Johnson, who ascribes this lack of discrimination, in his 1756 ‘A Dissertation on the Epitaphs written by Pope’, to two causes: First, the scantiness of the objects of human praise; and, secondly, the want of variety in the characters of men; or to use [Johnson’s] own words, ‘to the fact, that the greater part of mankind have no character at all.’10


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Johnson paraphrases Pope’s Moral Essays here, but his own urbane detachment from humanity in general also produces this kind of observation. This detachment was itself remarked as a flaw in his writing by William Hazlitt, who observed that ‘the fault of Dr Johnson’s style is, that it reduces all things to the same artificial and unmeaning level. It destroys all shades of difference, the association between words and things.’11 Like Molloy’s stars, his equanimity is in danger of shading into indifference. Johnson is flippant, then, and gives an instance of his own characteristically laconic style, but there is something useful in his observation. What this tells us is that an absolute detachment from one’s subject flattens difference and discrimination. A complete objectivity such as might be achieved from beyond the grave would stress the similarities between human creatures rather than the differences. Beckett’s work imagines such a perspective, and the collapse that it would effect in the anthropocentric distinctions of human reason. His theatre is particularly explicit in this respect. This perspective is the ‘longue vue’ that Clov has of humanity through his telescope in Fin de partie, a view which seems to make the humanity outside (if there is any) further away rather than closer. There is also something of the epitaph in Vladimir’s aphorisms in Waiting for Godot: ‘When Pozzo asks, ‘Who are you?’, Vladimir replies, simply: ‘We are men’ (CDW, 76). He and Estragon refer to their condition in cosmic terms: they are ‘men’ only as far as to indicate an opposition to God. In both plays, the characters’ pronouncements on humanity tend to make it a homogeneous entity rather than a precisely knowable set of differences. This is due to a certain flattening of register in this play, but only among the characters who are in the know. Pozzo is not in the know, and so his selfevaluation is made from an anthropocentric perspective, and indeed, more particularly, a self-centred one. It is, to begin with at least, correspondingly much more lively. The differences he perceives between himself and the other characters are rather problematic ones, however. In judging Vladimir and Estragon, the nature of Pozzo’s judgement suggests that he himself has replaced God at the centre of his conceptual system: You are human beings none the less. (He puts on her glasses.) As far as one can see. (He takes off his glasses.) Of the same species as myself. (He bursts into an enormous laugh.) Of the same species as Pozzo! Made in God’s image! (CDW, 24) Others are judged by the likeness or unlikeness to himself, rather than God: Yes, gentlemen, I cannot go for long without the society of my likes (he puts on his glasses and looks at the two likes) even when the likeness is an imperfect one.

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Vladimir and Estragon, on the other hand, seem to view themselves—and all of humanity—with Clov’s ‘longue vue’. Although Pozzo generalizes about his ‘species’, this is ironic where Vladimir and Estragon are innocent. Pozzo suggests degrees of difference relative to himself; Vladimir’s ‘we are men’, as we have seen, is meaningful only in contrast to God. The more cosmic the perspective, it appears, the more bare and less ambitious the vocabulary. Differences are less pronounced and humanity becomes a single entity. Vladimir’s late sortie into rhetoric—‘We have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?’ (CDW, 74)—is punctured by Estragon’s retort that ‘billions’ of humans can: what seemed like hyperbole has turned out to be an understatement. All the gestures of human rhetoric seem vain in the cold light of this universal perspective: an objectivity is hinted at which is implacable. Pozzo’s intelligences about the world and his attempts to persuade, please, frighten and move the two protagonists dry up, leaving the earth to continue existing without definitive judgement or explanation: Pozzo: But—(hand raised in admonition)—but behind this veil of gentleness and peace, night is charging (vibrantly) and will burst upon us (snaps his fingers) pop! like that! (his inspiration leaves him) just when we least expect it. (Silence. Gloomily.) That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth. Long silence. Estragon: So long as one knows. Vladimir: One can bide one’s time. (CDW, 37) The greatest irony in the play comes with Estragon’s response. The gap between Pozzo’s last comment and the rest of his oration suggests the distance between his rhetorical account of the earth and how it really is. This speech does not constitute knowledge: it falters and gives up before a conclusion is reached. Estragon’s comment (‘So long as one knows’) simultaneously underlines the fact that we do not know and the paramount importance that knowing has for the characters in the play. In fact, knowing, for the characters in all Beckett’s plays as for those in his prose, is dependent on a teleological perspective which they cannot achieve. If one knows what the end of the day will be like, Vladimir suggests, one can endure the intervening time. Not knowing what the end of life, or of the world itself will be like, the implication is that life is unendurable. Or not quite unendurable: Estragon: I can’t go on like this. Vladimir: That’s what you think. (CDW, 87–88) Beckett is scrupulous to ensure that there are no absolutes in this world. Vladimir and Estragon’s own language does not escape censure. Their


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language is no more objective or knowledgeable than that of Pozzo; it is simply more careful to avoid claims to the contrary. Clichés that overdramatize are particularly vulnerable to deflation in the world of Beckett’s theatre. The only way in which language can be precise is to know its limitations. We cannot use the resources of our language which make absolute statements. Utterances which make any kind of absolute claim for human will, either in terms of what it can do or in terms of its ability to make an end, to refuse existence, must be reined in. Beckett also anticipates in this exchange the ambivalent treatment of the idea of ‘onwardness’ seen later in his work. Estragon, like the Unnamable, ‘can’t go on’, but will nonetheless do so, as Vladimir points out. The question hangs in the air, however, as to whether or not there will be an end— in either sense—to this drearily stoic continuation. These degradations of stature and register are meaningful only in relation to some end-point, some point of termination that both threatens and cannot be achieved. The bodily decline of Beckett’s narrators, which intrudes upon every instance of the activity of thinking, again pertains: time is ‘telling’ in the present. Already conspicuous here is the attitude towards ending so cherished in Beckett’s Malone Dies, contained within the narrator’s comment that ‘After all, it is not important not to finish, there are worse things than velleities’ (T , 198). Even ‘after all’, one may not be ‘finished’. The way may be ‘well charted’ but there is ‘little hope of coming to its end’ (T , 182). Such a prospect is embodied in the physical entropy of the characters on Beckett’s stage. Both in behaviour and in language, they recall the ideas in Henri Bergson’s essay on laughter, where he sees a derogation from the ‘moral’ or philosophical self to the physical as a lack of momentum, a lapse, an inhibition of the dynamic e´ lan vital by the material inertia of the body. The comic in language is, he argues, an analogous kind of ‘lapse’ in attention (Bergson, Laughter, pp. 49–50, 104). What is being laughed at in both cases is a kind of slowing down of humanity, an atrophy of its potential. The end never arrives, then, but still Beckett’s plays are haunted by ideas of judgement. There is no objective standpoint from which this judgement could be made, but there is still the suggestion that all tends in the direction of a final extinction. Clov and Hamm are one step further on from Vladimir and Estragon; ‘naturally’ those around them are ‘extinguished’. Beckett’s plays depict a world that from a cosmic perspective has lost its momentum: Vladimir: Let’s wait till we know exactly how we stand. Estragon: On the other hand it might be better to strike the iron before it freezes. (CDW, 19) Vladimir is most often the advocate of waiting to see. Estragon suggests, on the other hand, that they should act. His conflation of the two clichés ‘strike while the iron is hot’ and ‘till hell freezes over’ gives, however, the true

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picture of what action in such a context as theirs might constitute. The world is slowing down to such an extent that it is in danger of freezing over. Any action is measured in terms of this palontological time, like that imagined in How It Is: ‘of empires that are born and die as though nothing had happened’ (HI, 13). In addition, the echo of the idiom ‘till hell freezes over’ behind the comment, with its colloquial sense of ‘never’, suggests that their action will not happen at all, that the time frame is too impossibly vast to be conceivable. When will all of this have been just play? The characters in many of Beckett’s plays are in thrall to the idea of a time that will come, a future point at which they can look back at their lives and determine their meaning. This is the notional perspective from which one writes one’s epitaph, or concludes the autobiographical account of one’s life. At one point Estragon asks, ‘And if he doesn’t come?’ Vladimir replies, ‘after a moment of bewilderment’: ‘We’ll see when the time comes’ (CDW, 56). Instead of being in their power to imagine, the future becomes the external authority into whose arms they gratefully deliver themselves. Whatever happens, it, at least, can be relied upon to arrive. As the narrators in Beckett’s prose works look to manifestations of objective will (God, the implacable drives of the body, the faceless ‘gentlemen’ of the trilogy) to impel their narratives, Beckett’s stage characters both justify and endure their current situation by imagining a moment at which all will be reckoned. The plays’ titles establish this moment. Godot will come. The end, while never in sight, is a source of solace to Hamm and Clov. Winnie gestures towards the moment when she can say for sure that this has been another ‘happy day’. Naturally, these moments of reckoning never arrive. The characters cannot rely on their own authority to make sense of their lives. Any moment that they themselves settle upon to do so will be an arbitrary one—as the moment of death itself is. How will ‘the time come’ for Vladimir without Godot, whose anticipated arrival alone shapes and defines the future? The titles shape a trajectory that the plays can never achieve, establishing a template for failure. As a spatial horizon always recedes into the ‘far distance’ as one approaches it, in the way that the plain and the sky on the backdrop for Happy Days do, the temporal horizon too proves itself to be a false one. In this predicament, the horizon that Beckett’s characters do adopt is one that shifts between the most immediate physical and temporal concerns— the next urination, the next sleep, the next few moments of dialogue—and the perspective of their identity and significance sub specie aeternitatis. They cannot see themselves from the middle ground that would give an individual life meaning. They see themselves instead from a totalizing perspective that erases all distinctions between human beings, and flattens the dramatic arc of a life.


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Beckett’s first theatrical venture, a version of Corneille’s Le Cid written with George Pelorson at Trinity (called Le Kid), gave parodic expression to the idea that the end of a life might provide this life with shape and purpose. Whereas Beckett’s later plays represent a vision of life without a teleological framework, this one gives the suggestion of an anticipated end. The play uses the conceit of the Aristotelian unity of time whereby a play’s dramatic action, for ease of understanding and empathy, takes a short space of time such as a day. The literal application of this to Le Kid involved a clock whose hands were turned by a figure on a ladder throughout the course of the play. Beckett’s interest in Henri Bergson’s dynamic concept of time, on which he was lecturing at Trinity at the time, is felt behind the imaginative structure of the play. Bergson argues that we substitute for the real ‘dynamic’ and variable time (la durée) an image of successive and discontinuous points of time: a stable, quantifiable entity. In fact time is mobile and in flux and it is only our scientific conceptualization of it that gives it this regular character.12 Beckett’s play accordingly presents a subjective image of time. When the figure on the ladder falls asleep, the clock-time ‘lapses’. When he awakes, he needs to hurry the delivery of the play to reach the moment when 24 hours would ostensibly have elapsed. As the clock hands whir round, the dialogue speeds up to a ludicrous and unintelligible pace. Beckett’s character carried an alarm clock, anticipating Endgame where the ringing of Clov’s alarm clock gives the characters an experience of finitude. Clov will set the alarm if he leaves to let Hamm know that he is gone rather than dead. The clock has a larger resonance, however. Its alarm is ‘fit to wake the dead’ in Hamm’s words, providing a parodic representation of the day of judgement, the earth’s wake-up call. Clov finds the ending ‘terrific’ (CDW, 115), reawakening this word’s original sense of causing terror. The French original is even more striking here: ‘La fin est inouïe’ (FP, 67): the end is unheard of, incredible. There is a familiar form of Beckettian pun here: the stem of the word is the verb ‘to hear’—is the end of the alarm clock’s ring heard or unheard? Aside from this paradox, there seems to be a further resonance to the idea that this ending might be ‘unbelievable’, something that cannot be imagined happening on earth. Clov will not leave, the end will not come, the dead will not awaken. Hamm famously compares his existence to millet grains ‘pattering down’, as we have seen, and comments, ‘all life long you wait for that to mount up to a life’ (CDW, 126). This moment will never arrive. Clov’s preference for the ending makes him, Stanley Cavell has suggested, ‘the eschatologist to the end’ (Cavell, ‘Ending the Waiting Game’, 153). Hamm, on the other hand, quashes the revitalizing possibility of an apocalyptic end: he ‘prefers the middle’ (CDW, 115). In French, again, his words lend further emphasis to the cod symbolism of the alarm clock: he favours the ‘milieu’, perhaps their current situation, to any new condition that might arrive. The later reappearance of the clock harks back to Le Kid: Clov hangs

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it on the wall and, when Hamm asks him what he is doing, replies ‘Winding up’ (CDW, 127). Rather than reminding us that the end is near and our time short, however, the idea of ‘winding up’ suggests a premature end, a decision to impose an ending before one’s natural term. Every action of the pair comes to stand for their attitude towards an impending apocalypse. Clov wants to impose an ending: he tidies up as a gesture towards the idea of finitude. Trying to create a little order, he dreams of total order, of a world with ‘each thing in its last place, under the last dust’ (CDW, 120). Hamm again tells him to ‘Drop it!’ Where discrimination would seem to be most needed, a ‘want of discrimination’ is found. In fact, things in their ‘last place’ are not necessarily in the ‘right place’ of the more familiar idiom: the end is no more significant or meaningful than any other moment of one’s life. How far, then, are the hints of apocalypse in Waiting for Godot and Endgame to be seen as allegory? In one respect, the ideas found in conventional idiom are shown to be unbounded in scope and so resonate in a newly magnified sense. Ideas such as ‘going on’, ‘winding up’, ‘putting things in order’ and ‘clearing away’ become slogans for the ultimate processes of history. Beckett seems to translate the four last things, heaven, hell, death and judgement, into the idiom of domestic routine. In the ‘longue vue’ of these plays the distance between such language and the language of eschatology is rubbed out. Yet these activities cannot simply symbolize the coming of a theological end. As symbols, they themselves decay: in Waiting for Godot the patterns of action weaken; in Endgame activities are terminated abruptly before they are completed; in both, modes of oration and narration trail off in the face of the blank and implacable present. Beckett’s art is not mock-heroic: there is no distance left between the heroic or the monumental and its burlesque imitation. The colloquial register of the action is neither blasphemous nor satirical. Furthermore, this is not mimicry of an endgame in more momentous circumstances. There is neither story to allegorize nor concept to symbolize. The ending that has already taken place is the end of the idea that there can be any thing other than the seen world to be revealed. Like Watt, again, these characters live and have always lived, ‘miserably it is true, among face values’ (W, 70). Time itself loses all objective structure in these circumstances. Vladimir and Estragon have the following exchange: Vladimir: Well I suppose in the end I’ll get up by myself. (He tries, fails.) In the fullness of time. Estragon: What’s the matter with you? Vladimir: Go to hell. Estragon: Are you staying there? Vladimir: For the time being. (CDW, 76) ‘For the time being’ suggests for Vladimir that every experience of time is provisional rather than objective. Time is, Vladimir suggests here, whatever


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you say it is at any given moment. Any statement about the ‘fullness of time’ is just as empty and subjective as the idea of ‘the time being’. The narrator of the fourth Text for Nothing makes a similar conflation of ideas, describing himself in the French original as ‘au fond de ce lieu, qui n’en est pas un, qui n’est qu’un temps pour l’heure e´ ternel, qui s’appelle ici’ (NT, 209, my italics).13 The idea of the eternal is confused with the idiom ‘pour l’heure’ (for the time being): the subject cannot comprehend eternity outside the ‘present moment’ in which she or he lives, and so it becomes a meaningless idea. Time cannot justify such portentous statements when there are no portents to be had. Henri Bergson spelt out the provisional nature of our experience of the present in The Creative Mind: My present, at this moment, is the sentence I am pronouncing. But it is so because I want to limit the field of my attention to my sentence. This attention is something that can be made longer or shorter, like the interval between two points of a compass. The distinction we make between our present and our past is therefore, if not arbitrary, at least relative to the extent of the field which our attention to life can embrace.14 The characters in Beckett’s plays also make their focus of attention the words they are speaking. The direction of this analogy is reversed, however. In answer to Clov’s question ‘What is there to keep me here?’, Hamm replies, ‘The dialogue’ (CDW, 120–121). Their present continues to the end of the next sentence but possibly no further. The condition of provisionality itself was a central concern for Beckett at the time of writing this play, a preoccupation informed perhaps by his experience of surviving day to day in France during the war. It was a particularly charged idea in this context, as he suggests in his early piece for radio, written in response to his French war work, ‘The Capital of the Ruins’: ‘ “Provisional” is not the term it was, in this universe become provisional’ (CSP, 278). This situation has become ground for Hamm and Clov’s activities. At this moment, while they speak, they exist; the next, who knows? The fruits of memory and hindsight are discredited in such a condition. It is often argued that Beckett’s is a theatre of presence, of actions happening in front of an audience but divorced from any world beyond the stage. If it is a theatre of here, however, it is also one of now. This present-tense presence is menaced by its own provisionality. Winnie in Happy Days is more than almost any character in theatre in the here and now. Willie’s unresponsiveness keeps her painfully attentive and, as she entreats him to be, ‘on the qui vive’ (CDW, 148). The second Text for Nothing compares the ‘one enormous second’ of the ‘now here’ to ‘Paradise’, but for Winnie it is closer to hell. She can establish nothing about this present. Her feelings are expressed for the most part in relation to the future (‘this is going to be a happy day’) or, in a more complex construction, the ‘future perfect’

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(‘this will have been a happy day’). Rather than experiencing happiness in the present, she—like Beckett’s other protagonists—is required to make her present into a past—‘this will have been’—in relation to some putative future vantage point. The present is only significant in its capacity to be a future memory. Even the exceptions to this rule, when she can risk a present tense, are far from comforting. Winnie requires that the present be shared for it to attain an objective existence, but the moments when Willie does respond to her do little to establish her in a shared frame of experience or to allow her to feel present ‘joy’. Willie’s raising of his hand occasions a momentarily ‘joyful’ tone of voice from Winnie, who comments, ‘you are a darling today, now I may continue with an easy mind’ (CDW, 154). What she continues with, however, is the most cheerless reflection on the condition of her environment in the play: Shall I myself not melt perhaps in the end, or burn (Pause.) On the other hand, did I ever know a temperate time? (Pause.) No. (Pause.) I speak of temperate times and torrid times, they are empty words. (Pause.) I speak of when I was not yet caught—in this way—and had my legs and the use of my legs, and could seek out a shady place, like you, when I was tired of the sun, or a sunny place when I was tired of the shade, like you, and they are all empty words. (Pause.) It is no hotter today than yesterday, it will be no hotter tomorrow than today, how could it, and so on back into the far past, forward into the far future. (CDW, 154) She dismisses all the distinctions that she might make to differentiate now from then, here from there, as ‘empty words’. She cannot distinguish, let alone judge, in what her present might differ from past and future. Her mind in this state may be easy, but only by virtue of being indifferent, immune to the nuances of anticipation or regret. Elsewhere the moments of communication with Willie only sow doubts about their mutual understanding and even their identity as fellow creatures. Winnie describes feeling ‘sucked up’ into the air, a concept Willie can only understand, we infer, as an obscene pun. His incomprehension prompts Winnie to comment, ‘Ah well, natural laws, natural laws, I suppose it’s like everything else, it all depends on the creature you happen to be’ (CDW, 152). Similarly, when Willie makes a pun on ‘fornication’ and ‘formication’, they both laugh, but Winnie is unconvinced that their laughter has the same source: Or were we perhaps diverted by two quite different things? (Pause.) Oh well, what does it matter, that is what I always say, so long as one you know what is that wonderful line laughing wild something something laughing wild amid severest woe. (Pause.) And now? (Long pause.) (CDW, 150)


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The allusion to Gray’s ‘On a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ here, and the irony of Winnie’s unwitting invocation of ‘moody Madness’ as the appropriate response to life, has been much discussed. The reference to a poem which perceives the present (young schoolboys) through the lens of a doomed future to come (their future misery and defilement) is significant here for Winnie’s own attitude to the present. The young boys in the poem achieve their ‘paradise’ and ‘bliss’ by living unthinkingly in the present tense. Winnie, by contrast, can only enjoy her present by envisaging the moment when it will be a past fondly thought on, a precarious aspiration all too vulnerable to ruination. The last moment of connection between Winnie and Willie is famously ambiguous, as he crawls up towards her or her revolver: ‘Is it me you’re after, Willie or is it something else?’ (CDW, 167). He says her name, providing the climax of the play, but even here the joyful cadence is attenuated and her triumphant present tense qualified: Oh this is a happy day, this will have been another happy day! (Pause.) After all. (Pause.) So far. (CDW, 168) The qualifications produce an after-effect of enervation consonant with Beckett’s professed aim to create a ‘syntax of weakness’ (Harvey, 249). The caveats to Winnie’s happiness are also consistent with the pattern of the rest of the play. ‘All’ must be seen and judged before this can be pronounced a happy day but this judgement is provisional and finality deferred. The bell at the end of the play, far from making an end, keeps Winnie awake and this day in play. All notions of time with which we are familiar have again vanished. There is no modulation of day into evening to relieve the ‘hellish’ glare; day and night are created, for the sake of clarity perhaps, by a bell ringing at indeterminate intervals. Yet time weighs down on Winnie. She is living constantly in the mode of nostalgia or anticipation, attempting a dynamism in relation to time denied to her in terms of space. She finds, however, that the past and the future are equally unpromising resources. She is chronically forgetful or, as Beckett put it, ‘interrupted’ and cannot recompose her stories, her memories or her poetry-by-heart sufficiently to ‘lose herself’ and escape her surroundings. The future seems irremediably bleak, hemmed in by an encroaching earth, and reliant for distraction and succour on a lover who is keeping his distance. Beckett even stressed the ‘agedness’ and ‘endedness’ of the objects Winnie takes out of her bag in his notes on the German production.15 The end seems to be at hand. This crippling sense of time coming to an end paralyses Winnie: movement and change, conditions of time, have become disabled: ‘something must move, in the world, I can’t any more’ (CDW, 166). She displays the same condition of aboulia as Pozzo: neither able to seize the present moment,

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both finding themselves unable to act unbidden. Winnie comments on her desire to sing: ‘One says, Now is the time, it is now or never, and one cannot’ (CDW, 164). Her world is carved up into absolutes: an unbearable ‘now’ and the ‘never’ that threatens it with extinction. The old style Yet cliché provides Winnie with a something, albeit a spurious something, in between this ‘now’ and this ‘never’. It recalls a lost world of commonality, a world possible to remember existing in the near past but now irrevocably over. Her expressions belong to this lost world, but there is comfort in the resurgence of a familiar cadence or idiom: ‘not a day goes by—(smile)—to speak in the old style ’ (CDW, 147). These words give Winnie momentary consolation, evoking a community for whom this language was meaningful. It is the very fact that this language is archaic, that it has had its day, which gives it its appeal. It is of a different order than the objects that are also returned day after day. These objects signal a world that is endlessly repeated. After her parasol has burnt up, Winnie comments, Yes, something seems to have occurred, something has seemed to occur, and nothing has occurred, nothing at all The sunshade will be there again tomorrow, beside me on this mound (CDW, 154) It is not, in fact, the capacity for endless regeneration that gives Winnie pleasure so much as the past joys that the fragments of beautiful poetry perhaps deceptively suggest. She calls the regeneration of her world ‘wonderful’ but her ‘voice breaks, head down’ and she cannot continue. Her world is not becoming new again but simply repeating itself in its old barren form. The significance in the things of language that Winnie finds again is precisely that they are old. They testify to change and so permit of nostalgia. In suggesting that her present purgatory has a time limit, decay in Winnie’s world becomes a token of hope. In addition, her old expressions themselves reassert the idea of time: from this day out. (Smile.) The old style! (CDW, 151) Day after day. (Pause. Head up. Smile. Calm.) The old style! (CDW, 156) The whole day has flown—(smile, smile off ). (CDW, 164) They give the impression that time can be controlled and contained, their rhythms suggesting a certain harmony between human activity and the units of time which it occupies. The fragmentary nature of these idioms and Winnie’s quotations, broken by pauses for self-conscious reflection on the form of these phrases, tell the true story, however: the story of her distracted


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state of mind and the suggestion that her world is out of joint. Beckett’s production notes indicate the larger significance of these disruptions: Relate frequency of broken speech and action to discontinuity of time. Winnie’s time experience, incomprehensible transport from one inextricable present to the next, those past unremembered, those to come inconceivable.16 The broken cadences speak of a failure to control or perceive continuity in time that undermines the brief consolations of a half-forgotten phrase from the past. Winnie’s identification of the ‘old style’ is equally uneven. Certain expressions identified as such are not conspicuously archaic or idiomatic. We barely recognize the distance from ordinary language in expressions such as ‘they help me through the day’, to which Winnie applies her epithet ‘old style’. It comes to seem that it might be Winnie’s ideas themselves rather than their linguistic expression that are superannuated. They have, perhaps, lost their currency in a universe impervious to human description or understanding. Winnie’s smiles become progressively less fulsome, flickering on and off increasingly abruptly as the play wears on. The pleasure to be gained from her conventional formulations of ‘day’ and ‘night’ is receding in the face of the implacable glare of light. One particularly significant instance of ‘old style’, conspicuous by its complete inconspicuousness in terms of linguistic form, is the following address to Willie: Whereas if you were to die—(smile)—to speak in the old style—(smile off )— or go away and leave me, what would I do, what could I do, all day long, I mean between the bell for waking and the bell for sleep? (CDW, 145) Unusually scrupulous in qualifying ‘day’ above, Winnie is equally careful to qualify the notion of dying here. The idea that she or Willie might die has become quaint and outdated. Death in the play is a fond hope, a romantic notion, imbued with all sorts of emotive connotations that are lacking in the idea of being sucked up into the air or sucked down into the earth. Such ideas might once have seemed fanciful; they are now more concrete than the notion of death, surrounded as it is in Winnie’s mind with literary associations. Death seems to require a setting very differently rigged out than that of Winnie: her ‘beechen green’ evokes Keats’s nightingale and the poet’s fading into ‘the forest dim’; her allusion to Cymbeline the shaded place of the tomb where she might ‘fear no more the heat o’ the sun’. Both the nightingale and Imogen in Cymbeline mimic death but neither actually dies. Dying is old style in Winnie’s world. Even Willie’s ‘shade’

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(a word of course reminiscent of death) is, she fears, an illusion, a construction of words: I speak of when I had my legs, and could seek out a shady place, like you, when I was tired of the sun, or a sunny place when I was tired of the shade, like you, and they are all empty words. (CDW, 154) Not only is death an illusion, but so is a past which held, or a future which might hold, greater promise than the present. Reality remains indifferent and impervious to the efforts made by language to give it form or term. There is no future in this If the trajectories of Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days do not reach their anticipated end-point, two plays which do seem to achieve, imaginatively at least, a vantage point from which to review the past are Krapp’s Last Tape and Play. Yet their mechanisms for retrospection—the purgatory of recapitulation forced upon the figures in Play and the parcelling up of Krapp’s past life in sound recordings—are far from stable and successful. Krapp’s situation seems at first to hold promise. He looks back at his past, a narrative told in consecutive episodes securely recorded on numbered spools. Is this act of listening the point of reckoning? The voice on the tape talks of looking back on the past year with ‘a glint of the old eye to come’: the audience is offered the brief hope that the moment has come in the present of the play when a cold eye can be cast on his life. The play indeed ends in a firm judgement expressed in a syntax of uncharacteristic strength: Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back. (CDW, 223) Yet this is the tape speaking. Krapp’s current incarnation sits silent. The ‘strong’ voice of the tape dominates the play, the current one ‘wavering’ and ‘gasping’ through his abortive account of the present. The current Krapp abandons his present reflections in favour of reliving his former life. The scene of the past, Krapp lying over a woman in a punt, obliterates the present stage action: Krapp: Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn’t enough for you. (Pause.) Lie down across her. (Long pause.) (CDW, 223) The darkness, the ‘off-stage’ encroaches upon the stage image, ‘drown[ing]’ Krapp in ‘dreams’. Krapp cannot construct the memory of a life with beginning, middle and end out of his archive but shudders to a halt in the middle, swallowed up by his own voice.


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The narrator of the prose work How It Is offers a concise judgement on Krapp’s enterprise: ‘unless recording on ebonite or suchlike a whole life generations on ebonite one can imagine it nothing to prevent one mix it all up change the natural order play about with that’ (HI, 115). These imaginative possibilities in fact demonstrate that this would not represent a life, that this recording would be an artifice, an artificial selection and presentation of the moments of a life. ‘Mix[ing] it all up’ and changing ‘the natural order’ might in fact make this registration better equate to the working of real memory, but both artistry and memory itself are doomed to falsify one’s past life, just as the narrator of From an Abandoned Work can ‘skip’ through the days in talking about them ‘in a way that [he] could not at the time’ (CSP, 161). Play offers no more authoritative a standpoint than Krapp’s Last Tape does. The first part of the play has the three speakers, a man and two women, enclosed in urns and speaking at the bidding of a spotlight that moves between them. They tell the story of a love triangle that once existed between them, and are revealed as husband, wife and (his) mistress. The ‘Meditation’ that comprises the second half of the play, however, sees the same characters comment not on this past story but on their present predicament, which seems at first to offer itself as a vantage point which might bring atonement and resolution to their complicated past lives. W2 had hoped for something more restful from the afterlife than this inquisition, but says nonetheless of it: ‘At the same time I prefer this to the other thing. Definitely. There are endurable moments’ (CDW, 312). As well as being bearable, these moments might endure, unlike those in life. M too hoped for a point when ‘pain’ would cease and ‘peace’ arrive. He comments at the beginning of the ‘Meditation’: M: When first this change I actually thanked God. I thought it is done, it is said, now all is going out. (CDW, 312) Yet all is not yet said and done, it transpires, as the cliché that hovers behind these words suggests. M. goes on: M: It will come. It must come. There is no future in this. (CDW, 313) This last bald colloquialism, conventional expression of despair, is in fact ironically inappropriate: what M expressly wishes for is for there to be no future. All three characters look forward to a moment of true objectivity in the future when, it is suggested, they might be released. Yet this end-point will not, he suggests, come about by their current interventions. At what future point, M. asks, will their perspective on this be a neutral one: ‘All this, when will all this have been just play?’ The characters in all of these plays seem to use language expressly chosen to wear away. It is language whose day is past; there is, by definition, ‘no

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future’ in it. It cannot entirely die, however, just as, as the da capo structure of Play seems to suggest, their own situation is endless. Cliché may testify to an imminent end, but its trope has come to a halt before its natural death, and is often repeated in this half-dead state. The visibility of its image has degenerated but not entirely been erased. It draws attention not only to language’s vulnerability to time but also to its reluctance to end, its vociferousness, its aversion to silence. Most of all, it bears witness to the truth of Beckett’s crippled narratives: that time bestows no authority and brings no revelation. Winnie may look back and see ‘the old joke’ of existence ‘again’ (CDW, 145), but she can no longer laugh. ∗

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The subject habitually constructs a perspective on their life through retrospective points of view: those of literature, autobiography, or simply the customary social practice of accounting for oneself in (past-tense) narrative. The linear structure of the sentence is mirrored in the larger structures of telling a life. Both at the level of the sentence and at the level of narrative structure, however, these patterns accord badly with our many-layered experience of time. We do not experience life through the neat order of a beginning, a middle and an end; the story of one’s life requires a retrospective point of view that always remains hypothetical. Beckett’s work enters into a dialogue with that of Proust and deliberately adopts the losing position, settling for damnation rather than salvation in his own battle with the ‘double-headed monster’ of Time (P, 1). He renounces any belief in the capacity of memory and the recreation of feeling to redeem lost time, and any faith in cumulative experience to give this lost time significance. This battle is no longer presented in terms of individual psychology, however, or even in the demise of a particular instance of aesthetic or cultural sensibility, constructions that might be identified in Proust’s novel. The representation of ignorance is given a wider scope in Beckett’s investigations, which scrutinize the very forms of reflection and retrospection themselves. Beckett figuratively reverses the progress of Enlightenment, and offers a philosophical image of darkness that is no longer the prelude to an awakening into light and knowledge, but a kind of immanent state of collapse in all rational systems of thought.

4

Cliche´ and the Language of Religion

it harps, but no worse than Holy Writ —‘The Voice’

I Introduction: Holy Writ Winnie’s description of existence as a ‘joke’ represents a typically ambivalent take on the idea that there may be an objective authority responsible for this existence. The position of cliché itself mimics that of Beckett, similarly ambivalent, with regard to religion. Beckett’s protagonists feel that they are cursed with original sin (life the ‘immemorial expiation’ of which Molloy speaks; Hamm taking it for granted that any progenitor is ‘accursed’) despite not believing in the framework that would give the idea meaning. Correspondingly, cliché is felt as language that has ‘fallen’. It also casts doubt, however, on whether there is an exalted position (of precision, of temporal coincidence, of eloquence) from which it is possible to fall. It has often been remarked that this analogy between speaking and sinning is one from which Beckett can never fully escape, reinforcing his ambivalence towards both religion and language. The significance of these associations comes into focus, however, in looking at the fallen language of cliché in his work. Beckett wrote the following in his essay, ‘Dante Bruno Vico Joyce’ in 1929: There is not the slightest Biblical authority for the conception of language as a direct gift from God, any more than there is any intellectual authority for conceiving that we are indebted for the ‘Concert’ to the individual who used to buy paint for Giorgione. (Disjecta, 31–32) Here, then, he seems at least to try to escape from theology as the allconsuming form for thinking and feeling. This pronouncement seems to offer, unusually for Beckett, a clear position on the relationship between language and divine authority. Even if one cannot tease out the full import 123

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of the analogy, Beckett seems to distance himself categorically from the idea that human language is an imitation of the divine Word, or a dispensation from God. Yet, perhaps inevitably, things are not so straightforward. For one thing, some relationship between God and human language is implied here, if not a direct or authoritative one. God has, in the analogy, furnished the materials for us to speak, even if he has not created them. It is also perhaps surprising that God is given an existence at all, given Beckett’s sceptical views. God is in this image some sort of conduit in the production of language, however small his role in that process may be. It may be foolish to probe too far the statements of this early essay, which seem frequently to become bewitched by their own allusiveness and figurative nature. It is telling, however, that Beckett cannot dissociate the question of God entirely from human language. In fact, his own works display until the very end a double-bind in this respect that makes the allusiveness of this early essay more truthful than a direct and categorical statement of belief. Beckett wants to free himself from the influence of his religious upbringing and the authority that was held over him, ever-present as a kind of verbal memory in his head. The image of God as a lowly dogsbody, sidelined in the creative process, is one that would have appealed. On the other hand, there is no other model or source of imagery than a theological one for his abiding view of humanity as disabled, passive and suffering. Even more problematically, nor is there any other explanation for the compulsion to create and even to live towards which Beckett’s narrators appear to feel so ambivalent (and which mystifies many commentators on Beckett himself: why go on writing at all if it is such a hopeless, if not sinful, endeavour?). Molloy, talking of his writing, gives one of many examples: ‘Yet I don’t work for money. For what then? I don’t know’ (T , 7–8). The treatment of religion in Beckett’s work seems to bear witness to this dilemma. It is telling that many of the references to God in Beckett’s works are in the tags and idiomatic phrases where his mention is conventional (and often blasphemous): ‘God help us’, ‘God forgive me’, ‘God knows’. Hamm wants to stamp out signs of existence, such as the flea, ‘for the love of God’ (CDW, 108). Any benevolent God would, the suggestion is, want life on earth to be put out of its misery. It is preposterous, Hamm exclaims, that Clov should imagine a rejuvenation of life on earth ‘in God’s name’: ‘But what in God’s name do you imagine? That the earth will awake in the spring? That the rivers and seas will run with fish again? That there’s manna in heaven still for imbeciles like you?’ (CDW, 118). In these expressions, God is usually a metaphor, often suggestive of the idea that no one can know or help, or—as here—a token excusing of something that is fully intentional. This idea that God can and does already stand for nothing is appealing to Beckett. But the famous self-cancelling exclamation in Endgame—‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist!’ (CDW, 119)—cannot come to rest with this emphatic, if paradoxical

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statement. ‘Not yet’, says Clov, with characteristic bathos. Hamm cannot even be allowed his moment of glory in repudiating God. The locutions that use God’s name can also be taken literally. There are no sure things in Beckett’s rhetorical armoury, every assurance undercut. God at once provides emphasis and occasions the most profound moments of doubt. Criticism of Beckett’s work reflects this ambiguity in his position on religion. In an insightful essay on Beckett’s unpublished text ‘The Voice’, P. J. Murphy records the prevailing view: that the treatment of biblical language in Beckett’s works is to set it in what Hersh Zeifman calls ‘ironic counterpoint’ with the rest of the text, a strategy which undermines an orthodox reading of such language.1 P. J. Murphy argues, however, that, rather than simply poking fun at the scripture, Beckett’s writing in fact makes a point of failing to ‘measure up’ to that of the Authorized Version.2 It is not clear, however, what Murphy is making of this failure. His choice of Beckettian text for exegesis is at once highly pertinent and strangely unhelpful in this respect. The example that he gives of reference to this issue in Beckett’s work is the line in the prose text ‘The Voice’ that reads, ‘Yes, it harps, but no worse than Holy Writ’ (Murphy, ‘On First Looking’, 63). Yet in this observation, the voice does not compare itself unfavourably to the Bible. In fact, it precisely ‘measures up’, though no more than that, in being ‘no worse’. It is clear that Beckett still holds up biblical discourse as an authority against which to compare his own narrators’ utterances, but it is not clear from Murphy’s example how he (or indeed they) feel that they compare. Leslie Hill, as Murphy observes and we have discussed, sees the biblical allusions as a ‘genealogical forbear’, a ‘minimal ironic frame’ that gives Beckett’s texts a ‘temporary guarantee of legitimacy’ (Hill, Beckett’s Fiction, 109). Hill is talking in terms of the symbolic structure of Beckett’s work: the ‘family’ background of Father and Son, and the complex embodiment of each that the narrators of the trilogy, in particular, represent. His comments could equally be applied to the kind of cultural value that the rhythms and images of biblical language bestow. Again it is not clear from Hill’s comments, or perhaps in reading Beckett’s work at all, whether this temporary guarantee of legitimacy is contained within a wider frame in which the promise of such language is ultimately decried, or whether the irony is in the gap between the truly legitimate language and Beckett’s illegitimate one. Beckett seems to repudiate this language while still acknowledging that it plays some part in influencing his own words, as Hill’s talk of genealogy suggests. It is interesting to compare this particular kind of textual memory to the more personal material discussed in the second chapter. In fact, religious language in Beckett’s work is often no less personal than memories connected with family relationships or romantic love. Religious language is for Beckett himself both a personal memory, in recalling his deeply devout mother and his own strict upbringing, and a cultural authority so ingrained that it determines the way he thinks and the creative images available to

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him. Time, space, dark and light, love, anger: all these, and any number of other basic concepts, are already encoded by the cultural framework of religious belief, whether or not what sustains that belief endures. Biblical rhythms and images saturate Beckett’s language and seem protected from decay, however often they are repeated. In this sense, religious language can never become cliché, having a kind of odour of sanctity provided both by its place at the heart of the English language and by its protected status, the belief that it is renewed each time it is repeated in prayer and ceremony. Beckett aims, however, to lift this sanctity and turn it into cliché: into language that can be scrutinized and judged. To this end, he appears to treat religious language in exactly the opposite way to that in which he treats existing cliché: he does not bring it back to life, but questions its enduring vitality and disables the power that its cadence and musicality bestow. P. J. Murphy makes the interesting argument in his article that Beckett’s critics, like the exegetes of scripture, have lost sight of the literal and realist meanings of the writer’s work, imputing increasingly gnomic meanings to its simplest statements. Beckett’s own elliptical and gnomic comments on his work have of course encouraged this trend. Murphy makes little attempt to suggest what its literal meanings might be, but his comments are suggestive for my argument that Beckett celebrates face values in his work and returns cliché to the more direct and often striking images at its origin. What biblical language becomes in this context is then a décor for Beckett that in fact illustrates the opposite to its transcendent meaning. The picture in theological discourse of humanity as suffering, ignorant and directionless is indeed one that Beckett embraces. The range of reference that scripture offers in this respect is entirely grist to his mill. There is, of course, in his world no compensatory promise of salvation and redemption, however. Theological language can have no double meaning; human flesh cannot be interpreted as the embodiment of God’s Word. If the ordinary terms of biblical language mean exactly what they say, the authority of this language collapses. God’s voice and the written word In using a metaphor of painting for the dismissal of God as the source of human language, Beckett evades—perhaps deliberately—the question of the relation between speech and writing, a question crucial to debates about both divine and human language. God’s Word is always imagined as a voice, which human scribes then set down, giving authority to the idea of the spoken word over the written in Western culture in general. In a similar argument to that made in relation to memory, it can be seen that making religious language consciously written is one element of the creative disturbance of its status that Beckett effects in his work. Unlike other kinds of language, which decay into cliché or empty of affect altogether with their repetition, religious language draws a continued legitimacy from its being


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given life repeatedly in prayer, sermon and hymn. In writing, however, this privilege can be revoked. Beckett manipulates the form of religious language so that the spoken word is not made flesh in physical image, but converted into the dead shroud of the written word, the ghostly outlines of print. There is an intriguing religious analogy in a passage of The Unnamable that is otherwise very difficult to interpret: here it’s dark, it’s they who make this grey, with their lamps. When they go, when they go silent, it will be dark, not a sound, not a glimmer, but they’ll never go, yes, they’ll go, they’ll go silent perhaps and go towards their master, who will punish them, or who will spare them, what else is there, up above, for those who lose, punishment, pardon, so they say. What have you done with your material? We have left it behind. But commanded to say whether yes or no they filled up the holes, have you filled up the holes yes or no, they will say yes and no, or some yes, others no, at the same time, not knowing what answer the master wants, to his question. (T , 368) This group, never identified, answer in order to gain pardon or, if they give the wrong answer, to receive punishment. This seems to be an allegory of Calvin’s elect, who do not know which is ‘the right answer’, but must wait submissively for the verdict on their lives. The images of filling holes, however, harks back to the passage in Molloy, where the narrator mused that ‘you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes in words until all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery’ (T , 13). In both passages, then, one can read these ‘holes’ as text, the blank spaces created in and between the written or printed words. Writing can render the text ‘blank and flat’, can extinguish speech— to create the ‘speechless’ misery of which Molloy speaks—and can even eliminate the illusion of speech that the narrative creates. It can silence itself—paradoxically—by filling up the space in between words (perhaps with more words?) until the whole is illegible and without meaning. The passage in The Unnamable puts this activity into a religious context: the narrator is tormented by the scrutiny of God, ‘the light’ in this passage, or by the illusion of this scrutiny, which may only be ‘powerful lamps’ (T , 368) trained on him. Filling in the gaps by writing might, however, banish this light: it is, as he says in this passage, ‘like shit’, a ‘question of elimination’ (T , 368). A barricade of words can be produced that will seal off the channels of communication with God. This is a kind of anti-prayer, a compulsive action of writing, so that he might ‘drown’ in words and be covered over. There are several aspects of Beckett’s work that point to his awareness of the possibilities of the written word. Beckett famously said to Howard Hobson that he was interested primarily in the ‘shape of ideas. It is

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the shape that matters’ (Beckett and Schneider, No Author, 173), a sentiment that is often understood by critics to explain his fascination with a theology that he did not believe in. This is, perhaps, itself an idea that emerges from a print culture: such an evaluation is made with reference to an idea of language that is spatial, even visual, rather than temporal and aural. Beckett’s written manipulations, as this chapter will argue, disrupt the naturally pleasing cadences of biblical language. He famously ‘touches with obscenity’, in the words of Christopher Ricks, the biblical verse ‘It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks’ in the title of his early short story collection More Pricks than Kicks (Ricks, 166), as well as creating many other blasphemous contexts. He also plays with almost every allusion to a biblical phrase, however, in modifying, qualifying, or otherwise interrupting its rhythm and distinctive wording, creating such ‘broken paternosters’ as those the old man in ‘Enough’ ‘pour[s] out’ (CSP, 188). Beckett’s narrators cannot accept religious teaching as truth, but must test, debate or deny it in what Walter Ong, as has been seen, called an ‘ostentatiously logical’ manner (Ong, 14). Malone muses of some music that he hears: ‘or could not this song have simply been to the honour and glory of him who was the first to rise from the dead, to him who saved me, twenty centuries in advance?’ (T , 208–209). By qualifying the act of salvation with such precision, he undermines the simple solace of the preceding phrase, ‘to him who saved me’. In the later work, such phrases cannot be left alone either, but the disruption is achieved more economically (and decisively). In Company the narrator queries, ‘God is love. Yes or no? No.’ (C, 73). Finally, as was seen in the first chapter, Beckett’s decision to write in French is bound up with his sensitivity to the idea of language in a print culture. This creative choice affected his relationship with the medium in which he wrote, offering a greater degree of control: however able a linguist Beckett was, the French words he used would not have automatically sounded in his head in the way that English ones would have done. His relationship with biblical language in particular is, I would argue, one aspect of the comment that Beckett made to Richard Coe of English: that ‘you can’t help writing poetry in it’.3 It was biblical verse, as well as literary association, that he wanted to banish from his head. Eventually, as he himself said, English came to seem like the foreign language, at which point he switched back to writing in it. To start with, however, French provided him with the detachment from language that prevented it—to some extent at least—being poisoned with personal memory and with religious authority. As is the case with other memories, however, these measures taken against the power of religious language are something of a failure. The sounds, rhythms and images of the biblical verses come back into Beckett’s work, particularly in the English translations that he made of his own work. Arguably of course, like the resistance to memory that his works claim to enact, this is a willed failure, a performance of impotence. His writing dramatizes


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a struggle between the powerful stylistic current of religious language and its own syntactic strategies. He must combat the power of this religious language through weakness—a good Christian strategy. It is the possibility for the attenuation and interruption of biblical cadence with his own ‘syntax of weakness’ that Beckett explores. Despite such strategies, however, the aural effects of biblical verse recur and, as P. J. Murphy has suggested, they do so deliberately. The fact that this recurrence occurs so often in Beckett’s English translations only underlines how deliberately he allows them to surface there. Beckett’s language consciously invites a comparison with religious language in which the former will be the loser: his work needs this authority to create its own peculiarly negative, if no less powerful effects. The whole enterprise of creation is, for Beckett, thought through by means of the theological precedent. As befits one of Hugh Kenner’s ‘Stoic Comedians’, Beckett is very conscious of the idea that creation is only copying. ‘You invent nothing’ (T , 32) as Molloy reminds us and himself. Coleridge famously argued that the artist echoes the voice of God, the eternal ‘I AM’, so that even the most original art is only an instance of the secondary imagination (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, I, 304). Beckett’s scepticism about creativity is closer to Flaubert’s vision in Bouvard et Pécuchet, however. The protagonists in Flaubert’s novel scribbled senselessly, filling in blanks but saying nothing new. Like them, Molloy ‘takes an interest’ in human branches of knowledge such as astronomy, geology, anthropology, and psychiatry. He also follows them in being ‘horribly confused’, ignorant of men ‘beyond me’ (T , 39), despite this prodigious effort of learning. Unlike Bouvard and Pécuchet, however, Molloy, along with Beckett’s other protagonists, longs for silence. The familiar double bind reasserts itself here again. Speaking is imagined as both sin, when Moran confesses his ‘excesses of language’ (or Beckett himself famously describes it as a ‘stain’ on the silence), and as expiation, performed ‘vilely, like a pig’, or in the long ‘pensum’ (T , 312) that lasts one’s whole life. Only by speaking or, more explicitly, writing more—filling in the holes—can Beckett’s narrators ever hope to end. Writing seems to be a kind of punishment for an unnameable sin, imposed by an external authority that is never satisfied. Religion, repetition and stupidity Léon Bloy made a direct analogy between cliché and religious language in his 1901 Exégèse des lieux communs, where he invoked St Jerome, the ‘inventoriateur plein de la glorie des Lieux Communs e´ ternels’.4 Bloy’s work makes an exegesis of the ‘holy’ laws and idées fixes of bourgeois society, revealing a spiritual impulse that takes for its object the materialism and nationalist feeling of genteel French society. Beckett’s work is not without censure of some of the same conventions, as the first chapter of this book suggested, but it is the basis for Bloy’s analogy that is most interesting for the purposes of this study. God’s Word is, he suggests, the perfect commonplace: a fixed

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and eternal truth that can be repeated endlessly. There are two aspects to this comparison. First, in speaking exclusively of himself, God perforce repeats himself constantly, saying ‘the same thing in a thousand different ways’ (Bloy, ‘Preface’).5 Secondly, like Wordsworth’s epitaphs, the Word of God must be made as intelligible as possible, something which might render it trite in its human form. In fact, biblical teachings, particularly in the idiom of the New Testament, often seem in their form to converge with communal habits of thinking, as the idea of proverbial wisdom suggests. Bloy is concerned with the evacuation of spiritual content in the perpetuation of these forms in secular contexts. Beckett, on the other hand, suggests that such teachings cannot be easily separated from Bloy’s secular commonplace, or Flaubert’s bêtise: religious language too often appeals to collective everyday experience rather than categorical and necessary truth. Belacqua submits to proverbial wisdom in ‘Dante and the Lobster’ as though it had the authority of divine law. He muses of burning his lunchtime toast to a crisp: ‘It took time, but if a thing was worth doing at all it was worth doing well’ (MPTK, 12). Religious teaching is treated in identical fashion, however. If ‘fish had been good enough for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour’, he muses, ‘it was good enough for Mlle Glain’ (MPTK, 19). But his apparently wide-eyed insistence after such expressions that ‘that was a true saying’ suggests that they are not truths but truisms, empty and unreflective. In the first case, indeed, the pun on ‘well done’ gives a new literal meaning to the expression: a general maxim for living a useful life is converted into the most specific (and detrimental) of culinary instructions. It was, Léon Bloy suggested, the earth-shattering confidence with which the bourgeois pronounced their clichés that made them so stupid, and his ‘exegesis’ of such expressions is justified by the fact that their speakers believe them to be on a par with biblical truths. Unthinking religious faith, and the prejudices that it engendered, have also of course been subject to a more hostile kind of ‘exegesis’ by the most central Enlightenment thinkers. Anne Herschberg Pierrot has written of Voltaire’s attack in his Lettres philosophiques on the thoughtless way in which religious ideas are accepted. Religion could indeed promote the kind of unreflective thinking that produced bêtise. Herschberg Pierrot also quotes the following observations from Flaubert on the same theme: En aura-t-il fini avec la métaphysique creuse et les idées reçues? Tout le mal vient de notre gigantesque ignorance. Ce qui est e´ tudié est cru sans discussion. Au lieu de regarder, on affirme!6 Such received ideas, Herschberg Pierrot observes, ‘belong to the power of number, of majorities’. Beckett seems to situate himself in this critical tradition, but there is something that fascinates him in the very certainty (or complacency) of the language of both truism and religious law. He cannot


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find an alternative to this language in his own work: there is no stable irony, as has been suggested, or perfectly secular language that can act as a point of reference from which to challenge religious language. This is because there is no perfectly literal language, in terms of either its reflection of life or its immunity to religious appropriation. Secular language can always be used in religious discourse as a symbolic figure or a moral example, or indeed as a simple example of secular language or profanity itself. All that Beckett can do to step outside the figurative economy of religious language is to create a structure whereby the language of religious orthodoxy clashes with both referential context and stylistic frame, or to translate its meanings from their original, transcendent context to another, more prosaic one.

II Fallen language and Molloy Above all, no profane comparisons Beckett goes to some trouble to deny his religious language its odour of sanctity, and one key strategy for doing so is to wrest it away from its original context and applying it to the chaotic and merciless world of his texts. The literal application of these expressions means that they lose the authority that they have in their original context. The most sustained instance of this strategy is in the second part of Molloy, when the outwardly pious Moran struggles to understand the message of the doctrine that he has swallowed by rote. Any delay in setting off on his mission to find Molloy would, he thinks, be construed as hindering providence. He comments, ‘I was not going to expose myself to thunderbolts which might be fatal It was not for nothing I had studied the old testament’ (T , 119). The very possibility that such thunderbolts might not be fatal makes them literal and undermines their symbolic role. In the radio play All that Fall, Mrs Rooney is similarly literal about the little birds that God has the beneficence to save, even if they are of less value (even less value—the implication is) than humans. ‘They were not sparrows’, she insists twice. The priest in Moran’s story seems to provide guidance as to the use of such symbols. Moran searches for an analogy for the lamentable situation of ‘Sunday without the Body and Blood of Christ’, and the priest raises his hand in alarm: ‘Above all no profane comparisons, he said. Perhaps he was thinking of the kiss without a moustache or beef without mustard’ (T , 100–101). The pun on ‘above all’ underlines not only how this language is perceived as being of a higher order than the everyday, communicating as it does God’s Word, but also how it has to sacrifice this position in order to make itself intelligible to human thinking. This very intelligibility, making God in man’s image, sullies the essence of religious thought. The priest himself, indeed, entirely disregards his own advice: observing that ‘a wink is good as a nod’ when offering Moran an irregular communion, and comparing Job to the hen who ‘sit[s] with her arse in the dust, from morning to night’ (T , 101).

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Another instance of this strategy of literalization is the reference to the biblical significance of the sky made in several places in Beckett’s work. Beckett appears to misremember Psalm 121 in the short story, ‘The Expelled’, written just before Molloy. He alludes to the line ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills: from whence cometh my help’ in a passage from the story: ‘I raised my eyes to the sky, whence cometh our help’ (CSP, 49). The narrator of the story ‘The Calmative’, written in the same period, gives us a permutation of the idiom. The narrator’s aggrieved disappointment over the failure of God’s assurances disrupts their original reassuring rhythm: ‘it was always from the earth, rather than from the sky, notwithstanding its reputation, that my help came in time of trouble’ (CSP, 66). The irony of Beckett’s faulty memory of this psalm, perhaps deliberately mistaken, is that in the second example the narrator in fact finds help exactly where it was promised. Nonetheless, the ‘reputation’ of the God that sits in the sky is tarnished. The disrupted cadence in the passage from ‘The Calmative’ signals that God’s authority, enshrined in the very rhythms of this discourse, has been undermined. A literal understanding threatens the biblical message; God’s promises are all for the life to come, but as Hamm says in Endgame, Beckett’s narrators’ lives were already ‘always that’ (CDW, 116). They, like believers, have—faute de mieux—waited for something meaningful to happen to them, but unlike those who believe, they live with the apprehension that it never will. Sanctified cadence The form as well as the sense of Beckett’s borrowings from scripture is significant. The comment about the sky in the French original of ‘The Expelled’‘L’Expulsé’, is unmarked: ‘d’ou` vient notre fameux secours’. In English, however, it attracts the familiar archaism: ‘whence cometh our help’. If Beckett’s move to writing in French made the defiance of his cultural and religious heritage easier, he often seems compelled to return to the sanctified rhythms of biblical language in the English versions of his texts. It might be argued that the automatic nature of this phrase—unmotivated by the context—makes this is little more than a habitual and empty reflex. Nonetheless, such rhythms are powerful, perhaps providing the fleeting glimpse of something better, stronger, and more authoritative, the temporary legitimacy for which Hill argues. When the Unnamable says ‘his will is done as far as I am concerned’ (T , 314), this first phrase has a specific resonance missing in the French ‘sa volonté est faite en ce qui me concerne’ (I, 43). This language can provide a kind of succour: Moran would take refuge in a ‘quietist’ prayer when his ‘cup ran over’ (T , 168), an expression (from Psalm 23) that he seems to entirely misconstrue, using it to mean when the world becomes too much for him, unbearable rather than blissful: And I recited the pretty quietist Pater, Our Father who art no more in heaven than on earth or in hell, I neither want nor desire that thy name


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be hallowed, thou knowest best what suits thee. Etc. The middle and the end are very pretty. It was in this frivolous and charming world that I took refuge, when my cup ran over. (T , 168) Moran’s parodic prayer soothes him with its apparent proximity to the familiar rhythms of the original. John Pilling has commented that Beckett seems at such moments ‘inescapably attracted to the forms he seeks to subvert’.7 Moran’s prayer is far from reassuring in sense, however, introducing the theme of non-communication with God that will develop in the rest of Beckett’s work. Later in Beckett’s work, these biblical cadences recur without psychological motivation. The reader finds several instances of this phenomenon in How It Is, where even the echo of an authoritative discourse seems incongruous in relation to the abject vision the text presents: an endless chain of creatures prone in the mud, making each other suffer. Such a discourse does surface fleetingly, however. The French ‘comme ça des choses incompréhensibles’ (CC, 76) in the original Comment c’est is rendered in English by the biblical phrase: ‘just one of those things that pass understanding’ (HI, 68, my italics).8 The ironic suggestion is given that the arbitrary injustice of Pim’s sack staying intact where the narrator’s newer one bursts can be explained by the working of a higher order, if not by the human understanding of the narrator. In translating ‘cette voix qui ne sait pas ce qu’elle dit’ (CC, 154), later in this work, Beckett seems again unable to resist the incursion of a distinctive biblical phrasing: ‘this voice which knows not what it says’ (HI, 139).9 Again, to the narrator’s ears the voice that speaks to him makes little sense—he wonders if he might ‘hear wrong’—even if there exists elsewhere a more authoritative way of explaining what it says. The familiar rhythms of these phrases give fleeting comfort in the context of the horrifying vision that the text presents, but the sense of these expressions insists upon human ignorance, unrelieved by any hope, once again offering Beckett’s particularly selective version of the Christian message. Adam Piette’s important book on sound-memory in modern prose devotes one of four chapters to Beckett, but surprisingly overlooks the significance of the biblical sound-memories that surface so often in the writer’s prose. The fallen cadences of the bible are, I would argue, an important strategy in Beckett’s work. Beckett finds such language powerful in spite of himself, one might say: it is telling that when the speaker in Beckett’s 1962 radio play Words and Music wants to find a language that might match the unsullied medium of music in order to describe ‘the most powerful passion’, he looks first to a garbled version of the Catholic catechism (CDW, 288). The tension between the fleeting musicality of the biblical cadences and the syntax of weakness which contains them creates a struggle not only in the text but also within the reader, who is torn between being seduced by their promise

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of authority and order and being dismayed at the ease with which their assurances are undermined and their authority dismantled. What once were immutable truths cannot now be reiterated without caveat or deflation. An unlikely but suggestive analogy for the investment that Beckett makes in such cadences might be Olivier Messiaen’s famous quartet, ‘Quatuor pour la fin du Temps’, in which the composer disrupted rhythm and stretched conventional musical phrases until their form was almost imperceptible in order to give the impression of the messianic end of time. He writes in his preface to the work of how ‘Special rhythms, outside of all measure, contribute forcefully to banishing the temporal.’10 Beckett’s attenuation of familiar phrase and cadence, to different ends, similarly makes the flow of the text into something unpredictable and elusive. The rhythms of human speech no longer seem natural, harmonious and in step with our experience. Beckett’s permutations on the familiar forms of cliché disrupt their comforting patterns and often make their message bleaker as a result: the narrator of First Love is, for instance, ‘more dead than alive than usual’ (CSP, 37); Estragon urges Vladimir to ‘strike the iron before it freezes’ (CDW, 19); help cometh not from God, ‘notwithstanding [his] reputation’. It has been argued that Messiaen’s changes in musical register in his ‘Quatuor’, often seen as lapses in taste, are in fact a comment on the moment when judgements of taste, based on past experience, are no longer meaningful and all is revealed as sacred.11 Beckett’s changes in register have a different intention: all is fallen rather than sacred in his world, no discourse elevated or given a more authoritative status than any other. The musicality of the biblical cadence is just that: a sound-memory rather than a present truth. The radio play All that Fall is structured around this idea of fallen language: the ‘dying fall’ of Beckett’s weakened syntax sounds in much of the dialogue, and the main character, Maddy Rooney, comments explicitly on the impression that she feels she is speaking a ‘dead language’: Mr Rooney: Do you know, Maddy, sometimes one would think you were struggling with a dead language. Mrs Rooney: Yes indeed, Dan, I know full well what you mean, I often have that feeling, it is unspeakably excruciating. (CDW, 194) Humanity itself is characterized by its tendency to ‘fall’ in Christian doctrine: ‘The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raised up those that be bowed down’ (CDW, 198), as Mrs Rooney intones towards the end of the play. The truncated reference to this particular passage from the Bible in the title of the play suggests, however, that it is this capacity to fall, rather than the idea of a subsequent salvation, that is the most dominant message of the Christian religion. Miss Fitt’s lugubrious hymn, mimicked spitefully by Maddy Rooney, emphasizes the ‘encircling gloom’ and the experience of being ‘far from home’ rather than the uplifting possibilities of faith. The religious language


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in the play is exhausted as a source of comfort for the characters, Maddy characteristically struggling with its archaisms and making a nonsense of its hallowed cadences. Her anxiety about the inaccurate translation of ‘sparrows’ is compounded by the difficulty she faces in translating the inflexible syntax of the bible into conversation in her everyday world: It’s like the sparrows, than many of which we are of more value, they weren’t sparrows at all. (CDW, 197) She is comforted neither by the rhythms of such language nor its everyday images, intended to translate the word of God into familiar and intelligible ideas but collapsing into bewildering specificity when taken in literal fashion. This is indeed characteristic of proverbial wisdom, as Beckett’s works show in such a compelling manner. Nonetheless, sound wins out to some extent over sense in Beckett’s densely textured and often poetic prose. Maddy’s desire to come ‘safe to haven’ retains some of its original poetry, albeit one more wistful than reassuring. These cadences, however corrupted, represent the return of a voice, an aural memory, not only in the radio play but even in Beckett’s prose text. They are most familiar from the spoken life of scripture: private or communal prayers, Bible readings, and—that secondary life—the biblical echoes in Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot and other literary sources that also reverberate in Beckett’s head when he comes again to write in English. The shape of words somehow recalls the memory of the sound even in the silence of a written work. The Unnamable evokes a very vivid experience of such a memory in the course of dismissing it: ‘I don’t feel the jostle of words in my mouth, and when you say a poem you like, if you happen to like poetry, in the underground or in bed, for yourself, the words are there, somewhere, without the least sound’ (T , 386). The return of aural memories in Beckett’s texts suggest that this resistance is a token one, however. God’s Voice is not only there as an ineradicable metaphor for presence itself, as will be seen, but also finds a prosthetic extension in the aural encounters with scripture that the young Beckett made so often, and of which even his most secular readers in the English-speaking West have some distant cultural memory.

III Willing and nilling: God and human volition Beckett cannot entirely suppress the overwhelming memory of biblical language, then, but he can corrupt its cadences and disrupt its meanings. That he felt as an imperative, if an ironic one, the impulse both to say and to missay God’s Word is demonstrated by the famous ‘German Letter’ that he wrote to Axel Kaun in 1937. He wrote there that he wished to sin against language ‘Deo juvante’ (Disjecta, 173). The echo of the idea of sinning ‘God willing’ in this phrase gives an ironic indication of the indispensability of

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both theological models and religious language to Beckett as a writer and thinker. He also characterizes himself in this letter as sinning ‘willy-nilly’ in using language at all. Free will itself is already a dispensation from God; humanity can only sin with God’s sanction, as it were. Beckett had already noted in his ‘Dream Notebook’ a phrase from Augustine’s meditation on his own helplessness in the face of God’s power in the Confessions: ‘When I did will or nill anything’ (DN, 127; Augustine, Confessions, VII, 3). Beckett’s characterization of the dilemma in this way in writing to Kaun suggests that it applies both to the particular case of ‘God’s language’, and the wider attitude Beckett has to language in general. He responds to language in the way that he responds to religion: neither can be dispensed with entirely—one must speak whether one wills it or not, ‘willy-nilly’—but both must be misused creatively in order to resist their insidiously negative effect on the process of thinking. The question of the will in Beckett’s work, often identified by critics as significant, is one that is consistently—and perhaps inevitably—mediated by the language of religion. The most telling illustration of this is Beckett’s choice of analogy for Murphy’s idleness: ‘An atheist chipping the deity was not more senseless than Murphy defending his courses of inaction’ (M, 26). This could serve as a knowing comment on Beckett’s own enterprise: the full variety and ingenuity of his strategies for disempowering religious language are simply testament to its influence over him. As has been suggested, Beckett literalizes the picture of humanity in Christian theology as ignorant, weak and suffering, embracing the archetypal images and stories that illustrate this condition in doctrine, without endorsing the other side of the story, the promise that this condition might be alleviated through faith. The stories of human suffering in the Bible are used not to demonstrate God’s benevolent intervention or to argue that one can find an answer or an end for this suffering in Christianity, but as a picturesque illustration of the ongoing suffering of Beckett’s heroes. This is particularly prominent in Beckett’s novel Malone Dies. Malone comments at one moment: ‘what it is all about exactly I could no more say, at the present moment, than take up my bed and walk (T , 225). Here, as often, Beckett cannot when translating back into English resist the echo of a biblical phrase that is lacking in the original French ‘j’en serais bien incapable, a` present’ (Mm, 83). Even the idea of ‘impotence’ in this novel has a theological origin, in addition to its well-worked possibilities for obscene suggestion in the hands of the scatologically minded Beckett. One example is Malone’s comment: ‘My body is what is called, unadvisedly perhaps, impotent’ (T , 186). John Fletcher has suggested that the qualification (‘unadvisedly’ or the French ‘à la légère’) is made in this passage because humanity is universally in a state of impotence, philosophical, spiritual and physical, making the more restricted sexual sense of the word at the least redundant, if not a misleading understatement.12 Bodily impotence, Malone suggests, is only one localized form of a general condition.


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Perhaps the most prominent of the borrowings from scripture that describe humanity’s submission to suffering is that of the crucifixion. The analogies with being crucified in Beckett’s work are well known, used there to describe not Christ’s but the human predicament. As well as the legion references in Waiting for Godot, Malone too bucks himself up with the thought that one of the thieves to be crucified with Christ was saved, a ‘generous percentage’ (T , 256). In a less frequently cited example, Beckett uses Christ’s story in the early story ‘Dante and the Lobster’. A shopkeeper becomes exasperated with the protagonist Belacqua when trying to sell him cheese: ‘The grocer, instead of simply washing his hands like Pilate, flung out his arms in a wild crucified gesture of supplication’ (MPTK, 14). The two protagonists of the story of the crucifixion are conflated with one another here, and as so often in Beckett’s work a moment of decision on the part of the grocer is turned into a helpless submission to outside forces. The pattern of borrowings from Christianity emphasizes the passivity of humanity without offering a solution to the question of who or what might be the corresponding agent. All that is clear is that Beckett’s characters are generally crucified rather than crucifying. There is also a great range of other insistently literal borrowings from scripture in all of Beckett’s work. The pattern that emerges is that, in the frame of the abiding idea that it is ‘better never to have been born’, Christ’s example is again in the passivity of his living and his choice to die. Christ’s lesson in patience and humility is transformed into a picture of idleness in Watt, where Mr Nixon says of the protagonist that he ‘would literally turn the other cheek, I honestly believe, if he had the energy’ (W, 18). Death prevails over life, too, in Murphy, when the protagonist opines that the raising of Lazarus from the dead was perhaps ‘the one occasion on which the Messiah had overstepped the mark’ (M, 102). Malone’s sexual impotence is, in this sense, a blessing, as at least he will not perpetuate the life of the species. He comments on his character, Macmann, that, like Jesus, the other ‘Son of Man’ (as the name Macmann denotes), Macmann is childless: his ‘semen had never done any harm to anyone’ (T , 241). Christian theology offered to Beckett a model for his own perplexity in the face of existence itself, seeming both to justify the ultimate passivity of the renunciation of life, and, on the other hand, to compel its continuation. As Beckett wrote in Dream of Fair to Middling Women in an echo of his cherished phrase from Augustine, ‘The will and nill cannot suicide’ (D, 123). A parody of religious thinking is for Beckett one strategy for finding both a set of symbols for the embracing of oblivion itself and a way of objectifying the otherwise mystifying compulsion to live, the ‘élan vital or struggle for life’ that ‘prodded’ Macmann ‘in the arse’(T , 244) when he had been lying insensate for too long. Beckett examines both this religious imperative and other ways in which the compulsion to live is objectified in his work, without endorsing any of the existing explanations. The philosopher Thomas Nagel suggests that when thinkers arguing for an objective picture of the world encounter an

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irreducible element of subjectivity—an individual impulse or feeling that cannot be explained with reference to such a picture—they often recast that element as an objective (or at least objectified) entity: as the will, the soul, or God’s voice itself.13 Correspondingly, these entities that Nagel identifies are a familiar triumvirate in both Beckett’s prose and theatre, but their objectivity is equally spurious there. The will, and more often its failure or inadequacy, is a constant preoccupation; the word ‘soul’, incongruous in Beckett’s bleakly finite and terrestrial worlds, attracts a sardonic irony but no legitimacy there; and the idea of God saturates Beckett’s works without ever being given the credibility that might allow it to redeem them. As Vladimir says to Estragon: ‘What’s Christ got to do with it? You’re not going to compare yourself to Christ!’ (CDW, 49). Mercier and Camier, in Beckett’s 1946 novel of that name, are similarly dismissive of the idea of the soul: ‘soul: another four letter word’ (MC, 72). Beckett is deeply ambivalent in respect of these objective entities: he undertakes the strategy of objectifying feeling or impulse in his writing, but with an irony that indicates his awareness that such displacements of responsibility are a sleight of hand. Beckett undermines the philosophical tendency to give the will objective form, in particular, by taking this practice to a ludicrous and elaborate extreme. In Watt, the narrator gives the will not only autonomy, but also some other unlikely characteristics. He talks of Watt’s ‘own volition, which, if not robust, did nevertheless possess, at that period, a kind of kittenish tenacity’ (W, 156). Beckett also more explicitly undermines this autonomous picture of will, however. Earlier, when ‘purpose’, a near-synonym for will, has been seen as both ‘living’ and ‘dead’, the other servant Arsene—cannier than the narrator in this respect—admits that this is ‘what you might call what I think the English call six of one and half a dozen of the other’ (W, 57). The will is as good living as dead—that is to say, no good at all. So while making the will objective, figuratively speaking, Beckett also suggests that it can have no effective meaning—within or outside us— because we are fundamentally helpless. We are all crawling eastwards along a boat that is going west, as Beckett’s Molloy (after the philosopher Geulincx) pictures it (T , 51). There is more to Beckett’s presentation of such would-be objective entities than Molloy’s philosophical comedy, however. The paralysis of the will is figured gloomily in Dream, as has been seen, where the will’s bondage is illustrated by the fact that it is not ‘free to suicide’ (D, 123). This bondage suggests two conflicting conceptions of the will. Humanity’s own will has for Beckett no power or agency and is therefore for an empty concept, but there might also be (perhaps has to be) something closer to Schopenhauer’s idea of an objective will outside humanity, pushing it inexorably onwards and preventing it from extinguishing itself. The human will might itself be under some mysterious and implacable constraint. The ‘pre-established harmony’ of Leibniz—a frequent tag of Beckett’s characters (T , 12, 62)— whereby humanity has no free will and every movement is planned and


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impelled by some outside force (divine or otherwise), comes to seem less harmonious than sinister. Despite the irony with which Beckett treats the idea of an objective will, he does not accept an irreducible subjectivity in its place. His treatment of the idea of the Schopenhaurian will is playful but not antagonistic. Similarly, his works are godless, but he uses the model of God’s voice in the fashion Nagel proposes—as a means of positing an external authority. The narrator of Dream, as we have seen, compares himself unfavourably to the ‘Deus’ who might contrive an ending to his story by means of an ‘enormous improbability’ (D, 117). In Beckett’s mature fiction, this analogy is treated in a more sustained fashion. An unidentifiable authority dictates the text to his narrators, compelling them to write or speak. In the absence of occasion or psychological explanation for the impulse to ‘go on’, a voice modelled on the divine Word, or the ‘delegates’ (T , 299) of this unseen authority, is invoked to take responsibility for the words of the text or the theatrical dialogue. Beckett finds by these means a dramatic form through which to displace the locus of authority from the author. The terms and the tone in which these figures of authority are presented are, in Beckett’s early texts, as flippant as his treatment of the will, however, and become impenetrably vague—the ‘voice [that] comes to one in the dark’—later on.14 The narrator of How It Is is even more candid still: ‘Pim Bim proper names presumably imagination’ (T , 89). Authority is always a matter of metaphor and Beckett leaves us mystified, as he seems mystified himself, as to what compels his voices to continue.

IV The docile herd: Religion and social conformity in the later work Home safe and sound Beckett’s early engagement with Christianity also determined his attitude to certain fundamental notions that he presents as normative in his work, the ‘deaf and dumb alphabet of convention’, as he put it in an early letter (Cronin, 262). The ideas of home, of duty, of love, and of ‘company’— social communality—itself, ideas so often felt to represent as a kind of herd mentality in Beckett’s work, are constituted through the generalized notions of a Christian society derived ultimately from scripture and religious teaching. Here again Christian teaching and the lieux communs, the commonplaces of bourgeois society, are seen to converge, and to share the same unshakeable complacency. Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen in their study of cliché take as an exemplary metacliché, the perfect cliché of following the herd, the phrase troupeau humain [human flock] (Amossy and Rosen, 17). Beckett’s culture is one in which concepts of belonging have traditionally been determined by the pastoral metaphors of Christianity: to be one of the flock, to be of the common herd, to be in the fold. These images of

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community are generally negative, however, if not malign in Beckett’s texts, as his comments to Thomas MacGreevy about the ‘mucus of conformity’ suggest they would likely be (Cronin, 188). Moran speaks in Molloy of joining the ‘slow tide of the faithful’ and the ‘docile herd’ of churchgoers (T, 129). Belonging is not given a positive value in this passage, however. It is a painful irony that the only time Moran can persuade his son to walk with him, they are swallowed up in this anonymous crowd. In Malone Dies, Mr Saposcat is similarly pious at the expense of his personal relations. He will not renounce the Christian observance of the Sabbath in order to work for the benefit of his son: ‘And Mr Saposcat had to allow that he would indeed be ill-advised to forego his Sunday rest’ (T , 187).15 The relationships between Beckett’s characters are more often compromised than improved by this automatic social conformity. One inevitable influence on this aspect of Beckett’s writing is James Joyce, whose Ulysses can be seen in part as a chronicle of Bloom’s attempts and failures to conform. Both men knew at first hand the dominance of religious orthodoxy in their own country: as Joyce spoke famously through Stephen Dedalus of the ‘net’ of religion in Ireland from which he fled, Beckett also, if more prosaically, singles out for criticism the dominance of the church in Ireland: ‘theocracy, censorship of books, that kind of thing’ (Shenker, 147). Joyce explores the insidious way in which the religious culture of Ireland translates itself into the fabric of social intercourse. Katie Wales has written, for instance, of the important role of proverbial expressions in Joyce’s ‘Eumaeus’ episode in a collection of essays about cliché.16 Bloom talks there about the time he deflected anti-Semitic insults, using a Christian expression: ‘A soft answer turns away wrath’ (Joyces, Ulysses, 597). As this example ironically suggests, these expressions, many of which have their origin in the Bible, are indicative of the Jewish Bloom’s desire to join the fold. As Wales writes, they represent the ‘clannish orthodoxy of society, to which Bloomian figures belong, or, more tellingly, wish to belong’ (Mathis, Le Cliché, 226–227). The notion of belonging is often both theme and function of this language. Henk Nuiten et Maurice Geelen, writing about Léon Bloy’s choice of clichés in his Exégèse des lieux communs, fix on his choice of the phrase ‘la douceur de foyer’ (the comforts of home), as an exemplary commonplace.17 ‘Foyer’ is the word for ‘home’ used in biblical images of the spiritual home that the believer finds in God, and the bourgeois Christian hearth is supposed to be a metonymic extension of this idea. As this study has already suggested, the concept of home is a grounding metaphor, like that of light, which encompasses ideas of spirituality, psychological identity and spatial location. And cliché in particular is a language in which one should feel at home, safely enveloped by the ‘docile herd’ of Moran’s story. Beckett’s characters, as my first chapter also suggested, struggle to feel at home in such a language. The 1981 work Ill Seen Ill Said indeed turns its


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attention to the notion of home itself but, typically, fails to find it reassuring. The subject of the work, an old woman, makes small journeys on foot out of her house and back again, in part perhaps simply to test the experience of home itself. The concept seems to have the potential to comfort and to provide a haven in the otherwise unrelieved bleakness of the text: ‘How find her way home? Home! Even as the homing bird. Safe as the saying is and sound’ (ISIS, 34). Yet the exclamation mark points up the absurdity of the idea that the ‘home’ of this text might correspond to the reader’s idea of what ‘home’ means. The text also draws attention to the conventional nature of the biblical expression ‘safe and sound’, breaking up the reassuring finality of its usual cadence.18 The associations with security, companionship and rest that the idiom usually evokes are missing: the women lives in a ‘hovel’ (ISIS, 20), enveloped in ‘gloom’ and watched by silent and mysterious figures with only darkness to protect her. Who, indeed, might there be even to say the words ‘safe and sound’ about her? The perspective from which this communal language might be uttered is absent in this most cold and impersonal of texts. It is interesting to note in this connection that the loss of the security of home has an explicitly religious dimension in this work. Ann Beer has commented that the bleak recasting of religious elements there—the Golgotha-like setting, the significance of the nail (a symbol of crucifixion) ‘all set to serve again’ (ISIS, 56), the twelve disciples now silent and uninvolved—‘represent ruins of a system of authority and security once thought unshakable’.19 The Unnamable too dismisses the notion of home: ‘I won’t seek my home any more, I don’t know what I’ll do, it would be occupied already, there would be someone there already I’d disturb him ’ (T , 405). How far is one’s home still home if it is occupied by another? In both texts the displacement of the safety of ‘home’ seems to suggest an erosion of identity itself: the home in The Unnamable becomes another metaphor for human existence. The very notion of being ‘at home’, being identical with oneself, comfortable, and able to find the world familiar, seems for Beckett to be predicated on conversational notions that dissolve under scrutiny. The narrator of the tenth ‘Text for Nothing’ on the other hand seems to be able to identify himself as ‘home’, commenting that his past comes ‘home to roost, home yet again’ with ‘all its hidden treasures of promise for tomorrow, and of consolation for today’ (CSP, 141). There is something menacing about the idea of coming ‘home to roost’, however, that suggests that the influence of his past might not be entirely benevolent. By the twelfth ‘Text’, the subject has lost this momentary assurance of a point identifiable as himself, and with it the first person, and refers to ‘his babble of homeless mes and untenanted hims’ (CSP, 150). Language itself has thrown him out, and he cannot even borrow (as ‘tenant’) a subject position from which to speak. Other Christian language is similarly barren for Beckett’s characters. The common fold involves a sense of duty in Beckett’s work that replaces personal

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autonomy. Miss Fitt in the 1957 radio play All that Fall is open about helping Mrs Rooney only because it is the ‘Protestant thing to do’ (CDW, 183). Even for the non-believer, Beckett suggests in other works, religion provides the concept of social utility and underpins the moral precepts that a good citizen will follow. The Unnamable comments at one moment: ‘I too must contribute my little convulsion, mewl, howl, gasp and rattle, loving my neighbour and blessed with reason. But what is the right manner. I don’t know’ (T , 338). Beckett’s English translation—‘loving my neighbour’—has again a more explicit Christian resonance here than the French ‘l’amour du prochain’ (I, 81). It is to such commonplaces of social duty that Beckett pays particularly hostile attention, however. The Unnamable is unable to find the ‘right manner’ and later, exhorted by his interlocutors to join the community of humanity and to rescue himself from banishment, he resists similar appeals, speaking tellingly of his putative human existence in the third person: I can’t any more, there was perhaps a time I could, in the days when I was bursting my guts, as per instructions, to bring back to the fold the dear lost lamb, I’d been told he was dear (T , 384) Here yet again the English is more specific than the French in its reference to the biblical image, the ‘dear lost lamb’, which goes further than ‘l’être cher’ (I, 155). The narrator tells stories of the ‘daily round and common task’ (T , 383) [la vie des tous les jours], but these remain fictions that he cannot speak of with conviction. He cannot belong to this world. The narrator from the short prose text From an Abandoned Work takes a somewhat more conciliatory position: ‘Yes, I believe all their blather about the life to come, it cheers me up.’ This is perhaps why, as has been seen, he is looking for a woman to ‘be the making’ of him, while Murphy rejects the idea that Celia will make him into anything other than himself. Yet the flippant terms in which the narrator of For an Abandoned Work speaks about this ‘blather’ belie any real belief in it. He also holds up an implacable misery as protection against complete capitulation to the good cheer of Christian commonplace: ‘unhappiness like mine, there’s no annihilating that’ (CSP, 159). Hamm, as we saw above, has a similarly resolute pessimism, believing in the ‘life to come’ only in the sense that his life has not yet arrived: ‘Mine was always that’ (CDW, 116). He has not participated in a life of action or society; for him, the Christian message has the opposite effect to the intended one, suggesting that his existence is held permanently in abeyance rather than enjoining him to lead an active and useful life in the present. Commonplace can protect as well as compel, however. Beckett’s later narrators, like Murphy, find themselves more sympathetic to the cliché that excuses their weakness than to that which jollies or coerces them into effortful social duty. Malone invokes the precedent of commonplace


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in forgiving a wide variety of behaviours as ‘human’. He justifies both the asylum guard Lemuel’s violence against others and his self-abuse in this way: ‘the part he struck most readily was the head it’s only human’ (T , 269). A few pages later, he makes a more modest and familiar use of the word in describing how he himself cherishes his exercise book, one of his last possessions: ‘it’s human’ (T , 272). These uses show, however, that this comforting catch-all of the human can no more embrace the notion of humanity than that of ‘home’ or ‘fold’. Indeed, what is ‘human’ veers in this novel between two contradictory ideas: the civilizing of our urges, in the form of self-control and acquisition of knowledge, and the very capitulation to those unenlightened urges in the form of violence or the grotesque treatment of the body. Molloy abandons ‘the human’ for the broader church of ‘nature’ to get round the contradictions in his behaviour: ‘And what was I doing there, and why come? These are things that we shall try and discover. But these are things we must not take seriously. There is a little of everything, apparently, in nature, and freaks are common’ (T , 14). Nature creates incompatibilities within itself, as the narrator of ‘The End’ implies when recalling his friend’s words: ‘My friend replied that we were as nature had made us, the boys too were as nature had made them. It was inevitable, under these conditions, that the peace should be disturbed from time to time’ (CSP, 88). But in what can this inconsistent nature consist? Human reasoning is frail in so far as there is always an exception to its rule. It is ‘human’ to ‘build hypotheses’, as the narrator of The Unnamable famously reminds us: ‘a lobster couldn’t do it’ (T , 375). But these hypotheses ‘collapse on top of one another’. Beckett’s narrators are always the freak of nature, the exception that causes the hypothesis to crumble. The Unnamable goes on from this speculation about hypotheses: ‘is it possible we’re all in the same boat, no, we’re in a nice mess each in his own peculiar way’ (T , 375). There is little common ground for humanity, and generalizations are rarely sound. As these scrambled locutions suggest, for every commonplace there is a contrary image or proposition that collapses the edifice of reason. In fact, Molloy ultimately detaches himself from these amorphous categories, discounting the possibility that he might be even a freak of nature: But that there were natural causes to all these things I am willing to concede, for the resources of nature are infinite apparently. It was I who was not natural enough to enter into that order of things, and appreciate its niceties. (T , 44) If the categories of ‘human’ and ‘nature’ themselves fall apart, there is still more confusion about what their conjunction, ‘human nature’, might mean. Beckett had, appropriately, some very personal reasons for resisting the communal discourse of social responsibility and Christian virtue in his

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writing. He returns frequently in his writing to those moral lessons and Christian dictums instilled in him as a child by his strict and devout mother. Moran turns on its head the idea—not explicitly Christian but reminiscent of Protestant self-reliance—that if one wanted something doing properly, one should do it oneself: Not that I was positively lazy. It was something else. Seeing something done which I could have done better myself, if I had wished, and which I did do better whenever I put my mind to it, I had the impression of discharging a function to which no form of activity could have exalted me. (T , 93) As has been seen, Celia’s attempts to ‘make a man of Murphy’ (M, 41) also meet with firm if passive resistance, Beckett recalling a similar pressure on his own account, in the same idiom, from his mother. There is an echo of this personal bête noire, the expression to make a man of someone, in a different context in The Unnamable. The narrator comments, ‘I’m like dust, they want to make a man out of dust’ (T , 351). Here too is an instance of the favoured strategy in Beckett’s work where religious metaphor is made literal. Beckett refers to the famous passages in Genesis: ‘And the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground’ (Genesis 2, 7). On the one hand, Beckett’s version seems unusually to avoid a literal approach, acknowledging that this is an analogy (‘like dust’). More characteristically, however, this suggestion that he is only like dust weakens the biblical resonance and in fact returns the literal image of dust (with its connotations of dispersal rather than creation) to the familiar phrase. There is also a hint of the same irritation that Murphy felt towards Celia (and perhaps Beckett towards his mother) in the Unnamable’s response to these imperious demands that he be brought into existence: ‘I’m tired of being matter, matter, pawed and pummelled endlessly in vain’ (T , 350). Why this misguided and overzealous impulse to create him (or to create at all) by shaping this dust into the figure of a man? In fact as suggested above dust stands in many of Beckett’s works for a principle of dispersal which heralds finitude but also peace, and is treated with a rare lyricism. Clov longs for everything ‘in its last place, under the last dust’ (CDW, 120); the leaves in Fizzle 5, a ‘reminder of beldam nature’, do not rot but instead crumble ‘into dust’ (CSP, 237); even the narrator in That Time escapes the world with its ‘cold and rain’ and embraces the whispered message of mortality that the dust offers (‘something the dust said’): ‘what was it it said come and gone was that it something like that come and gone come and gone no one come and gone in no time gone in no time’ (CDW, 394–395). To gather this dust into the shape of man, to reverse the process of decay and start over the cycle of creation, seems to the Unnamable and many other of Beckett’s protagonists an act of particular perverseness. This tendency to see the world as ‘formed matter’ belongs not only to Aristotle, as


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has been seen, but also to Christianity itself. In Heidegger’s words, Western metaphysics sees ‘that which is’ as ‘the ens creatum, that which is created by the personal Creator-God as the highest cause’.20 Beckett prefers to return the world to the unshaped material of dust, dismantling the conspicuously ‘formed matter’ of biblical phrases, literary quotations and social clichés and returning to their components to the ‘dust of words’: ‘I am in words, made of words, others’ words I’m all these words, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling’ (T , 390). This discussion returns us to Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition between the molar and the molecular. Beckett recognizes that language, as has been suggested, has a molar sensibility. Words such as nature, humanity and home become impervious to question and immune to redefinition, allowing ideology to appropriate them. Religion offers a particular moral framework within which these concepts are configured. Culture, as Derrida has suggested, is disguised as nature as a result. Beckett investigates and challenges this process, revealing that these innocuous concepts can also be seen as what Deleuze and Guattari called ‘order-words’ (mots d’ordre): that categories are also in this respect commands, imperatives, rather than being peaceably descriptive. The brutality of the everyday phrase ‘freak of nature’ comes to light in Molloy’s appropriation of the phrase—only ever used of society’s ‘other’—about himself. And even life itself is one such category that is also a compulsion, as Beckett’s protagonists ruefully acknowledge. The lyricism in Beckett’s late work challenges this normative model of language. As the language of the dust in That Time indicates, words undergo a molecular dispersal rather than being harnessed to descriptiveness or the ‘expression’ of a subjectivity that would itself follow a familiar molar pattern. That Time offers many such images of molecular dispersal that relinquish not only identity but life itself: the child ‘making up talk breaking up two or more talking to himself being together that way’, or the eyes ‘passing over you and through you like so much thin air’, or even ‘a great shroud billowing in all over you on top of you and little or nothing the worse’ (CDW, 393–394). Words do not ‘settle’, but remain in flux, even their syntactical relationships ambiguous in works such as this one, or to similar effect already in the 1961 How It Is, or later in Company or Worstward Ho. Yet even in this late writing the molar principle cannot be abandoned. Beckett’s reader sees familiar groupings and associations emerging all the more clearly in the effort required to ‘understand’ the drift of words in the text. The reading process is one that already impels the reader to make meaning, and therefore by definition to shape that meaning along familiar lines. Even without punctuation the reader understands the groupings (particularly the biblical phrasings hitherto noted) in which words cleave together. Religious faith in particular comes to take the form of an idiom of enshrined associations, the collection of images and phrases that seem arbitrary but rise automatically in the mind of Beckett’s narrators and carry with

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them obligations and duties. The narrator of How It Is reflects on ‘God that old favourite’ in this respect: a moment of the tender years the lamb black with the world’s sins the world cleansed the three persons yes I assure you and that belief the feeling since then ten eleven that belief said to have been mine the feeling since then vast stretch of time that I’d find it again the blue cloak the pigeon the miracles he understood (HI, 77) These words are at this moment being carved into Pim’s back, enacting the indelible inscription of this language that took place in the young narrator’s mind. ‘[T]hat belief said to have been mine’: the belief system referred to here was imposed upon him rather than being discovered or claimed of his own volition, but in resurfacing it has become his own. It becomes inevitable that he should find this feeling again, despite his apparent detachment from it in the initial encounter. Associated with the ‘tender years’ of his childhood, it too has become something cherished, some part of himself. Yet the images are in this new context infected with some contrary principle of dispersal. ‘[T]he blue cloak the pigeon the miracles’: these fragments can only be integrated into a meaningful narrative in the mind of a reader familiar with the Christian story. We are forced to see anew the social framework that this story requires in order to make it necessary or compelling. How far does this story ever require, or even allow, understanding, and how far simply adherence? Personal Jesus: Memory and religion It is now well understood that Beckett had personal reasons for resisting molar religious language, depicting childhood encounters with it similar to his own in several of his texts. He is, as has been suggested, deeply ambivalent about this language expressly because of its personal nature. It might have often been, we can conjecture, just this language that had him ‘blushing for his automatism’ not only in his early years but also later on. We come up against the same dilemma as with other kinds of memory: the fact that it comes to mind automatically makes it both very intimate and an alienation from one’s rational self. In Beckett’s experience, a child in a Christian environment learns biblical language—as they do cliché—by repetition and in fear, and parrots it back in similar fashion. Beckett’s personal experience of such a religion—one that crushes the will of the subject and renders expression automatic—make it both a strategy for depersonalizing his writing and a very personal kind of expression indeed. Whether or not the critic chooses to identify these passages with Beckett’s own life, the nature of the ‘memories’ presented in them is striking. The idea that one might divest oneself of self and speak or write impersonally by surrendering to religious language is represented in an emblematic scene


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in How It Is. The young boy in the ‘memory’ of the narrator watches his mother pray: my mother’s face I see it from below it’s like nothing I ever saw that’s not all she closes her eyes and drones a snatch of the so-called Apostles’ Creed I steal a look at her lips she stops her eyes burn down on me again I cast up mine in haste and repeat awry. (HI, 16–17) The memory is conveyed in the impersonal language of the Church—a formality more marked in the French text, Comment c’est, which has the more technical ‘psalmodie’ (CC, 23) where the English has the word ‘drones’. The English cannot match the felicity of the French ‘psalmodie’ here, a verb that has two senses, ‘chant psalms or prayers’ and ‘recite in monotonous fashion’, and so already contains the idea that religious discourse can become a monotonous, oppressive drone. The mother’s eyes rekindle (rallument) after a blankness that corresponds to her submission to a word not her own; she subdues her self in order to contain the word of another, the Other. She herself also takes on the mantle of a divine authority, however: the boy prays ‘according to her instructions’, just as the subjects of texts such as How It Is speak following the impersonal verbal lead of disembodied voices: ‘I speak it as I hear it’ (HI, 113). In the same way that Beckett’s later narrators cannot find the right words to appease their masters, the boy can only pray ‘de travers’, or speak the verses ‘awry’. The memories—the narrator’s, whether or not directly the author’s—in How It Is, as well as in Company, are conveyed in a paratactic syntax which results in a blank tone. No relationship, such as one of loss or nostalgia, is established between the narrative present and the time of the memory. Like Proust’s mémoire involontaire these recollections are seemingly unmotivated, but unlike those in Proust’s novel, Beckett refuses to accord them any power to teach or even move the subject of the piece. Even such personal material does not appear to occasion the generation of sentiment or personality in the text. Yet this very flatness comes in the context of the text to connote deep experience on the part of the narrator, yoked as it is to such intimate contexts. The impression is created that the text itself has been taken over by a kind of automatism, a blank expression of memory, that suggests the irruption of subconscious or at least deep-seated material into the external utterance. These moments of memory flame from nowhere in Beckett’s later works, and consequently fascinate at least the critic, and perhaps the reader too, far more than material with a more evident motivation in the narrative. Beckett approaches religious language as at once familiar and impersonal, evoking as it does both his mother’s severe love and instances of alienated speech. The sensory qualities attached to its cadences, rhythms and

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consciously archaic forms have similarly ambivalent associations for Beckett, particularly in connection with his mother’s religious zeal. Early exposure to the sensory qualities of language, the medium rather than the message, took two forms for Beckett: the language of infancy and the blind repetition of prayer. These forms, childish language and prayer, become conflated at moments in Beckett’s texts. In Beckett’s late prose piece All Strange Away the narrator instructs, ‘Imagine other murmurs, Mother mother, Mother in heaven, Mother of God, God in heaven, combinations with Christ and Jesus, other proper names in great numbers say of loved ones for the most part ’ (CSP, 175). This is a recitation of an autonomous text. Religious language becomes another kind of ‘babble’. In passages of Beckett’s writing such as these, prayer comes to be a substitute bond for real affection, making love a habit rather than a spontaneous feeling. Beckett even used the anonymity of its language in this way as a means of distancing himself from his own parents. He wrote in a letter in 1931 to Thomas MacGreevy of the situation he was in at home: Daddy says come off it for the love of God, come out and dine, I’ll give you a drink, kiss and make friends. God bless dear Daddy Mummy Frank Bibby and all that I love and make me a good boy for Jesus Christ’s sake armen [sic]. So I said something quiet and flat and blank but I won’t. No sir. Nothing would induce me to.21 Love and family relations are made into a duty, and this process allows Beckett to bracket them with the automatic rituals of religion that he does not intend to trouble a deeper self. In a work such as All Strange Away, the recitation of these religious formulae from childhood, set out end to end in a list that never manages to be a litany, discovers in the most personal language an impersonal and automatic discourse. The Unnamable too gives an instance of this kind of language, in similar arbitrary and automatic fashion: ‘Bedtime story atmosphere The instalment over, all joined in a hymn, Safe in the arms of Jesus, for example, or Jesus lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly, for example’ (T , 320). His insistence that these are ‘examples’ seems aimed to distance himself from them and flatten their impact. This is language that is interchangeable and habitual, a simple case of going through the repetitive motions. Yet the repetition of ‘for example’ itself seems a kind of protesting too much: the casualness suddenly appears too studied. The childlike intonation of such language jars, and some deeper discomfort seems to reveal itself. Beckett’s narrators claim expressly to look for discourse that is ‘quiet and flat and blank’, discourse with the ‘flat tone’ that the narrator of Company identified (C, 26). That the language of religion becomes a kind of childhood babble brings us back to the scene of an early preoccupation, however, and testifies to a discomfort which has not been resolved but which comes back obsessively in gestures which are themselves markedly childlike, even childish,


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in the context of these works’ otherwise studied detachment. A timeless world as setting and a highly formalized language should give Beckett the perfect means to achieve detachment, but the insistence with which he spoils religious discourse hints at a more personal engagement that he cannot conjure away.

V Voice and incarnation This chapter has so far identified two main strategies by which Beckett’s language unseats religious discourse. One is to make his characters resolutely literal in their approach to its teaching and its symbols. The other is to undermine the affective power that attaches to it as spoken discourse, both in its ceremonial and ritual uses and in a more general sense as the transcription of a divine voice. These two strategies converge in the play that Beckett makes with the Christian doctrine of the incarnation—the embodied Word—in his own imaginative schema. Investigations of the history of the idea of figurative language inevitably encounter theological views of language. Religious discourse, as Northrop Frye among many other commentators has pointed out, is essentially figurative.22 As humans, we cannot understand God except via metaphor, his own perfect and transcendent terms translated into our human ones. All religious language is in this sense metaphorical, to be treated within a special interpretative framework. On the other hand, any figuration that we do produce in human language is only a debased and potentially blasphemous form of the transcendent symbolization practised by the divine. French nineteenth-century theorists of language point to the etymological link between ‘esprit’, meaning wit, and the ‘langage spirituel’ of God, but also the gap between our prosaic ‘esprit’ and the work of the ‘Saint-Esprit’, the Holy Spirit itself.23 Viewed in this light, Beckett’s drive to banish all metaphor, to make his narrators’ language relentlessly literal, is a kind of religious purgation, a textual hygiene that aims to purify his language of its transgressive elements. The most fundamental metaphor of all, as Jacques Derrida has argued, is the metaphor of presence itself, the idea of a voice behind the written text, whereby written language can conjure personality and feeling out of nowhere.24 The Unnamable elaborates on this illusion in memorable fashion: ‘it’s only beginning, it hasn’t begun, he’s only preluding, clearing his throat, alone in his dressing-room, he’ll appear any moment, he’ll begin any moment ’ (T , 385). Meanwhile, without this voice, his present existence and his memories are only this ‘dust of words’ (T , 390). Therefore the drive to banish voice and to banish figure is in this sense one and the same in Beckett’s texts. This is a kind of anti-Incarnation, as Bruno Clément has pointed out, making flesh back into word—simply words on the page (Clément, 370).

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La parole spirituelle Moran puts his linguistic behaviour into a theological context, as has been suggested, by indulging his tendency towards metaphorical ‘excesses of language’ and then confessing to doing so: Anger led me sometimes to slight excesses of language. I could not regret them. It seemed to me that all language was an excess of language. Naturally I confessed them. I was short of sins. (T , 116) This pattern of indulgence and expiation or purgation recurs throughout Beckett’s work. The Unnamable follows suit, speaking of dirtying his texts with figures, and then confessing them to make them clean: Method or no method I shall have to banish them in the end, the beings, things, shapes, sounds and lights with which my haste to speak has encumbered this place. But not so fast. First dirty, then make clean. (T , 302) There is a similar moment in Malone Dies when he describes Macmann’s desire to ‘make a clean sweep’ of the flowers he sees growing—a common metaphor, of course, for literary figures—and ‘have nothing before his eyes but a patch of brown earth’ (T , 244). The moments of Beckett’s text which articulate this principle—that of deliberately inventing in order to deny or to banish—often equate sanctity with silence, and expression itself with sin. Speaking and then seeking to erase what is said is understood by Moran, as later by the Unnamable, as a process of sinning and then repenting. The idea that all human language is, from a theological point of view, fallen gives a particular framework to our understanding of figurative language. God’s Word is only perceived through analogy and allegory, a discourse spirituel in two senses, both ingenious and holy, but this power in human language—the power of metaphor itself—is an indulgence that needed to be carefully controlled and used only in these sanctified contexts. The tendency of French manuals of style to classify tropes as ‘impertinent’ or ‘aberrant’ uses of language is a legacy of the idea that putting language that is figurative (spirituel) to profane uses might in itself be morally suspect. Beckett uses the implications of these ideas in such a way as to reverse the priority of language and referent by the end of his trilogy. As language that we expect to be figurative is made literal in reference to his characters, these characters come to seem in some respects Godlike, able to drink an ocean or live eternally—even if these attributes are more of a curse than a potentiality. Beckett shows us the strange result of taking all our language to be literal, understanding in good faith the mass of hidden figures in the most common idiom. The world becomes strange, and the narrative is disrupted by the anarchy of images to which the most simple description gives rise.


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Religious language offers Beckett a suggestive model in this respect. The embodiment of the Word of God in Christ is one of the aspects of religious language which underlines its particular status. When Christ says ‘This is My Body’, offering bread, believers understand this as literal, but only by some transformatory process effected by the language itself. The status of ‘body’ here does not conform to that in any secular language: enunciations such as this one are performative acts of speech which can, it is suggested, materially change the world. The language is as a result at once both performative and descriptive. Religious discourse such as this takes believers beyond the limitations of reason, affirming where predication gives up. And so the terms of biblical language are neither literal nor metaphorical, but collapse the distinction. They can only be understood as metaphorical truth which is at the same time first-order truth. Beckett finds a dramatic pretext for this condition of language in his work. At first, he seems to have made the greatest and most daring imaginative leap of all in the last novel of his trilogy, The Unnamable, by imagining his protagonist as God himself. The text seethes with comments and questions that seem to make this assumption. The Unnamable has ‘puppets’ for company, whom he can, when he chooses, ‘scatter to the wind’ (T , 294). Molloy, for instance, when he appears as character in this text, ‘wheels’ about him ‘like a planet about its sun’ (T , 297). He asks thorny theological questions of himself: ‘Did I wait somewhere for this place to be ready to receive me? Or did it wait for me to come and people it?’ (T , 298). Perhaps most tellingly, he inquires, ‘Why did I have myself represented in the midst of men, the light of day? when, through what channels, did I communicate with these gentlemen?’ (T , 299). Such questions, indeed, are reminiscent of those which Augustine’s doubters asked about what God was doing ‘before he made heaven and earth’ (Augustine, Confessions, 229). In one sense, then, this imaginative manoeuvre justifies the making literal of all the language of the text (if in another it makes it an audacious blasphemy). Beckett’s whole imaginative scheme, aspects of which we have touched upon already, follows from this imaginative leap. Making God incarnate, human time gives way to eternity. The narrator of How It Is comments that he has ‘centuries of time’ (HI, 19) or ‘vast stretch[es] of time’ (HI, 24). When he says of his buttocks, later, ‘I haven’t touched them for an eternity’ (HI, 41), this has become—impossibly—a literal statement. As Messiaen—to more devout ends—tried to encapsulate an eternal moment in music, Beckett paints a picture of this moment, the ‘one enormous second, as in Paradise’ (CSP, 106) of the eleventh Text for Nothing, in words. The Unnamable is ‘obliged to assign a beginning to my residence here’ but ‘only for the sake of clarity’: the human structures of thought and reason (that were thought to bring clarity, enlightenment) are preserved but are ultimately empty. In Beckett, like Messiaen, this perspective has a flattening effect on the hierarchies of taste: nothing is good or bad taste. Cliché is no longer fallen

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metaphor: as the distinct between spirit and flesh is dispensed with, so to is that between figurative and literal language. As V. A. Kolve has written, Christ ‘was the first to interpret events as figures’, referring to Moses lifting up the serpent in the desert as a figure of His own crucifixion (Jn 3: 14) and to Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale as a figure of His resurrection (Matt. 12: 40).25 With His coming, however, and God being made incarnate, the need for such symbols stops. And Beckett takes this literality to parodic lengths. In this new apocalyptic world, even the distinction between God and humanity is dismantled. At one point, the Unnamable reverses the model that his text seems up until this point to have carefully assembled: ‘I alone am man and all the rest divine’ (T , 302). In this scenario, however, the labels of God and man have simply been swapped around. All the rest are still his ‘creatures’. Beckett then seems in this work to dramatize himself, or at least his narrator, as the author-God and to take this analogy to its logical conclusion. In a drastic answer to the dilemmas of consensus and objectivity presented in his early fiction, Beckett gives voice to the unnameable third person of narrative. As in his early fiction, here too, in so doing, he also exposes its fallibility. The implications in this later fiction are more far-reaching, however. Like the subject of the dialogue in the play That Time, who as a child could be found ‘making up talk breaking up two or more talking to himself being together that way’ (CDW, 393), the Unnamable and his ‘creatures’ are both parts of the same fiction. The analogy with the divine in this scenario becomes unsettling. Absolute authority to create is seen in fact to be an absolute abdication of self-mastery: how in this case can the creator discern his fictions from himself? As voice ‘A’ in That Time puts it to the child with the over-active imagination: ‘did you ever say I to yourself in your life’ (CDW, 390). Cliché and incarnation There is a precendent for this audacity in Beckett’s earlier writing. He has played with the idea of the Incarnation, and its effect on language, before. There are, for instance, persistent analogies between Beckett’s heroes and Christ: Watt resembles ‘the Christ believed by Bosch, then hanging in Trafalgar Square’ (W, 157), Godot abounds with references to Christ and symbols of Christianity, and Malone seems to allude to the crucifixion when he beseeches: ‘Water, for pity’s sake! How is it I am not thirsty? (T , 275). Later, the Unnamable makes these suggestions literal, commenting on ‘[t]he thorns they’ll have to come and stick into me, as into their unfortunate Jesus’ (T , 352–353). He also imagines himself ‘giving up the ghost’ (T , 345), evoking the Holy Ghost, a sense lost in the French ‘un dernier soupir’ (I, 93). Both he and Christ will be ‘born again’ in the action of giving up the ghost, making the expression more than the usual euphemism for a mortal


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death. As in the case of Christ, it is suggested in Beckett’s text that the only way of making life meaningful is to put an end to it. Beckett may be said to be fond of language that has itself ‘given up the ghost’, the language of cliché. The images of cliché gain a new life in his texts, however, in a process that takes divine creation as a parodic model. If existence is the Word of God incarnated, Beckett’s narrators can give themselves a shadowy existence through their words alone. This suits Beckett’s imaginative universe, where words and flesh are continuously conflated. In Molloy, Moran imagines Molloy disappear, ‘his whole body a vociferation’ (T , 114). The Unnamable’s material being is likewise comprised of the wraithlike substance of language: ‘I’m in words, made of words, others’ words ’ They constitute, nevertheless, a ‘thickness’ (T , 390). Beckett invokes a divine precedent by promoting figures into events, as religious allegory or parable might do. Daniel Albright has written, for instance, of how figures of speech are enacted dramatically in Beckett’s writing. Malone’s simile about his life as a pile of sand ‘trickling away’ (T , 223), for example, is later elaborated so that Beckett’s characters themselves have the properties of sand (or dust, as we have seen), atomized, dispersing and without distinguishing marks.26 The language of cliché is particularly useful to Beckett in this respect, hovering as it does between literal and figurative language, between embodied physical image and conceptual metaphor. Another aspect of the literalization of image throughout Beckett’s work is his practice of converting the figurative images of cliché into concrete matter. So far the argument has focused on how Beckett’s treatment of religious language might comment on and disrupt the meaning of this language itself. Might it be, also, that Beckett uses religious language to serve other ends? One such use that has been suggested is that it provides a model for his own ambivalent compulsion to create, to resolve the dilemma ‘when “I can’t” meets “I must” ’ (Harvey, 249), in Beckett’s words. A more particular use for its strange working, albeit one with a presumption of which Beckett is ironically aware, is as an analogy for the problems of talking about the self. Speaking of the self has always caused Beckett’s narrators insurmountable problems and called for uncommon ingenuity. Some of the disturbing aspects of the Unnamable’s experiment with speaking of himself as a kind of divinity have already been seen. Leslie Hill reads the end of Malone Dies as signifying the protagonist’s failure to ‘embrace the totality of his flesh in one inclusive and identifiable signifier’.27 In the world of the Unnamable this problem is sidestepped: the self of the speaker takes on the shifting appearance of the figures that the process of signification generates. Even the process in Beckett’s work that Adorno calls ‘pure self-positing’28 constantly falls back on figures: the first person ‘really too red a herring’ (T , 345), ‘always out for the whole hog’ (T , 391), its memory ‘real fly-paper’. In fact, the attempt to name the self results in an aporia like that of naming other unknowables such as death or God. Since all names are, as the Unnamable

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concedes, merely ‘surrogates’ (T , 396), the self is unsayable, a nothing which must be talked about as though it were something—the principle with which Watt is familiar. In fact, the Unnamable says of himself: ‘it’s entirely a matter of voices, no other metaphor is appropriate. They’ve blown me up with their voices, like a balloon ’ (T , 327). He cannot be present, even to himself, in a literal manner. He is forced back upon metaphor to perform a paradoxical act: the act of embodying himself by means of language. Beckett elaborates this paradox of the voice that is itself a metaphor in an ingenious direction. Commentators have long been intrigued by Beckett’s use of the parrot in many of his works, a motif that gains a new significance in this argument. Beckett’s parrots suggest, as Steven Connor has argued, that there is no private and unique self to communicate.29 I would go further, and argue that they also playfully undermine the metaphor of presence sustaining the text itself. Many of the foundational written texts of Beckett’s culture relied on the idea that they were authorized by the voice of a Christian God, copies of a divine and spoken Word. Likewise, the ‘little bird’ of the cliché that tells Malone that he will not finish his inventory is in fact a sort of divine intelligence, ‘the paraclete, psittaceously named’ (T , 250). The pun on paraclete/parakeet makes the Holy Ghost itself a kind of parrot, suggesting not only that it is ridiculous, in contrast to the usual graceful image of a dove, but also that the source of this voice is untraceable and that it is perhaps without a founding authority at all. The parrot in Beckett’s one film (the 1965 Film) might also be seen to represent the Holy Spirit: the protagonist is watched by a picture of ‘God the father’ on the wall, a goldfish—the fish that stands for Jesus—and a parrot; the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost. These links between Holy Spirit and parrot recall Flaubert’s story Un Coeur simple, in which the heroine Félicité becomes so attached to her parrot, even when it is dead and stuffed, that she mistakes it for an incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Flaubert, like Beckett, was simultaneously touched and appalled by the similarities between humans and parrots, neither of whom always understand or think about the language that they speak. Both writers also go further, however, in hinting that the founding Word of the Church itself might only be a parroted ‘pensum’, gaining its authority from its very repetition alone. The very conditions of the personal subject, the founding ‘voice’ behind the written text and the basis for saying ‘I’ and ‘you’ in writing are likewise undermined in Beckett’s work. The voices of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing question their own legitimacy with particular urgency. In ‘Text 7’ the text comments at one moment: ‘what a blessing I’m not talking of myself, enough vile parrot I’ll kill you’ (CSP, 128). All power to judge, describe or even predicate unravels in these texts along with the subject position: ‘And the yeses and noes mean nothing in this mouth, no more than the sighs it signs in its toil, or answers to a question not understood’ (‘Text 9’, CSP, 136). The speaker becomes in this situation ‘a mere ventriloquist’s dummy’ (‘Text 8’, CSP, 133).


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Beckett’s Unnamable reiterates the image of the ventriloquist: ‘I think Murphy spoke now and then, the others too perhaps, I don’t remember, it was clumsily done, you could see the ventriloquist’ (T , 351). Speech itself is deliberately ‘clumsily done’ in Beckett’s work. The conventions for reproducing the spoken word in writing are themselves examined and found wanting. The gap between the words on the page and the ‘living speech’ of a subject in the here and now opens wide. But the most significant thing about Beckett’s work is precisely that you cannot ‘see the ventriloquist’. The narrator of the early fiction slides between an authoritative third person and identity with the protagonists themselves, as the earlier discussion of Beckett’s realism has mentioned. Later, the reassuring intimacy and effects of presence generated by the first person are erased by its own quest to depose itself, opining as the Unnamable does that the first person is a ‘red herring’ (T , 345), even while failing to find a better, truer source for its narrative. The voice is just one aspect, albeit a key aspect, of the idea of God that provides imaginative inspiration for Beckett. In respect of another, the Unnamable comments that his ‘master is in my image’ (T , 314): an economical twist to the doctrine that we are created in God’s image. Beckett hints in this passage at the presumption with which humanity has, faute de mieux, pictured God by analogy with itself. The ‘pure’ figurality of the Unnamable has a precedent in the cataphatic tradition: we give God human attributes but these are only ever substitutes, intelligible to humanity, for the real, divine truth.30 Yet God is always the primary referent of religious language and everything is a modification of the idea of him. As Bloy put it, God speaks ‘Lui-même exclusivement, sous les formes symboliques, paraboliques ou similitudinaires de la Révélation par l’Ecriture’, and in so doing says ‘la même chose de mille manières’ (Bloy, ‘Préface’). This idea that all in religious discourse is a permutation of the founding idea of religion informs the reversal of metaphorical and literal meaning already identified in biblical writing: the primary term, the most literal and foundational idea, can only be—for humanity—a metaphor, not accessible to human knowledge and beyond our capacity for predication. Louis MacNeice wrote, in connection with Beckett, of how ‘ “Nothing”, in [the] mystical sense, seems to be an essential part of the foundations of religion’.31 Beckett’s heroes seem to identify with the idea of the deity itself in this respect. The protagonist in Company is ‘Devising figments to temper his nothingness’ (C, 64). ‘No other metaphor’ but a voice is ‘appropriate’ to talk about the Unnamable, but neither is there any other language other than the metaphorical that can. What can we make of the idea that the voice is the most suitable analogy for the Unnamable? Much of Beckett’s work, it must be remembered, imagines itself as the ill-heard and ill-captured version of a primary spoken text. The founding example of the Bible, notionally God’s Word copied by human scribes, is instructive here. The Bible, of course, seeks to overcome the gap between speech and the written word, but it cannot entirely

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do so. Gerhard Ebeling has written of the ‘word events, the utterances of God on which the authority of the Bible is based’. They constitute promises, he suggests, and refer ultimately to the absent, but they do this ‘in such a way that in the promise the absent thing so to speak presents itself’ (Ebeling, 327).32 Yet the Bible is a written and therefore mediated version of the original word event. Kevin Mills highlights this problem, commenting on Ebeling’s formulation that in its ‘so to speak’ we witness the writer confronted by a figurality that ‘cannot be diminished or overcome—because this is a kind of writing about speaking’.33 Beckett interrogates the way in which text in general works in the way that religious text does in particular: by the illusion of a presence, what Jacques Derrida has called a ‘spectral’ voice elevated into a metaphysical element that transcends the written word (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 270–280). In these terms, every written text reverses the literal and metaphorical modes: the first term of the written text is always this illusion of presence, the speaking subject. Yet the subject of the text, the guarantee of the primary meaning of the words, is also always absent. The Bible and the narrative of Christianity thus provide a mythic expression for one of the most fundamental features of language. Beckett’s work explores the implications of the fact that even though the written first person may be a ‘red herring’, a ‘matter of habit’, as the Unnamable suggests (T , 345), the reader will always posit a corresponding presence behind the text like an unquestionable deity. The body is absent but the idea of presence is the founding metaphor—a metaphor which cannot be literally expressed or paraphrased—behind every literary text.

VI Theatre, voice and divine communication Beckett’s theatre offers a strange paradox with respect to the question of presence. In the most obvious sense, of course, theatre deals exclusively in presence and the immediacy of the spoken word. It might be argued, however, that Beckett exerted so much directorial control over his theatrical productions that he could in one sense determine and contain the delivery of his words there in a way that he could not the inevitable ‘soundtrack’ in the head of the reader of his prose. First-person or confessional narratives, after all, encourage the reader to hear their voice particularly readily. Richard Jacobs has described this privilege of the first-person narrator, the ‘rhetorical manoeuvrability’ of the position, in relation to Beckett’s work.34 Jacobs suggests, however, that such a privilege is lacking in Beckett’s plays, where the playwright himself gives careful written instructions as to the delivery of his lines, and the tone of which became particularly muted under Beckett’s own direction. The present voices of his stage work can, intriguingly, seem less immediate than the absent ones of his written.


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There are many examples of stage directions and production notes in which Beckett seems to want to drain the spoken word of its plenitude and power. He advised Peter Hall, while attending the rehearsals of the first London production of Happy Days, that he should avoid overt expression of feeling, and aim instead at ‘emotionlessness’ and ‘monotony, pallor and faintness’.35 He suggested similarly that the German actress playing Winnie in the 1971 Berlin Schiller Theatre production should drain her voice of colour in the second act, and speak in a ‘white’ voice.36 Billie Whitelaw has also given full accounts of the qualities of flatness and monotony with which Beckett often directed her to speak for many parts, and William Worthen writes of the ‘tonelessness’ that Beckett aimed for in the production of his plays.37 What is even more interesting, however, is the suggestion that Beckett somehow wanted to find a performance equivalent for the written word itself. In both the London and the Berlin productions of Happy Days, under Beckett’s instruction, the quotations were given an extra emphasis in the delivery (Worth, Waiting for Godot, 88). Their status as quotations of the written word was signalled. Quotation, like cliché, bears the self-conscious mark of its written existence. The daughter’s act of storytelling in the 1975 Footfalls is the most telling example of this phenomenon. She speaks to an anonymous ‘reader’ rather than a listener—‘as the reader will remember’ (CDW, 403)—and Beckett correspondingly advised the actress playing her in the Berlin production of 1976 to speak in a ‘monotone, without colour, very distant. You are composing’.38 This strange storytelling is an ‘improvisation’, but one, the suggestion is, with the writing, not telling, of a story as its model. Beckett’s second comment seems to confirm this: ‘the voice’, he said, ‘is the voice of an epilogue’ (Asmus, ‘Practical aspects’, 86). Scenes of writing and reading are prevalent in Beckett’s late theatre, in plays such as the 1981 ‘Ohio Impromptu’ in which the ‘Reader’ reads from a book in which a man’s companion leaves him, perhaps through death, and he begins a new life alone. Within the story itself, a stranger comes, sent by his former love, to read his own ‘sad tale’ (CDW, 447) to him, presumably as a kind of solace. The performance is thus at two removes from the emotional content of the story, the reading of a tale of reading. Another short theatrical fragment, sometimes called ‘Rough for Theatre II’ started much earlier but published in 1976, sees two men discussing a third man, silent but present, who is contemplating suicide. Their job, imagined as an official and paid employment, is to perform a kind of book-keeping (as Knowlson helpfully characterizes it) on his life, recording testimonies from himself and others that might help him to evaluate whether or not his life is worth sparing (Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 456). The religious language here is highly ironic. They meet to debate ‘the crux’ (CDW, 237), the etymological echo of ‘cross’ in the word bringing to mind the crucifixion that they will, in one sense, perform on their subject. They check the date of this, their last

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session, in a diary, the date ironically the saint day of ‘Our Lady of Succour’. Their conclusion is, however, to ‘let him jump’ (CDW, 238). ‘B’, one of the men, reads from their report on the third man’s life at one moment, his reading verbalizing the chirographic symbols of the written text: ‘Questioned on this occasion’—open brackets—‘(judicial separation)’— close brackets—‘regarding the deterioration of our relations, all he could adduce was the five or six miscarriages which clouded’—open brackets— ‘(oh through no act of mine!)’—close brackets—‘the early days of our union’ (CDW, 239) Again, the emotional material of this silent subject’s encounters with people as well as his own feelings are presented to the audience at several removes, by other people, and in the bureaucratic written language of the men’s report. What is significant for my argument, however, is that religious language usually surfaces in these plays in spoken form, and its force in this respect seems one which Beckett again cannot entirely disarm. It often seems like a kind of verbal habit for the characters, and it generally—as in this late fragment—has an ironic relationship with their context. In an earlier work, Winnie’s frequent references to ‘many mercies’ are cruelly undermined by the awful conditions in which she exists in Happy Days; Mouth in Not I similarly intones that ‘God is love’ but can draw no comfort from this phrase. The voice in the prose text Company, written a year later, is more explicit on this count: ‘God is love. Yes or no? No.’ (C, 73). There is a shift, however, between Winnie’s relationship with this language, and that of the later protagonists in Beckett’s theatre. Winnie’s investment in such language may to some extent be in terms of what it offers of the ‘old style’, feeding her nostalgia for a world of certainties and solace that is consciously past. God himself seems part of that lost universe. The musicality of the religious language in this play is equivalent to that of the other literary phrases that she quotes, and references to God and heaven are indeed from ‘the classics’ of literature rather than strictly religious sources (the ‘holy light’ which she refers to is, for instance, from Milton’s Paradise Lost). In the later theatre, however, the musicality of the religious language is more isolated, and stands out more starkly. It also surfaces at more pivotal moments in the dramatic development of the plays. Walter Asmus describes how in Footfalls under Beckett’s direction the argument between mother and daughter in May’s story late in the play ends with the sentence ‘ “The love of God” which, with pauses, hesitatingly, is almost sung’ (Asmus, 90). For Asmus, this diffuses the tension between the two women, but it also disrupts the flat and ‘written’ tone, that of ‘epilogue’ in which this tale is to be told. Unlike the ‘flat, blank’ recitation of religious language in the prayer in All Strange Away or the hymns of The Unnamable, this phrase introduces a musicality that cannot


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be erased. Eh Joe employs religious language for the moments of epiphany or intensity: ‘spirit made light’ for the romantic feeling of the past; ‘mud thou art’ for the moments of self-blame in the present. In Rockaby, the reference to ‘another living soul’ stands out from the repeated descriptions of movement and time passing: a religious concept here crosses over into everyday idiom, but retains something over its power in this spare work, a ghostly metaphor hovering between life and death as the protagonist herself is. Religious language cannot be disarmed in Beckett’s later plays even as far as it can in his prose writing. However strict Beckett’s stage directions are, this language, being spoken, has restored to it an authority that was taken away by the textual manipulations in Beckett’s written work. Such language has an ambiguous status in Beckett’s theatre, however. It is not appropriated by the characters, and they struggle to feel that they are communicating with God. Julia Kristeva, reading Beckett’s Not I, makes a suggestive reading of Mouth’s ‘refusal to relinquish the third person’ (CDW, 358), as Beckett puts it in the stage directions. Kristeva argues that we can understand this refusal as the desire to retain, in Kristeva’s words, ‘the third person: the element beyond discourse, the third, the “it exists”, the anonymous and unnameable “God”, the “Other” ’ (Kristeva, 153). Kristeva’s Other corresponds to Lacan’s Law of the Father that lies behind language, represented in Beckett’s play by God but also by the society that Mouth sees judging her: ‘God [Good laugh.] first thought was [ ] she was being punished for her sins’; ‘so that people would stare’ (CDW, 377, 379). Beckett’s Mouth has internalized this Law, and cannot establish a self separate from this anonymous Other. If we read this in Kristeva’s terms, this patriarchal Law of the Father has repressed the feminine voice. The context given to it by the rest of Beckett’s work makes this a more general predicament, however. The possibility is mentioned teasingly here as elsewhere that God might be the force that is both calling forth and silencing the individual voice, but there are none of the attendant compensations of religious faith: he is never offered as a source of salvation. Similarly the constitutive Law that sustains discourse simultaneously reduces human language in this way to an inadequate proxy of the ultimate and inaccessible word of God. Kristeva goes on to argue that ‘A missing (grammatical or discursive) object implies an impossible subject: not I’ (Kristeva, 153). In the absence of a ‘he’ or a significant other to whom to relate, Mouth has to become ‘her own other’, as the protagonist in Rockaby does in the chair of her dead mother, in order that she can exist at all. She may speak of God, the ultimate Other, but He remains abstract: a ‘He beyond communication’ (Kristeva, 153). Speaking becomes in this play intransitive as a result: Mouth never manages to find a ‘you’ to whom to speak, or even the right words to say. She does not ‘hit on it in the end’ (CDW, 383) and so her speaking has no object, either direct or indirect, but goes on in tortuous futility. Mention of God elicits simply a ‘good laugh’ (CDW, 377).

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In Beckett’s television play Eh Joe, the voice that appears to speak in Joe’s head also refers slightingly to his relationship with God: How’s your Lord these days? Still worth having? Still lapping it up? The passion of our Joe. Wait till he starts talking to you When you’re done with yourself . All your dead dead [ ] Silence of the grave without the maggots . To crown your labours . Till one night . ‘Thou fool thy soul’ Put your thugs on that Eh Joe? Ever think of that? When He starts in on you When you’re done with yourself. If you ever are. Here the memory of religious language returns as a voice, and so cannot be manipulated as it might in the form of writing. It escapes the censure of cliché and retains its power, however specious this might be. Joe will not, the voice suggests, be able to put his mental ‘thugs’ on the voice of God to silence it, as he has done with those voices of his parents and former lover that had haunted him before this point. These words have the authority of an ultimate judgement. Even after death, when he has escaped himself, God will be implacably and relentlessly there. But here too the tone taken by Beckett is somewhere between mockery and fear. God is referred to as ‘your Lord’, rather than an objective entity, and the image of Joe ‘lapping it up’ suggests an uncritical appetite for something false. Has Joe invented a phantom that will turn on him, becoming the last in the procession of characters that embody his own conscience? Or will he discover after death, his own mind silenced, that there is something beyond? The question is never answered. Beckett introduces God into these plays as the tantalizing promise of a final end, a voice to silence all other voices, an absolute judge, yet he cannot deliver on this promise. The subject is thrown back on its own devices, God finally simply the last, the most ambitious one of these. ∗

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Beckett’s ambivalence towards the authority of religious language has often been noted by his critics. Thinking about his treatment of this sanctified language in relation to the more debased formulae of cliché, however, brings new aspects of his work to light. Not only does it tell us something about his thinking on wider questions of human agency and social duty, but it also sheds new light on the interplay between the spoken and written word in his work, and what is at stake there. Like personal memories, as we have suggested, religious language seems to surface almost compulsively in his writing, and to exert a strange influence over it. Strategies for emptying such language of its power—by manipulating its forms, making literal its reference, giving it incongruous contexts—work up to a point in Beckett’s writing, but cannot quite exhaust it. The cadences and images of Christian


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rhetoric still lend a patina of authority to the voice of the text, however assiduously this voice is trying to discredit the fundamental premises of the faith itself. Similarly, Beckett’s works cannot dispense with the model of an all-seeing authority that authorizes and compels one’s very existence, however elusive and, indeed, undesirable this authority might prove to be in practice.

5

Beyond Cliche´ : Authority, Agency and the Fall of Rhetoric

a violation of I don’t know what, public order, public decency —Molloy

I Introduction: Condemned to life Two conflicting attitudes to authority in Beckett’s narrators have emerged in the argument of this study so far. First, there is a resistance to certain rhetorical strategies for asserting authority, whether intellectual, moral or psychological. Beckett’s use of cliché challenges and re-engineers the different authoritative discourses that determine one’s social identity: both the formal languages of social consensus, literary and cultural tradition, and religious conformity, and the more general expectations of progression and learning attached to experience and time itself. Secondly, however, there is also the quest for an external authority on the part of Beckett’s characters. The need to find a source for the imperatives that constrain or compel one—whether it be to wait, to speak, to go on or any other equally purposeless activity—is a constant preoccupation of Beckett’s characters, as well as an imaginative challenge to Beckett himself. Unsurprisingly, Beckett’s work maintains an ambivalent attitude to the social means of exercising power or command, whether these are linguistic or otherwise. Even those figures who appear to be in power—be it through secular law, religious jurisdiction, or even the family structure itself—attain and impose this power through arbitrary means. Furthermore, Beckett’s protagonists are generally at least one remove from such authority. They position themselves at an oblique angle not only to these overt legislators, but also to the more insidious demands made by the fact of social belonging: demands of duty and responsibility, love and even company itself. The necessity of such social imperatives is largely absorbed unconsciously or under the benevolent aegis of family life or education. There is nonetheless a large element of coercion in such beliefs and relationships, in Beckett’s 162

Authority, Agency and the Fall of Rhetoric

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view at least, and his protagonists often testify to a certain mystification as to their provenance and justification. Molloy’s reluctant acknowledgement of his love for his mother, for example, and the attitude of the little boy who says to him ‘Thanks, I suppose’ when Molloy gives him back his marble are characteristic instances. Molloy is indeed mystified in the second instance by his own action and the constraint it puts the boy under: ‘I don’t know why, I didn’t have to, and I suppose he would have preferred to pick it up himself. Or perhaps it wasn’t to be picked up’ (T , 49). The narrator of How It Is similarly resists the sociability forced upon him, exclaiming at the ‘equanimity’ he had up until the moment that they ‘gave [him] a companion’ (HI, 27). He is also explicit about the feeling of constraint, as well as the necessity of coercion that often accompanies love: ‘my right arm presses him against me love fear of being abandoned a little of each’ (HI, 73). The final chapter of this study therefore explores what happens in Beckett’s work when his characters encounter the instruments and effects of power. It demonstrates that the scenarios of Beckett’s late theatre, representing examinations and interrogations, elaborate a preoccupation with power that is there from the very beginning of Beckett’s work. Belonging itself is a kind of submission, as the narrator of The Unnamable understands: Ah but the little murmur of unconsenting man, to murmur what it is their humanity stifles, the little gasp of the condemned to life, rotting in his dungeon garrotted and racked, to gasp what it is to have to celebrate banishment, beware. (T , 328) One can only identify oneself, whether it be positively or negatively, in relation to the architecture of social authority. As has been argued, Beckett explores in this regard the dilemma that attaches to Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of order-words, whereby language—even that of the most neutral description—is always also a form of command. This chapter will look at where this suggestion in Beckett’s works becomes more explicit, where language becomes the direct means of exercising power. The consensus that creates commonplace is seen to be a blunt, even a brutal instrument in this respect: serving social institutions, it follows that it cannot also serve the deterritorialized subject of Beckett’s work. Molloy’s interrogation by the police as to the whereabouts of his mother’s room in Beckett’s novel is taken by Deleuze and Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus as emblematic of the ‘schizophrenic’ subject under capitalism, who is interrogated in every encounter with the institutions of state and market.1 These interrogations often, the pair argues, concern themselves with family, whether this is under the aegis of criminal law or psychoanalysis. The family is for both the molar unit par excellence, the microcosm of patriarchal law that creates and disciplines the subject. Molloy’s ‘schizophrenic’ nature, as Deleuze and Guattari might see it, would follow from

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his failure to successfully negotiate the Oedipal process, and so he remains ‘somewhere else, beyond or behind or below’ the family structure (Deluze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 23). Beckett explores this locus of authority from both sides, however, examining the necessity the subject feels to find definition and identity, to follow and repeat a model, as well as the unbearable imposition that this can seem to be. The question of one’s birth presents the same fundamental paradox as one’s death in this respect: one cannot identify or experience again the founding identification with one’s family, but it is repeated continuously in later relationships (images invoking the ‘caul’ or the experience of ‘being given birth to’, in Beckett’s words, or suggesting the umbilical cord, being rife in Beckett’s fiction), just as the impulse towards death is felt to reassert itself continuously without death being reached. Beckett’s characters cannot do without the categories that language offers to them, however inappropriate or uncomfortable they find them. Even his isolated later protagonists are unable entirely to relinquish the forms of social verification that might offer them an identity. The Unnamable himself appeals to his ‘compatriots, contemporaries, co-religionists and companions in distress’ (T , 329). He has, however, systematically rejected—or been rejected by—each of these categories, exhaustive as they seem. His location is too indeterminate and fluid to allow him to identify his compatriots. He cannot pin down a ‘now’, a collective present in which he might exist contemporaneously with another. His relations with a Christian God, at least, are nothing short of blasphemous, and he is only of the company in so far as he, like the rest of humanity, is doomed, a companion ‘in distress’. He is ‘in the swim’, as he puts it later, only in so far as that means ‘guaranteed to sink’ (T , 372). This comment reminds us of Beckett’s own conversation conducted in similar terms with Tom Driver in 1961: What is more true than anything else? To swim is true, and to sink is true. One is not more true than the other. One cannot speak any more of being, one must only speak of the mess. (Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, 22–23) Few assertions can be made about life: sink or swim, a perfectly balanced but perfectly arbitrary chance is at work and no common wisdom can have any purchase on this necessary uncertainty. The Unnamable is set apart from his companions in distress, then, in knowing the true nature of the fate he shares with them. He may participate in the radical ignorance of humanity but he alone knows it to be so, and dismisses his so-called companions in a careless gesture: ‘those that are not in the know, that is to say, all mankind’ (T , 347). The institutions of social authority are all guilty of the same presumption from this devastatingly even-handed perspective. Their claims to authority


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are unfounded, and so their methods of asserting this authority must be an enforcement of their power rather than an appeal to their knowledge or inherent value. This chapter will look at how Beckett moves from satiric representations of the ‘powers that be’ in his early writing to the more diffuse representation of power relations in later works. It asks what remains of this concern with power in work that confines itself to the dimensions of one mind. In answer, it argues that this concern with power redistributes itself in two main directions. First, it is disseminated in questions of authority, over who owns and authorizes the voice that speaks and the words that are spoken. Secondly, it is identifiable in the related question of agency—the ever-present enquiry in Beckett’s work into whether Beckett’s characters act through external compulsion or their own will. Beckett’s work reveals in this respect the link between rhetoric and violence that thinkers such as Nietzsche and, more recently, Paul Ricoeur have investigated, rhetoric seeking to persuade through a kind of coercion rather than an open appeal to understanding and fact. Beckett’s later works suggest, however, that this coercion, identified in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of order-words, extends to the very structures of rational language themselves. As Nietzsche famously observed, our grammatical structures make everything ‘run smoothly’ for a certain kind of philosophical system, and bar the way to other possibilities.2 Finally, then, this chapter will examine the challenge in Beckett’s late writing to the cogito itself: to the idea that the individual can transcend time and apply categories or judgements that rely on an elusive identity between things. Beckett examines the linguistic means of achieving rationality—the instruments of categorization and precise reference—and finds them wanting. The fixed identities we assign things are themselves born of habit and repetition and ignore the element of pure difference that is involved in any actual encounter with the real. Beckett’s latest work go beyond the clichés of one particular way of thinking to challenge the authority of our very means of perceiving and understanding themselves.

II Figures of authority Molloy (I): Interrogation and the imperative voice It is characteristic of Beckett’s complex relationship to authority that his writing represents both the search for authority and also the failure to find a satisfactory manifestation of it in any of its human faces. Most significantly of all, this apparent failure does not and cannot deflect or put a stop to the search. The last chapter looked at the concepts through which subjective elements of one’s consciousness might be objectified—the will, the soul and God’s voice—and how they are characterized in Beckett’s work. There is another triumvirate, however, to which Beckett also pays attention. The idea of the Law, theorized in modern thinking by Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva as the Law of the Father, finds manifestation in Beckett’s work too not

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only in the image of God, absent but still exerting an imaginative influence over Beckett’s work, but also in the social embodiment of the law in the form of the police and the judiciary, and finally in the figure of the father himself—behind both these others—in Beckett’s works. This trio too appears to provide an objective order or authority to which his characters might submit, but in fact reveals itself to be elusive, arbitrary and even malign. Kristeva has argued in relation to the play Not I, as has been seen, that God represents a ‘He beyond communication’ (Kristeva, 153). It is not only the female protagonist of this play, however, but all of Beckett’s characters that struggle to identify themselves in or through God’s language. As with God, the other two manifestations of patriarchal authority—the law and the (literal) father—are likewise often unfathomable and sometimes wilfully cruel. It is not, however, the complexity or hauteur of their language that distances them from Beckett’s protagonists. If anything, it is the banal language in which these authorities so often speak that proves impenetrable to the writer’s supremely asocial characters. Religious language often presents not awe-ful mysteries but simplistic and complacent notions— God’s ‘tender mercies’, the ‘faithful herd’. Similarly conventional and formulaic, the language of both the numerous policemen and the father figures in Beckett’s work cannot unbend enough to accommodate the needs of the protagonists, nor is it flexible enough to accurately represent them. Despite the shortcomings of these pronouncements, however, the fate of Beckett’s central characters is determined by them. Their search for identity and even freedom would be condemned to fail were it to take place outside the terms and structures of social authority. This argument gives a new dimension to the prominence of what Molloy calls the ‘unavoidable’ policemen in Beckett’s work (T, 33), as well as to the way that these figures seem to develop in significance. Beckett’s early comic stories and novels seem to follow an Irish tradition traceable in works such as the plays of Dion Boucicault, the mythological novels of James Stephens, and the absurdist stories of Flann O’Brien, as well as back much further in folklore and popular song. The stupid policeman is a familiar type in Irish literature, often part of the comic (and so indirect) resistance in this literature to the English occupation of Ireland and the often clumsy administration of English law. In such stories, the rigid language of the (counterfeit) law is often made to look foolish by the artful and fluent doublespeak of the natives. Communication becomes the verbal agon of oral culture, a battle of wits and words in which the historical authority is defeated. Beckett’s early policemen seem at first to follow this model. In More Pricks than Kicks, Belacqua encounters the irresistible force of a Dublin policeman: He [Belacqua] furnished his name and address, whence he came and whither he went, and why, his occupation and immediate business, and why. It distressed him to learn that for two pins the Guard would frogmarch him to the Station, but he appreciated the officer’s dilemma.


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‘Wipe them boots’, said the Guard. Belacqua was only too happy, it was the least he could do. [The Guard] seemed rather at a loss as to how to press home his advantage. ‘I trust, Sergeant,’ said Belacqua, in a murmur pitched to melt the hardest heart, you can see your way to overlooking my misdemeanour.’ Justice and mercy had doubtless joined their ancient issue in the conscience of the Guard, for he said nothing. Belacqua strangled a shrug and moved away in a tentative manner. ‘Hold on there’ said the Guard. Belacqua halted, but in a very irritating way, as though he had just remembered something. The Guard then decided to conclude his handling of this small affair of public order. ‘Move on’ he said. (MPTK, 75–77) The monosyllabic imperatives of the policeman here are at this stage a source of amusement and a cause for disdain on the part of the more eloquent Belacqua. At this point, Belacqua’s range of social gestures— physical and verbal—far exceeds that of the policeman, who is the epitome of unimaginative and unreflective brute force. Belacqua can also mediate the policeman’s language through a free indirect discourse that mimics this formulaic discourse but holds it at a distance: ‘It distressed him to learn that for two pins the Guard would frog-march him to the Station’. Nonetheless, it is hard to see that Belacqua has the upper hand here. His ‘murmur’ does not melt the heart of this character, who proceeds to spit on his outstretched hand, and the Guard’s bald imperatives dictate his coming and his going. Belacqua’s observations, spoken and silent, are in one sense closer to cliché, the excess of words to little end, than the other’s flat commands. The policeman that intercepts Neary when he headbutts the status of Cuchulain in Dublin is in a similar mould. His movements are of ‘measured tread’ in comparison to Wylie’s reactions ‘as rapid as a zebra’s’ (M, 28), and the two men’s language follows the same pattern. The narrator comments: ‘It was not in the CG’s [Civil Guard’s] nature to bandy words, nor had it come into any branch of his training’ (M, 28). His orders have the same monosyllabic authority as those in the earlier story: ‘ “Move on,” he said to the crowd, “before yer moved on” ’ (M, 29). He ventures to offer some advice, but stops short, unable at first to extricate himself from ‘the labyrinths of an opinion’. Wylie is, as Belacqua is in the first episode, superficially obliging, wearing an ‘expression of strained attention’, but this expression is one ‘clamped’ there, the implication being that this deference is very superficial indeed. Again, however, the Civic Guard is powerful, as Wylie is only too well aware, his stature large in contrast to the ‘tiny’ Wylie, and his hand ‘monstrous’ on the smaller man’s arm. The crowd moves off, the

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narrator tells us, ‘with the single diastole-systole which is all the law requires’, but it nonetheless does so immediately and automatically on receiving its instruction. The law, it is suggested, is highly inflexible and powerful only in certain limited directions, but this power in those channels is implacable. The fact that Neary is prevented from showing disrespect to a Republican hero, and the use (in both these instances) of the word ‘Guard’ for policeman (from the Irish ‘Garda’) also makes it difficult to read these incidents in the tradition of republican resistance to the colonial law. In fact the Civic Guard whom Beckett ‘loathed more profoundly’ than any other creature was an instrument of the new Free State rather than England and for Beckett, as he put it in an early letter, ‘a symbol of Ireland with his official, loutish Gaelic complacency’ (Cronin, 262). Political authority is of course especially difficult to locate in Beckett’s early work for sound socio-political reasons: Beckett cannot quite feel a natural connection to the emerging Irish nation (which itself had yet to feel fully secure in its power at the time Beckett was writing), and there is a good deal of ambivalence if not hostility in the presentation of its new Irish representatives, as there is towards the Free State itself throughout Murphy in particular. Beckett puts an equivocal Anglo-Irish spin on the republican narrative of dull English law and articulate Irish insurrection. Yet however scathing Beckett is of these representatives of the new order, his characters are compelled, ultimately, to submit to them. Most perplexing of all is the encounter between Mercier and Camier and their policeman, which at first seems to follow the usual pattern: the policeman’s hand is, in the French version of the novel at least, large and red (‘one hand the size of two’ (MC, 92)), his manner violent, and his vocabulary monosyllabic in contrast to the protagonists’ flowery rhetoric. Instead of him terrorizing them with his physical presence, however, they shrug off his threats and end the encounter by beating him savagely. Yet even in this instance, which seems to gainsay the pattern in Beckett’s other works, the men seem influenced by the meeting. The English translation of this incident in particular shows signs that their own language starts to take on the character of that of the policeman, suggesting that they have been affected, even transformed, and have started to think in terms of the order-words of the constabulary itself. Mercier instructs Camier, in the most clichéd version of police-speak to ‘look lively’ (MC, 93), and their decision to return to Helen is seen in the language of social conformity: ‘the flock back in the fold’ (MC, 95). Even their recourse to violence, perhaps, is a kind of testament to such influence. In their heads, in a mysterious close to the chapter, they are described as being mentally bludgeoned, if not physically, subject to the ‘pelting of insatiable blows’—perhaps a mental version of the beating the law failed to administer. The instability of political authority and Beckett’s own complicated relationship to it is only one instance, in any case, of a more profound ambivalence towards social authority in general, in protagonists who on the one


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hand long to feel the ‘white-fingered glove’ on their shoulders, verifying— however punitively—their inclusion within the terms of social law, and on the other find the brutality and simplistic discriminations of this law mystifying. Their relation to this type of authority, as to that of religious authority, is as complex as Beckett’s own. Molloy’s relationship with social law at first seems very similar to that in Beckett’s earlier works. He is similarly dismissive of the ‘unavoidable police constable’ (T , 33) that appears when he knocks down Lousse’s dog, this figure’s ‘big red hairy paw’ recalling the ‘monstrous hand’ (M, 29) of the ‘CG’ in Murphy as well as the ‘vast crimson face’ (MPTK, 75) of Belacqua’s Irish Guard.3 While some of Belacqua’s conversation with the policeman is delivered indirectly and with disdain, Molloy dismisses the words of the ‘sergeant’ altogether, cutting over them abruptly with his own voice. The policeman and the woman Lousse: had it appears the following conversation. Is this the man who ran over your dog, Madam? He is, sergeant, and what of it? No, I can’t record this fatuous colloquy. So I will merely observe that finally in his turn the constable too dispersed, the word is not too strong (T , 33) Again, Molloy seems to have the power to silence the figure of authority, to defeat him in the verbal agon, albeit with the decided advantage of telling the tale retrospectively. But here too there is something insidious about the policeman’s language, however ‘fatuous’ it may appear to Molloy. Molloy’s own language, as Mercier’s was, is infected by the policeman’s discourse, the term ‘to disperse’ forcing him into a strange semantic blunder. The crowds with which the policeman customarily deals disperse, not the individuals. It is difficult to know how to read this apparent infelicity of language, particularly as Molloy points out the fact that it is carefully chosen (‘the word is not too strong’). Is Molloy unable to prevent himself from internalizing the policeman’s language, despite his apparent disdain for it? Or is he suggesting that even on the policeman’s own terms, he is successful, and the authority vested in the policeman is dissipating? ‘The word [is] not too strong’ in either reading, however: Molloy seems to concede here that the policeman represents an army of people, a force beyond his own person—the amorphous force of the law itself. A few pages earlier, Molloy has had a very different collision with the social law in the shape of a policeman. Here, Molloy is exposed to the full force of this patriarchal law without the mother-figure Lousse to mediate it: I raised my head and saw a policeman. Elliptically speaking, for it was only later, by way of induction, or deduction, I forget which, that I knew what it was. my way of resting, my attitude when at rest, astride my bicycle, my arms on the handlebars, my head on my arms, was a violation

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of I don’t know what, public order, public decency. Modestly, I pointed to my crutches and ventured one or two noises regarding my infirmity, which obliged me to rest as I could, rather than as I should. But there are not two laws, one for the healthy, another for the sick, but only one to which all must bow, rich and poor, young and old, happy and sad. He was eloquent. I pointed out that I was not sad. That was a mistake. (T , 20–21) Molloy does not immediately recognize this policeman, and fails to understand perfectly the law or even the principle that he violates. He interprets the policeman’s ‘eloquence’ literally, and so cannot entirely recognize himself in the binary system of hierarchies that it offers. ‘But there are not two laws’: the law is singular, univocal, undiscriminating, a categorical imperative. Elsewhere, Beckett’s characters seem to get the better of their encounters with the law, verbally at least. Here Molloy’s delicacy is even rhetorically ineffectual, however, in relation to the brutal and unnuanced line that the policeman takes. His careful diction bludgeoned by the complacent banality of the sergeant’s clichés, it appears effete when compared with the heavy tread of the binary oppositions: ‘rich and poor, young and old, happy and sad’. It is possible to read this encounter as an Oedipal face-off in which Molloy cannot find a language equal to that of the father. He is ‘modest’ and diffident, allowing himself to be obliged rather than to oblige. Neither expression nor sentiment can successfully match the masculine thud of the policeman’s language. One is reminded of the moment in the story ‘The Expelled’ when the narrator—also making a nuisance of himself in the public street—has a similar encounter with a policeman: ‘A policeman stopped me and said, “The street for vehicles, the sidewalk for pedestrians.” Like a bit of the Old Testament’ (CSP, 51). There is no need for such authoritarian figures to concern themselves with accuracy and discrimination: they are the law, they create and enforce meaning, and the aphoristic nature of their diction reflects this. Beckett mocks their God-like appropriation of linguistic authority, but it turns out that none of his protagonists are quite able to deflect it. Molloy’s diffidence later turns into pique without ever achieving anger or passion: ‘[the sergeant] listened to his subordinate’s report and then began to interrogate me in a tone which, from the point of view of civility, left increasingly to be desired, in my opinion’ (T , 22). The rhetorical game is up for Molloy: not only is he reduced to the negative and passive euphemism ‘to leave to be desired’, but he qualifies the whole observation as ‘my opinion’, a language game that can never compete with the language of the law, which poses at least as objective and impervious to questioning. Ultimately, the competition is not a fair one: the rhetorical violence of the policeman’s unyielding language is underpinned by the threat of physical force. Molloy comments: I have gone in fear all my life, in fear of blows. Insults, abuse, these I can easily bear, but I could never get used to blows. It’s strange. Even spits


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still pain me. But they have only to be a little gentle, I mean refrain from hitting me, and I seldom fail to give satisfaction, in the long run. Now the sergeant, content to threaten me with a cylindrical ruler, was little by little rewarded for his pains (T , 22) His euphemistic language finally delivers all power to the policeman, transferring even the idea of ‘pains’ from himself as victim to the policeman. Even the moral high ground is yielded to the law by the counter-productive niceties of Molloy’s language. The other figure in this police station scene is a woman: ‘a big fat woman dressed in black, or rather in mauve. I still wonder today if it wasn’t the social worker’ (T , 23). She tries to feed Molloy unappetizing tea and bread, but he hurls them away. Molloy has become the child in this trio of characters: the father-figure here is the law, the iron fist; the mother-figure welfare, unconditional nurture, but of an unappealing kind. These figures even have characteristics identifiable with Beckett’s own parents. Phil Baker has linked the ‘cylindrical ruler’ of the sergeant (tellingly identified later in the passage, despite Molloy initially describing it as a ‘thin, flexible object I could not identify’) with the ruler that Beckett’s father kept in the office and with which he used to hit Beckett and his brother to discipline them (Baker, 28). The social worker, in her turn, wears a version of what commentators have identified elsewhere as the ‘black’ of the widow, a garb which Beckett associates with his own mother. These identifications with family give this scene a symbolic resonance familiar in Beckett’s work. Father and mother, representative of authority and charity respectively, are constitutive influences on the subject’s sense of himself. It is significant that ultimately submission to charity, rather than submission to the law, is Molloy’s unwelcome fate, however. He is finally released without charge or undue ill treatment, causing him to wonder whether his mother had been found to confirm his statements, and he carries on with his quest to seek her, his ultimate protector. Molloy’s attitude too is very telling in this respect. The impositions made by the father-figure in this episode are withstood with a kind of pained acceptance, the real bile being reserved for the maternal social worker’s attentions: Let me tell you this, when social workers offer you, free gratis and for nothing, something to hinder you from swooning it is useless to recoil, they will pursue you to the ends of the earth To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth. (T , 24) He comments with similar ingratitude of his mother’s ‘charity’ that it keeps him ‘dying’ (T , 22), a less desirable state than being kept alive. Molloy asks nothing more than to ‘give satisfaction’ in the eyes of the law, and is excessively grateful for the least clemency on the part of the sergeant, but he is violently opposed to this kind of unconditional care.

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Molloy is rejected by the patriarchal law in all its guises, however. He does not receive punishment—he is released without charge—but nor does he gain any legitimacy or sanction, as ‘they’ do not insist that he obtains any of the missing identity papers, a situation that troubles him. He comments: To apply the letter of the law to a creature like me is not an easy matter. It can be done, but reason is against it (T , 24) He is not identified, then, by the language of the father, but is thrown back on the charity of the mother, who cannot give him either legitimacy or identity in the social framework Beckett represents. The language that attaches itself to the maternal elements of his situation once he is let go by the patriarchal legal process speaks consistently of the namelessness with which this maternal influence threatens him: not only can he not remember his mother’s name (by implication his own), but he cannot identify the woman who approaches him in the police station for certain—she comes to him in the dark, one of the ‘dark forms crowding in a dark place’ (T, 23)— and the food that she offers him is also all but unidentifiable, a ‘tottering pile of disparates’ (T , 24). It is possible to probe Beckett’s characters’ attitude to charity, and its relationship to identity, still further. I suggested in passing above that the woman Lousse may have played a similar role to the social worker, intervening in Molloy’s later encounter with another policeman to provide another kind of influence. She is in fact one of the many women in Beckett’s fiction that take his protagonists in and give them shelter and food without seeming to make any conditions. We might think here of the prostitutes Helen in Mercier and Camier, or Lulu in First Love, the latter explicitly taking in the male character rejected in his father’s will (and by extension prevented from inheriting a place in patriarchal society in general). Beckett’s protagonists display a startling ambivalence towards this charity, however, despite their straitened circumstances. One explanation for this is the resistance to the controlling maternal love that Beckett himself felt. Again, the short story ‘The Expelled’ seems more explicit than the trilogy on this point: the narrator, speaking of his troublesome efforts to hide his childhood incontinence, comments: ‘The very idea of changing my trousers, or of confiding in mother, who goodness knows asked nothing better than to help me, was unbearable’ (CSP, 51). The principle of charity, unconditional giving, is made into an intolerable interference: this is, in fact, the ‘soft’ way of wielding power, an alternative to the ‘blows’ of the father, as the two-pronged assault on Molloy’s person by the sergeant and the social worker at the police station suggests, but no less of an imposition. ‘Goodness knows’, the narrator of ‘The Expelled’ comments, his mother wanted to help him: even when this is a good impulse, she is asking that he needs her, a dependency that, as is well understood, Beckett’s characters find an unbearable burden.


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We recall Molloy’s memorable formulation: ‘Need of my mother! No, there were no words for the want of need in which I was perishing’ (T , 34). Yet the policeman’s interrogation of Molloy culminates in insistent questions about his mother. The family structure closes around the protagonist. Just as the patriarchal law seems to cast him out of the masculine world, throwing him back on the charity of the mother, it also actively impresses upon him the need to find his mother and to identify with her towards which he is so ambivalent: Molloy, I cried, my name is Molloy. Is that your mother’s name? said the sergeant. What? I said. Your name is Molloy, said the sergeant. Yes, I said, now I remember. And your mother? Said the sergeant. I didn’t follow. Is your mother’s name Molloy too? Said the sergeant. I thought it over. Your mother, said the sergeant, is your mother’s—Let me think! I cried. Take your time, said the sergeant. Was mother’s name Molloy? Very likely. Her name must be Molloy too, I said. (T , 23) It becomes increasingly clear that Molloy is the child to the policeman’s father here: the article is dropped from ‘mother’, turning the language into the intimate nomenclature of the family circle: ‘Was mother’s name Molloy?’ Not only can Molloy not gain the name of the father, as Leslie Hill has argued (Hill, Beckett’s Fiction, 97), but he is condemned to the non-identity of identification with the mother. Our discussion of the social law has become, then, a discussion of the family. Other critics such as Leslie Hill and Phil Baker have identified the question of authority and identity with that of family in the trilogy, but a discussion of the rhetoric of this patriarchal law, and its identification with God (‘the old testament’) opens up a new set of associations within the novels themselves and beyond them. Most importantly, it elucidates passages of the trilogy that seem otherwise simply to be a kind of abstract play with different rhetorical positions. For what happens in the course of Molloy, as elsewhere in Beckett’s work, is that the external manifestations of power become simply metaphors that give voice to parts of one’s own ‘consciousness’. Molloy himself reflects upon this process. He gives as ‘an example’ the sergeant’s voice in his head, identified with the earlier police interview but which, it is now suggested, might have been only a facet of his own psyche: ‘And then sometimes there arose within me, confusedly, a kind of consciousness, which I express by saying, I said, etc., or Don’t do it Molloy, or Is that your mother’s name? said the sergeant’ (T , 88). The policeman’s words turn out to represent an internal compulsion rather than an external law, or at least suggest that the external machinery of authority is in place simply to answer to an internal need. In this passage, late in the first half of the novel, Molloy is lost in the forest, and muses on the ‘imperatives’ that seem to come to him from nowhere

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there: ‘I would have had the feeling, if I had stayed in the forest, of going against an imperative’ (T , 86). He comments on imperatives: ‘I have always been inclined to submit to them, I don’t know why.’ Following them has ‘become a habit’. These imperatives seem to hark back not only in their form but also in their subject matter to the instructions of the policeman that Molloy meets earlier in the novel, as he suggests above. In fact, like the very earliest encounters with policemen in Beckett’s work, these abstract ‘imperatives’ are little more than instructions to come and go, to move on or to stay. And like the sergeant’s interrogation earlier in this novel, they ‘nearly all bore on the same question, that of my relations with my mother, and on the importance of bring some light to bear on these’ (T , 86). In this reading, characters in the novel themselves become simply outward manifestations of inner needs or desires. So although Molloy has internalized the law that these dictates represent, this law cannot give him an identity, but again returns him to the nonidentity of association with his origin, his mother, the flesh from which he has unsuccessfully separated. His return to his mother is tantamount to dying, as Phil Baker has argued in the inverse case: ‘death is a return to the mother’ (Baker, 70). Moran suggests something similar, with all the sexual overtones of a return to the womb, when he characterizes the comfort in taking ‘refuge in the horizontal’ (and relinquishing in turn the imperatives that haunt him) as ‘like a child in its mother’s lap’ (T , 140). Just as Deleuze and Guattari identify Molloy’s earlier interrogation as a typical instance of the experience of the schizophrenic modern subject (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 14), in this passage Molloy becomes much more recognizably ‘schizophrenic’ in negotiating his own identity and direction by reconfiguring the territorial grouping of his family within his own mind. Beckett uses a strange word in this scene in the forest in Molloy that recalls the link between memory and violence established in the earlier encounters with the law. It seems that the memory of his mother is called up out of him by a kind of interrogation, whether externally or internally induced: ‘if I had never succeeded in liquidating this matter of my mother, the fault must not be imputed solely to that voice which deserted me’ (T, 87). ‘Liquidating’ or erasing the memory of his mother in the past and his need for her in the future—her inevitable presence at both at the beginnings and ends of his life—is bound up with his encounters with the imperative voice, the law of the father, the principle of authority itself. Yet, this encounter with the internalized form of this voice is no more satisfactory than with its previous external forms, and he is still unable to enter the patriarchal order and liquidate this shameful need. As the second chapter of this study illustrated, he cannot banish his mother either by the repetition of her memory or by its suppression. Instead, this kind of interrogation, whether its source is external or internal, inevitably calls her forth. The interrogation comes up against certain limits, however: Molloy cannot speak her name, and both


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the name and the appearance of the home town where he must seek her are forgotten. He calls her elsewhere in the novel by the name of ‘Mag’—simply the generic ‘Ma’ with a ‘g’ added to it: ‘And I called her Mag because for me, without my knowing why, the letter g abolished the syllable Ma [ ] And at the same time I satisfied a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need, the need to have a Ma, that is a mother’ (T , 17). ‘Besides’, Molloy goes on, ‘the question did not arise [ ] of whether to call her Ma, Mag, or the Countess of Caca, she having for countless years been deaf as a post’ (T , 18). Neither Molloy nor his close family members are identified correctly in this early passage, and throughout Beckett’s works the processes of interrogation that might achieve such an identification are always fruitless. The right word will never be spoken: the protagonist will never be identified to his or anyone else’s satisfaction. By contrast, the eloquence of the police officer in Molloy’s first encounter with the law is in the simple definitions that his banal language seems to offer. These later imperatives in the forest, too, are simple, monolithic, and resonant with authority. One comes to Molloy ‘in Latin, nimis sero’ and charms him with its old-style classicism. Neither Molloy’s past, nor his future, can be contained within these clear expressions, however: these outer imperatives are in fact, as he suggests, simply a form for a far more ambiguous and ‘confused’ inner need. The ‘oratio recta’ that characterized the story of his encounter with the policeman is likewise described as a ‘deceitful figure’ (T , 88). His journey is a complex one that cannot be summed up in any of these clear imperatives or logical sequences of question and answer, or even the more elaborate psychodramas involving paternal policemen and maternal social workers. Furthermore, the journey is a return rather than a progression. It needs, however, to maintain the appearance of progress, which is why Molloy preserves these fictions of order and compliance. Here again we can invoke Freud’s pleasure principle, the psychoanalytic principle that Steven Connor, and later Phil Baker and others have identified in Beckett’s work. Molloy must give himself the illusion of following external imperatives because ‘somewhere something had changed, so that I too had to change, or the world too had to change, in order for nothing to be changed’ (T , 88). In order to preserve his inertia, Molloy must make adjustments on the long road back to the womb, back to sameness. In this Freudian reading, Molloy, as all humanity, avoids exertion and preserves where possible a state of inertia. Changes are in this sense only repetitions, as Deleuze argued in Difference and Repetition, in that they carry him backwards towards the original ‘inanimate state of matter’ before birth that will come again only with death (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 128). As Freud formulated it in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’: ‘it seems that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life’.4 Molloy also speaks suggestively in this passage of the novel of his ‘horror of trouble’ (T , 88) in this respect. Beckett’s own dark

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comment in the early essay Proust that we might follow ‘a deeper instinct than the mere animal instinct of self-preservation’ (P, 11) anticipates this strain of inertia in his later work. Molloy’s need for his mother is not only depicted positively, if we can call these ambivalent characterizations this, but also negatively, in the absence of, or Molloy’s failure to identify with, his father or the patriarchal superstructure of the law. We might return to the senile tendency of his mother to conflate him with his father in her reminiscences: Dan, you remember the day I saved the swallow. Dan, you remember the day you buried the ring. I remembered, I remembered, I mean I knew more or less what she was talking about, and if I hadn’t always taken part personally in the scenes she evoked, it was just as if I had. (T , 17) Molloy tries here to act the part of ‘Dan’ (or ‘Da-n’, the generic father), but in imagining an incestuous union with his mother, he makes it impossible ever to assume a masculine identity separate from his father. Beckett’s own mother had urged him to model himself on his father, as he suggests in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy when describing her ‘code of father-idealization (whenever in doubt about what to do ask yourself what Darling Bill would have done)’ (Cronin, 264). In fact, of course, Beckett famously acknowledges her own influence as much more central: ‘I am what her savage loving has made me and it is good that one of us should accept that finally, as it has been all this time’ (Cronin, 264). If this is tantamount to ‘saying what a bad son I am’ then, Beckett suggested, so be it (or, in his more characteristic words, ‘amen’). Likewise, Molloy cannot perform the role of his father in this passage, and, conversely, the father figures in this and Beckett’s other works are also explicitly unhappy with the main character, as we have seen. Just as Molloy cannot understand or ‘give satisfaction’ to the policeman, other characters in Beckett’s writing experience an absence where their father’s love or approval should be. And just as it does in the encounter with the policeman, cliché often mediates these experiences. The introduction of a cliché where intimacy and a personal bond should be illustrates the particular cruelty, which this absence represents. In Beckett’s radio play, Embers, Henry remembers his father calling him a ‘washout’, with the awful pun suggestive of an aborted life, when he would not swim in the sea with him (CDW, 256). In the short story ‘The End’, written in French at the time of ‘The Expelled’ and just before Molloy, Beckett uses another cliché to suggest that his protagonist’s relationship with his father never quite ‘gave satisfaction’ here either. The protagonist dwells on the following memory: I was with my father on a height, he held my hand. I would have liked him to draw me close with a gesture of protective love, but his mind was on other things. (CSP, 98–99)


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‘His mind was on other things’: the innocuous expression suggests in this powerfully intimate context a deep-seated failure to connect with the father that seems to reflect a preoccupation that was Beckett’s own. Moll, the lover of Macmann in Malone’s story in the second novel of the trilogy, but perhaps also (as the names suggest) another surrogate for Molloy in this respect, experiences an even more profound rejection by her father. She remembers an instance of her father’s conversation with her: ‘Papa notably used to say that people would run a mile from me, I have not forgotten the expression’ (T , 262–263). Again, the distance between them is encoded in the expression itself. The French original is more obscene than the English version, but somehow less painful: ‘Papa notamment me disait que j’étais foutue comme un maggot, j’ai retenu l’expression’ (Mm, 146). The very banality of the English version gives it its particular cruelty. This is language that one uses of a stranger. In the radio play Embers, the absence of a bond between parent and child is expressed from the father’s point of view when Henry talks about his daughter. Beckett again explores the effect of breaking the taboo that says that children must be loved and cherished by their parents. The language is strangely flat, however: what turned her [his wife, Ada] against me do you think, the child I suppose, horrid little creature, wish to God we’d never had her, I used to walk with her in the fields, Jesus that was awful, she wouldn’t let go of my hand, and I mad to talk. ‘Run along now, Addie, and look at the lambs.’ (CDW, 256) This piece of bad fathering, turning on its head a Wordsworthian celebration of childhood and the pastoral as Beckett does so frequently (his fields barren and his sheep unappealing), appears in the context of Henry’s own relationship with his father, a presence in his head as Joe’s father is described as having been—for a certain time, at least—in his head in the television play Eh Joe. Embers, written much earlier than this work, treats the similar theme of an unstoppable voice running in the protagonist’s head. For Henry in Embers, as for Joe, his father has stopped speaking in his head: Ada comments drily that ‘you wore him out living and now you are wearing him out dead’ (T , 262). Henry requires only that he can imagine him as a listener. Yet even speaking to his father has never been a satisfactory process: Father! (Pause.) Tired of talking to you. (Pause.) That was always the way, walk all over the mountains with you talking and talking and then suddenly mum and home in misery and not a word to a soul for weeks, sulky little bastard, better off dead. (Long pause.) (T , 256) It does not become clear who is doing the talking on the mountains until the vicious phrase ‘sulky little bastard’, clearly his father’s judgement on Henry’s

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own lack of sociability as a boy: in Henry’s ventriloquizing of his father’s voice we see the parent–child relationship from the other side and begin to understand that Henry’s own lack of affection for his daughter Addie is linked to his own difficult relationship with his father. It is significant that the word ‘mum’ in this passage is also associated with silence and a breakdown in communication, another ‘mother’s name’ synonymous with the failure of identity. It is to his father that Henry looks for identity and witness, and his father who ultimately denies it, pronouncing on Henry’s life in a casually vicious comment that condemns him to a kind of nonexistence: ‘better off dead’. The father, however weak, living or dead, has the power to create Henry by naming him as his own and acknowledging Henry’s words. This, however, he declines to do. Henry talks incessantly to drown out the sound of the sea in his head, this sound a positive symbol of a negative: the empty space where human speech should be and where his father disappeared, drowning without passing onto him his blessing and his identity, in ‘that evening bathe you took once too often’. Henry is, indeed, in the colloquial cruelty of his father’s, a washout— a failure for his father while his father was alive, and condemned later to be engulfed by the wash of the sea that took his father, his own personality to be ‘washed out’ by this pathological noise. The ‘letter of the law’ cannot be applied to these protagonists, or at least—as Molloy puts it—‘reason is against it’. Their identity is so fluid, so amorphous, that it cannot be contained within rational language, the language of reason: it cannot be judged because it eludes the terms of such a judgement and cannot be spoken by it. For these characters, this presents the expected crisis of identity: Molloy wishes for some papers, even though this would put him more firmly under the state’s control; Henry wishes to hear his father’s voice, even though it only spoke of him in negative terms. In the larger picture, however, the machinery of judgement itself breaks down if its object eludes judgement. Beckett does not in this respect simply present the unmovable force of social authority. The irony of the particular double bind that he presents is that his characters in fact admit their need for such authority, but in their ignorance of its terms often also unwittingly challenge, if not unseat it. Theirs is a reluctant form of iconoclasm, but Beckett nonetheless performs through them a kind of negative resistance in this respect. The order-words of social discourse lose their power to label, and so to create or change beings. Language no longer commands the world to be as it describes it, but becomes—as Beckett once suggested—a proxy for a world it cannot coerce into being or delimit within a fixed identity. Molloy (II): The prophetic present If Molloy presents a family structure with a dominant maternal influence, Moran’s family, in the second half of the novel, is one without a mother, the image—on the patriarchal model—of pure authority. Moran is the archetypal


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bad father in Beckett’s terms, both distant and aggressively authoritarian. And yet he is highly self-conscious in his parenting. The problem lies in the nature of this awareness, which leads him to perceive his fathering as much as a rhetorical performance as an intimate relationship. His concern with the role is purely one of self-interest; as he comments at one point: ‘There is something about a father that discourages derision. Even grotesque he commands a certain respect’ (T , 125). However grotesquely cruel and self-centred his treatment of his son may be, his position in the structure of both society and the family is unassailable. His manner of carrying out this duty is similarly imperious: You leave both your albums at home, I said, the small one as well as the large one. Not a word of reproach, a simple prophetic present, on the model of those employed by Youdi. Your son goes with you. (T , 109) The imperative voice that Molloy sets such store by is here modelled on God’s Word (albeit in the thinly veiled disguise of Youdi). Moran shapes the father–son relationship in the image of his own relationship with his distant employer, who expects his words to be all but identical with others’ actions, and whose instructions are mysterious but never questioned. Youdi, or—we can infer—God, does not issue imperatives: he speaks in the present tense, and his word performs the requisite change in the world. It is enough for God to have spoken for something to happen. Unlike Molloy’s ‘mythological present’, which is conscious of its own ‘written-ness’ and so is in fact always already speaking the past, Moran wishes to speak the future with the bald statements of his ‘prophetic present’. These are to be imperatives in the guise of descriptions. Humanity aims for a language that can make such changes, the orderword that Deleuze and Guattari describe, but it cannot perfectly achieve it. Almost all of Moran’s rhetorical performances fail in some way, and have to be qualified, justified or reneged upon. He himself comments on this: he tends to commit ‘excesses of language’ (T , 116); he speaks ‘badly’ (T , 118). In this passage, he cannot achieve the form of the ‘prophetic present’, adding unnecessary detail (‘the small one as well as the large one’) to the words that he hopes will come across as awe-inspiring and monumental. There is nothing redundant in God’s speech, which is identical with reality. Moran cannot achieve the same effect. Tellingly, Moran’s own personal motto is a suitably authoritative phrase from Goethe’s Faust: Sollst entbehren, that was the lesson I desired to impress upon him, while he was still young and tender. Magic words which I had never dreamt, until my fifteenth year, could be coupled together. (T , 110)

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Faust uses this phrase, meaning ‘Thou shalt refrain’, in Act I, scene iv, to sum up the Christian teaching that governs the world around him—the principles of self-denial, renunciation, abstinence. In Goethe’s play, however, this authority is thrown off. The life-denying doctrine has caused Faust to despair, and allows Mephistopheles, in this scene, to tempt him along a different path. Moran ignores this context, however, and seems to exult in such abstinence. Beckett himself knew only too well how a parent might try to instil such a lesson into their offspring, putting duty—a word that Moran uses frequently—in the place of love. Despite this hunger for orthodoxy on Moran’s part, Youdi’s imperatives conflict with and unseat his own. In fact, they impose a state of powerlessness on Moran, and when his position and that of his son are reversed in the lawless context of the forest Moran is profoundly troubled: his son ‘asked me what was wrong. I must have winced. I’m sick of the sight of you, I said, that’s what’s wrong’ (T , 144). Moran’s prophetic language is replaced by petulance. Like that used by Moll’s father, who imagines suitors ‘running a mile’ from her, the familiar cliché is a painful betrayal of the expectations of the relationship. These cruelly casual expressions of rejection in the context of parent–child relations, as has been seen, break a taboo. They assume a conditionality to a relationship that must be unconditional. Moran in fact tries to uphold the unconditional authority of the father without fulfilling the corresponding duty of responsibility and obligation—and inevitably fails. In this family drama, Beckett uses the violence of rhetoric, or—more accurately—the rhetorical unsuitability of the casual applied to the significant, to inflict blows far worse than those of the sergeant’s cylindrical ruler. Natural authority is replaced by this ill-disciplined verbal assault. Molloy and Moran seem to have antithetical experiences of authority, one submitting to and one administering it. Neither can quite master its rhetoric, however, and neither finds himself perfectly expressed by its terms. Even Moran is governed by another’s instructions, and his own language fails to be prophetic, or even instrumental. Far from shaping the future, his narrative famously undoes itself, his last words erasing his first: ‘It was not midnight. It was not raining’ (T , 176). In fact, Moran’s efforts to administer power and define the world verbally are thwarted not only by an external force but even his own psyche, where he finds the imperative to seek Molloy ‘readymade’ (T , 112). He, like Molloy, is ultimately driven by an imperative that is the making of his own consciousness—but which nevertheless undoes him. Similarly, his question for power is undone not by his failure to adopt the position of the powerful, but by the doubt cast on the whole edifice of power itself. Both men seek an external manifestation of the law, but their efforts to appropriate and voice its language fail, and this failure itself indicates that there is nothing necessary about the privilege it affords. Both also express the ambivalence towards authority whereby they need identity in the terms of the patriarchal system, but desire the non-identity attendant on a return


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to the mother (even Moran, as we have seen, desiring ‘his mother’s lap’). Like Murphy, these men’s inertia is an unwitting challenge to the very basis of society’s norms, their ‘horror of trouble’ threatening even the imperative to stay alive itself.

III Agency and the undoing of rhetoric Agency, impersonality and the untranslatable il faut Leslie Hill has pointed in an article to the intriguing non-symmetry between the language of the law in Beckett’s French and English works.5 He points specifically to the gap between the endings of L’Innommable/The Unnamable in French and English. A phrase towards the end of the narrative—in English, ‘you must go on, I can’t go on’ (T , 418)—takes in the original French the form: ‘il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer’ (I, 213). Hill indicates that this French il faut is ‘virtually untranslatable’, the English ‘you must’ lacking the rigour of the original French (Hill, ‘Beckett, Writing, Politics’, 221). This difference, Hill argues, reveals the untranslatability of the law in Beckett’s work, ‘both a poverty of language and an excess of language’, and indeed Beckett comments frequently on this capacity of language to be at once too little and too much. Moran argues that ‘all language’ can be seen as ‘an excess of language’ (T , 116). Molloy similarly muses that ‘on reflection, in the long run rather, my verbal profusion turned out to be penury, and inversely’ (T , 34)—his formulaic qualifications here exquisitely illustrating the point. And Beckett’s whole oeuvre can be seen to enact this dilemma with respect to the concept of ‘il faut’ itself. His writing makes play with the baroque and excessive metaphors that attach themselves to different forms of compulsion—the will, God, the drives of sex and death. We recall the ‘kittenish tenacity’ of the will in Watt, Molloy ‘rubbing up against’ his mother, or the gesture of Jesus, an excessive one in Murphy’s view, whose raising of Lazarus from the dead ‘overstepped the mark’ (M, 102), to name but three examples. The ‘il faut’ that compels existence itself appears both necessary and arbitrary. Another instance of this untranslatable il faut occurs in the midst of the grand verbal commands that Moran scatters in his speech. He comments on his son in the French version of Molloy that ‘il ne fallait pas que mon fils s’imaginât de force a` me mentir impunément’ (Mo, 159, my italics). There is again no exact English translation for the ‘il ne fallait pas’ that stands so unchallengeably like a law at the beginning of the sentence. The English finds nonetheless an alternative in the idea of the ‘imperative’, a term that carries something of the impersonality and the idea of necessity of the French original: ‘it was imperative my son should not imagine he was capable of lying to me with impunity’ (T , 96). This is felt by Moran to be a categorical imperative, a principle that he holds to be unshakeable. His relationship with his son crumbles around these monolithic principles, however, which

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stand like statues in the desert, serving no purpose and answering to the law of no external force or agency. Moran’s story in fact constitutes an extended play on the notion of agency. Moran is ostensibly an ‘agent’ in his professional life, but rather than this meaning that he is autonomous—‘his own boss’, as the cliché goes—as the link with the idea of agency might suggest, this in fact means that he acts for someone else and at their behest, as Godot’s ‘agents’ do (CDW, 20). The authority in this case is the mysterious figure of Youdi, and the meaning or purpose of the action of seeking Molloy itself elusive: it is, as Moran puts it, a cause which, while having need of us to be accomplished, was in its essence anonymous, and would subsist, haunting the minds of men, when its miserable artisans should be no more. (T , 115) That Moran calls this purpose a ‘cause’ suggests that it is political as much as commercial, and so recalls another sense of ‘agent’—that of spy—as well perhaps as Beckett’s own work for the French Resistance in particular. Moran’s speculations about Gaber, the messenger, and the possibly ‘surgical’ amnesia he seemed to exhibit, also have sinister political overtones to this effect. The timeless nature of this cause, however, existing far beyond the lifespan of the ‘miserable artisans’ involved in it, removes it from the concretely political sphere. Indeed, acting rarely has an explicit political motive in Beckett’s work. Even the Lord Mayor of Cork, in Malone’s account in the second novel of the trilogy, survives hunger strike due to ‘plain human convictions’ as much as political ones: ‘the Lord Mayor of Cork lasted ages, but he was young, and then he had political convictions, human ones too probably, just plain human convictions’ (T , 275). The imperatives that impel Moran to detach themselves from Gaber—‘the voice I listen to needs no Gaber to make it heard’ (T , 132)—and start to resemble the motiveless imperatives that Molloy thinks about in the forest. Moran is afraid of this voice by ‘force of habit’, just as Molloy’s imperatives are also a matter of ‘habit’. Neither can identify the source or sense of these instructions, but nor can either man break from their hold. There is here, as David Weisberg has argued, yet another pun on the idea of ‘agent’: that on the ‘agent’ in the structure of a story. The oft-repeated terms of Moran’s dilemma—those of ‘voice’ and ‘agent’—are also those of narrative discourse (Weisberg, 107). Such agents as Moran have little agency, but ‘bear’ the agency, the forward momentum of the narrative. And the author in this reading becomes the god-like figure of Youdi. Moran feels himself, as has been seen, to be part of a story that will go on without him. He contemplates blasphemy against the idea of a creator in its largest sense, however: And when I speak of agents and of messengers in the plural, it is with no guarantee of the truth. For I had never seen any other messengers than


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Gaber nor any other agent than myself. [ ] I might have gone to the extreme of conjuring away the chief too and regarding myself as solely responsible for my wretched existence. (T , 107–108) The author or authority here, as often, is also a travestied version of the creator-god. This ‘chief’, whether or not we interpret him as God himself, is a proxy for the idea of an ultimate authority about which Beckett’s narrators are ambivalent, if not sceptical. This religious doubt appears in a more explicit fashion later in the tale, in Moran’s reporting of a conversation with the farmer towards the end of his story. Moran pleads with the farmer to fetch him from the farmer’s home a ‘little hot tea’: ‘It’s a long way, he said. God will go with you, I said. He thought it over. Well he might’ (T , 174). It is not clear in this apparently direct speech, lacking quotation marks as Beckett’s dialogue customarily and deliberately does, whether ‘Well he might’ is the farmer’s reply or Moran’s comment on his own strategic piece of rhetoric. In either reading, it suggests the doubtful nature of God’s benevolence, if not the doubtfulness of his very existence. In the latter reading, attributing it to Moran, it further implies a rather facetious attempt to justify his own insincerity on Moran’s part. It might be true that God will go with the farmer, but—the suggestion is—it is scarcely likely. More likely is that this is one of the throwaway phrases that Beckett’s characters use, such as ‘God knows’ or ‘God help you’, which, as has been seen, guarantee neither knowledge or help but in fact imply God’s failure to do either. Weisberg makes the similar argument that the idea of hope itself, even objectified and detached from God, offers in this second part of Molloy a narrative development which Moran rejects: ‘not only psychologically, in the manner of the nihilist, but also by reducing it to cliché: “hopes that spring eternal” ’ (Weisberg, 110). A similar effect is created in How It Is where the narrator alludes more obliquely but with similar pessimism to another cliché involving hope: ‘abandoned here effect of hope’ (HI, 52). Beckett develops the cliché in the passage of Molloy with further playfully incongruous expressions: And on and off, for fun, and the better to scatter them to the winds, I dallied with the hopes that spring eternal, childish hopes, as for example that my son, his anger spent, would have pity on me and come back to me! (T , 162) Moran changes places with his son in hoping ‘childish[ly]’ that his son would return to him, or that Molloy, ‘like a father to me’, might also come back, or—finally—that the father-figure of Youdi himself might not be angry or punish him (T , 162). The action of hoping itself is made to seem childish and passive, rather than active. Such hopes exist, as he suggests, simply in order to ‘scatter them to the winds’. Following the logic at work in all of

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Beckett’s writing, the molar, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, dissipates into the molecular, the structures of authority and family becoming scattered local desires without any necessary fulfilment. Finally, then, Moran rejects these hopes for good: ‘I swept them away, with a great disgusted sweep of all my being, I swept myself clean of them and surveyed with satisfaction the void they had polluted.’ These hopes—described as ‘a thousand fancies’—are figments of the imagination, comparable to those people and scenery that the Unnamable imagines in his surroundings, images conjured and then denied in order to ‘first dirty, then make clean’ (T , 302). Just as the figures of cliché are as good as any to serve the Unnamable’s need for images, generating themselves automatically out of the conventions of the language he speaks, the messages of cliché are good enough for Moran, the complacent ‘hopes that spring eternal’, equally contrived and equally easy to sweep away. Notions such as the idea that a son will help his father, or that a God (Youdi) will be merciful, are ‘bright’ and have ‘charm’ (T , 162), but are by no means necessary or even true. There is nothing imperative in these relationships, and the hierarchies that they traditionally sustain cannot be relied upon. Weisberg argues that Moran seems initially to have all the things Molloy does not—family, home, the command of a ‘systematic decorum’—but that he shifts his sense of unfreedom from the external to the internal (Weisberg, 106). I have demonstrated, however, that Molloy’s imperatives too are recast as internal ones in the fertile psychological scene of the forest. Neither man achieves self-knowledge as a result of this recognition of the internal nature of their compulsion. Moran cannot find the source of the ‘cause’ that resides within him or the phenomenon of déja` vu whereby he finds Molloy ‘readymade in my head’ (T , 112). Acting in this context is not a matter of agency. In fact, he cannot decide, in contemplating his abandoned hopes, whether he is ‘powerless to act, or perhaps strong enough at last to act no more’ (T , 162). Similarly, the (failed) end of his quest sees him unable to decide whether he is ‘freer now than [he] was’ (T, 176). For Beckett, one’s greatest accomplishment is perhaps—as in the logic of Freud’s death drive—this ability to let go: the relinquishment of the purposeless imperative to move, to seek, or to go on. ‘It’s nobody’s fault’: The agentless sentence Beckett’s work introduces one rhetorical strategy in particular that enables him to express these dilemmas of agency, a stylistic trait as characteristic as his syntax of weakness or his familiar sentence pattern of statement and negation. This strategy is his own version of what the novelist J. M. Coetzee has called the ‘agentless sentence’. By using idioms which suppress agency by eliding the subject position, Beckett can give imaginative expression to his view of a world without design or salvation. He can also reach in this way beyond the semi-autonomous language of cliché towards a more meaningful


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form of impersonality in prose. Coetzee mentions Beckett by name as has been seen in his article on ‘The Agentless Sentence’ as a writer who uses such a strategy. Louis Barjon has identified many such constructions in the language of Beckett’s En attendant Godot, the French original of Waiting for Godot. He describes Beckett’s tendency to use impersonal agentless phrases with a placeholder subject, abstract and anonymous: ‘ “On a faim”—“y fait chaud”— “c”est long’ [One is hungry—it’s hot—it’s long]. For Barjon, this stylistic strategy evokes a ‘vie végétative, impersonnelle’ [vegetal, impersonal life]. The verb structures that Beckett chooses, Barjon argues, contribute in large measure to the impression that his characters live at a ‘stade rudimentaire’ [rudimentary stage] of human existence (Barjon, 49). Deleuze argues similarly that Beckett identifies something profound and general in giving voice to such ‘larval subjects’, whose existence is conditioned predominantly by ‘passive syntheses’ of experience rather than active ones (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 100). This existence is somewhere beyond or below both the voice of society or consensus, as it might be found in cliché, and also the voice of God, in religious injunction. Beckett’s writing keeps these voices at a distance by putting them in the context of the rudimentary lives of his characters: characters that subsist, perhaps, rather than exist. This kind of living is at the root of the examination of identity and person in all of Beckett’s writing. By closing the curtain at the end of his first major play without Godot having appeared, Beckett put into strikingly memorable form the agentless event that he found life to be. The submissive passivity of Beckett’s protagonists is often characterized as a reaction to coercion, threat or entrapment, but the cause of these conditions is invariably absent. In this agentless environment, it is the impersonal voice, as Barjon says, stripped of the accoutrements of culture and sensibility, which is true to the experience of Beckett’s protagonists. This is the discourse that is allowed to pass unqualified or sanctioned, where so many others are not. The Unnamable seems to confirm Barjon’s argument much later in Beckett’s work when he approves his own use of the impersonal form: ‘hypotheses are like everything else, they help you on, as if there were need of help, that’s right, impersonal’ (T , 408 my italics). His words in fact go on all too easily without him, he suggests, coming from an unstoppable source and not allowing for the expression of his own subjectivity. The undertow of Beckett’s writing, that Ricks has characterized as a desire for oblivion and Steven Connor, looking at the desire to repeat in Beckett’s work, has similarly (but in a different idiom) connected with Freud’s pleasure principle, means that this autonomy is not only acceded to but welcomed by Beckett’s protagonists. The narrator of The Unnamable glimpses a way of leaving behind need, the defining desires of the individual, in favour of a vegetal or even mineral existence. This is an expression of the tendency of the organism

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towards inertia that Freud argued for, enacted here in verbal form. The narrator of How It Is also removes the idea of agent: ‘what does he require of me or better still what is required of me’ (HI, 69). The fulcrum of this sentence fragment is the word ‘still’, or perhaps the phrase ‘better still’: the impersonal voice allows for the stilling of the subject, or rather avoids the temptation to create this subject through the seductive Cartesian structure of language itself. The original version of this quotation from How It Is in Comment c’est ˆ on que veut-on de moi’ (CC, 78), indicating reads: ‘que veut-il de moi plutot that the French language offered Beckett a more economical and natural way of achieving such impersonality. The capacity to use the impersonal pronoun ‘on’ allows Beckett to refine his evasion of agency in the French language before finding more artful ways of doing so in English. This gives a particular irony to his comment that he turned to French ‘pour faire remarquer moi’, one that I think was not lost on him. It is in its capacity to avoid the ‘moi’, rather than to make it apparent, that French is so valuable for Beckett. Jean-Michel Bloch identifies a similar strategy in the French new novelists, whose works are characterized, in his view, by this ‘on’ ‘to which individuals are today reduced’.6 Yet the ‘reduction’ in subjectivity that is identified in modern writing cannot, in Beckett’s case at least, itself simply be reduced to a contemporary malaise—Bloch’s ‘today’— attributable to the automatization of society, for instance, or the devaluing of individual labour in the capitalist economy. It carries with it in Beckett’s work also the more positive intention of expressing the fundamental puzzle of an existence that ‘subsists’, in Moran’s words, without cause or justification. Bloch goes on to argue that the nouveaux romanciers have found unexplored terrains beyond the psychological novel ‘in the reproduction of a new sort of interior life, one not more original, but profoundly banal and inauthentic’ (Bloch, 27). This banality is again not simply a satiric reflection of the society that these writers found around them. Deleuze too links Beckett with the proponents of the ‘new novel’ in exploring this domain of banality or as Deleuze puts it, the ‘component fatigues’ and ‘derisory presumptions’ that comprise the self (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 100). Beckett also—like them—reveals the mysterious mixture of ‘fatigue and passion’, passive reaction and exhaustive enquiry that constitutes his subjects’ relationship with the world. Beckett’s theatrical contemporary, Arthur Adamov, in a text fittingly entitled Je Ils , writes an essay called ‘Ce qu’il y a’ which touches on both the mystery and the banality of everyday language: Nous disons: il fait beau, il fait mauvais, comme si nous parlons de quelqu’un. Il, mais, qui, Il? Ce même Il qui se manifeste quand nous disons: il se fait que. Quel est donc ce Il, ce mysterieux inconnu qui fait la pluie et le beau temps et tant d’autres choses encore? (Adamov, 38)


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This passage is untranslatable, as Adamov relies on the resonance of the French constructions ‘il fait beau’, literally ‘he or it makes fine’, and so on for his point. An approximate English version might, however, read: We say, it’s fine, it’s wet, as if we were talking about something. It, but, who/what, it? This same It is seen when we say, it so happens that. What is this It, then, this mysterious stranger who makes the rain and the good weather and so many other things? In his late works, Beckett harnesses this il (‘it’), the same that allows for the expression il faut, to both literally and conceptually dismantle the structure of language that privileges the subject, and to explore what is revealed when this shrill subjectivity is put to one side. Our inner life, he suggests, is not our own in so far as it becomes more and more generalized, the more fundamental the experience that it approaches. The model of a superficial social self and a moi profond beneath is challenged in this language at once intimate and impersonal. We are reminded by these observations of Sartre on Flaubertian cliché, describing it as ‘cet on heideggérien, le commun des homes, qui emploient le langage a` server leur fins triviales.’7 In this respect, Beckett’s work arrives at a dilemma frequently touched upon in modern philosophical thought, whereby the subject cannot fully appropriate its discourse for itself but speaks always a collective language. Sartre’s symbolic pronoun ‘on’ is literal and prevalent in Beckett’s French writing, communicating the idea that the voice of the text is always in some sense a ‘we’ (or the ‘they’ that returns so insistently to the Unnamable’s text). Impersonality is no longer the sign of a controlling authority behind the text, as it might have been in nineteenth-century realist writing, but instead signifies the very diffuseness of the molecular subject, a subject that finds itself imperfectly expressed in the structures of language, the discipline of ‘grammaticality’ that Deleuze and Guattari identify in the authoritative order-word (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 88). This connection goes some way to explaining Beckett’s taste for free indirect discourse, a style of ‘exemplary value’ for Deleuze and Guattari in expressing the subject’s uneasy interpellation into social discourse, and which prepares the way in Beckett’s early writing for the blurring of the ‘contours’ of grammatical person that he achieves in later work. Whether or not Molloy’s inner voices find outer form as policemen or social workers it scarcely matters, as we have seen: he internalizes the social authority that they represent and express. In neither oratio recta or oratio obliqua can one be sure who is really speaking. Indeed, the very distinction between cliché—the words of others—and one’s own language founders if all human speech takes this collective form. Behind the speaking voice in Beckett’s work, then, there is a ‘collective assemblage’ of voices, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘the murmur from

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which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice’ (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 93). This model is also approached, more formally, in Wittgenstein’s early thinking. Bernard Williams has identified in Wittgenstein’s vision of language an ‘idealism of the first-person plural’—an idealism that we all share. The ‘hermeticism of the spirit’ that Beckett talked of is in fact a general condition: just as we can only find our self in Deleuze and Guattari’s constellation of voices, we can likewise only perceive the world which our collective language allows us to formulate.8 This idea offers the most profound challenge yet to the link between consensus and realism addressed earlier in this study. In this ‘idealism of the first-person plural’, empirical referents (our perceptions of ‘the world’) fall within the realm of language rather than being the transcendental facts (the facts ‘outside’ language) that realist discourse makes of them. When the implications of this collective idealism are ‘followed out strictly’, in Wittgenstein’s words from the Tractatus, ‘it coincides with pure realism’; there can be no unmediated, objective, ‘real’ realism.9 And nor can there, conversely, be any truly subjective position. Beckett moves towards this idealism of the first-person plural in his early texts, and mentions it explicitly in his late work, Company, where the narrator stages a desire to rid himself of a subjectivity that is ‘a fortiori’ plural: ‘For the first personal and a fortiori plural pronoun had never any place in your vocabulary’ (C, 86–87). The ambivalent attitude of Beckett’s narrators to such ‘company’, that of a collective subject position, itself emerges in this late prose work. The speaker’s given language reminds him of the countless others whose agreement sustains the meaning of this language, in theory at least, and who are spoken by it, as Martin Heidegger suggested, whenever it speaks. On the one hand, this relieves the subject of the oppressive freight of the first person. As we see in Not I, the first person can bring with it ownership of painful memories and experiences that a subject might want to avoid or suppress. On the other hand, this collectivity means that, as countless commentators have argued in relation to Beckett’s work, the subject cannot find themselves in language: ‘Confusion too is company up to a point’ (C, 34), as the narrator in Company comments. This statement seems poignant: an isolation mitigated by dividing oneself, creating ‘playmates’ as does Malone and the little boy pictured in the play That Time. It is also deliberately enigmatic, however, and suggests—more in line here with Wittgenstein’s later works than his earlier—that the capacity of language for vagueness can comfort one and help one on as well as trip one up. This company of the first person plural also seems to allow for a merciful distance from one’s utterances, then. Yet Beckett raises the question of whether or not these rhetorical strategies are not simply in fact evasions. The narrator of The Unnamable describes this distance from his utterance, rather hopefully, as ‘innocence’. He puts his failure to produce his own utterances


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down to the fact that he is not properly ‘born’ into the human world, and so cannot affect anything or be affected by anything, even God himself. He comments: ‘we’re innocent, he’s innocent, it’s nobody’s fault’ (T , 389). We find a similar sentiment in Malone Dies, whose narrator comments that he ‘can say, Up the Republic! for example, or Sweetheart!, for example, without having to wonder if I should not rather have cut my tongue out’ (T , 236). He is not implicated in these sentiments: as the integral nature of their exclamation marks, and particularly in the French original the italicized English form of the first phrase suggest, these are simply fragments of speech learnt from elsewhere and as alien to him as any other. Locating the ‘author’ whose authority might be identified behind the ‘collective’ speech is a difficult business, an exoneration that Beckett’s narrators seem to embrace, but which at the same time seems to provoke them to endless tail-chasing enquiry into the matter. Later, in any case, this innocence is put into question. The narrator argues, referring to himself in the third person, that because ‘travellers found him and told him tales’, this ‘proves my innocence’ (T , 407). These are, after all, the words of others. He himself is ignorant of the world, simply repeating in an unadulterated form the stories that he is told, and therefore he is not guilty of having lived among men or absorbed any of the human attitudes or assumptions that the language of these stories might entail. These stories come from far away and via others. Yet, he goes on to ask, ‘who says, That proves my innocence’ (T , 407). The mere fact of speaking indicts him: if he cannot identify the other who speaks then no deferring of responsibility can save him from it, however far away he locates its source. Language itself imposes a judicial framework: a subjectivity, and hence a responsibility, that must come to rest somewhere. Again Beckett’s terms return us to the concerns about language that Wittgenstein also explored. Stanley Cavell, as has been mentioned, imputes to Wittgenstein an aspiration similar to Beckett’s towards ‘innocence’ in his philosophical writing. In Cavell’s account, Wittgenstein, like the Unnamable and Beckett’s other narrators, identifies the danger of delusion that ordinary language holds, but has no choice but to use it. As Wittgenstein writes: As long as there is a verb ‘to be’ which seems to work like ‘to eat’ and ‘to drink’; as long as there are adjectives like ‘identical’, ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘possible’; as long as people speak of the passage of time and of the extent of space, and so on; as long as all this happens people will always run up against the same teasing difficulties and will stare at something which no explanation seems able to remove. (Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript, 424) It is this ordinary language, rather than the semantically or syntactically complex, that is the key to understanding. Cavell has spoken in several studies about the significance of Wittgenstein’s sense that ‘poverty is the

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condition of philosophy’ (Cavell, ‘Ending the Waiting Game’, 153–178). Ordinary words hold the key to understanding ourselves, but they are also likely, in their very appearance of simplicity, to sabotage our attempts to do so. Cavell reads Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as struggling between an emphasis on distrusting language and an emphasis on trusting ordinary human speech alone as a source of insight into how we think. We cannot choose between these emphases. They are both necessary and mutually contradictory, and as a result this struggle will present itself in ‘touches of madness’.10 As Wittgenstein puts it in this work: Philosophy results in the disclosing of one or another piece of plain nonsense and in the bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of that disclosure. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §119) Embracing this ordinary language or ‘plain nonsense’, with all its pitfalls, is the only possible way, according to Wittgenstein, to philosophize while still ‘leaving the world as it is’11 ; to be, that is, an innocent philosopher. Beckett displays a knowing kind of innocence in this respect. His narrators do not always embrace this ordinary language willingly, but they do find a version of Cavell’s ‘poverty’ in dismantling the postures of rhetoric and finding the most literal sense possible of the baroque range of discourses that the world offers to them. They sever rhetoric from persuasion by looking at this rhetoric with the cold eye of the innocent, who can take nothing for granted. Implicated in the act of speaking, they are at least vigilant in scrutinizing the foundations of their learned utterances. Unrhetorical questions and the violence of persuasion Perhaps the most explicit demonstration of the dismantling of rhetoric in Beckett’s work is in the writer’s treatment of the rhetorical question. This is a form of language that is far from innocent: it imposes a point of view while masquerading as an enquiry. The link between persuasion and coercion is therefore particularly strong. Beckett takes issue with two telling aspects of this phenomenon: first, the impression that it gives of direct communication between a speaker and a listener, an effect always under siege in Beckett’s writerly work as we have seen, and, secondly, the assumption that there is common ground between this speaker or writer and his or her audience or reader, a shared set of beliefs that can underpin and guarantee the statements made and the attitudes struck. The rhetorical force of this device is shown to rest on an authority that can never safely be assumed. Moran in particular gives us flamboyant examples of the rhetorical question. Again, however, he fails to make the locution work for him. In a rhetorical question the answer, and therefore the speaker’s position, is presented


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as self-evident: the question, therefore, does not require an answer. This presupposes, however, some shared understanding between interlocutors. Moran, on the other hand, attempts to use this sort of tactic in a contrary spirit in order to deride his son and creates a distance between them. Here his questions mean ‘no one who is sane would think otherwise than me—as you evidently do’. One such exchange with his son uses the familiar rhetorical question ‘you call that x’: What are you doing? I said. Looking at my stamps, he said. You call that looking at your stamps? I said. Yes papa, he said, with unimaginable effrontery. (T , 109) In the textbook of ancient rhetoric, Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian listed among the functions of rhetorical questions: ‘to throw odium on the person to whom it is addressed, to arouse pity, or embarrass an opponent’ (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, III, ix, 379). The vast gap in understanding between Moran and his son that these questions impose is intended to demonstrate his authority. It is also, however, the very thing that causes it to founder. The son breaks the rules of exchange, apparently innocently, by answering these questions for which an answer should be unnecessary, and this transgression signals that the rhetorical system has broken down. Moran’s assumption that he can impose meaning through his authority looks not only flawed but ridiculous. Later in this section of the novel Moran cannot even take the answer to his own questions for granted: What do you say to that? I said. He said to it, Yes, papa. Did he love me then as much as I loved him? You could never be sure with that little hypocrite. (T , 120) Moran talks to his son, and even to himself, as though he were performing to the air. His questions are challenges, gestures rather than messages. Such gestures, intended to impose his authority, in fact put him in thrall to public forms of language that require silent acquiescence and understanding. Without such understanding, however, he flounders. His trust in even literal language collapses, and concepts such as ‘love’ and ‘honour’ became opaque to him. Moran’s cliché may be rhetoric that is doubly fallen, worn-out and also misused, but it still has great power to coerce or at least to hurt in this context. In his later work, however, Beckett turns the mishandling of this rhetorical technique into a deliberate strategy for removing the link between rhetoric and persuasion, and in so doing disarming the power that rhetoric has over its addressee as well as scrutinizing its presuppositions. As this study

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has argued, Beckett cultivates a renunciation of the power of persuasion by rhetorical means. His texts teem with rhetorical figures, but they are invariably undercut or deflated either by their deliberate manipulation or by their incongruous relationship to the context at hand. Rhetorical questions are a special instance of this strategy. Beckett made the observation in an essay on the Irish poet Denis Devlin that art should be ‘pure interrogation—rhetorical questions less the rhetoric’ (Disjecta, 91), and Beckett himself follows this principle to the letter. His literal treatment of this particular strategy demonstrates that our everyday language is highly rhetorical, in so far as it manipulates the listener or reader into taking up certain positions (usually of assent), and elides many logical consistencies by means of conventional forms. Beckett’s approach to such manoeuvres exposes them. An innocent look at the world must dismantle in this way the assumptions that using ordinary language entails. Beckett takes his own principle of unrhetorical questions literally in his later writing and uses the form of the question to indicate both how little is certain in the world of his narrators, and how rhetoric can only go so far in covering up this uncertainty. Beckett is aware that there is never a perfect parity between speaker and listener. A response to another’s utterance is always constituted within a nexus of power relations. In his later works, however, the power in question is often the narrator’s power to make observations or judgements about the world at all. Questions rhetorical in form are converted into genuine and often unanswerable enquiries. The narrators likewise treat with bewilderment the idea of a self-evident proposition or a shared truth. The formulation in Moran’s ‘you call that looking at your stamps’ is a good test case for this argument. The locution ‘you call that x’ is a verbal sneer in Moran’s mouth, but this sense is gradually eroded in Beckett’s later work. In its everyday usage, this locution does not require or even leave room for an answer. It tries to impose an opinion on its silent audience by bringing the opposite view into question (though what the alternative could be in the above instance from Molloy, when Moran’s son is patently looking at his stamps, is baffling). A gentler version of the locution is used in The Unnamable: ‘and as far as thinking is concerned I do just enough to preserve me from going silent, you can’t call that thinking’ (T , 309, my italics). It is telling that this is a favourite locution of Beckett’s. Language only works if one can ‘call it that’, if there is a consensus about what something is. This consensus appears less and less frequently in Beckett’s later texts. Rhetorical appeals to common sense are used instead to disable the movement of the text and unravel what it has just proposed. Common sense here is reduced to the belief that none of the designations of this language are accurate. At this stage of The Unnamable, however, there is still a vestige of common ground. ‘You can’t call that thinking’: the text still relies in this instance on the possibility that the ‘you’, the reader, thinks in the same way as the


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narrator—even if this is only to agree negatively about the failure of their shared language. Later in the text, however, there are only flat statements which contradict each other: I’m sleeping, they call that sleeping, there they are again, we’ll have to start killing them again I was nearly sleeping, I call that sleeping, there is no one but me (T , 406) If the Unnamable uses human language a ‘they’ keeps rearing its head in his text: ‘We’ll have to start killing them again’ (T , 406). This is a rhetorical illusion, however: there is no consensus to which to appeal. How then can there be authority to ‘call that sleeping’ or anything else? The echo of this rhetorical locution, which had been a favourite of Beckett’s in the course of the trilogy is all but extinguished at this late stage, in an austere context where there is only room for statements and denials (‘they call that sleeping I call that sleeping’). Rhetorical questions are questions that have ‘lost every trace of a desire for an answer’.12 They normally become declarative as a result. In Beckett’s writing, however, they are only declarative in so far as they declare against the possibility of knowing anything at all. The dismantling of the status of these rhetorical locutions mirrors what happens to all clichés in Beckett’s work. With no common ground between interlocutors, the comprehension of the figures of cliché, often compressed so that the grammatical sense is lost, is made difficult. As a reader, one may feel competent to recognize cliché, but is the narrator competent to use them? Do his narrators mean by them what you or I do? How can they, having neither practical experience nor concrete environment to which to make reference. As successive generations read Beckett, as with any writer who uses living language, the sense of some of his colloquial expressions is erased: few twenty-first century readers—perhaps mercifully—will recognize the biblical reference when Malone describes how the seat of his breeches ‘sawed my crack from Dan to Beersheba’ (T , 171), for instance, or find familiar Winnie’s description of herself as ‘on the qui vive’ (CDW, 148). We begin to understand in an investigation of cliché in Beckett’s work, however, that this experience of ignorance has already been pre-empted by and built into the dramatic situation itself. Beckett’s language always already is in the process of losing its usual or original meaning in the hands of his unworldly narrators and, in so doing, Beckett makes the experience we have of it rich and strange. Beckett also wants to keep his readers aware that they are reading a written text, that there is no direct and immediate relationship between them and the text’s narrator, or between the narrative and the world it represents. The source of the text is not, or not only, the author Beckett: these words are remembered from elsewhere and are visited upon Beckett, by memory or convention, no less than they are upon us.

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The loss of common ground in Beckett’s writing gives his rhetorical language a particular status. The fact that there are no certainties for the Unnamable means that the questions he asks are destined to be both never rhetorical and always merely rhetorical. There is no pre-determined answer, so they do not conform to the usual sense of ‘rhetorical question’. On the other hand, if the answer cannot be determined then there is never a real purpose in asking a question, other than for rhetorical effect. Moritz Schlick writes in his essay ‘Unanswerable Questions’ that: ‘Every explanation or indication of the meaning of a question consists, in some way or other, of prescriptions for finding its answer no real question is in principle—i.e. logically—unanswerable’.13 Beckett therefore emphasizes the emptiness of the logical form of a question which, in his texts, so often cannot be answered. The rhetoric of Beckett’s narrators fails in so far as they cannot appeal to a common doxa, a store of shared ideas and understandings. Conversely, rhetoric is in some sense all that there is left; its forms are empty, divorced from the function of persuasion, but the structures of argumentation are still in place. The narrator of The Unnamable says at one point: ‘Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric’ (T , 269). Beckett’s readers still recognize the instructions that they are given by the form of his rhetorical questions— that these are questions that they must not try to answer, or that already indicate the answer through their shape and tone—but they also infer that this structure now harks back to a world of certainties that no longer obtains. As Beckett’s work develops, more and more is put into question, including finally what the eye of the text sees and whether or not there is any referent beyond mental ‘fancy’. That no question is technically unanswerable is what allows Beckett’s texts to continue, making formal reply to real and virtual questions with answers that are just as confusing and disorientating as the original question. Finally all is in question, which makes the verbal form of the question strangely superfluous. From an Abandoned Work, written soon after the trilogy, marks a stage in this process: The questions float up as I go along and leave me very confused, breaking up I am. Suddenly they are there, no, they float up, out of an old depth, and hover and linger before they die away In twos often they came, one hard on the other, thus, How shall I go on another day? and then, How did I ever go on another day? Or, Did I kill my father? and then, Did I ever kill anyone? That kind of way, to the general from the particular I suppose you might say, question and answer too in a way (CSP, 159–160) In a dizzying twist, the form of the rhetorical question becomes the closest thing to an answer that the text can provide. It offers a spurious answer to the ‘real’ and particular questions in the text by replacing them with


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rhetorical questions that are unanswerable: ‘How did I ever go on another day?’; ‘Did I ever kill anyone?’ Although the latter question has, one might suppose, a very real answer, the rhetorical form of these questions is such that they become performative gestures rather than genuine enquiries; they put a provisional stop to the terrifying questions that lie behind the text and haunt both speaker and reader. These rhetorical questions expose how we sustain ourselves by making our situations general and by presenting them to ourselves as inevitable and untouchable by logic and analysis, just as Molloy presents his imperatives and Moran the ‘cause’ he follows. As the Unnamable says at one moment: ‘I’m going to ask questions, that’s a good stop-gap’ (T , 405). By the time of writing Ill Seen Ill Said in 1981, Beckett’s questions have been long dead, are stillborn in fact, uttered redundantly: Was it ever over and done with questions? Dead the whole brood no sooner hatched. Long before Over and done with answering. With not being able. A dream. Question answered. (ISIS, 37) In the context of this passage, all questions are ‘dead no sooner [than] hatched’, answered by the conclusion that everything has been a dream. If the observer cannot distinguish between reality and a dream, then the observed world responds to no questions. It is futile to enquire into the workings of a dream. Like fancy, it makes no pretence to have truth content or respond to laws of cause and effect. ‘Question answered’: the fact that the very concept of a dream begs its own questions (about what its constitutive other—the real—might be) is avoided. Ill Seen Ill Said presents a tension in this way between reason and imagination, the present and the past. The vision refers, in Ann Beer’s deftly worded observation, to a scene in Molloy’s ‘mythological present’. As Beer elaborates: ‘[t]he old woman is both dead and not dead. The eye sees her when it is closed rather than open’ (Beer, 781). The scenes of Beckett’s late prose both pre-empt and rebuff the questions of the ‘reason-ridden’ mind, the ‘how, why, when, where’ of the realist Mr Kelly in Murphy. These scenes, personal to Beckett but drained of identity, are part memory and part fiction: the ‘dream’ that refuses to be questioned. The sparest form of rhetoric persists in Beckett’s latest texts. In the 1983 Worstward Ho questions are functional (again) in so far as they provide the text with an almost mechanical impulse. They create the simplest verbal equations: The void. How try say? How try fail? No try no fail. Say only— Add others. Add? Never. In the skull all gone. All? No. (WH, 17, 25)

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The text interrogates itself in vain as to how it can talk of, or fail to talk of, such inevitable subjects as the void. Within the verbal structures of this enquiry, as Moritz Schlick’s theory of the question proposes, the possibility of its solution lies. Beckett demonstrates how resourceful language seems in warding off its own inanition, however little it is given to nourish it. The structure of language is both empty and sustaining in these texts. It seems to be a closed system that protects us from the threatening reality beyond our analytic systems. But the bald imperatives of Worstward Ho gesture beyond themselves towards a deeper power of continuation, a tenacity, in life as well as language. Hence the strange quality of Beckett’s late prose works. The apparent poverty of their style disarms the hidden power of rhetoric, but achieves a new kind of power in restoring to language its closeness to life itself. In the rhythm of these strange formulations is expressed the unacknowledged and unwanted need to continue, to love, to speak. Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus: ‘We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer’ (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, #6.52, 88). The implication behind Wittgenstein’s statement is that our process of reasoning itself might be a ‘red herring’, as the Unnamable might put it, a set of hypotheses which ultimately collapse on top of one another. The final question is not a scientific one; there is perhaps no language with which we might formulate such a question. No human forms of reasoning approach what for the early Wittgenstein was the almost mystical concept of life, a concept that escaped the analytical forms of language. Beckett too questions whether one can ask questions of the ‘void’ that is the subject of Worstward Ho. The closest we can get to truth, he seems to suggest, is by systematically negating all our statements or questions about this void. Our approach to the void can tell us only about our processes of thinking themselves and the strange compulsion to engage in them.

IV Beyond the figural: The later work The Lost Ones: The end of the figural Beckett’s late work thus attacks the aspiration of the human mind to rationality itself, to a mastery—both representational and analytic—over the world. Humanity is ‘reason-ridden’, as Beckett puts it in Company, infected with anthropocentric ways of thinking as though they were a disease or a bodily corruption. His protagonist in this work asks himself whether he can create while crawling in the same dark as his creation, but deplores the activity of putting questions to himself and answering them as ‘reason-ridden’: ‘So while in the same breath deploring a fancy so reason-ridden and observing how revocable its flights he could not but answer’ (C, 75). The logical structure of such questions, as we have seen, conceals their absurdity.


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Beckett’s 1971 prose text The Lost Ones explores in more detail the idea of the ‘reason-ridden’ mind, which seeks impossible information about an environment that it has itself imperfectly imagined. It also goes further, however, in suggesting by way of this imaginative exercise that the very mania for reason unseats such reason’s authority in every kind of human discourse. The Lost Ones presents at first glance a chilling portrait of a community where both social cohesion and embodied authority seem to be absent, replaced by an abstract bureaucratic machine that retains none of the volition of the paternal image of God or the maternal image of human welfare. There is no agent, benevolent or otherwise, to control this environment or compel its inhabitants. Beckett in fact appears to give dramatic form to the dilemma posed by the omniscient but detached third person of the realist text in his early writing. The apparent neutrality of the narrative, told from the point of view of an observing eye so far from the creatures it observes that the spectacle risks complete blandness, is deceptive. In fact, the drama is in the language itself, which undermines not only its own detachment from the scene but also the distinction between figurative and literal that underpins the rational operation of any language whatsoever. As H. Porter Abbott has argued, this text also creates a disturbance in genre (Abbott, 137–138). The language of The Lost Ones unsettles reading conventions to create strange versions of reality that are neither quite concrete nor purely abstract. Human figures move around a cylinder where light and temperature fluctuate with uncanny regularity and debilitating effect. Some of the figures search for a way out by climbing ladders or exploring tunnels in the cylinder; others have given up hope and barely cling to life itself. This strange scenario offers intractable problems of interpretation. Many allegorical readings and dystopian models present themselves, but no explanation can fully explain the details of the scenario, all presented as equally meaningful, with the result that none of these readings can be definitive. The tone of the language can be no more surely established than its referent. The ‘faint breathings’ of feeling in the tone of the narrative seem at first to be smothered by the language, a frozen bureaucratic discourse. The voice seems to present at the same time a clipped detachment and a mania for exhaustive description and analysis that speaks of a culture of surveillance: Consequences of this light for the searching eye. Consequences for the eye which having ceased to search is fastened to the ground or raised to the distant ceiling where none can be. The temperature. It oscillates with more measured beat between hot and cold. It passes from one extreme to the other in about four seconds. (CSP, 202)

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The ‘searching eye’ in the text not only belongs to any one of the ‘lost bodies’ looking for a way out, but also to the unitary viewpoint from which the text is narrated. Social control here is represented abstractly by this scrutinizing and omniscient eye and the measured impersonal tone of its report. This is an investigation, rather than an intervention, however: an authority even more chilling for seeming unwilling or unable to intervene. This is the power of rationality itself, which claims objectivity but in fact murders to dissect. Furthermore, this clinical language is shown to be neither sufficiently stable in tone, nor sufficiently abstract to give a reliable analysis of the scene. The English version, in keeping with a pattern of greater concreteness in the English language texts (and perhaps in the language itself), makes its latent materiality more evident than the French. In the manner of the Unnamable, who describes himself as ‘dying under his own steam’ (T , 333), figurative clichés and idioms become disturbingly literal: ‘Those with stomach still to copulate strive in vain’; ‘Thus flesh and bone subsist’ (CSP, 202–203). Even plain words become detached from their usual bearings. Words such as ‘rung’, ‘press’, ‘humours’ and ‘tube’ are used literally but this literal meaning is unbalanced by the figurative uses of words such as ‘spur’, ‘dead’, ‘bolt’, ‘buckle’ (in the expression ‘buckle to’) and ‘melt’. The tallest climbers stand ‘bolt upright’ on the ‘top rung of the ladder’ (CSP, 207), scarcely distinguishable in this description from the ladder itself. Thought and bodily movement become particularly difficult to distinguish: An intelligence would be tempted to see in these [the sedentary] the next vanquished and continuing in its stride to require of those still mobile that all in due course each in his turn be well and truly vanquished (CSP, 212) The ‘intelligence in its stride’ is in painful contrast to the sedentary and the vanquished; even for the mobile their ‘course’ is one that leads them in turn to extinction. Theories and creeds concerning a way out are ‘fluctuant’ (CSP, 206), rising up and waning like the conditions of temperature and light, and the physical well-being of the inhabitants. Beliefs are described as if they were diseases: the inhabitants are ‘immune’ to certain beliefs; other theories have ‘virulence’ (CSP, 205). Thinking itself is a kind of contagious disease that can only blight the lives of such creatures. It is indeed a curse to be so ‘reason-ridden’. Like the inhabitants of the cylinder, the figures of the text are ‘vanquished’ (CSP, 221, passim) but never quite die. Beckett explores the effects available from a language that is exhausted and half-petrified. Even verbal forms so close to neutrality and objectivity resonate with what Lawrence Graver has called ‘surprising modulations’.14 An imperative to be absolutely precise likewise leads the voice to admit its own failings both of knowing and saying, and to establish an awful creeping uncertainty as the only certainty.


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The more that rules are imposed and formulae elaborated to control and represent the world, the more elusive the world starts to seem. Beckett’s text reads as an unwitting parody of Wittgenstein’s model of language in his Tractatus: ‘The facts in logical space are the world’ (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, #1.13, 5). But just as for Wittgenstein there is no value in what is said in this way—and so likewise in the world as it can be expressed—Beckett’s narrator is limited by his language and cannot ever say what this world means.15 Enough cannot be said to explain even the most circumscribed scene (even in a finite and regular world such as this one): ‘All has not been told and never shall be’ (CSP, 219). This tension between the fullness of description and the emptiness of value is expressed in the text itself. Here again, Beckett turns to questions to pose this dilemma. The text asks questions that it claims are easy to answer: Is there not a reason to fear a saturation of the intermediate zone and what would be its consequences for the bodies as a whole and particularly for those of the arena cut off from the ladders? Is not the cylinder doomed in a more or less distant future to a state of anarchy given over to fury and violence? To these questions and many others the answers are clear and easy to give. It only remains to dare. (CSP, 219) These answers may be easy to give here (although the text never gives them), being perhaps even contained within a simple yes or no. On the other hand, these questions offer little clarity about the origin of this situation or its meaning. Rational forms of language in themselves guarantee nothing in the way of reason or insight. Furthermore, the one resource of language that allows completely new things to be said, the resource of metaphor, collapses in this text: tenor and vehicle, the literal and the figurative, become impossible to dissociate. Yet never has the body been more conspicuous in language than in this text full of moribunds and statistics. The not quite dead bring what it is to live into view more vividly than the healthy. As cliché displays a tenacious flicker of life even in its nearness to termination, the lost ones’ disintegration troubles the calm discourse of numbers and rules more than their death ever could. The crux of this is that they are neither one thing nor another, neither alive nor dead. They disturb the most fundamental system of categorization that we have. The inorganic aspects of their appearance and behaviour, described in phrases about the ‘dessication’ (CSP, 220) of their skin, its greyness, their ‘tarnished’ (CSP, 221) hair, and the ‘jumble’ (CSP, 222) of their limbs, bring the boundaries of our model of humanity, and life itself, into view. Yet again, Beckett’s language itself seems to embody the almost mineral inertia of Freud’s death drive. Yet the surfacing corporeality of the text does more than merely undermine the authority of the detached language in which the events of the

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cylinder are framed. It also unseats the authority of the literal itself. It challenges the status of abstract language, of rational or scientific discourse, of the systems of organization instigated by the advent of print culture. It does this not, however, by reasserting symbolic meaning. Instead, it exposes as primary, in society as well as outside it, the significance and power of the will, of unbiddable physical urges and even the blind, unreflective impulse of hope. These cannot be fully represented with a literal language, but can, Beckett’s work suggests, be mimicked by the re-assertion of the recovered materiality of cliché, the return of the repressed in language. Towards oblivion: The later prose work This recovered materiality extends here and in other late Beckett works towards what Gilles Deleuze has called the ‘intensities’ of experience that elude measurement and comparison. Individual experiences of sensation and significance can never for Deleuze be submitted fully to external structures of measurement and value, the order-words of orthodoxy. The individual event always entails an infinite set of particular conditions and circumstances that ensure its difference from other such events.16 Habit and memory give such experiences and events fixed identities—categories that allow us to compare, evaluate and measure them. But they never have these transcendent qualities in reality. Beckett in his late work strikingly anticipates Deleuze’s discussion of difference, challenging not only those ideas recognized to be clichés, but also the ‘fixed identities’ of rational thinking themselves. An example other than The Lost Ones is Beckett’s short prose fragment ‘He Is Barehead’, published first in For to End Yet Again and Other Fizzles in 1976. Here the writer explores with great explicitness the experience of intensities of sensation and the corresponding failure of the human mind to measure and compare them. Their uniqueness is registered in a language of affect unusual in Beckett’s late prose: in the qualitative terms of ‘sweetness’, ‘shock’ and ‘surprise’. The protagonist of this piece wanders round a dark and narrow labyrinth, trying to analyse and order his few sense impressions. He clings as tenaciously to the categories of experience with which the structure of his language provides him as he clings to the walls of the passages. He puts in place a logical system which follows the dictates of grammar, and tries to range experiences and objects in terms of a comparative and superlative order: ‘his history studded with occasions passing rightly or wrongly for outstanding’ (CSP, 227). The system slips, however. Time and forgetfulness of sensation intrude to make the authoritative categorization of experience impossible. The flow of time and his loss of memory shunt experience through the system creating new highs and lows: there is never a definitive first or last, best or worst, ‘straitest narrow’, ‘most lingering collapse’, ‘sweetest wall lick’ (CSP, 227–228). Each intensity, in Deleuze’s term, is purely different from each other.


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Beckett imputes an implacable relativism to this experience: the protagonist may employ comparatives, but he will never achieve a definitive superlative, as those under interrogation in Beckett’s late works for the theatre will never find ‘the thing you want’ (CDW, 315)—in the words of ‘M’ addressing the tyrannical light in Play. Deleuze similarly distinguishes actual differences, defined by characteristics that are ruled by the possibility of negation, from these kind of ‘pure differences and intensities’, of the nature of ‘becoming-harder not becoming-softer’. Similarly, Beckett’s ‘He Is Barehead’ begs the question of how one might begin to compare one ‘lingering collapse’ with another. Or, indeed (a characteristic Beckettian enquiry) how until one ‘drops’—as we learn this protagonist has not yet done—one can ever determine how ‘lingering’ one’s condition will be. We recall in this context the following exchange over a carrot in Waiting for Godot: Estragon: Funny, the more you eat the worse it gets. Vladimir: With me it’s just the opposite. Estragon: In other words? Vladimir: I get used to the muck as I go along. Estragon: (After prolonged reflection.) Is that the opposite? (CDW, 22) Habituation allows us to assign fixed identities, but it is also precisely this habituation that denies us a definitive judgement about our experience. Have we learnt a truth about something, or have we just become used to our original impression of it? Again, we seem to become each time ‘a little deader’ (CSP, 132–133), understanding the world simply by suppressing our apprehension of its difference: the non-identity of each event and sensation. In his later work Beckett begins to use his studied formulations of imprecision, familiar from earlier works, to more profound effect. The studied casualness of the colloquialisms in ‘He Is Barehead’ in fact become precise in their concessions to imprecision: the text speaks of periods of time in the labyrinth that were ‘not yet exactly its good and bad days’, of incidents ‘passing rightly or wrongly for outstanding’ (CSP, 227), of the heart about which all that can be said is there are ‘no complaints’, an expression that hovers undecidably between two senses. No firm judgements are offered that might become ‘landmarks’ in reference to which other evaluations might be made. Even the authority of simple statement eludes the speaker in this text. As was seen in The Lost Ones, the physical environment in this work, with its summits and straits, begins to mimic the topology of perception and understanding itself. It even, perhaps, affects its critics. James Knowlson and John Pilling, for example, comment of this depiction of wet labyrinthine passages that ‘problems of beginning and ending’ reach ‘a kind of high water mark’ therein (Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes, 134). The protagonist is, in a

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familiar Beckettian conflation, in the dark, or here at least in the ‘shade’: ‘new maxima and minima tend to cast into the shade, and towards oblivion, those momentarily glorified’ (CSP, 228). The cool, damp surroundings ceaselessly present ‘fresh’ elements of experience. There gradually emerges ‘a smatter of settled ways’ (CSP, 227), but these do not mean that the protagonist has any more idea of how he will emerge from this labyrinth or what its layout might be. The body, like the protagonist’s memory, is in fact ‘fragile’, even ‘coming unstuck’. As Adam Piette has pointed out, the acoustic landscape of the text itself creates a third level on which this text might be seen to operate: ‘The narrative voice, imagining the figure’s memory accruing a fragile past out of the ways his body has been, gathers its own sounds up to make a history. It takes up into his prose the delicately accrued sounds it has made on its way’ (Piette, 210). This conflation of mind, body and the matter of the text itself—as in The Lost Ones—destabilizes the interpretative faculties of the reader as it does the protagonist: the language of intensity and sensation infects and disrupts the rational processes of discovery, measurement and analysis. The protagonist in this piece, exhausted by his thwarted attempts to ‘pierce the gloom’ around him, now keeps his eyes firmly closed. Beckett gives the reader here a variation on the ubiquitous and uniform ‘grey’ that characterizes so many of his other works. For he who is barehead, the case is somewhat different: he closes down the very possibility of seeing and perhaps also—by the figurative extension so beloved of Beckett—of understanding, so inhospitable is his environment. The narrator comments drily that there is ‘nothing like a ray of light, from time to time, to brighten things up for one’ (CSP, 225). But there is, literally, nothing like this in these late works of Beckett. In none of these works can the light break through: their protagonists are destined to remain unenlightened. The dawn in the 1976 For to End Yet Again is ‘leaden’, the sky a grey identical to that of the sand. By the later prose piece Lessness, dawn, which one might hope would bring illumination and ‘dispel figments’, is itself, along with dusk (connoting comfort, rest, relief), only a ‘figment’: ‘Figment dawn dispeller of figments and the other called dusk’ (CSP, 199). The subjects of these late works are not in the dark, a situation that might offer the prospect of illumination as Theodor Adorno has argued, but in the more relentless and unforgiving grey. The fundamental categories of thought, and the values assigned to them, give way to chains of sensations that are both monotonously similar and literally incomparable. Gilles Deleuze in his book on difference and repetition critiques the Aristotelian privileging of identity over difference. Aristotle celebrated in metaphor the seeing of similarities, seeing one thing ‘as’ another. Metaphor is also distinguished from cliché, however, by the simultaneous seeing of difference, and the tension between these two processes that it creates. Deleuze invites his reader to open themselves up to the experience of intensities, without a corresponding effort to compare and identify them with


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one another, but he also acknowledges the forgetfulness necessary to living with such a profound recognition of difference. It is, after all, perhaps more comfortable to live with clichés than with metaphors. Beckett’s late protagonists, as we have seen, experience both such ‘intensities’ and the concomitant forgetfulness in abundance.

V Beyond cliché: The body and the law in Beckett’s theatre In both The Lost Ones and ‘He Is Barehead’ the body disrupts the working of rational conceptual language, giving expression to intensities of experience that cannot be contained in fixed categories. In the theatre, too, there is a much more direct relationship between the maimed bodies of Beckett’s characters and their faltering mental efforts to understand and articulate the world than has hitherto been identified. There Beckett uses an ingenious physical extension of the confusion of literal and figurative seen in the late prose to unseat the rational and expose our habits of thinking to scrutiny. Most critics of Beckett’s theatre recognize the analogy between bodily and mental experiences, and the limitations of both, but few have observed that the breakdown of the body incapacitates in turn the common bodily idiom by which the world is understood. Beckett’s plays are often seen to demonstrate a gap between language (Vladimir or Estragon’s ‘let’s go’) and action (‘they do not move’). Where language and action too closely converge, however, this too causes perhaps the most profound breakdown in the communicative capacity of Beckett’s language. The ‘accidental’ correspondence between verbal idiom and visual image prevents language from being understood separately from the stage picture: this language can thus neither provide an authoritative interpretation of what we see, nor tell a story set firmly in the past that might explain it. It is swallowed by the physical body and the imperious present of the stage. It becomes literal in a more thoroughgoing sense than that we have hitherto encountered in all of Beckett’s play with cliché. This redefinition of the literal also destabilizes the mechanisms for interpretation and, by extension, control that Beckett represents so starkly in his theatrical scenarios. His later theatre turns on the observing eye of conventional third-person narrative and confounds its characterizations. A new ‘innocence’ of the stage image, like that of the images of his prose, resists the mechanisms of identification and blame. The phenomenon of counterpoint between idiom and stage image in Beckett’s theatre is elaborated with great sensitivity in Paul Lawley’s studies of two plays, Not I (1972) and Play (1963). Lawley makes an illuminating reading of how the bodily images in the language of Not I shape the audience’s expectations of the evolving dramatic image before us.17 It is his study of Play, however, which is most helpful to an exploration of how figurative

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language functions in the theatre. Lawley suggests that the three figures that we see before us in Play, talking at the bidding of a spotlight of their relations in the past as husband, wife and lover, draw us constantly in fact to their current predicament, trapped in urns, bullied and cajoled by the inquisitorial light.18 Attributions of narrative causality founder in this unforgivingly immediate present. Lawley argues that the language of these characters, either so appropriate or strikingly inappropriate to their present condition, brings to light the synchronic relations between them, their shared experience in the present, rather than the diachronic story of their past. The descriptions of time past are felt irresistibly to apply to the present: ‘He was looking pale. Peaked’ (CDW, 310); ‘She was looking more and more desperate’ (CDW, 310). There are artful puns on the audience’s possible interpretations of the characters’ present condition: are they in limbo, disembodied, in an afterlife? Woman 2 asks, ‘there is obviously nothing between you any more? Or is there?’ (CDW, 309), reinforcing the audience’s speculation about the void between the urns in which the characters are enclosed. Does this refer to the present physical relation between the characters rather than the past emotional one? She comments later: ‘I felt like death’ (CDW, 310). Woman 1 makes such speculations explicit: ‘Penitence, yes, at a pinch’ (CDW, 316). Are they in purgatory, doing penance for past sins in these painful conditions? They are indeed at a pinch, ‘the neck held fast in the urn’s mouth’ (CDW, 307) as the stage directions indicate, but the very fitness of the expression to the stage image undermines its idiomatic sense. The characters are unable to transcend their physical condition, not only to experience but even to mean anything beyond the present concrete image. This seems to be the final indignity that Beckett visits on his characters in the theatre: that their language should break down and its capacity to signify be mocked and subverted by the more direct communication of their bodily predicament. What seems like dehumanizing dumbness, however, in fact becomes something else in these works. The presence of the body offers Beckett a means to make language innocent in a way that is impossible in the written text. Play, like other of Beckett’s late dramatic works such as Rough for Radio II and What Where, seems to depict or describe an interrogation, but the body itself intrudes upon this activity and—far from becoming its instrument—disrupts the process of interrogation itself. Like the characters in these other plays, those in Play will never say what is ‘want[ed]’ about their past actions, condemn themselves, and so satisfy the interrogative spotlight that elicits their speech. M asks: ‘Am I hiding something? Have I lost——’; ‘Have I lost the thing you want?’ (CDW, 315). Instead, the spectacle of their bodies keeps drawing their words from past to present, and identifies these words with the physical experience of the moment in a way that makes them redundant. Beckett’s characters at last seem to relinquish the need to find ‘imperatives’ that might give purpose and meaning to their existence.


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W2, we recall, chooses her purgatorial present over the past experience of ‘real’ life, in which a meaning was never found: ‘At the same time I prefer this to the other thing. Definitely. There are endurable moments’ (CDW, 312). The order-word that condemns them to being this or that, that compels their participation in the social order cannot be imposed on this ‘thing’. Their own bodies resist this transformation and keep language literal, and so innocent, rather than giving it the transforming power of social ritual. Their here-and-now may feel punitive, but it cannot be connected with the past and therefore disrupts the logic of punishment itself. The tyranny of interpretation—the judicial process of recreating the past by seeking the ‘right’ or incriminating words—is thwarted. Following this logic, by the time of the later play Catastrophe words have become superfluous. At first, again, this attention to the body at the expense of words seems to be an instrument of tyranny. The play depicts a theatrical director rehearsing not his character’s delivery of dialogue, but the silent physical image that the figure presents. The ‘final scene’ that he creates is silent: a body arranged as spectacle. This body both seems to embody meaning, presenting a direct picture of the end of life—the hands claw-like with ‘fibrous degeneration’ (CDW, 458), the skin white and bloodless—and to represent it, symbolically, at the same time: his clothes are the colour of ‘ash’; the language with which the Director shapes the scene is that of death, ‘all black’, ‘a shade more’; the Protagonist’s hands are joined not naturally but by the Assistant to resemble those of a corpse in the last, silent attitude of piety. This spectacle is the culmination of all of the images in Beckett’s work of humankind being moulded like clay, or made out of dust and ashes. The narrator in The Unnamable comments on the unseen ‘gentlemen’ in authority that they want in his case to ‘make a man out of dust’ (T , 351), and he is resentful of being so ‘pawed and pummelled’ (T , 350) as this protagonist is by the director’s Assistant. Where once the protagonist was compelled to live, however, he is now made to resemble an image of death. Is this a worse indignity still? In fact, the figure famously raises his head as the audience applaud, outside the frame of the performance the director envisaged: ‘Pause. Distant storm of applause. P raises his head, fixes the audience. The applause falters, dies’ (CDW, 461). It is tempting to see this as a moment of autonomy, a final escape from the double bind in the rest of Beckett’s work: that of the need for and rejection of a controlling authority. The end of Catastrophe might in this respect be compared to the moment that ends the play Rockaby, when the figure in the chair, for most of the play in the role of listener, speaks suddenly to say ‘Fuck life!’ (CDW, 442). Do these characters find a new defiance denied to the cowed protagonists of plays such as Not I and Footfalls, or to the silent bodies of Beckett’s late prose? Or is there is only pathos in these gestures, made at the end

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of life in the case of the protagonist in Rockaby, or, in the case of Catastrophe, after the performance envisaged by the Director has, after all, been accomplished? The performance of dehumanization and even annihilation is certainly deemed by the Director to be fully achieved: the Protagonist robbed of colour, movement and speech. Yet the Director in Catastrophe is, like Beckett’s other father-figures, rather a distracted one. He forgets what he has planned for the Protagonist at one moment—is he to wear a hat or not, are the hands to be in the pockets or out of them—only to be irascibly dictatorial about his vision at another, exploding at the suggestion that the Progatonist should be gagged: ‘For God’s sake! This craze for explicitation! Little gag!’ (CDW, 459). Like God in the jokes of Murphy, Nagg and Willie, this creator too ‘makes a mess’ (M, 41) out of creation; like the father in ‘The End’, perhaps, his ‘mind was on other things’ (CSP, 98–99). Perhaps, even, he underestimates the capacity of his creation to cling onto life. In fact, the Protagonist’s raised head and direct stare at the end of the play undo the symbolic values that the Director has assigned to his body and turns the associations it is intended to invoke into empty clichés. His hands are not ‘claws’ but hands; he is not yet ‘ash’ or a ‘shade’. Even the direction of the gaze of judgement itself is reversed. The light—suggesting God’s eye, operated as it is by the apostolic stagehand ‘Luke’—seems to pinion the Protagonist’s body under the glare of identification. But this light is ultimately thwarted by the Protagonist looking past it into the auditorium and ‘fixing’ the audience with his own stare. The Protagonist’s gaze is intense because it is literal: nothing other than what it is. The audience can respond with nothing but silence: there is no conventional response that can be invoked to define and contain it. In this context, the incident of the gag becomes a particularly significant one. The Director, as we have seen, considers it superfluous, the symptom of a ‘craze for explicitation’ (T, 459) where none is needed. Yet how far does the gag indicate (unnecessarily in the Director’s view) that this character has been controlled? Silence is not necessarily indicative of defeat. Beckett suggests as much, as Robert Sandarg has remarked, in Malone Dies, where the narrator envisages a different sense of the word ‘catastrophe’ than it might usually have: ‘Catastrophe in the ancient sense no doubt. To be buried in lava and not turn a hair, it is then a man shows what stuff he is made of’ (T , 255).19 The play Catastrophe too seems to invoke this ‘ancient sense’, perhaps the calm attitude of the Stoics whom Beckett was so fond of reading to the slow conflagration that they predicted would engulf the world, making all small human concerns trivial. Beckett indeed mentions the idea of stoicism, inflected no doubt with its precise meaning, to Mel Gussow in discussing the play with him, saying of the Protagonist: ‘He is a triumphant martyr rather than a sacrificial victim [ ] and is meant to cow onlookers into submission through the intensity of his gaze and his stoicism.’20 Silence


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itself is a statement in such circumstances. And silence becomes in these later works for the theatre a viable alternative to language, a means to get beyond cliché, rather than a gesture of defeat. ∗

∗

∗

∗

∗

∗

∗

Beckett’s late work, then, draws together issues of representation, memory and power in a language beyond cliché, and, ultimately, a silence beyond language. He uses cliché as a verbal means to create a ‘minor literature’ within a major language—or two, in fact—as Gilles Deleuze has argued.21 This is in no way, as Deleuze points out, to argue for the ‘minor’ status of Beckett in the canon, but to identify the resistance of the work of these writers to the gestures and identifications of the social institution of Literature. In the terms of my argument, the nature of this resistance returns us to Roland Barthes’s question about Flaubert’s bêtise: ‘how can stupidity be pinned down without declaring oneself intelligent?’ (Barthes/Miller, S/Z, 206). By rejuvenating the discredited language of a culture, Beckett escapes this double bind. His voice is both knowing and newly innocent. He avoids the complacency of his culture’s order-words, the imposition of social meanings, memories and habit that, as Deleuze puts it in ‘L’Epuisé’, ‘imprison’ and ‘stifle’ those who use those words (Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, 8). Instead, he creates a language that has renounced, to some degree, its power over both user and audience. How to skewer cliché without assuming a superior intelligence in one’s own flawed writing, in the terms of Roland Barthes’s enquiry, is not to claim anything other than stupidity, to advertise the weakness and imprecision of one’s own language. The narrator of Worstward Ho glosses the meaning of insistent ‘say’ of his text: ‘Say for be said. Missaid. From now say for missaid’ (WH, 8). In renouncing every effort to persuade, in other words every strategy for rhetorical authority, however, Beckett does not reach the degree zero of language that Barthes also imagined, albeit as a kind of ‘utopia’. The language of his narrators, even in the sparest late works, seems to submit to something beyond itself, energies that mimic those of living and dying, and reveal these to be—as they are inevitably—one and the same process: the urge to go on, but to go ‘worstward’, to change ‘in order for nothing to be changed’ (T , 88). As Molloy puts it: ‘life seems made up of backsliding, and death itself must be made up of a kind of backsliding, I wouldn’t be surprised’ (T , 61). The Protagonist of Catastrophe displays this continued energy. And this perplexing momentum, depicted in another of Beckett’s cherished images as crawling eastwards on a ship that sails west, also expresses the undecidable question over whence the authority for this activity comes. Who or what compels us to speak, or even to live, when the inorganic, the silence and stillness of stone, seems the desired state even for organic life? None of the objectifications of this subjective impulse, be it religion, the Oedipal vicious

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circle of desire and conflict, or the Schopenhauerian will, can convince under Beckett’s sceptical gaze. ‘It’s vague, life and death’ (T , 225), as Malone puts it. Yet, as he says, his senses are also ‘trained full on me’ (T , 186). The human understanding of both states is at once less precise and more immediate than the eloquence of literature or the authority of other intellectual discourses might suggest. Beckett’s work takes to task these past gestures of mitigation and enquiry—‘the voice failing to carry’ (T , 372) his narrators, hypotheses ‘collaps[ing] on top of one another’ (T, 375)—and compels us to live, as Watt’s narrator puts it, ‘miserably’ among ‘face values’ (W, 70) once again. Beckett’s last works explores what happens when the voice fails to carry: the authority of the subject itself, and its manipulation of images and ideas in the service of emotive or cerebral effects, gives way to simple images in their own right, the purest kind of ‘face values’. These images are what Stanley Cavell calls the ‘poverty’ of the everyday in Beckett’s work, and what Deleuze talks of as langue III, a language beyond the interests, intentions and memories of the old words (Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, 8). The strong central images of Beckett’s late theatre—the pacing feet in Footfalls, the figure rocking in the chair in Rockaby, the ‘head resting on hands’ in ¨ Nacht und Traume, the lit skullcap in but the clouds —take this strategy further: beyond language itself and its inevitable clamour of associations to the ‘undimmed’ reality of the literal. Even in these late works, however, there is a flicker of idiomatic life: Through it who knows yet another end beneath a cloudless sky same dark it earth and sky of a last end if ever there had to be another absolutely had to be. (‘For to End Yet Again’, CSP, 246) That ‘who knows’, the empty rhetorical gesture, in fact keeps the imagination alive, asserting the impossibility of ever silencing the voice. Who knows why there must be another end, the ‘hunger to utter’ never being silenced, false endings perpetuating themselves, leaving open the possibility of continuation, of repetition. But so it is—absolutely—in the prose work. Only the theatre can fully make use of silence itself. Yet even in the theatre, cliché keeps its hold on life. The protagonist of Rockaby is ‘off her rocker’, the Director in Catastrophe railing against ‘dotting the i’, a technology of cruelty intimated in Bam’s ‘the works’ in What Where. There is a change, however. This language always comes from those other than the silent subjects of these plays. A new language beyond language is carved out in the gaps between these other voices, and the gaps within their speech, the suffering that the cruel delicacy of their language evades. Beauty, as Beckett once put it, ‘is the gasp between clichés’.22 The silence of these protagonists is created by the speech of others, their innocence established against the euphemism of these authoritarian figures, their voicelessness the beautiful gasp between clichés that Beckett’s work achieves.

Notes

Introduction 1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968), trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 189. 2. See for instance Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961); S. Mintz, ‘Beckett’s Murphy: a “Cartesian” Novel’, Perspective (Autumn 1959); Edouard Morot-Sir, ‘Samuel Beckett and Cartesian Emblems’, in Morot-Sir, Harper and McMillan (eds), Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric (Chapel Hill: Northwestern University Press, 1976), pp. 25–104. 3. Margery Sabin, The Dialect of the Tribe: Speech and Community in Modern Fiction (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 63. 4. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 5 October 1930. Cited in James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 121. 5. Peter Lennon, Foreign Correspondent: Paris in the Sixties (London: Picador, 1995), pp. 71–72. 6. Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen, Les Discours du cliché (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1982), p. 9. 7. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1953), p. 25. 8. See Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (London: Elek, 1974), p. 164. 9. Michael E. Mooney, ‘Molloy, Part 1: Beckett’s ‘Discourse on Method’, Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 3 (1978), 40–55; p. 41. See also René Descartes, Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, trans. Desmond Clarke (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 20–21. 10. Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 109. 11. Samuel Beckett, Proust, and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder, 1965), p. 65. 12. Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology’, trans. F. C. Moore, New Literary History 6, no. 1 (1974), 5–74; p. 55. 13. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense’ (1873), Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 246–257; p. 250. 14. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, 3 vols, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), I, pp. 404–405. 15. See also Paul Ricoeur in The Rule of Metaphor (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 336, 345. 16. See Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), pp. 77–90. 17. Margery Sabin, ‘The Life of English Idiom, the Laws of French Cliché 1 + 2’, Raritan: A Quarterly Review, vol. 1, nos. 2 and 3 (1982). 18. Michael Riffaterre, ‘Fonction du cliché dans la prose littéraire’, Essais de stylistique structurale (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), p. 167. 209

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Notes

19. Cicero, De Inventione (Cambridge, Mass. and London: LCL, 1949), II, xv, 48. 20. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704), ed. A. C. L. Guthkelch and Nicol Smith, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 148. 21. Oliver Goldsmith, An Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), Chapters IX, XIV, Collected Works, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), I, pp. 306, 337. 22. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), p. 56. 23. Francis Bacon, De Augmentis scientarum (1623), in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath, 14 vols (London, 1857–1874), IV, p. 435. 24. Thomas Sprat, in the History of the Royal Society (1667), ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (St Louis, Missouri: Washington University Studies, 1958), pp. 111–113. 25. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Part 1, Chapter 8, p. 52. 26. Bernard Lamy, Rhétorique ou l’art de parler (Paris, 1675), cited in Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 268. 27. See Bruno Clément, L’Oeuvre sans qualities: rhétorique de Samuel Beckett (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1994). 28. Adam Piette, Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 249. 29. Beckett once described himself as aiming for such a syntax. See Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 249. 30. Stanley Cavell, ‘Ending the Waiting Game: An Essay on Beckett’s Endgame’, Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), pp. 153–178. 31. Francis Jeffrey, ‘Scott’s The Lady of the Lake’, Edinburgh Review, vol. 16 (August 1810). Reproduced in Jeffrey’s Criticism, ed. Peter F. Morgan (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983), pp. 68–69. 32. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), I, Chapter 2, pp. 38–39. 33. William Wordsworth, Note to ‘The Thorn’, The Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 701. 34. Fritz Senn, Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce, ed. Christine O’Neill (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1995), p. 180–181. 35. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 320. 36. See Colin Murray Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 13–17; Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 2nd edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), pp. 33, 77–79. 37. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘L’homme et les choses’, Situations 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 245–293; p. 250. 38. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), p. 206. 39. Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 183. 40. Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du discours, ed. Gérard Genette (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), p. 63.

Notes

1

211

Cliché, consensus and realism

1. Letter from Gustave Flaubert to George Sand, December 1875. The Correspondence of Gustave Flaubert & George Sand, trans. Francis Steegmuller and Barbara Bray (London: Harvill, 1993), p. 381; James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 233. 2. H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. x. 3. See Roland Barthes, ‘L’Ancienne rhétorique: Aide-mémoire’, Communications, vol. 16 (1970), 172–222; p. 212. 4. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols (London: Heinemann, 1922), II, pp. xvii, 38–39. 5. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 572. 6. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater, 1461a11–12, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), II, p. 2339. 7. Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette trans. Marion Ayton Crawford (London: Penguin, 1965), pp. 108, 123. 8. Beckett, Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 8 February 1935, TCD MSS 10402. 9. Rachel Burrows, S. E. Gontarski et al., ‘Interview with Rachel Burrows: Dublin, Bloomsday, 1982’, Journal of Beckett Studies, nos. 11 and 12 (December 1989), 6–15; pp. 6–7. 10. See ‘Albertine disparue’, 45th edition (1926), II, p. 96. Beckett’s copy of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, 12 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1923–1929), held in the Reading Beckett Archive. 11. Flaubert wrote in a letter to Louise Colet: ‘Il n’y a pas de Vrai, il n’y a que des manières de voir’. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 9 vols (Paris: Conard, 1926–33), VIII, p. 370. 12. ‘Albertine disparue’, II, pp. 96, 173. Beckett’s copy of Proust’s A la recherche. 13. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), Chapter 32, p. 299 (my italics). J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Agentless Sentence as Rhetorical Device’, Language and Style, vol. 13, no. 1 (Winter 1980), 26–34; p. 29. 14. Gérard Genette, ‘Vraisemblance et motivation’, Communications, vol. 11 (1968), 7. 15. Jonathan Culler’s translation of Gérard Genette, Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), p. 73. See Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 144. 16. Marcel Proust, ‘A l’ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs’, A la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), II, p. 406. Cited in Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 142. 17. C. J. Ackerley, ‘Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy’, special edition of the Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 7, nos. 1–2 (1998), I, p. 10. 18. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1935), pp. 12–13. 19. Leo Bersani, ‘The Subject of Power’, Diacritics (September 1977) 1–21; pp. 5–6. 20. Jacques Rivière, Marcel Proust et l’esprit positif, série Cahiers Marcel Proust, Hommage a` Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), p. 110. In the original: ‘Libre a` ceux pour qui la volonté et la forme qu’elle lui prête sont le propre de l’homme de se détourner d’un si e´ trange objet! Mais qu’ils apprécient au moins l’importance de son apparition parmi nous. Un homme est entré pour nous dans les Sargasses d’un loisir infini.’ 21. Salvador Dali cited in Henri Berenger, ‘Surrealism in 1931’, in André Breton (ed.), This Quarter, Surrealist Issue, vol. 5, no. 1 (Paris, September 1932), pp. 15–18, 117.

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Notes

22. Berenger, ‘Surrealism in 1931’, ibid., pp. 115–116. 23. Phil Baker, Samuel Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 132. 24. Comments made by Beckett to Tom Driver in 1961. See Tom Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, Columbia University Forum, vol. 4 (Summer 1961), 22. 25. Critics who have looked at this connection include Sighle Kennedy in Murphy’s Bed (Lewisburg, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1971), and Phil Baker in Chapter 7 of Samuel Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis. 26. André Breton, ‘Surrealism: Yesterday, To-Day and To-Morrow’, trans. Samuel Beckett, This Quarter, Surrealist Issue, vol. 5, no. 1 (Paris, September 1932), 20. 27. Olivier Burgelin, ‘Echange et déflation dans le système culturel’, Communications, vol. 11 (1968), 122–140. 28. Proust, ‘Le Temps retrouvé’, 36th edition (1929) VIII, pp. 40, 30. Beckett’s copy of Proust’s A la recherche. 29. Karen R. Lawrence, ‘ “Beggaring Description”: Politics and Style in Joyce’s “Eumaeus” ’, MFS, vol. 38, no. 2 (Summer 1992), 355–376; p. 371–2. 30. George Steiner, Heidegger (London: Fontana/Collins, 1978), p. 48. 31. Cited in Steiner, Heidegger, p. 48. 32. Beckett, Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 25 January 1931. Cited in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 126. 33. The ‘margarita’ or ‘margaret’ is the little flower but also a pearl—the find or the treasure. 34. Edwin Muir, ‘New Short Stories’, The Listener (4 July 1934), 42. 35. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, trans. Anthony Uhlmann, SubStance, vol. 78 (1995), 3–28; p. 5. See also Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre a` venire (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 211. 36. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita [1955] (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 103. 37. Roland Barthes, ‘L’effet du réel’, Communications, vol. 11 (1968), 84–89. 38. Philippe Hamon, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une description?’, Poétique, 12 (1972), 465–485; p. 485. Cited in Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 194. 39. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 98. 40. Walter Ong, Rhetoric, Romance and Technology (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 14. 41. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 45. 42. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea [1938], trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 183. 43. Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis, p. 193. 44. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, II, p. 239. 45. See Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (London: Elek, 1974), p. 165.

2

Cliché and memory

1. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 16 January 1936. Cited in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 224. 2. Proust, ‘Time Regained’, In Search of Lost Time, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, 6 vols (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), VI, p. 227–228. 3. Proust, ‘A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs’, 119th edition, 2 vols (1929), II, p. 4. Beckett’s copy of A la recherche. See also John Pilling, ‘Beckett’s Proust’, Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 1 (1976), 8–29; p. 14.

Notes

213

4. See Proust, ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, In Search of Lost Time, IV, pp. 180–181. 5. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937), The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), XXIII, 216–245; p. 245. 6. See John Pilling, ‘Beckett’s English Fiction’, The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 17–39; p. 20. 7. See Emile Pons, Swift, les années de jeunesse et le Conte du Tonneau (Strasbourg: Libraire Istra, 1925), p. 109. 8. Marcel Proust, ‘A propos du “style” de Flaubert’, Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 586–600; p. 594. 9. Letter to Charles Prentice at Chatto and Windus, 15 August 1932. Cited in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 160. 10. See Israel Shenker, ‘An interview with Beckett (1956)’, in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge, 1979), 146–149; p. 148. 11. W. B. Yeats, ‘A General Introduction for My Work’, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 509 (my italics). 12. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust’, Selected Writings, vol. 2 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 246. 13. See Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), Chapter 2. 14. Michèle Touret, ‘Les Fleurs et Les Orties: La Parodie des Formes Communes’, Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui, vol. 12 (2002), 107–119; p. 113. 15. Roger Scruton, Aesthetic Understanding (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 197. 16. Proust, ‘A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs’, II, p. 13. Beckett’s copy of A la recherche. See John Pilling, ‘Beckett’s Proust’, p. 28. 17. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), Book X, Chapter 14, pp. 191–192. 18. William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’, Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. W. J. B. Owen (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 85. 19. In the (blander) English version: ‘To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don’t torment me, but one sometimes forgets’ (T , 25). 20. Proust, ‘Time Regained’, In Search of Lost Time, VI, p. 250. 21. T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 39.

3

Cliché, autobiography and epitaph 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Manchester, 1929), p. 292. 2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), p. 414. 3. Olga Bernal, ‘Samuel Beckett: l’écrivain et le savoir’, Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 2 (Summer 1977), 59–62; p. 59. 4. See Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘The Emptiness of Existence’, Essays (New York and Melbourne: Walter Scott, 1919), p. 56. 5. Andrew Gibson, ‘Voice, Narrative, Film’, New Literary History, vol. 32, no. 3 (Summer 2001), 643. 6. James Knowlson and John Pilling comment that bursts of speed are ‘congenital’ in Beckett’s writing, particularly in Comment c’est, and From an Abandoned Work.

214

Notes

16.

See James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1979), p. 65. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 83–109; p. 94. David Lodge, ‘Review of Ping’, Encounter (February 1968), in Federman and Graver (eds), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, 291–301; p. 293. The English version struggles (and fails) to reproduce the flexibility of ‘échapper’ with its twin Beckettian connotations of idleness and death: ‘Hereunder lies the above who up below / So hourly died that he lived on till now’ (CSP, 26). Wordsworth, ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’, Poetical Works, p. 731. See also Samuel Johnson, ‘A Dissertation on the Epitaphs written by Pope’, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), III, p. 263. This is a paraphrase of a line from Pope’s own Moral Essays, ii. 2: ‘Most women have no characters at all.’ William Hazlitt, ‘On the Periodical Essayists’ in Lectures, 102. Quoted by Piette, Remembering, 37. See for instance Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910), pp. 105–116. In the English version: ‘deep in this place which is not one, which is merely a moment for the time being eternal, which is called here’ (CSP, 147, my italics). Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 151–152. See Samuel Beckett, Happy Days: The Production Notebook of Samuel Beckett, ed. James Knowlson (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1985), p. 185, n. 1. Beckett in Happy Days: The Production Notebook of Samuel Beckett, p. 150.

4

Cliché and the language of religion

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

1. See, for instance, Hersh Zeifman, ‘Religious imagery in the plays of Samuel Beckett’, in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 85–94; p. 92. 2. P. J. Murphy, ‘On first looking into Beckett’s The Voice’, in John Pilling and Mary Bryden (eds), The Ideal Core of the Onion, 63–78; p. 63. 3. Richard Coe, Beckett (London: Oliver and Boyd, revised edn 1968), p. 14. 4. See Léon Bloy, Exégèse des lieux communs (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1902), ‘Préface’. 5. In the original: ‘Avec une autorité beaucoup plus qu’humaine, il enseigna que Dieu a toujours parlé de Lui-même exclusivement, sous les formes symboliques, paraboliques ou similitudinaires de la Révélation par l’Ecriture, et qu’il a toujours dit la même chose de mille manières.’ 6. Anne Herschberg Pierrot, ‘Clichés et idées reçues: elements de réflexion’, in Gilles Mathis (ed.), Le Cliche (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1998), 29–33; p. 32. 7. John Pilling, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 118. 8. Cf. Book of Common Prayer: ‘such good things as pass understanding’. 9. Cf. Authorized Version (1611), St Luke 23: 34: ‘Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do.’ 10. Olivier Messiaen, ‘Préface’, Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Paris: Durand, n. d.).

Notes

215

11. See Paul Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time (Boston and London: Faber & Faber, 1985), pp. 101–102. 12. John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett’s Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), p. 134. 13. Thomas Nagel, ‘Subjective and Objective’, Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rajchman and Cornel West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 43–44. 14. Beckett’s Company (1979) opens: ‘A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine’ (C, 7). 15. The English ‘Sunday rest’ shows, as is often the case, a more conspicuously conventional form than does the French original, which has ‘se reposer le dimanche’ (Mm, 22). 16. Katie Wales, ‘The Foregrounding of Cliché in the “Eumaeus” Episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses’, in Mathis (ed.), Le Cliché, 219–232. 17. Henk Nuiten et Maurice Geelen, ‘Baudelaire et le cliché: Le cliché entre les mains ¨ französiche Sprache und Literatur, de l’auteur des “Fleurs du Mal” ’, Zeitschrift f ur vol. 17 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1989), p. 8. 18. Cf. Authorized Version (1611), Luke Chapter 15, Verse 27: ‘And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.’ 19. Ann Beer, ‘Beckett’s “Autography” and the Company of Languages’, The Southern Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (Autumn 1991), 771–791; p. 783. 20. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 310. 21. Beckett, letter to Thomas MacGreevy, undated (probably late August 1931). Cited in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 134. 22. See for instance Northrop Frye’s The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Toronto, Canada: Academic Press, 1981). 23. See Michel Charles, ‘Les Discours des figures’, in Rhétorique de la lecture (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 142. 24. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected edn (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 270–280. 25. V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), p. 64. 26. Daniel Albright, ‘The Acivities [sic] of Dead Imagination’, Omnium Gatherum: Essays for Richard Ellmann (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989), 374–383; p. 377. 27. Leslie Hill, ‘The Name, the Body, “The Unnamable” ’, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 6 (1983), 53. 28. Stanley Cavell, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), I, 241–275; pp. 246–247. 29. Steven Connor, ‘Beckett’s animals’, Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 8 (1982), 29–44. 30. See Mary Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 75. 31. Louis MacNeice, Varieties of Parable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 118. 32. Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith, trans. R. G. Smith (London: Collins, 1961), p. 327. 33. Kevin Mills, Justifying Language: Paul and Contemporary Literary Theory (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 31.

216

Notes

34. See Richard Jacobs, ‘The Lyricism of Beckett’s Plays’, Agenda, vols 18–19, no. 4 (Winter–Spring 1981), 105–111. 35. See Beckett, Happy Days: The Production Notebook, p. 127; and Katharine Worth, Waiting for Godot and Happy Days: Text and Performance (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 93. 36. Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 253–254. 37. William B. Worthen, ‘Beckett’s Actor’, Modern Drama, vol. 26, no. 4 (1983), 415–424; p. 416. 38. See, for Beckett’s instructions, Walter D. Asmus, ‘Practical aspects of theatre, radio and television: Rehearsal notes for the German première of Beckett’s ‘That Time’ and ‘Footfalls’ at the Schiller-Theatre Werkstatt, Berlin’, Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 2 (Summer 1977), 82–95; p. 86.

5 Beyond Cliché: Authority, agency and the fall of rhetoric 1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1988), p. 14. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern (London: Foulis, 1911), p. 29. 3. Most of all, it echoes that of the French Mercier et Camier, which goes further than the English in describing a hand ‘grande comme deux mains ordinaries, rouge vif’ (FMC, 157). 4. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Standard Edition, XVIII, 36, Freud’s italics. Quoted in Baker, 128. 5. Leslie Hill, ‘Beckett, Writing, Politics: Answering for Myself’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 9 (2000), 215–222; p. 221. 6. Jean-Michel Bloch, ‘Nouveau roman et culture des masses’, Preuves, vol. 121 (March 1961), 17–28; p. 27 (my translation). 7. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Idiot de la Famille, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 2, p. 1973. 8. Beckett, Letter to George Reavey, in Disjecta, p. 103. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), trans. D. F. Pears and B. McGuinness, 2nd edn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2001), #5.64, pp. 69–70. 10. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989), pp. 32, 37. 11. See also Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 16 on this tendency in Wittgenstein. 12. George O. Curne, Syntax (Boston: D. C. Heath and Co, 1931), p. 212. 13. In Michael Meyer (ed.), Questions and Questioning (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyer, 1988), p. 39. 14. Lawrence Graver, ‘Review of The Lost Ones’, Partisan Review, vol. 41, no. 4 (1974), 622–624; p. 623. 15. Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus: ‘The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value’ (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, #6.41, 86).

Notes

217

16. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 297–298. See also James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), ch. 1. 17. Paul Lawley, ‘Counterpoint, Absence and Medium in Beckett’s Not I’, Modern Drama, 26, no. 4 (1983), 407–414. 18. Paul Lawley, ‘Beckett’s Dramatic Counterpoint: A Reading of Play’, Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 9 (1984), 25–42. 19. Robert Sandarg, ‘A Political Perspective on Catastrophe’, Make Sense Who May: Essays on SB’s Later Works, ed. Robin J. Davis and Lance St J. Butler (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), 137–144; p. 142. 20. Mel Gussow, ‘Beckett distils his vision’, The New York Times (31 July 1983), section H, p. 3. 21. Gilles Deleuze, Kafka: Pour une litérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975). 22. Beckett here (mis)quotes Ezra Pound’s essay on Elizabethan poetry in Make It New in his review of Pound’s collection of essays, ‘Ex Cathezra. Review of Ezra Pound’s Make It New’, Disjecta, 128.

Bibliography

Beckett’s works For information about the main Beckett works cited, see Abbreviations, p. vii.

Other Beckett works The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: Waiting for Godot, ed. James Knowlson (London: Faber & Faber, 1993). Happy Days: The Production Notebook of Samuel Beckett, ed. James Knowlson (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1985). Beckett, Samuel and Duthuit, Georges, Three Dialogues, in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965), pp. 16–22. Beckett, Samuel and Schneider, Alan, No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Other works Abbott, H. Porter, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996). Ackerley, C. J., ‘Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy’, special edition of the Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 7, nos. 1–2 (1998). Adamov, Arthur, Ici et maintenant (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). ——, Je Ils (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). Adorno, Theodor, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), I, pp. 241–275. ——, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002). Albright, Daniel, ‘The Acivities [sic] of Dead Imagination’, Omnium Gatherum: Essays for Richard Ellmann (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989), pp. 374–383. Amossy, Ruth, ‘Cliché in the Reading Process’, Sub-Stance, vol. 11, no. 2 (1982), 35–36. Amossy, Ruth and Rosen, Elisheva, Les Discours du cliché (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1982). Aristotle, Poetics (350 BC), trans. Ingram Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), II, pp. 2316–2340. Asmus, Walter D., ‘Practical Aspects of Theatre, Radio and Television: Rehearsal Notes for the German Première of Beckett’s “That Time” and “Footfalls” at the SchillerTheatre Werkstatt, Berlin’, Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 2 (Summer 1977), 82–95. Augustine, Confessions (397 AD), trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Bacon, Francis, De Augmentis scientarum (1623), The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath, 14 vols (London, 1857–1874), IV. Bagnall, Nicholas, A Defence of Clichés (London: Constable, 1985). 218

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Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Picador, 1980). Baker, Phil, Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (New York: Macmillan, 1988). Balzac, Honoré de, La Peau de chagrin (1831), in La Comédie humaine, Pléïade, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–1981), X, pp. 3–294. ——, Cousin Bette (1846), trans. Marion Ayton Crawford (London: Penguin, 1965). Barjon, Louis, ‘Une littérature de décomposition’, Etudes, vol. 311 (October 1961), 45–60. Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967). ——, ‘L’effet de réel’, Communications, vol. 11 (1968), 84–89. ——, ‘L’Ancienne rhétorique: Aide-mémoire’, Communications, vol. 16 (1970), 172–222. ——, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970). ——, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972). ——, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974). ——, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975). Beal, Peter, ‘Notions in Garrison’: The Seventeenth Century Commonplace Book (Binghampton, NJ: Renaissance English Text Society, 1987). Beer, Ann, ‘Watt, Knott and Beckett’s Bilingualism’, Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 10 (1985), 37–75. ——, ‘Beckett’s “Autography” and the Company of Languages’, The Southern Review, Vol. 27, no. 4 (Autumn 1991), 771–791. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969). ——, ‘On the Image of Proust’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 237–249. Benveniste, Emile, Problèmes du linguistique générale, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1966, 1974). Ben-Zvi, Linda, ‘Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner and the Limits of Language’, PMLA, vol. 95, no. 2 (March, 1980), 183–200. Bergson, Henri, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910). ——, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1935). ——, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1934), trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946). ——, Matter and Memory (1908), trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991). Bernal, Olga, Langage et fiction dans le roman de Samuel Beckett (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). ——, ‘Samuel Beckett: L’écrivain et le savoir’, Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 2 (Summer 1977), 59–62. Bersani, Leo, Balzac to Beckett: Centre and Circumference in French Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). ——, ‘The Subject of Power’, Diacritics (September 1977), 1–21. ——, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Bersani, Leo and Detoit, Ulysse, ‘Beckett’s Sociability’, The Raritan, vol. 12, no. 1 (Summer 1992), 1–19. ——, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993). Blanchot, Maurice, ‘Where Now, Who Now?’, Evergreen Review (Winter 1959), 222–229. ——, Le Livre a` venire (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).

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Index

Abbott, H. Porter, 30, 93, 102, 197, 211, 218 Adamov, Arthur, 186–7, 218 Adorno, Theodor, 104, 153, 202, 218 agency, 37, 51, 68, 138, 160, 165, 181–2, 184, 186 All Strange Away, 148, 158 Aristotle, 11–12, 27, 31, 33–4, 39, 45, 50, 95, 144, 202, 211, 218 Asmus, Walter D., 157–8, 216, 218 Augustine, 21, 85–6, 136, 137, 151, 213, 218 authority, 1, 4, 7–9, 12–13, 14, 17, 18, 24, 26–7, 30–4, 37, 50, 54–5, 62, 63, 68, 80, 84, 92, 94, 98–9, 101, 104, 112, 122–34, 139, 141, 147, 152, 154, 156, 159, 160–75, 178, 180–4, 187, 188–9, 191, 193, 197–8, 200, 201, 205–8 autobiography, 93–5, 122 Bacon, Francis, 12, 210, 218 Baker, Phil, 8, 44, 171, 173–5, 212, 216, 219 Balzac, Honoré de, 33, 35, 39, 210, 211, 219 Barthes, Roland, 19, 23, 31, 59, 63, 207, 210, 211, 212, 219 Benjamin, Walter, 76, 101, 213, 214, 219 Bergson, Henri, 40, 61, 111, 113, 115, 211, 212, 214, 219 Bersani, Leo, 42–4, 48, 211, 219 bêtise, 1, 4–5, 22, 64, 107, 130, 144 biblical language, 7, 57, 125–6, 128, 132, 134–6, 140, 146, 151, 155–6 Blanchot, Maurice, 57, 212, 219 Bloy, Léon, 1, 129–30, 140, 155, 214, 220 body, 5, 9, 13, 24–5, 29, 31, 40, 48, 61, 74, 84, 86–8, 91–2, 95, 102, 107, 111–12, 136, 143, 151, 153, 156, 199, 203–6, 215, 219, 222 Burgelin, Olivier, 47–9, 212, 220

‘The Calmative’, 96, 102, 132 Catastrophe, 205–6, 208, 217, 225 causality, 34–8, 204 Cavell, Stanley, 6, 10, 14–15, 18, 51, 113, 189–90, 208, 210, 216, 220 charity, 171–3 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 11–12, 210, 220 Clément, Bruno, 14, 149, 210, 220 cliché, 1–5, 7–12, 14, 45–50, 52–7, 63–5, 67–8, 70, 72–3, 77–8, 86, 88–96, 98, 106, 108, 118, 121–3, 126, 129, 134, 139–40, 142, 146, 151–4, 157, 160, 162, 167, 176, 180, 182–5, 187–8, 191–3, 198–200, 202, 206, 207, 209, 212, 213, 214, 216, 218, 220, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227 Coetzee, J. M., 37, 184, 185, 211, 220 cogito, 1, 5, 26, 165 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 16–18, 129, 210, 220 commonplace, 1, 3–4, 11–12, 17, 20–1, 50, 63, 70, 72, 81, 92, 129–30, 140, 142–3, 163, 210, 219, 223, 224 community, 3, 6, 19, 44, 118, 140, 142, 197, 225 company, 6, 139, 151, 162–4, 188–9, 215, 219 Company, 6, 14, 82–3, 91, 128, 145, 147–8, 155, 188, 196, 215 Connor, Steven, 7, 26, 154, 175, 185, 215, 220 consensus, 11, 23, 27–8, 31–3, 152, 162–3, 185, 188, 193 Cronin, Antony, 27, 67, 139–40, 168, 176, 220 crucifixion, 137, 141, 152, 157 Culler, Jonathan, 50, 64, 209, 211, 212, 220

Dali, Salvador, 44, 211 ‘Dante and the Lobster’, 50, 86, 130, 137 ‘Dante Bruno Vico Joyce’, 123

228

Index death, 10, 24–7, 39, 43, 70, 80–1, 86, 93–5, 98–9, 101, 103, 107–8, 112, 114, 119–20, 122, 153, 157, 159–60, 164, 174–5, 181, 184, 199–200, 204–8, 214 death drive, 26, 184, 199 Deleuze, Gilles, 1–3, 5–8, 14, 26, 51, 57, 62–4, 67, 76, 82, 91, 106–7, 145, 163, 165, 174–5, 179, 184–8, 200–1, 203, 207–8, 209, 212, 216, 217, 220–1 Derrida, Jacques, 8–9, 15, 19–20, 47, 49, 52–3, 57, 92, 145, 149, 156, 209, 215, 221 Descartes, René, 1, 5, 21, 26, 209, 221 difference, 2, 7, 29, 60, 83, 106, 109–10, 165, 181, 200–3, 209, 217, 221 ‘Ding-Dong’, 38 Disjecta, 2, 28, 99, 105, 123, 135, 192 Dream Notebook, 136 Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 7, 33–6, 38–9, 45, 52–3, 71, 73, 75–6, 89, 98, 114, 120, 137–9 Eagleton, Terry, 19, 21, 210, 221 Eh Joe, 159, 160, 177 Eleutheria, 82 Eliot, George, 36, 211, 221 Eliot, T. S., 90, 135, 213, 221 Embers, 82, 176–7 Empson, William, 3, 7, 209, 221 ‘The End’, 82–3, 143, 176, 206 Endgame (Fin de partie), 97, 109–15, 120, 123–5, 132, 142, 144, 210, 215, 218, 220 Enlightenment, 93, 101, 104–6, 122, 130 epitaph, 27, 93–4, 108–9, 112, 213, 223 ‘The Expelled’, 69, 132, 170, 172, 176 father, 49, 78, 82, 125, 132, 154, 159, 165–6, 170–4, 176–80, 183–4, 194, 206, 214, 215 figurative, 9, 13–14, 16–18, 25, 50, 52, 57, 64, 94–5, 101–2, 105, 122, 124, 131, 138, 149–53, 155–6, 175, 184, 192–3, 196–9, 202–6, 208–9 Film, 154 ‘Fingal’, 32 First Love (Premier amour), 24, 97, 108, 134, 172 Flaubert, Gustave, 1, 2, 4, 18–21, 23, 30, 34–5, 63–4, 72, 129–30, 154, 207, 210, 211, 212–14, 220–3, 225

229

Fontanier, Jean, 25, 210, 221 Footfalls, 157–8, 205, 208, 216, 218 French, 1, 10, 13, 17, 22, 51, 52–7, 65, 74, 80, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 99, 105, 108, 113, 115, 128–9, 132–3, 136, 142, 147, 149–50, 152, 168, 176, 177, 181, 182, 185–7, 189, 198, 209, 215, 216, 219 Freud, Sigmund, 26, 29, 70–3, 82, 92, 175, 184, 186, 199, 213, 216, 219, 221, 225 From an Abandoned Work, 42, 93, 97, 100, 121, 142, 194, 213 Frye, Northrop, 149, 215, 222 Genette, Gérard, 38, 40, 210, 211, 221 ‘German Letter of 1937’, 135 Gibson, Andrew, 100, 213, 222 Gide, André, 35, 222 God, 5, 7, 19, 30, 34, 36–7, 50, 77, 90, 109, 110, 112, 114, 120–4, 144–6, 148–60, 164–6, 170, 173, 177, 179, 181–5, 189, 197, 201, 206, 215, 220 Happy Days (Oh les beaux jours), 112, 115–20, 157–8, 214, 216, 218 ‘He Is Barehead’, 200–1 Hegel, G. W. F., 8–9, 21, 209, 222 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 26, 50, 51, 61, 145, 188, 209, 212, 215, 222, 226, 227 Hill, Leslie, 7, 28, 125, 132, 153, 173, 181, 209, 215, 216, 222 home, 8, 9, 32, 37, 48, 51–2, 77, 82, 99, 134, 139–41, 143, 145, 148, 167, 175, 177, 179, 183–4 How It Is (Comment c’est), 20, 29, 67, 79–80, 91, 94–5, 98–100, 102–5, 107, 112, 121, 133, 139, 145–7, 151, 163, 183, 186 idée reçue, 2, 23, 130 idiom, 2–4, 29, 50, 52, 54, 56, 72, 74, 87–8, 97, 102–3, 112, 114–15, 118, 124, 130, 132, 141, 144–5, 150, 159, 185, 203–4, 209, 225 ignorance, 4–5, 10, 14, 18, 27, 30–1, 46, 62–3, 95, 104–5, 122, 130, 133, 164, 178, 193 Ill Seen Ill Said (Mal vu mal dit), 63, 140, 195

230

Index

impersonality, 29, 30, 67, 88, 91, 141, 147–8, 185–7, 198 impotence, 17, 30, 73, 94, 128, 136–7 incarnation, 83, 120, 149–56 innocence, 4–6, 10, 14, 22, 29, 31, 72, 90–2, 97, 106, 110, 189–90, 192, 204–5, 207, 208 Johnson, Samuel, 108–9, 214, 223 Joyce, James, 2, 18–19, 21, 25, 30–4, 39, 49–50, 55, 70, 73, 77, 123, 140, 210–13, 215, 223, 224, 226 Kenner, Hugh, 18, 55, 78, 129, 209, 213, 223 ‘Le Kid’, 113 Knowlson, James, 41–2, 157, 201, 209, 212, 213–14, 215, 218, 223 Kristeva, Julia, 159, 165–6, 223 law, 4, 7, 27, 33, 35, 130, 159, 162–3, 165–6, 168–9, 170–8, 180–2, 203, 209 Lawley, Paul, 203, 217, 223 Lawrence, Karen, 49, 212, 223 Lennon, Peter, 3–4, 32, 209, 223 literal, 8–10, 13–15, 25, 34, 45, 48, 50, 52, 57, 58, 78, 86, 88, 91, 101, 105–6, 113, 126, 130–2, 135, 137, 144, 149–56, 160, 166, 187, 190–2, 197–200, 203, 205–6, 208 The Lost Ones, 88, 96, 196–7, 200, 201–2, 216, 222 ‘Love and Lethe’, 36 Malone Dies (Malone meurt), 23, 29, 37, 59, 65, 69, 82–3, 88, 94, 99, 100–1, 103, 106, 108, 111, 128, 136–7, 140, 142, 150, 152–4, 177, 182, 189, 193, 206, 208 memory, 1, 14, 27–8, 60–1, 65, 92, 103–4, 106–7, 115–16, 120–8, 132–5, 146–7, 153, 160, 174, 176, 195, 200, 207, 212, 219 Mercier and Camier (Mercier et Camier), 74, 80, 138, 168–9, 172, 216 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 95, 97, 213, 224 Messiaen, Olivier, 134, 151, 214, 222, 224

metaphor, 3, 8–10, 13–15, 17, 19, 22, 25, 28, 47, 49, 52, 64, 84–5, 102, 124, 126, 135, 139–41, 144, 149–50, 152–6, 159, 181, 199, 202–3, 209, 210, 223, 225 molar, 1, 2, 145–6, 163, 184 molecular, 2, 145, 184, 187 Molloy, 1, 7–8, 20, 24, 29, 37, 48, 57, 60–5, 69–70, 73, 77–8, 93, 95–6, 99–101, 103–6, 109, 123–4, 127, 129, 131–2, 138, 140, 143, 145, 151, 153, 163, 165–6, 169–85, 187, 192, 195, 207, 209, 224 More Pricks than Kicks, 48, 50, 71, 73, 128, 166 mother, 1, 7, 8, 24, 41, 53, 77–8, 81–3, 87, 92, 96, 103–4, 125, 144, 147–8, 158–9, 163, 169, 171–6, 178, 181 Murphy, 5, 6, 31, 38–45, 47–8, 52, 56–9, 64, 75, 99, 102, 106, 125, 136–7, 142, 144–5, 155, 168–9, 181, 195, 206, 209, 211, 212, 218 Murphy, P. J., 125–6, 129, 214, 224 Nagel, Thomas, 137–9, 215, 224 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8–9, 94, 165, 209, 216, 224 Not I, 158–9, 166, 188, 203, 205, 217, 220, 223 Ong, Walter, 61, 128, 212, 224 ordinary language, 4, 10, 14, 18, 72, 119, 189–90, 192, 216, 220, 224 origin, 4–5, 7, 9, 26, 72, 96, 107, 126, 136, 140, 174, 199 Partridge, Eric, 12, 224 Paulhan, Jean, 22–5, 64, 70, 224 persuasion, 13–15, 29, 190, 192, 194 philosophy, 1–2, 5, 8, 10, 14, 92, 190, 215, 224 Piette, Adam, 14, 39, 66, 72, 76, 82, 133, 202, 210, 214, 224 Pilling, John, 72, 133, 201, 212, 213, 214, 223, 224, 225 Ping (Bing), 107, 214, 223 pleasure principle, 26, 29, 175, 185, 216, 221 police, 163, 166, 168–9, 171–2, 173, 175

Index

231

poverty, 2, 6, 14, 18, 21, 48, 51, 181, 190, 196, 208 print culture, 11, 15, 18–19, 56, 127–8, 200, 210, 224 Proust, 7, 33, 35, 43, 46, 62, 74–6, 122, 176, 210 Proust, Marcel, 2, 7, 30, 33, 35, 40, 43, 46–7, 62, 67–79, 85–91, 99, 122, 147, 176, 209–13, 219, 224–5

spoken word, 126–7, 155–7 Sprat, Thomas, 13, 22, 210, 226 Stereotype, 16, 40 Stupidity, 1, 5, 10, 23, 35, 51, 63, 104, 129, 207, 222 Surplus-value, 9, 15, 19, 47, 53, 57 Surrealism, 44–5, 211, 212, 220 Swift, Jonathan, 12, 72, 210, 213, 225, 226

Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, 31, 191, 211, 225

Texts for Nothing, 10, 37, 96, 98–9, 115, 141, 151, 154 That Time, 38, 144–5, 152, 188, 216, 218 This Quarter, 44, 45, 211, 212, 220 Three Dialogues, 45, 47, 209, 218 time, 6, 11, 27, 48, 61, 69, 74, 84-8, 92-105, 108, 110-23, 126, 134, 146, 147, 149, 151, 159, 162, 182, 189, 201, 204, 212, 215, 218 transition, 71, 74

realism, 18, 23, 27, 30, 33, 35, 38–9, 43–51, 54, 57, 75, 155, 188, 223, 226 reason, 7, 13, 26, 37, 58, 60–2, 78, 103–4, 109, 142–3, 151, 172, 178, 195, 197, 199, 213, 220, 223 register, 8, 47, 66, 90, 108–11, 114, 134 religion, 3–4, 7, 20, 27–8, 61–2, 76, 123–42, 144–9, 151, 153, 155–60, 162, 166, 169, 183, 185, 207, 214, 227 repetition, 1–2, 5, 7, 15–16, 26, 29, 46, 64, 70–1, 73, 82–5, 96, 98, 103, 107, 126, 129, 146, 148, 154, 165, 174–5, 185–6, 202, 208, 209, 217, 220, 223 rhetoric, 4, 10–15, 17, 20, 22–3, 31, 48–9, 52, 57, 110, 161–2, 165, 168, 173, 179–80, 181, 190–2, 194–6, 209, 211, 216, 220, 222, 224 rhetorical question, 190–2, 194–5 Ricks, Christopher, 24–6, 79, 128, 185, 225 Ricoeur, Paul, 13, 25, 165, 209, 225 Riffaterre, Michael, 11, 209, 225 Rockaby, 159, 206, 208, 220 Romanticism, 16–17, 86, 101, 220 Rough for Radio II, 70, 86, 204 Rough for Theatre II, 157 Sabin, Margery, 2, 10, 19, 54–5, 209, 225 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 22, 61–2, 100, 187, 210, 212, 216, 225 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 26, 99, 138, 213, 225 Scruton, Roger, 81, 91, 213, 226 spirituel, 149–50

Uhlmann, Anthony, 2, 61–3, 212, 221, 226 Ulysses, 19–21, 31–2, 39, 49, 70, 73, 105, 140, 211, 215, 223, 226 The Unnamable (L’Innommable), 7, 24, 26, 29, 63, 65, 71, 81–5, 87–90, 93, 95, 97–8, 100, 102, 104–5, 107, 111, 127, 132, 135, 141–4, 148–56, 158, 163–4, 181, 184–7, 189, 192–6, 198, 205, 215, 222, 223, 226 usury, 9, 15 voice, 18, 31, 33, 50, 52, 57, 64, 66, 72, 89, 91, 99–100, 116, 118, 120, 125–6, 129, 133, 135, 138–9, 149, 152, 154–61, 165, 169, 173–4, 177–80, 182, 185–8, 197, 198, 202, 207, 208, 213, 214, 215, 222, 224, 226 Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot), 37, 94, 109–12, 114, 120, 134, 137–8, 152, 157, 182, 185, 201, 216, 218, 220 Watt, 14, 41, 44, 46, 51–2, 72, 75, 114, 137–8, 152, 154, 181, 208, 219 Weisberg, David, 182–4, 226 ‘A Wet Night’, 73, 85 ‘What a Misfortune’, 36 What Where, 70, 204

232

Index

will, 14, 24, 26, 28, 32, 34, 43, 73, 86, 90, 99, 111, 112, 128, 132, 135–9, 143, 146, 165, 172, 181, 190, 198, 200, 208, 214 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2, 6–7, 10, 14, 188–90, 196, 199, 216, 220, 223, 224, 226

Wordsworth, William, 17, 18, 86, 108, 130, 177, 210, 213, 214, 226 Worstward Ho, 62, 93, 102, 107, 145, 195–6, 207 Yeats, William Butler, 76, 98, 213, 227 ‘Yellow’, 50

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